Soul Caress. Kim Shaw

      “Here is your toothbrush. The paste is already on it.”

      Kennedy felt in front of her again until she located the toothbrush and clumsily directed it to her mouth. She brushed her teeth for several moments and then took the cup of water offered by Nurse Crosby. She rinsed, gargled, spit into the basin and rinsed again.

      “Now, that’s better. Once you’ve had your wheelchair lessons, you’ll be able to do this in the bathroom all by yourself. Won’t that be great?”

      Kennedy slumped back against the pillow without responding. It was taking every ounce of reserve that she possessed not to go off on the nurse. Normally, she was not what you would call a combative person. She hated conflict and discord, preferring to find less confrontational ways in which to work out disagreements. Unless she felt backed into a corner with no alternatives—as in the case of the rumble at summer camp back in the day—Kennedy was mild-mannered and diplomatic. Her patience was running low these days, however, and the last thing she was prepared to deal with was an overzealous nurse who’d swallowed one too many happy pills.

      “Do you feel like pink or blue today?”

      “What?”

      “Pink or blue? I’ve taken the liberty of making two selections from your closet—the first is a blue denim dress and the other is a pink skirt and matching sweater. What will it be?”

      “I don’t care,” Kennedy responded tersely.

      “Well, let’s go with the denim.”

      Without another word Nurse Crosby helped Kennedy remove her gown and slip into the denim dress. After her arrival the day before, she’d been left alone pretty much to rest until evening, when another nurse had helped her bathe in a special shower designed for people with casts on their legs. Within the shower stall there stood a metal closet in which Kennedy placed her plastered leg and then the nurse closed it, thereby keeping it sealed and protected from the water.

      “All right, dear, I’ve got other clients to tend to,” Nurse Crosby announced as if Kennedy had been keeping her there.

      Kennedy listened as the nurse retreated, closing the door behind her. She covered her face with her hands, pressing her fingertips against her useless orbits. She cursed and muttered, allowing herself to release the frustration that she’d held in check while Nurse Crosby was in the room. While Kennedy’s other injuries had begun to heal, her emotional health teetered on the brink of crumbling. Her arm had been freed from the cast and despite a slight loss of muscle tone, it felt as good as new to her.

      Outwardly, she had mended sufficiently enough so that the doctors at Annandale were comfortable in signing her out of the hospital and sending her to Stillwater Rehabilitation Center to begin the arduous task of rebuilding her life. However, inwardly her spirit remained fractured and she felt no motivation to even get out of the bed. The fire that had previously driven her to become the lively, energetic woman that everyone who knew her believed her to be, had been extinguished.

      She took sharp, deep breaths, feeling as though she were suffocating under the unfairness of it all. She gasped for air where there was none to be had.

      “Good morning, Ms. Daniels. I’m Malik Crawford and I work the day shift here at Stillwater. I’ve been assigned to work with you during your stay.”

      Kennedy turned toward the door, the direction from which the baritone voice came. Two things struck her at precisely the same moment. One, the voice was vaguely familiar, although she could not place it. Secondly, whoever he was, the brother had the sexiest voice she had ever heard in all of her twenty-eight years. She wiped the tears from her cheeks, momentarily pulled from the cliff of crushing despair on which she had been lingering.

      “Mr. Crawford—” Kennedy began.

      “Malik, please. Just call me Malik. As I said, we’ll be working together during your stay. I will take you to all of your therapy sessions, doctor’s appointments and twice-daily trips outdoors. Outside of that, if you need anything else…if you’d like to leave your room, say, to go down to the game room or something, I’m your man. Okay? Just buzz the nurses’ station and ask them to page me. How’s that sound?”

      I’m your man sounded interesting, but Kennedy didn’t say that. Had she been in another frame of mind, another place in her life, she would have allowed the heat of attraction to spill over her. Yet other more pressing things were on her mind, like the fact that she was dependent on this person for however long she was at Stillwater. Dependence was not something she did very well. She was used to taking care of herself and coming and going as she pleased. Once again, the realization that she was no longer the woman she’d once been smacked her in the face. Once again, she fought the powerful urge to cry.

      Malik watched Kennedy for some reaction. He’d neglected to tell his new client that he had been part of the team who’d helped to unload her transport bed from the ambulance that had brought her to Stillwater early the day before. In part, he’d omitted this fact out of sheer embarrassment. He had been rendered speechless when he’d laid eyes on Kennedy Daniels for the second time in his life. Absent were the bruises and bandages, the intravenous tubes and the heart-monitoring devices. Gone was the poor nameless individual for whom he felt sorry.

      Her jacket unzipped to reveal a white camisole that fit her torso like a glove. On her left foot she wore a pair of yellow-and-white Nike cross-trainers, and her hair was pulled back off of her face and held in a ponytail by a large barrette. Her fresh face and fit figure could easily have been that of an eighteen-year-old college freshman, yet something in her carriage even as she was rolled on a gurney out of the transport van told him that she was a mature woman in every sense of the word.

      The singular thing that struck him, literally sucking the air right out of his lungs, was her smile. It had been ever so brief, but immensely potent. One of the nurses, an older woman who did a remarkable imitation of comedienne Adele Givens, said something that prompted the brief smile from Kennedy. Behind the expensive shades that covered one-third of her face, Kennedy smiled, her plump lips parting, revealing beautiful teeth and exposing a small dimple in her left cheek. Malik’s iron-man persona melted, causing him so much discomfort that he’d had to excuse himself to other duties just to get away from her before he became a staring, blundering idiot.

      Twenty-four hours later, Malik had collected himself. He was confident that he would be able to handle his duties with professionalism and decorum with the light of a new day around him. Upon entering her room, he’d steeled himself against the potential of her physical beauty to stir his emotions. He was not a man for whom a woman’s physical appearance was enough to do more than cause a slight stir in his loins. What turned him on mentally and emotionally was a woman whose intellect and conversation were equally as attractive. If he couldn’t talk to a woman and share his ideas, hopes and dreams, he could not share his body with her, either. He had no way of knowing what rested inside of Kennedy Daniels, so to him she remained just another pretty woman—a client at that.

      Kennedy reached her left hand out to the side, bumping it against the side of the nightstand clumsily. She moved her hand several inches up until she could feel her way along the surface of the table. When she came into contact with the object for which she had been searching, her shades, she snatched them up gratefully and moved slowly to her face, placing the shades over her eyes. Malik, having received no verbal response from her, took that as a sign that she was ready to go. He came farther into the room, pushing a wheelchair in front of him. He stopped next to her bed.

      “I know movement is a little tough for you right now with that cast covering most of your leg, but we’ll help you learn how to navigate with it and trust me, as soon as you get used to it, it’ll be time to take it off,” Malik said.

      He hadn’t expected a response, although he felt that at least a nod of the head would have been nice.

      “I need you to try to turn your body sideways, swinging your broken leg toward me while letting the other one hang down toward the floor. I’m right here so don’t worry…I’ll catch you if you need me to.”

      With Kennedy