Cade
With a groan, I hobbled toward what I hoped was a full dinner buffet.
The physical therapy was getting better, but it was also getting worse.
I wasn’t walking around feeling like a stiff board as much as I had before; that much was true.
The cost, however, was that after one of my physical therapy sessions, I was left limping and aching.
They had offered me pain relievers, but that only took the edge off rather than making anything better.
Still, I was noticing a difference, so that meant the therapy was doing something.
It also had the benefit of making it easier for me to be a little more…
flexible when it came to sex. Not that I was going to tell the guys in the medical ward that; they didn’t need to know I was having some of the best sex of my life.
Not that they would have cared, Lord knew Walker and I weren’t the first people to sleep together at the resort.
First things first, though, I needed to get to my room and take a shower.
The thunk of my leg was lighter than usual, but that was because despite it being the only part of me that couldn’t feel pain, the part of my real leg that was left certainly could, and it was feeling it.
I leaned against the wall before letting myself into my room with a sigh of relief, noticing Walker wasn’t around.
He was probably enjoying a nice meal, but that also meant he was probably talking to Logan.
It was a friendship that was…hard to understand.
Sure, it wasn’t like Logan had crossed a line…
not with Walker anyway, though he’d certainly done a good job of tapping his toe on it.
Still, after his apology, a hesitant friendship grew.
Well, hesitant on Logan’s part, probably because he knew he’d fucked up and needed to tread carefully.
I didn’t really know what was going on in Walker’s head.
He wasn’t the most social of people, and he wasn’t the most patient anymore either.
Yet with Logan, he was showing a begrudging understanding that confused me.
Still, Walker wasn’t a kid, and he wasn’t an idiot either.
He knew how to draw boundaries, and he knew how to take care of himself if Logan got the bright idea to be more than just annoying.
Emerging from my shower, I hobbled over and took my leg off so I could dry everything properly, and glanced at my phone.
I had another missed call from my mom, and with a guilty wince, I swiped the notification away.
This was the longest I had been silent, and although she hadn’t left a voicemail, I knew if she had, it would have been filled with concern for my well-being.
Sighing, I opened my phone, hovering over her name before sucking it up and hitting the call button.
Perhaps I’d get lucky and she wouldn’t answer.
I knew she and my dad were going to have questions, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to give any answers.
There was so much going on in my life, and I didn’t really want to keep them out of it, but… some things were hard to explain.
“Hi, honey,” came her familiar, somewhat tired voice, but I could hear the smile in her voice…and the relief. “I was startin’ to wonder if you were alright.”
“I’m fine,” I told her.
“Don’t go lyin’ now,” came my father’s rough booming voice. “If ya were, ya wouldn’t be in the crazy house.”
“Don’t call it that,” my mother chided, but sighed when she heard me chuckling. “You’ll just encourage him, you know that?”
“He doesn’t need encouragement, Ma,” I told her with a smile.
As guilty as I was for having taken so long to talk to them, I was happy to hear their voices again.
As hard as it was to pretend to be a normal person when I was back home, there was nothing quite like hearing the sounds of home, even when I was miles away. “He’ll do it anyway.”
“Maybe he’d get some sense if you and that brother of yours would stop givin’ him the attention he wants,” she said, but anyone who knew her wouldn’t be fooled for a moment. As aggravated as she could get with all of us, I doubted she would have traded any of us.
“If he hasn’t got any sense by now, he’s not gonna get it,” I told her.
“Don’t go helpin’ her ride my ass now,” he said crossly.
“I sure don’t need any help with that,” she said, and I knew she was glaring at him from the kitchen table.
“Tell me about it,” my father muttered, but I was even less sold on his annoyance than I was on my mother’s.
“Shush, you,” she said, and then her tone brightened again. “So, honey, please tell me you forgot about us because somethin’ good is happening on your end.”
Damn, she had leaped immediately to something good, and that left me in an awkward position that was going to be hard to wriggle out of.
Not that it was surprising, my mother, despite the hard life she and my father had lived, always tried to find the best in things.
That was especially true when it came to my brother and me, and she was eternally hoping for something good to come our way, even when I repeatedly proved that good things in this life were hard to find.
