Everything Changes (6 page)

A
FEW
hours later, Carey lay sprawled on his bed in Jase’s tiny guest room, his thoughts churning, his mind a muddled mass of confusion. When they got home from the beach, it was early afternoon, and Jase left Carey to head to Quinn’s house for rehearsal, saying he would stay with the guys until it was time to go to the club for setup and sound check for the concert that night. Carey said he wanted to take a short nap, and he’d meet Jase at the club later. Jase had given him a concerned look but hadn’t said anything, gripping Carey’s shoulder in good-bye as he snatched up his keys and wallet and headed out the door.

Now Carey stretched out on the bed in the dark, quiet guest room trying to make sense of what had happened that afternoon. He’d been blindsided by his desire for Jase. Of course he’d always appreciated Jase was a beautiful man, the same way he appreciated how the mountains in Colorado were beautiful or the beach in San Diego was gorgeous. Jase was very easy on the eyes, and he had something that made everyone simply want to be around him. Carey was no different; he loved being around Jase. He wanted to bask in that larger-than-life personality that drew men and women like moths to flame. But he’d never, ever considered the attraction Jase held for him to be of a sexual nature.

You’re a lying liar who lies,
his conscience whispered, and Carey couldn’t suppress it anymore, memories swamping him suddenly, memories he’d tried so hard to bury deep until he could almost convince himself it hadn’t fucking happened.

But it had.

C
HAPTER
4

Four years ago

T
HE
LAST
thing Carey clearly remembered about the day his life changed forever was a nap in the shade of a Humvee tire, his head pillowed on a hard thigh. There was something about cold water splashing in his face, then laughter, Jase shouting, “Fuck you, Gomez!”

Not a whole lot after that other than some fuzzy images of Jase’s anguished face, smoke and haze, blackness… and pain, so much fucking pain. He remembered screaming, feeling like his body was on fire, thrashing in the dirt, Jase’s voice telling him to “Hold on. Oh Jesus, hold on, bud.”

The next clear memory he had was of waking up in a hospital in Germany, learning he’d almost bled to death on the ground at the firebase and that his heart had stopped twice on the way to the hospital in Kabul.

“You’re very lucky,” a grizzled surgeon had told him.

Carey had closed his eyes and turned his face away, his right hand resting on top of his heavily bandaged leg. Well, half of a leg, anyway. The lower half, below the knee, had been mangled beyond repair from the explosion, what they called an incomplete amputation. Tendons and muscle had been torn away, bone shattered. The surgeons had finished the job the bomb blast had started, taking the lower part of his leg completely off so just a stump remained. His other leg was intact, but he’d suffered several deep lacerations to his thigh, which had nicked his femoral artery and caused the bleeding that had almost taken his life.

“The medic you had deserves a medal,” that same surgeon told him. “He did everything right.”

Jase. Carey knew Jase would have worked tirelessly over him, wouldn’t have quit until they’d dragged him away and tied him down somewhere. He owed it all to his friend, and he expected that someday he would be grateful, but now….

When he’d first gotten to Walter Reed in DC, he’d faced another series of surgeries, including skin grafting due to the traumatic nature of his injury. His leg hadn’t been sliced cleanly off that day, but torn away. The surgeons had obviously wanted to save as much of it as possible, and from what Carey had been told, he was extremely fortunate to have the amputation be below the knee. That meant he didn’t need an artificial knee, had more range of motion, and would have an easier time being fitted with a prosthesis.

Carey knew he was lucky to be alive and that he wasn’t disfigured. He’d been superficially burned in the explosion, but his heavy uniform and Kevlar vest, along with the bodies of the men in front of him, had shielded him from the worst of that. Carey thanked whatever god might be out there he didn’t remember seeing the teammates immediately in front of him getting ripped into pieces by shrapnel and burned by flames.

When Carey woke from his latest surgery, it had been a little more than a month since the initial injury. As usual he was lying flat on his back, the lower half of the hospital bed elevated. He had a drain sticking out from the incision, and compression bandages were wrapped tightly around the whole stump to try to keep the swelling down. The lacerations on his other leg had healed, finally, but at first they’d become infected, requiring yet another surgery to clear away necrotic tissue, leaving behind deep pits in his thigh. His severe concussion had resolved without any lasting effects, but due to his internal injuries, he was now missing a spleen.

Carey was a mess, and he tried not to wallow in self-pity, he really did, but it was hard. He’d been taking care of himself for most of his life, since around the age of ten, when his mom, his only family, had gotten really sick. She wasn’t up to doing much for him, so Carey had learned to cook simple meals and clean the house, even go grocery shopping, on top of his fifth-grade schoolwork. When she died, Carey had been placed into the foster care system, and things weren’t really all that much different there. Most of the homes had lots of other kids, so Carey was just absorbed into household after household, another warm body added to all the other warm bodies. He didn’t have anyone to depend on but himself, no one he could really count on or say he trusted. Now he was flat on his back, at the mercy of strangers for everything.

