Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (11 page)

“Fuck,” he gasped.

“Shhh.”

Her mouth moved all over him, over his neck and throat, his chest, his belly, up and down and around. She sucked at his nipples and licked his scars. Three times, he reached for his mask, and three times, she took it from him and held it to his face herself, sucking on his neck while he filled himself with air.

Fucking A. She’d made his damn tank sexy.

And she hadn’t even opened his jeans yet.

When she finally did, his cock nearly sprang free. She’d been sitting on his lap, flexing like a stripper giving a VIP lap dance, for twenty minutes, and he was ready to come. So ready, in fact, that doubt and loathing knocked at the door, and he grabbed her hands.

Words were hard. His brain was elsewhere. “Long time,” he finally managed to get out.

“I know. For evens, I haven’t done this in almost four years, so hopefully I won’t take a chunk off.”

Surprised and delighted at her joke, in a twisted, scary way, Joey laughed and then lost what breath he still had.

But it was okay. He put the mask on, and Tina sat on him, nuzzling his bare skin.

She was taking the worst things about his life and making them irrelevant.

As his breath settled again, she slid to the floor between his legs and took him into her mouth.

The sizzling wet of her mouth, the fluid silk of her tongue, the squeeze of her hand at his base—never in his entire life had he felt anything so entirely, consumingly perfect. Every muscle in his body throbbed to the tempo of her sucking mouth and clenching hand.

He came in about twenty seconds. His body went stiff, his heart, mind, and lungs all froze, and all he could do was feel the pulsing, brilliant ecstasy of it. She pulled back just in time, and he blew his wad all over his chest.

When he was done, he was desperate for breath he didn’t have, but Tina was there, setting the mask over his nose and mouth, and, somehow, she was now topless, laying her chest on his, even though what he’d blown was still all over him, and now her. Her sweet tits that he’d been dreaming about for weeks were pillowed between them. She put her mouth to his ear and let him hear the breath he felt moving her chest against his.

It calmed him and helped him find his own rhythm again.

When he could think and be fully present, Joey knew that he loved her.

A few months earlier, he hadn’t seen anything in his life, or himself, of value. Not in the present or the future. He hadn’t been able to imagine ever having, or being, anything worthwhile.

Now, he could imagine everything.

He didn’t know how to say it, or when, and he didn’t want to fuck it up and lose her, so he said nothing. But he wrapped his arms around her and held her as close as he could.

~ 8 ~

The little girl clung to her mother’s neck, shaking her head with a steady, immutable rhythm, and keening in the same time.

“Okay, Ava. Okay.” Tina stepped back to the other therapists in the room, one of them a sexual abuse specialist and the other a speech pathologist who’d been working with Ava for more than a year. “There’s too many people in here. Mom and I will take her down to Oliver’s, and I’ll call you.”

Warren, the speech pathologist, nodded and said, “I might need to step back for a while.”

“Let’s not make any big decisions yet. You guys have a relationship. So let’s just see. Kim, do you agree?”

The sexual abuse specialist nodded. “Big changes can do more damage, unless she needs those specific changes. Your instinct is good, Warren, but we need to try to get her to communicate. You know how fast she can lose what she’s gained. If she still trusts you, you’re the best shot at it. So let’s go slow and strategize as we go. Tina, has animal contact helped her before?”

Tina nodded. “It made her first breakthrough. I still bring her a bunny when we start something new.”

As a pediatric occupational therapist, Tina worked with children experiencing a wide range of challenges. Her job was to help them learn to live in the world. Most of her patients had physical or mental disabilities and needed to learn new ways of doing things. Some had traumatic, emotional disabilities and needed to learn new ways of seeing things. Sometimes, she was a child’s only therapist. Sometimes, she was part of a team. Sometimes, she was there only at the beginning, to help a patient build trust.

She’d come to animal-assisted therapy in that way, and in her research, she’d found it helpful for almost every patient she’d introduced it to.

Ava had autism, on the severe end of the spectrum, and mild cerebral palsy. When she and Tina had met, she had been entirely unresponsive. At almost three years old, she had never acknowledged her mother or her father.

The first time Ava had ever smiled was at a big white bunny, named Sunny, that Tina had sat on her legs.

