Page 18 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded (Rogue Bonds #2)
Zeke
B reakfast was already on the table by the time I wandered into the living room. Dax had prepared two plates of scrambled eggs and toast, so I sat, offering him a cursory thank you for the meal.
I had to say something about last night. But fuck knew what it was supposed to be. I shoved the first forkful into my mouth and glanced up, seeing Dax just standing there, staring at me. Shit. He was apparently just as on edge as I was.
“Are you going to eat breakfast?” I asked him, managing to keep my tone light. I didn’t want to spook him while I figured out what the hell I was supposed to be doing about this clusterfuck.
“Yes, sir,” he said, sitting down a little more abruptly than he usually did. He ate, but I suspected it was only because he thought I expected him to, rather than because he was hungry.
Part way through the meal, he paused, eyeing my half-empty coffee cup. “Did you take your pill?” he asked, after a moment’s hesitation.
Fuck, I hated all this walking on eggshells. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to explain to Dax that I wasn’t going to punish him, without having to tell him that my dick had taken a wholescale vacation for the last twelve months.
“Yes, I did,” I answered his question about the pill, before swiftly returning to shoving food into my mouth. I’d nearly finished the meal – and was no closer to knowing what to say to Dax – when his comm beeped. He opened the message, and a moment later, my comm beeped as well; he’d just forwarded the message to me.
“It’s from Doctor Green,” he told me, not waiting for me to open the message. “He’s sent through the information on the physiotherapy support group. There’s a meeting on today, at eleven o’clock. And he’s included directions to get there. We need to take the train to station eighty-three.”
I didn’t comment on what I assumed was a deliberate use of the word ‘we’. I knew Aiden had given Dax various instructions about how to look after me that he hadn’t told me about, and I suspected that one of them was to avoid letting me go out on my own whenever possible.
A small, childish part of me attempted to get angry about being followed around by a babysitter… but a larger, more sensible part of me knew I would be grateful for his company. He could do the planning and make sure we got off at the right station and run interference if anyone tried to get in my face. And it also got him out of the house so he wasn’t bored shitless while I was off doing stupid appointments. All things considered, him coming with me was an arrangement that would do both of us good.
But even despite my reluctant acceptance of the situation, I couldn’t help but groan. “For fuck’s sake, I don’t want to go do that shit.” That much was actually true; I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to hear a bunch of well-meaning sympathy from someone who knew fuck all about what I’d actually been through. I didn’t want to think about the fact that at the ripe old age of thirty-two, I would likely never have full use of my leg again.
And that thought was accompanied by the equally depressing knowledge that I didn’t currently have the use of my dick, either. But I didn’t think there was any physiotherapy that was going to fix that one.
With a protracted grumble, I hauled myself to my feet. “I’m going to go take a shower,” I told Dax, pausing to drain the last of my coffee before shuffling off down the hall. “For fuck’s sake, they couldn’t have given me a bit more notice?” I asked no one in particular. Yeah, I snorted to myself. Because I was so busy that fitting in a physiotherapy session was going to wreck my otherwise pumping social life. God, I was pathetic.
???
“Looks like this is it,” I said to Dax, as we arrived in front of a large, boxy building a short walk from the train station. The session was being held in a community hall, but the electronic panel at the entrance proudly proclaimed, ‘Physiotherapy Session – 11:00’.
A private corner of my mind was immediately grateful for the discreet wording of the sign. It didn’t say anything about it being a support group, or the fact that the class was treating long-term, traumatic injuries. To any interested bystander, it was just physiotherapy. And in the information sent through by Doctor Green, he’d included the fact that if anyone inquired about the class directly to the instructor, they would be advised to get a referral from their doctor, which would provide a neat screening process to keep anyone out who didn’t fit the class’s strict criteria.
I hesitated before opening the door… but Dax completely ignored my reluctance to go in, pulling the door open and holding it for me. I’d learned enough about him by now to know that he absolutely had noticed my hesitation, and that he’d deliberately chosen to ignore it. Gritting my teeth, I walked through the door.
Inside, we crossed through a small reception area, then through another door into the main hall. It was about as big as a basketball court, with a number of stations set up, with mats on the floor, small dumbbells, some rubber exercise bands, and some coloured tape stuck to the floor in various configurations.
