Losers Weepers

  “I can’t give you that, Joze,” I said, wishing she’d close the shower curtain and put me out of my misery . . . every other moment wishing she wouldn’t. “I’m sorry. I’d do a lifetime stint in hell to get another six inches below my waist to operate as well, but until the devil shows up at my door with a pen and a contract, I can’t do anything about it.” I swallowed against the ball trying to block every word I was saying. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

  She turned to face me. A moment later, I found myself wheeling closer. As soon as I realized what I was doing, I stopped. She made a point of noticing my nearer proximity to the shower and lifted an eyebrow. “There are more ways to be intimate than using what resides south of your belt buckle, you know. Lots of ways.”

  I felt my forehead wrinkle.

  She shook her head at my apparent confusion. “Ways I know you’re familiar with based on experience.” Her tone sounded as if it was meant to be a nudge or a hint. “You’ve had no problem getting creative before, so what’s stinting your creativity now? Did your imagination get paralyzed too?”

  My body flinched like she’d just shoved me. “Josie—”

  “What? I don’t get it. I need to be close to you. I always have and always will.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if the rivulets of water trailing down her cheeks were from the shower, but either way it looked as if she was crying. I pushed my chair closer until I could feel the steam across my face.

  “Don’t you need to feel close to me too?” Her voice sounded small as her eyes dropped to the shower floor.

  The tightness in my throat came back in full force. “Of course I do, Joze.”

  Her eyes slowly lifted but not quite high enough to look at me. “Then what’s the problem?”

  Sighing, I motioned between her and my lap. Josie was naked, water streaming down her, and inviting me closer, but I had absolutely nothing going on down there. Nothing. If I wasn’t so pissed off and frustrated, I might have cried. “Other than my malfunctioning dick?”

  I hadn’t meant it to be funny, but I noticed a smile tug at the corners of her mouth as she reached for a bottle of body wash and squeezed some into her palm. “Other than that.”

  When she turned away from me as she started to soap her skin, I found being vulnerable with her easier. For some reason, when her eyes were practically drilling holes through me, I found it more natural to tell her what I guessed she wanted to hear instead of the entire truth. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No,” she almost snapped. “Whatever you’re doing all the way over there while I’m lathering my chest here, there is nothing obvious about it.”

  Based on her experience with me before the accident, I understood her confusion. If she expected me to be the Garth from before instead of the Garth of right now, there was nothing obvious about what I was doing so far away from her. Part of me loved that she still saw me as that same man she’d fallen in love with, but the other part of me knew that would make everything so much harder . . . because I wasn’t that man. Realizing that brought on a surge of anger.

  “I’m in a wheelchair, for Christ’s sake, Josie.” I motioned at my chair—which I very likely would spend the rest of my life in. More anger coursed through me. “I’m handicapped. I can’t move my legs. I can’t get it up. I can’t do anything a man my age should be able to do.” Mrs. Gibson was only a few rooms away, and I should have kept my voice down, but there was no possible way to keep my voice down while saying the things I was saying. “Like stand up to a man who’s disrespecting a woman. Or climb onto the back of a horse. Or drive a truck. Or take a piss on a fucking tree without having to cath myself first and wheel up to it. I’m half of a man, Joze.” My voice broke, so I got myself back together before saying the rest. “You should be repulsed by me, not curling your finger and inviting me closer. So no, I don’t understand why you’d want to be close to me after this.”

  For a long minute, nothing but silence and shifting stares passed between us. In that minute, I must have witnessed a dozen different emotions filter through her eyes, her expression keeping pace. Watching her was nearing the point of becoming too painful to bear when she stepped out of the shower. Water streamed down her body, collecting in puddles at her feet. Drops of water were fanned into her lashes and fell down her face when she blinked.

  “You really can’t understand why I’d still want to make love to you in whatever way we can figure out just because you got hurt?” Her eyes narrowed as they searched me for an answer. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  I circled my finger around my face. “Not my kidding face.”

  Her hands curled into fists before she crossed her arms. I couldn’t tell which she felt more, hurt or anger, but I guessed she felt some of both.

  “I wanted to be with you before, I want to be with you now, and I’ll want to be with you forever because I love you.” She said each word so slowly, so purposefully, it was as if there was nothing she believed in more, as if there was nothing she was more passionate about. She didn’t seem to blink as she continued. “I. Love. You. Do you really think that came with the condition that so long as you were still walking, I’d love you? Or with the condition that if you turned into a prudish lunatic who hid in corners while I pretty much handed you a play-by-play of how I wanted you to do me, I’d stop loving you? Do you really think that anything could happen to you or change you or that I could find out about you that could just make all the love I have for you disappear? Is that really what you think?”

  I was quiet, not knowing how to reply. Before she’d, in so many words, reminded me that her love came without conditions, yes, I really had doubted why she’d want to be with me if I was going to spend the next fifty years as a mostly helpless invalid, but now . . . now I didn’t know what to think.

