Free Can't Hold Back by Serena Bell Page A

Becca had told him the truth, that had been one of the first things he’d thought of—
Ohhh. Right.
    Not
Becca’s words. Made-up words. Fictional words.
    But now he saw it differently.
    Alia’s
words.
    Holy shit.
    This probably wasn’t going to help him much with the wood-on-the-PT-table problem.

Chapter 8
    At lunchtime most days, Alia took a break and swam across the lake and back. It took her about half an hour at an easy pace, so she estimated it was probably a quarter-mile in each direction. It was part exercise and part meditation, the sameness of the strokes, her fingers cutting through water, the quiet under the surface, only the bubbling of her exhalations audible. She could
think
under there, or, rather,
not think,
which was the point. To empty her brain, which lately had been jumping around like a monkey on her.
    Maybe I should tell Nate the truth.
    The truth being the fact that she had, once upon a time, loved him. That the letters had held so much of her, that the care package and the IMs had been all her, and only her. No fictional amalgam.
    He’d told her so much the other day, the way it had felt to hit bottom, why the kayaking mattered to him, the exact shape of his survivor’s guilt.
I didn’t do anything to make him die or to make myself live. It was just what happened.
And then—offhand, as if it weren’t the thing he thought about most:
He was such a nice guy, the kind of guy everyone loved.
    She knew what he was really saying was,
If it had to be one of us, it should have been me.
    Of course, there was nothing fair, not from a human perspective, about who lived and who died—not on or off the battlefield. But that wasn’t what he needed to hear.
    She’d almost said it.
You’re that kind of guy, Nate
.
The kind of guy everyone loves. And I know, because I—
    “Wait
up.
” A shout loud enough to cut through the water in her ears.
    Murphy’s Law of Empty Lakes,
she thought.
The guy you’re thinking about is the one gaining a length per second on you.
    He reached her and they treaded water. “You look great,” she said.
    Jake was due back in three days. Nate had grown stronger; the dark shadows had faded from under his eyes, and his skin had bronzed—but that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that he moved more easily, as if pain were no longer his constant companion.
    She’d given him a regimen of stretching and strengthening, cardio to keep inflammation low and endorphins high, and loads of water to drink. But she’d also done everything she could to keep him off her table and out of her quiet office. If pain surfaced when he was working with her in the open, central physical therapy area, she gave him more stretches, encouraged him to tap with a tennis ball on the tense spot, or sent him to the hot tub (without her). She told herself she was building his confidence, his independence, but the truth was, she was scared of him. Or, really, she was scared of herself. Of how badly she wanted to cross the line, slide a hand under his T-shirt, under the waistband of his jeans, between his thigh and the table, over his flat abs, up, down—everywhere.
    And this—alone in the middle of a lake, mostly naked—was not an improvement.
    “Looks like you’re going to be fine to do the trip, huh?” she asked. They were bobbing up and down the way one did when treading water and conversing. She wondered what her breasts were doing under her sporty swimmer’s suit, and whether they were too small altogether to register with him. She’d seen the body type he went for—if Becca was an indication—and, well, it wasn’t hers.
    He shook his head. “I have to get to the point where the pain is more under control. It keeps jumping out at me.”
    “That’s going to happen for a while. The trick is not to get into a fear-pain cycle when that happens—not to let yourself tense up and make the pain worse. Can you just…I know this sounds funny, but
accept
the pain?”
    He gave her a scornful