Over at the side, there was a small table set up, with a Solof man sitting behind it. He looked up as we entered the room and shot us a warm smile. “Good morning. You are…” He checked the holographic screen in front of him. “…Ezekiel, is that correct?”
“Yeah. Call me Zeke,” I mumbled, shuffling over towards him. There was only one other person in the room at the moment, a Wasop woman who was doing a few stretches in the far corner.
“Welcome to the class, Zeke,” the man said. “My name is Rolen. Now, if I may, could I just confirm a few of your medical details?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, glancing anxiously at Dax. Not that I was sure what I expected him to do. I didn’t like talking about my injuries, but this was one of the unfortunate parts of having to start anything new; a certain amount of factual information was a necessity.
Rolen pulled up a file on his screen. “Your doctor reported that you have nerve damage to your right leg and scarring to your left abdomen due to a penetrating wound. Is that the extent of your physical injuries?”
There was absolutely nothing provocative or condescending about his tone. But I bristled nonetheless. “Is that not enough?” I snapped, before I could stop myself. “Am I supposed to be in a wheelchair or something before I’m allowed to come here?”
Rolen didn’t reply. He simply watched me, his expression calm, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
“Sorry,” I apologised, after a long moment. “That was uncalled for.”
“You’re also suffering from PTSD,” Rolen said gently. “I understand. It’s very common for survivors of trauma to be angry about their experiences. That said, I do expect participants in this class to treat both me, and each other, with respect. Is that something you can work with?”
“Yes,” I said, just about managing to cut off the automatic ‘Sir’ that nearly followed. Too many years in the military made for some strange habits.
“Good,” Rolen said. “For today, I’d like you to attempt all of the exercises, but feel free to stop if any of the activities are causing you pain. I’ll spend some time with you individually in the second half of the class to work through the ones you’re having difficulty with, and to develop a few exercises specifically for you, to strengthen the appropriate muscles. Any questions before we start?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t spent a great deal of time thinking about what this class would involve, so I didn’t have any particular expectations. “No, that sounds fine.”
Rolen smiled and nodded. “And this is…?” he asked, turning his attention to Dax, who was lingering behind my shoulder.
“This is Dax. My support worker,” I replied, without blinking. The information brochure on the class had said I was allowed to bring one, and I figured Dax fitted the criteria well enough.
Rolen merely nodded. “And will you be participating in the class?” he asked Dax.
Dax glanced at me, clearly caught by surprise by the question. “No, he’ll just be watching,” I said.
“Very good. Everyone should be arriving in the next few minutes, and then we’ll get started. Feel free to have a look around until then. Ah, good morning, Liz,” he said, glancing beyond me to whoever had just arrived. “We missed you last week. Glad you could make it this time.”
I took a quick glance over my shoulder, anticipating giving the newcomer a polite nod, then moving away to mind my own business. But the instant I got a look at her, my polite intentions vanished.
A small, Wasop woman stood in front of me… and my eyes immediately honed in on the stump where her right arm ended, just below her elbow.
My vision swam, and images crowded my head of Lieutenant Ru, eyes wide in terror as a gaping maw full of jagged teeth closed around her hand during our desperate escape from Ixralia. Of the writhing vines that reached out to grab her as she plunged her knife into the beast’s head. Of the way she’d screamed when the creature had let her go… but had taken her hand with it. My entire body flushed with heat as I was pulled under by the images. My chest felt tight. My lungs locked up, and suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room.
“You got a problem?” I heard the woman ask, her voice a snarl as she took a step towards me in challenge.
I backed away, unable to tear my eyes off the stump of her arm. Phantom pain surged up my leg. I felt the slick drip of blood down my side. Then suddenly, my line of sight was cut off as Dax stepped between us.
The woman turned her anger on him instead. “What the fuck is his problem?” she demanded of Dax.
I turned away, feeling the floor tilt beneath my feet.
“He suffers from PTSD,” I dimly heard Dax explain. “He knew a woman who lost her hand in a traumatic injury. I suspect seeing you has triggered some unpleasant memories. We apologise for any rudeness.” I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and allowed him to lead me away into a corner. “Sit down,” Dax instructed me, so I did, sitting with my head lowered for a few minutes until my heart rate slowed and I could breathe easier. Slowly, the images faded, and I was back to staring at scuffed wooden floor boards. “Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes. Dax was still there, right beside me, and I noted with relief that no one else had come over to bother us.