“Uhhh,” I began and realized that not only was I in an awkward position, I was officially doing a terrible job at not being obvious about it. “Sorta?”
“Sort of?” she wondered, and there was a slapping sound I suspected was her hand against the kitchen table. “Now, ain’t that the sort of thing I want to hear when we talk?”
“I didn’t say there was,” I added hastily, but it was too late. I had thrown her a line, and she was going to reel it in with all her power.
“Now don’t go down playing things for me,” she chided.
“Ya finally decide to start talkin’ to a head shrinker?” my father asked roughly because that was the only way he knew how to communicate. I would be hard-pressed to find a man who was more earnest in his care for other people, though.
“They’re called therapists,” my mother corrected in exasperation.
“I know what he meant, and I know y’all want me to see one,” I said slowly. “And I can say I’ve been talked into considerin’ one. Dunno how much good it’ll do but—”
“Better than sittin’ around with your thumb up your ass, I can tell ya that,” my dad barked. “You been screwin’ around there long enough. It’s time ya got the help ya need and get back to livin’.”
“Carl, I talked to you about this already,” my mother hissed.
“I’m just puttin’ it out there, Candace! Ain’t no point in sugar coatin’ things.”
“He doesn’t need his daddy giving him blue hell either!”
“Sometimes that’s what’s needed, and he ain’t soft. Just…hurtin’, but he can’t keep hurtin’ is all!”
“Uh, hello?” I called into the phone as the bickering rose in volume. Sometimes I wondered how they got through almost forty years of marriage, with how badly they communicated. This wasn’t the first time they were both in agreement about something, but argued over the details. “I met someone.”
It was the only thing I could think of to stop the argument before it reached the point of no return, and the silence made my cheeks glow with heat.
I hadn’t planned on getting onto that topic with my parents, not before I figured out…
well, figured out what was going on between Walker and me.
It wasn’t as if we’d talked about how serious things were between us, or if they were ever going to be serious.
I couldn’t blame Walker; it wasn’t like he was dealing with a normal situation.
Both our lives were upended and, well…until over a month ago, I had been living under the assumption that I was straight.
“Met someone? That’s great, honey,” my mother said brightly. “Who did you meet? Tell me.”
My father muttered something, and my mother shushed him sharply. I wasn’t sure if she had put the numbers together, but I caught my father’s tone rather than his words, and he was confused.
“I, uh…I’m sure ya remember my team,” I said slowly, wincing at the reminder but hoping she didn’t make a fuss over the mention.
“Of course we do, honey,” she said. “How could we forget?”
“Damn fools showed up here causin’ trouble.
How could we forget?” my father, who was as bad a liar as I was, complained.
In the couple of years Walker had been with us, there had only been once he had come with me and the team to visit my family.
My father had loved those visits even as he griped about how much noise we made, all while laughing at stories we shared.
“You, uh…remember Walker? He only came the one time, and he wasn’t around for long,” I said quietly. “He would’ve been pretty quiet.”
“Then no, don’t remember ’em,” my dad said with a snort.
“Oh, that one,” my mother said, the memory forming in her mind. “Tall, too skinny to be healthy. Ate like he was starving.”
“Of course he did, he was eatin’ your food,” my father grumbled.
“Stop,” she said, but she was smiling.
“That’s him,” I said. “He, uh…he wasn’t there with the rest of us when the, uh…well, you know.”
“I remember you mentioning he had been hurt a few months before,” she said, just as careful to avoid the details. “I am so sorry, I forgot all about him. I never even thought to ask after him after everythin’ that happened. He’s there?”
“Yeah,” I said with a little laugh. “I wasn’t expectin’ it, and he sure as…he wasn’t ready for it either.”
“Aww, well, it’s good that you two got to meet up again,” she said warmly. “I hope he’s doing good.”
“He’s there with him at the crazy house, so he ain’t doin’ all that great.”
“Carl!”
I laughed. “He probably wouldn’t argue with that…and I wouldn’t either, ‘cept I don’t feel like talkin’ bad about ’em when he’s not here at the moment to defend himself.”
“And you shouldn’t,” she said, and I was sure she was shooting my dad the stink eye. “At least someone was raised right.”
“Aww, don’t start,” he muttered.