“Sure, b-but I’m going in for my follow-up appointment next week. I’ll know more then,” he gasped.
“Then I want you to try afterwards if your surgeon clears you for it.” She pointed at him with her pen. “Theo, the last time you were out in public was in early April. That was over three months ago.” She eyed the double-walled insulated stainless steel mug he always brought with him. He liked having something in his hands during sessions. Or…hand. “You like coffee, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m giving you an assignment: I want you to go sit in a coffee shop.” She held up her hands, placating but stern when he started to frantically shake his head as much as the pain would allow. “You don’t have to stay long: fifteen to thirty minutes, tops. Five minutes, if that’s all you can manage. I’ll even takeone. Consider it exposure therapy. I just want you to talk to someone who’s not me or Diego. Have you talked to anyone else?”
“Imogen, once or twice.”
“In person?”
He shook his head again. “Phone. Or Zoom. With the camera off.”
“Who else?”
“Doctors. My PT, but he comes to my house. Same for the massage therapist, and I knew him from before. We don’t talk much.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“In three months?”
“That I can remember.”
“Then go talk to a barista, or someone new.Anyone, Theo. Order a coffee, have an actual conversation if you can, and try to stayout for a socially acceptable minimum length of time.” She tucked her pen behind her ear. It swept some of her hair away from her face and sent it swirling around her jaw like a lilac cloud. “Try it once. See how you feel. Journal about it. Then we’ll debrief.”
He held up his hand. It was horrifying how much it shook. “I can’t write—not like this. How the hell am I supposed to journal? I’m right-handed.”
Broken piece of shit.
Amelia pointed and leveled a stern look at him. “Not without practicing, you can’t. That’s what you do in PT, right? Relearn how to move, strengthen muscles that have been injured or atrophied?” She tilted her head at him again and raised an eyebrow. He’d figured out a while ago that it was one of her tells—that she used it when she was trying to drive a particularly strong point home. “And that’s what we’re doing now: practicing. Strengthening your social—and physical—muscles. That’s all. A café is low stakes. Go to one you’ve never been to before. If it goes poorly, they’re a dime a dozen, and you never have to go back to the one where it went sour. This is New York. No one will know or care. And at the very least, you will have gotten some coffee out of it.”
When Theo left,he went straight home.
He didn’t go to the pharmacy. He threw the information sheet in his recycling bin. Instead of doing what Amelia told him to, he hobbled up the stairs with his cane and limped into his bathroom. The LED lights were stark and bright, and, not for the first time recently, he almost regretted renovating this place. Maybe he should have kept the dim, half-broken antique fixtures after all, even if they were ugly and not up to code and would have certainly shorted out and burned the house down.
What a shame.
It might have taken him with it in the fire.
After he ripped his hood and cap away, he swallowed and lifted a hand, tugging at where Diego had tucked the tail of gauze into the layers last night. Theo began to unravel while he started thinking about his new assignment.
Go out in public? Like this?He’d barely been able to manage today as it was. The usual ten-minute walk had taken him thirty both ways, and his heart raced the entire time, caught up in his throat like the last time he’d taken those goddamn pain pills instead of staying put in his chest where it belonged or shutting all the way up and stopping like he still half wanted it to.
He tugged the last of the gauze away, plucked off the clean cotton padding underneath, and steeled himself to look in the mirror. He’d only seen a glimpse of his uncovered face once: at the hospital before his last surgery, while his surgeon marked where he was going to cut, Theo turned his head and caught sight of himself reflected in the side of a stainless steel cart. It was enough to know what sort of state he was in, and the answer wasn’t good. He’d been avoiding it ever since. He hadn’t even shaved. His hand shook too much anyway, even for an electric razor.
But now that Amelia had brought up going out in public, he needed to know. He needed to see.
Theo lifted his eyes and finally faced himself.
A stranger stared back at him.
That…that wasn’t him, was it? It couldn’t be. His hair was long, brushing his shoulders now when it had previously been at his jawline, last he remembered. He hadn’t shaved since Diego helped him with that before his surgery, and his beard was growing in, dark and patchy and haphazard. He lifted a hand, and so did the thing in the mirror. He grazed his fingertips against his swollen right eye, and when he recoiled, so did the reflection. When he closed his good eye and opened it again, it was still there, staring straight back at him.
The reflection he found was torn and broken, red and splotchy, bruised, battered, bloated, distended. His left eye was lined with a dark circle of exhaustion, and his right? Oh god, hisright…
He tried to open his right eye, but it was still mostly swollen shut from the aftermath of his facial surgery. The massive slash down that side from the wreck had split him deep, shattered bone, severed muscle and sinew. Nerves had to be repaired, plates installed, everything cobbled painstakingly back together, and the result? The result was a raging deluge of stitches, what seemed like hundreds of them zippering down his face and neck from above his brow to his jawline, wicked and pointed and black, twisting deep into his skin.