After a pause, Dax asked, “Are you ready to join the group? Or would you like to stay here a bit longer?”
I looked down at my hands. There was no blood on them. No craters where I’d had to pull the leech-like parasites off me. Those wounds had long since healed.
“Yeah, let’s get on with this,” I said, managing to get my feet under me. Dax, to his credit, let me stand up on my own, though he remained nearby, just in case.
By the time I was feeling steady enough to turn around, the rest of the group had arrived. There were the two Wasop women; the one with the missing arm, and the other one who had been stretching when we’d arrived. That one had no visible injuries, though she moved stiffly as she came over to join the rest of us. There was also a Solof man with extensive scarring down the side of his face, a human woman who had a walking stick and a pronounced limp, and a Sedgeged man with a brace supporting each of his hind legs. The Sedgegeds were an interesting species – their bodies were covered from head to toe with brightly coloured feathers, and they had a tendency to walk on all fours when not engaged in formal business. They also had beaks, rather than soft mouths, and spoke in a series of chirps and whistles. Fortunately, our translators were well equipped to interpret their language. The Solof man and the human woman had each brought a support worker with them, which made me feel a little less conspicuous about having Dax there.
Rolen called the class to order, and we got started on some basic warm up exercises. He introduced me to the class briefly, but I was relieved to find that I wasn’t expected to give any kind of explanation of my injuries. Then we split into groups and headed to different stations around the room, working through a series of exercises, some designed to strengthen specific muscle groups, while others were meant to improve balance or range of motion. For the first twenty minutes or so, I found the movements too easy. I’d been in the military, after all, and for all that I hadn’t been exercising much lately, I was used to vigorous workouts.
But in the second half of the session, the intensity increased dramatically. Rolen cautioned us repeatedly to slow things down if the exercises were causing pain, but I relished the opportunity to extend myself. I’d been taking things far too easily, as far as physical exercise went, at least, and it was nice to have a faint reminder of what my body was actually capable of, if I bothered to put in the effort.
Coming to the end of my most recent exercise, I set down the exercise band and turned to head over to the rows of coloured tape. They were more for coordination, laid out to guide us to walk in figure eights, or to extend our steps instead of shuffling. I stepped up to the first set, in a fluorescent green…
A clattering boom echoed through the room, and my vision swam red. I screamed and ducked, leering vines towering over me. A second gunshot echoed through the narrow space, and I scrambled backwards until my back hit a tree. Or what passed for a tree on this godforsaken planet. For all I knew, the fucking thing was about to eat me. A vine wrapped around my wrist, but I shook it off, lashing out as a creature tried to pin me to the ground. Someone else was yelling, but I didn’t recognise the voice. Was there another crew here, as well as my own? For fuck’s sake, did I have to rescue more people?
There was more shouting, and I recognised one voice. Dax. He was shouting at the creatures to get back, to stay away from me, and I shuddered at the thought of him having to fend them off all by himself. I tried to move to help him, but everything was too dark, and I couldn’t see, my body frozen, my breaths coming in short, choppy pants.
And then…
And then everything got quiet. The light of the too-bright sun flickered out, leaving everything dim, bathed in shades of blue. That was better. Ixralia had been red. So much red, all the time. Red like blood. The blue was cooler, softer. And the silence settled, the faint pad of footsteps tapping gently across the room towards me.
“Ezekiel?”
I struggled to reply, not quite able to get my throat to work. “Hmm?” I managed, after a few tries.
There was a faint rustling sound. A gentle thump. “I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder,” Dax said. “Is that okay?”
I managed to nod just a little. I felt the soft weight of his hand, and the warmth of him.
“You’re safe now. Everything is okay. Can you take a deep breath?”
I tried, surprised to find my lungs looser now. The air no longer contained the acrid sting of smoke and sulphur.
“That’s very good. And again. In… and out. Now I’m going to put my hand on yours. Is that okay?”
I nodded, feeling his hand slide down my arm to land with his fingers over mine.
“Can you open your hand for me?”