  I was still trying to sort through it all when she spoke again. “Then fuck you, Garth Black. Fuck you for confusing my love with the cheap, shallow kind you could find with just about any tramp begging you to sign her bra.”

  Now I knew with certainty the moisture running down her cheeks wasn’t caused by the shower. How could I make it such a priority to make Josie happy yet be responsible for so many of her tears?

  “You might as well have just chosen one of them because then you would be right—they would have bailed at the first mention of paralysis. They would have ditched you before finding out your dick might never work again, as you’re so obsessed with, or before having to bathe, feed, and diaper the man they loved for the rest of his life even came up. They would have fled so quickly you wouldn’t have known what happened. Yet here I’ve stayed beside you, with you, every step of the way. So maybe I really am a fool, if I’m the only one of us who expected me to be made of something better and stronger. Maybe I should have run, especially if that’s as much credit as you’ve given me this whole time. But I didn’t run. I didn’t run because I couldn’t.” She was almost sobbing, every third or fourth word breaking as tears streamed down her face. “I couldn’t run from you, because I love you so goddamn much it’s buried so far inside me I could never dig deep enough to pull it out. I love you so much that when I look at you, I don’t see a man in a wheelchair.” She shook her head, biting her lip so hard it made a deep indentation. “All I see is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. All I see is the man I love.”

  Her confession ended in a whisper so faint I didn’t hear the word “love.” Instead, I saw it tumble from her lips.

  Scrubbing my face, I sighed. Where the hell did I go from here? How the hell did I respond to that? I knew she loved me like that and I knew I was a bastard who didn’t deserve that kind of love and I knew I loved her the same way, putting myself second to her and without condition. So how could I let her waste her life being confined to my small, lonely existence when she deserved so much more?

  All of the answers eluded me. Big fucking surprise.

  “Joze . . .”

  “Don’t ‘Joze’ me!
” she snapped, her tone reaching all its former angry glory. “You don’t get to call me that or imply all that you do in that tone if you’ve been thinking all these months that I’d cut my losses and bail if the going got tough.” She blew out a sharp breath and threw her arm at the door. “You can leave now. I think you’re right. Us taking a shower together isn’t such a good idea.”

  Turning her back to me, she stepped inside the shower and slid the shower curtain closed. She even made sure to seal the cracks on either end. I felt a pain in my chest come on so suddenly and so sharply I leaned forward. I felt like I was having a heart attack but one that wouldn’t end.

  “Besides, I can take care of myself if you don’t want to use your imagination and take care of me anymore,” she added as steam billowed out from the top of the shower.

  She wanted me to leave. I should have wanted to leave, but something about her turning her back and shutting me out because I’d hurt her made me move closer. I’d been trying on and off to push her away for days, and it had finally seemed to work, so why were my fingers curling around the edge of the shower curtain, about to pull it open? Why did the thought of never touching her hand again or seeing her or being near her feel infinitely more crippling than my damaged spine?

  How could I feel such a war raging inside me, one side pulling me away while the other pulled me closer, and not be moments away from either splitting right down the middle or exploding all over the bathroom walls? How could I feel so much conflict raging inside me when I knew how I felt about her and how she felt about me?

  The answer, I guessed, was that love wasn’t simple. It was complex and intricate and confusing and made a man question everything he’d ever held true. It made a person’s morals shift and be reexamined from a different perspective. Love wasn’t simple. It didn’t come naturally or instinctively or easily. It had to be earned and fought for and could drive a person to insanity just as quickly as it could drive them to greatness, but in the midst of all of that confusion, I knew one thing: I loved this woman. And she loved me.

  No matter what came tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, I wasn’t going to waste that right now.

  “I’m not done with you yet, Joze,” I said as I shoved open the shower curtain.

  Her face erupted with surprise, but she recovered quickly. She wasn’t shampooing her hair or shaving her legs or doing much of anything other than letting sheets of hot, steaming water encompass her. “Well, too bad because I am most certainly done talking with you.” She shoved the curtain closed in my face.

  My brows lifted as I inspected the shower curtain, contemplating my next move. I came up empty though, kind of like I seemed to be coming up empty a lot lately when I took the time to think about what to say or do next. Then a realization knocked me over the head and swung around to knock me one more time. I wasn’t the type who thought out every move or mapped out every step. I was the type who relied on instinct and gut feelings. I was the guy who jumped first and questioned later. I wasn’t the guy who drew up a detailed outline of choices and consequences before making a decision a week and a half later. No . . . I was the other guy. The one who leapt into the fucking shower before his girl could even crook her finger at him.

  This time I didn’t bother with the curtain. I just gave a hard push to get my wheelchair over the small lip of the shower and rolled inside. “I’m done talking too, Joze. I’m way done with talking.”

  I tried not to smile at her reaction to me bursting into the shower with my chair and pants and boots still on. From her expression, she would have been less shocked if a gorilla had leapt in with her.

  “Then what do you want?” she asked a moment later.