In the ensuing two years, Ava had blossomed. She would always have profound challenges, but she now interacted with her parents and other people she trusted, and she had learned to speak a few simple words—accomplishments far beyond her parents’ dreams.

Until two weeks ago, when some older kids had run off with her, strapped to her chair, at the park, while her father pushed her baby sister on the swing. She’d been found within twenty minutes—in an obscured space behind the men’s bathroom at the other end of the park, on the ground, naked, bruised, scratched and filthy, and keening. At the hospital, they’d learned what everybody had already known: she’d been sexually assaulted. They’d found dirt and traces of wood bark in her vagina and a small rock in her rectum.

By the end of the day, the police had arrested the perpetrators: three boys and two girls, ages from nine to fourteen.
Children
had done such a terrible thing.

Since then, the only person who could touch Ava without sedation was her mother.

She was five years old.

Now it was Tina’s job, and Kim’s, and Warren’s, to ease her back from her trauma. Tina had been near tears for the whole session, and when she got to her office, she was going to let them loose.

For now, though, she went back to Ava and her mother. “Mom, let’s go down to Oliver’s room. I think Sunny would love to see Ava.”

Oliver Gold was the coordinator for the animal-assisted therapy. He arranged for long-term placement for some patients, who needed the bond with an animal to get along throughout their day, and he was the handler for what they called their ‘zoo’: a small collection of animals ranging from hamsters to Moses, a one-hundred-seventy pound Newfoundland dog. They had cats and rabbits and even snakes and fish. The dogs and cats had free run of most of the RTC. Moses and the other two dogs—Betsy, a mutt, and Gogo, a pug—went home with Oliver. All the animals had the same job: help their patients with therapy.

In most cases, that meant that the animal was simply there to be loved. Mountains of studies had shown the calming, focusing benefits of petting a furry, gentle animal.

Ava’s mother, whose swollen eyes, sallow complexion, and clenched expression showed her to be a woman destroyed by sorrow and rage, nodded. She didn’t bother to return her daughter to her chair. “Do you want to see Sunny, Ava?”

Ava had stopped shaking her head, and her keen had become a moan. She didn’t respond to her mother’s query.

~oOo~

Ava didn’t respond to Sunny the bunny, either. Or Moses and Betsy, who’d been lounging together in a sunbeam in Oliver’s room. She was trapped in her head again, blocked by horror.

Tina loved her job. The work was fascinating, she was good at it, and she knew that every day she made a difference.

But when Ava and her mother left the center that day, Tina felt futile. She was angry and depressed and so fucking sad. She hurried to her office; she had a date with a crying jag.

Joey was leaning on the wall outside her closed office door. She wasn’t expecting him, and she really needed to cry. Her head teemed with bad shit, she needed to let it out, and it felt like he was in her way.

So she barked at him. “Did I know you were going to be here?”

Frowning at her tone, he stood straight. “Don’t know. …Okay?”

For the first time in the weeks they’d been together, Tina was impatient with his speech. She knew it wasn’t him, it was the day, and she caught the exasperated huff before it left her mouth. As she swallowed it back down, realizing how much it would have hurt him if she’d let it loose, she also realized that he was there. Right there. She was hurting, and he was there.

“No, I’m not okay.” She dropped her forehead to his chest and sighed. “I’m really not okay at all.”

His arms came around her. “What happened?”

She couldn’t tell him about Ava. That was confidential. But she could bring him into her office and let him hold her while she cried.

Stepping out of his embrace, she opened her door and pulled him in.

As soon as she had the door closed again, he brought her close and held her. She circled his waist with her arms and sagged into him, and the tears came.

They stood in the middle of her office, and he held her, tightly and quietly, until she had cried enough.

When she stepped back, he let her go, and she reached to pluck a handful of tissues from the box on her desk. She wiped and blew, and tossed the used tissues.

“Sorry.” His shirt was wet and smeared with her mascara.

He shook his head and reached for her hand. “What’s…wrong? Somebody…did something…to you?”

“Not to me. To a patient. I can’t talk about it, but I don’t think I can help, and it’s got me down. People are horrible to each other.” Even children. Tina shuddered at the thought of those monstrous kids.