I did, surprised to hear something solid drop to the floor.
“That’s very good,” Dax said. “You’re going to be fine. Take another deep breath for me.”
I did, and then opened my eyes… When had I closed them? We were sitting at the side of the community centre room, my back against the wall. The lights were off, the room illuminated dimly by a handful of blue emergency exit signs. The object I’d just dropped was still sitting at my feet, and I realised it was the walking stick belonging to the human woman. I must have grabbed it from where it had been set against the wall, while she was exercising.
“Everyone else is waiting in the reception area,” Dax told me. “There’s no rush. You can take your time.”
I was too numb to be terribly concerned about whether I was inconveniencing the class. My heart rate was finally slowing down, the images of Ixralia still lurking in the back of my mind. “What happened?” I asked eventually.
“Dala knocked over a couple of the storage crates,” Dax said, pointing to the rear of the room. There were a dozen or so crates in neat stacks, and sure enough, the stack at the end of the row had been knocked over. “The noise startled you.”
Startled? Yeah, that was the understatement of the century. I wasn’t quite clear on who Dala was, but it didn’t really matter in the end. There had been a loud noise and I’d had the mother of all flashbacks.
A click and a rattle sounded from across the room, and I looked up to see Rolen step through the door. He stopped just inside, seeming to wait for permission to come closer.
“Do you want to talk to him?” Dax asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, not because I actually wanted to, but because I couldn’t see any real way to avoid it. Dax waved him over, and Rolen approached slowly, leaving plenty of space between us. “Sorry,” I said, though the apology was probably insufficient for having disrupted his entire class – and quite possibly threatened a few of his clients.
“There’s nothing to apologise for,” he said. “You’re not the first person to have a panic attack in my class. And you won’t be the last. There’s a reason we hold separate classes for trauma survivors. And everyone else knows what this is like. They’ve all got their own stories to tell.”
I scowled at that. “Somehow I doubt there’s much comparison between their stories and mine.” I knew for a fact that none of the other participants were ex-military. And that meant they’d likely never left the planet. Getting hit by a car, or burned in a house fire was horrible, but it really couldn’t compare to being stranded on a remote planet and tortured by demonic creatures.
Rolen didn’t respond to that one, and somehow, that annoyed me more. “There’s an office off the reception area, if you’d like somewhere quiet to sit for a while?” he said. “I’m going to spend about ten minutes wrapping up the class. Or you can just go home, if you’d prefer? It’s entirely up to you.”
I wanted to go home. No, scratch that, I wanted to be at home. But the getting there was going to be a problem. “I think I’ll sit in the office for a bit,” I told him. Then I spotted the walking stick again. “Uh… Can you apologise to…” What was the woman’s name?
“Emily,” Rolen filled in. “Yes, I will.”
Holding onto Dax to steady myself, I stood up, following him across the room and through the door into the office. Thankfully, there was a door directly from the main hall, so we didn’t have to go through reception, where everyone else was waiting.
I sank into a chair, resting my head in my hands and my elbows on my knees, while Dax stood patiently by the wall. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, after a few minutes.
“You can figure out how we’re going to get home without me doing that again,” I muttered at the floor. “I don’t want to be having flashbacks on a crowded train.”
“We’ll take it slowly,” he said, sounding surprisingly calm about the whole thing. “You can stay behind me, and if you need to stop and take a break at any point, I’ll find somewhere quiet for us to sit.”
I blinked at him, not quite sure what to make of this sudden take-charge attitude. This morning, he’d been prostrating himself on the floor and panicking about having had a wet dream, terrified of my displeasure. But here he was, making decisions, ordering other people about, and presenting himself as a rock for me to lean on, unfazed by his master well and truly losing his shit. It seemed I had seriously underestimated Dax.
And that was… very interesting. Today had proven exactly two things to me. Firstly, that I was completely incapable of running my own life and taking care of myself. Right now, I couldn’t even remember how to get back to the train station, and left to my own devices, I’d probably spend the rest of the day wandering aimlessly in circles. And secondly, Dax was far more qualified to be taking control of the finer details of my life than I had ever imagined.
Maybe Aiden had been right all along. Maybe I just needed to give Dax a chance. And then maybe the rest of this mountain I had to climb wouldn’t seem so scary after all.