  I felt my smile move into place. Not the one others were used to seeing but the one only Josie had seen. The one that either preceded or followed a certain something. “I want you.” I shook my head to splash off the water running down my face from my hair. “Just you.”

  She had to bite her cheek to keep her smile in check, but she grabbed the showerhead and angled it so it was spraying my face for a few seconds. When I sputtered and cursed, she laughed. “Yeah, well, you had your chance, and you choose a cold lonely corner of the bathroom.”

  I didn’t stop looking at her, even with the water breaking across my face. I moved closer so she was almost within arm’s reach. “Do you see me in that corner right now?”

  She returned the showerhead to its original position. “No, but something about you accusing me of loving you conditionally, along with your sudden lack of imagination in a certain department, kind of ruined the whole mood for me. I’m over it.” Turning around, she reached for the shampoo. Before her fingers had a chance to curl around the bottle, my arms were around her waist and pulling her into my lap. She crashed into me with a little gasp. “What are you doing?” She angled her head back at me, blinking away drops of water as the shower rained down on us.

  One of my arms stayed tightly wound around her torso, my hand splaying in the soft bend between her hipbone and ribcage. My other arm slid lower, the hand even more so. When I’d barely just grazed her, she gasped again.

  “I’m getting creative.” I lowered my mouth to her ear and kissed the spot just below it until her breathing picked up. When her breathing hit the ragged realm, my finger’s touch became a bit more . . . intentional. “How’s this for imagination?”

  What I guessed was meant to be a smile formed on her face, though it looked more like she was riding the line between pain and pleasure. What appeared on my face was unmistakably a smile.

  She was right. We could be intimate in more ways than the act I was so familiar with . . . and a rather large fan of. I would have rather lost my hearing or eyesight—hell, I’d even have sawn off a limb or two—rather than give up a functioning dick, but I didn’t get that choice. Life had made that choice for me. So even though I might never have been able to experience falling apart inside Josie again, at least I could give her the experience. A finger in the shower while she reclined in the lap of a man in a wheelchair might have been a poor substitute for the way things had been, but it was something.

  And that something, from the look and sound of her, didn’t seem to be registering in the mediocre department.

  When her arm wrapped behind my neck, cinching tightly as she got closer, my head wound up closer to the base of her neck, so that was where I focused my mouth. I sucked at her skin harder than perhaps I should have, but every time I moved to a new section of skin, she whispered things that made soft and slow impossible.

  Even through the water dotting her skin, she tasted the same—like a summer night following a rainstorm. When she threw her head back over my shoulder, arching her neck toward the ceiling, I knew she was moments away from falling apart in my arms. However, this was the best thing to happen to me since the accident, and I wasn’t in a hurry to finish it. I could have stayed in the shower long past the expiration of the hot water, touching her . . . kissing her . . . making love to her.

  When my pace slowed, each stroke and kiss becoming softer, a groan escaped her lips.

  “Be nice,” she breathed, angling her face so our mouths were so close I could feel her heavy breaths against my lips.

  “You didn’t fall in love with me because I was nice, Joze.” I moved my face closer so our mouths were separated by just a thin sheet of air. I traced the seam of her lips with my tongue, and when her lips parted, I kissed her as if it were the last time. I kissed her as if we’d been separated by time and circumstance for years and we would be again in another few moments. I kissed her like I loved her—with abandon.

  “You’re right,” she whispered when she had to break away to catch her breath.

  Her chest was rising and falling so hard, practically begging to be touched. My hand at her side slipped up her wet body to palm one of her breasts. When I squeezed, more of a moan than a gasp escaped her lips.

  “I didn’t fall in love with you because you were nice.” Her vo
ice was so low with want, so breathy with desire, it barely sounded like Josie’s. “So where’s the not-nice man I fell for? Where’s the one who’s so bad he would have already been tossing me from my back to my front for round two? Where’s the guy who grunts dirty somethings into my ear as he’s coming so hard inside me that I’m sore the next day?” A sigh bubbled from her lips when my finger moved against her again. Faster. Firmer. “I want him.”

  I might not have been able to achieve a climax in my current condition, but damn if I didn’t feel as though I was right on the edge of my own. My grunt vibrated against her cheek when she grinded her hips into my hand. “I can guarantee you don’t want him as fucking bad as he wants you.”

  A shiver ripped down her body. One of her arms dropped from my neck and landed on my arm working on her before winding down it. All of the way down it. “I want to feel you inside me when I come.”

  When her hips lowered again, she ground her ass into my lap, circling it in a way that made my eyes roll back into my head. I might not have had any sensation in the area she was waxing with her wet backside, but fuck, it didn’t matter. I felt something, and whether that was just the memory of what it had felt like when she’d done that to me before or the accumulation everything else I could feel—like the fullness of her chest spilling out of my hand or the heat that resided between her legs so wet I could feel it running down the insides of her thighs or her beautiful face draped over me, staring at me like nothing had changed between us or her breathing so labored I knew I could give her what she wanted with a few more stokes—I might as well have had my dick buried deep inside her for the way I felt right then.