Tugging gently on her hand, he drew her close again and wrapped her in another encompassing embrace. As awful as she felt, Tina could also feel the peace and comfort in this. It was nice to lean on him, to take strength from his embrace, even from his quiet. In the weeks they’d been together, she’d been trying to help him, to be patient and steady for him, to ease him around his obstacles. It hadn’t occurred to her that she could lean on him, that he could give her strength.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she sighed and snuggled closer. “I needed a hug, and you were right there, like you knew.”

He kissed her head. “Glad, too.”

Looking up, into his mysterious, sparkling eyes, and his face furrowed with concern for her, she asked, “Did you have therapy today?”

He nodded. “Speech. Needed…a hug, too. …Not getting…anywhere.”

“Sure you are. You almost always find the word you want, or one that says what you want. Right? That’s better since you started, isn’t it?” It was; she knew it was. Though his speech remained halting, he rarely just gave up on a sentence anymore.

“So fucking hard.”

Aphasia was a tricky beast. Once the pathways that made words and ideas flow together were damaged, they couldn’t be repaired. The intent of therapy was restructuring. The patient had to forge new paths, and those were normally not as smooth as the first. It was rare for someone with aphasia to be completely recovered. Even those whose speech regained a normal flow were working twice as hard for it.

“I know. You don’t have to talk now.”

He made a huffing laugh, and Tina realized that he didn’t have his tank with him. “Did you leave your tank in Gayle’s room?”

“Car. Not with…Evan today. Didn’t need it.” He cleared his throat, as he so often did when he started a sentence. “Gayle says you’re… … …” He shook his head; that word, he’d lost.

But Tina knew where he’d been going. Gayle had said something to her, too. “Enabling?”

Joey nodded.

Fuck Gayle. She needed to butt the hell out. It had been inappropriate for her to bring Joey’s therapy up to Tina, anyway.

On the other hand, she was right, and Tina knew it. Expecting him to hold up his end of a conversation would help him. But Tina wanted to be the port in Joey’s storm. She wanted him to be able to relax with her.

Besides, she enjoyed his long texts, where she got deep insights into his head and heart. Each one felt like a love note, and she could go back and read them whenever she wanted. They had built this wonderful thing, like a couple out of a Victorian epistolary novel, where they learned everything about each other in writing. But they lived only a few miles apart, so they got to be together, too. It was deeper than anything she’d had before, with men who spoke freely.

Sometimes, words obscured; conversation itself became a wall, with nobody listening and everybody trying to say what they thought people wanted to hear. In writing, she and Joey laid themselves open.

She’d been right, in her high school crush days: there had been a hurting, lonely soul inside that brash boy in the low-slung jeans and open shirt, the one who’d worn a copious dousing of body spray, gelled his hair, waxed his chiseled chest, and shoved the word ‘wikkid’ into every sentence.

Then, she’d thought she loved him, but it had only been infatuation bolstered by fantasy. Now, when he was so different and yet still Joey, when he was so real, she knew she loved him.

“I’m not your therapist, Joey. I’m your girlfriend. You don’t have to work when you’re with me. But if you want to, we can.”

“Want to be…normal.”

‘Normal’ was beyond his reach. Tina snuggled close again. “Why? You’re perfect already.”

His body tensed, and she worried that he thought she’d lied to him. When he pushed her back, she prepared to tell him she’d meant it, but he was clearly trying to start a sentence, so she looked up at him and waited.

He cleared his throat. “I…I…love you.”

Louder even than the words ‘love you’ was the word ‘I.’ He almost never used it when he spoke, and Tina had often thought that it made him less present in his words. Maybe that was why his writing felt so deep. He had to search for words then, too, she’d seen him pause and comb through his brain, but by the time he sent a text, he had been expansive and eloquent, and the word ‘I’ was everywhere.

He’d wanted to be present in the sentence he’d just said. That he loved her.

Wanting to let his words linger in the air, wanting not to cover them with her own, Tina decided not to reply in the usual way. Instead, she held his eyes with hers and nodded, hoping he understood. When he smiled and bent his head to kiss her, she knew he had.