Darlene Graham - Under Montana Skies

“Mr. Scott?”

He looked up with the mug poised at his lips. He was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, in anticipation of his treatment, she supposed, with only thick gym socks on his feet. He jerked his head toward the massage table, still folded, by the fireplace. “Doc and Katherine suggested we set the table up over there.” He sipped the coffee and resumed reading the papers.

“That’s nice,” Laura said. She crossed the room to the bed, which Katherine had already made up. It was also Katherine, she assumed, who had placed a folded thin cotton blanket across one side.

Laura pushed on the mattress with a palm. “For now, this will be good enough. Nice and firm.”

He grunted and kept reading.

She picked up the cotton blanket—it would be useful—then crossed the room and dropped her bag beside him. “You’ll need to sit backward in your chair like you did yesterday.”

He pushed the chair out from the table, scraping the wood floor, then flipped the chair around and sat facing away from her.

“Here.” She tucked the cotton blanket over the back of the chair for his comfort. “You’ll need to remove your shirt, please.”

He jerked the sweatshirt up and off in one swift move, tossed it on the floor, then draped his arms over the chair back. Laura unrolled the hot pack and positioned it on his shoulder. While she waited for it to warm the muscles, she bent and dug in her bag. She pulled out a CD, positioned the player on the oak table and found the lone electrical plug in the room.

As the beat of the Pointer Sisters’ “Slow Hand” filled the room, Adam gave her an irritated glance over his shoulder. “Is that really necessary?”

“Well, no,” Laura admitted. “But it helps. You and I are both gonna get mighty bored with these therapy sessions. The music will keep us moving.”

He shrugged and turned his back to her again.

As soon as Laura laid her hands on him, she decided she’d been wrong. There was never going to be anything boring about touching this man. She blocked out that thought and concentrated on her work.

She massaged the places where she knew the pain was lodged and wished she’d chosen a different song to start with. The beat was all right, but the words…

Having these thoughts made her a little uptight, but fortunately her hands worked automatically, and her body took up the rhythm subtly, too. Halfway through the song, she smiled as she felt Adam relax.

By the time the song was over, the muscles in Adam’s back felt as fluid as a bank of shifting sand. His head rested on his forearms and his eyes were closed.

Was he asleep again? Laura wondered. Did this guy even get enough sleep? Maybe not, if he was always peering out the attic window in the middle of the night. She had to talk to him about that. If he wanted to play lookout with night-vision binoculars, he had to do it somewhere else.

“Mr. Scott?” she said softly, and he cracked his eyes in a squint at her. “Time for the second half of the treatment—the resistance training and stretching maneuvers.”

Without being told he went to the massage table and lay down.

Laura got out the lotion, gave him some cross-fiber friction massage before starting the stretches. She carefully and slowly brought his arm up, then down, stretching the joint until she felt restriction. She knew how far she could push a patient, but he seemed to be getting tense too quickly. She could feel his muscles guarding, resisting her.

“You know about my wife and child,” he said suddenly in the midst of a particularly difficult stretch.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I was so sorry to hear that. Now you must relax, Mr. Scott.”

But instead of relaxing, he twisted away from her hands and bounded up off the table, facing her, his bare chest heaving with rapid breaths. Every fiber of his body seemed tense now.

“Let’s get something straight, Ms. Duncan,” he said in a low voice. “My wife and child are none of your business. And if you speak about either one of them again to anyone, ever, I will have your license suspended for violating patient confidentiality. Is that understood?”

Laura, stunned, could barely nod before Adam turned and stomped off toward the back of the house. Again she worried: What kind of patient had she taken on?

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