Recovery from his surgery went relatively smoothly, and at last Carey was well enough to be released from the hospital. The problem was he didn’t have anyone to care for him, no wife or family. He was in a wheelchair and basically helpless, no one to help him transfer safely from the chair to the bed or from the chair to the goddamn toilet, no one to drive him to physical therapy or doctors’ appointments. That meant a rehab hospital.

In rehab he spent his days in physical therapy as well as occupational therapy, regaining his upper body strength and doing exercises to prepare his lower body for an eventual prosthesis. The evenings were boring, and Carey kept to himself most of the time, reading or watching TV. He longed for privacy and space and some fucking independence.

One day a little over a month into it, Carey was sitting in his wheelchair next to the window of his room, looking disconsolately out onto a rather forlorn garden, watching other patients getting some fresh early-evening air. The self-pity overwhelmed him again, and he gave a sigh that came out as almost a sob, as he wondered what the fuck he was going to do with the rest of his life.

He heard a soft knock on the closed door to his room, and without turning around, he called out, “Come in, Todd,” thinking it was the orderly who usually helped him in and out of the shower Carey liked to take before dinner and bed.

The door opened, and Carey heard footsteps come into the room. He swung his wheelchair around, opening his mouth to greet Todd, but instead he saw Jase, dressed in civilian clothes, looking fit and healthy, a cautious smile on his face.

“Hey, Carey,” he said tentatively, as if unsure of his welcome.

Carey’s mouth opened, but nothing came out until finally he choked, “What are you doing here, Jase?”

“I thought you might need me,” Jase said simply, and Carey felt his face crumple. In the next instant, Jase was on his knees next to Carey’s chair, and Carey fell forward into his friend’s comforting arms and wept.

After that, things moved quickly. Jase rented a two-bedroom, fully furnished apartment not far from the hospital. It was on the ground floor, accessible with a wheelchair ramp, with a bar in the shower and one next to the toilet. He and Carey moved in, Jase saying he was here to stay for as long as Carey needed him. Carey didn’t protest much, knowing as servicemen in a war zone, Jase, like himself, had gotten top pay, all of it tax free. Without a family to support, Jase had enough money to stay awhile and devote himself to Carey’s rehabilitation, and Carey was grateful enough, and selfish enough, to not turn that down.

Over the next several weeks, Jase drove Carey to all his doctors’ and PT appointments, and before long Carey had been assigned a prosthetist and they had begun work on fittings for Carey’s brand-new prosthetic leg. First there were molds and casts to be done, and while he waited for the leg to be manufactured, Carey was given a so-called interim leg so he could start practicing how to take it on and off, and could start strengthening, with his physical therapist’s help, the specific muscles in his residual leg he would need for eventual weight bearing.

Carey finally regained enough upper-body strength to forgo the wheelchair completely in favor of crutches. He was still dependent on Jase in a lot of ways, but the bar in the shower meant he could do at least some things for himself. He could hop into the bathroom on his crutches, pull himself into the shower slowly to sit on a small plastic lawn chair Jase had put in there, wash, then dry himself off with a towel as best he could in a seated position before using his crutches to pull himself back out. One time he’d almost slipped and fallen, but he didn’t tell Jase that because he knew he would insist on helping him from then on. No way was his friend going to have to wash his fucking ass for him.

Once Carey’s prosthetic leg was done, there was the arduous process of final fittings and the necessary tweaks, and when he finally had a socket that fit like it was supposed to, it was time to learn to walk again. He started off simply standing between some parallel bars, practicing side-to-side weight-shifting and balancing on one leg. When his therapist felt that was mastered, Carey progressed to side-stepping, using a full-length mirror next to the parallel bars so he could watch his posture and foot position. Taking forward steps brought a whole new level of difficulty into the equation, as Carey had to learn to swing the prosthetic leg forward the proper distance in order to build a gait pattern that was comfortable and efficient for him. Not being able to feel the floor under his artificial foot was nerve-wracking at first, knowing even the smallest variation in terrain could send Carey tumbling to the ground in a nasty fall.

According to his therapist, everything was moving along as it should, but progress was slow and Carey was frustrated. As a result he was testy and sometimes downright surly. Everything he knew and loved about his old life was gone, especially his identity as a Marine, and all there seemed to be left was pain and aggravation and an ugly-ass lump of scar tissue where his leg used to be.

Jase never complained when Carey took his frustration out on him, when he fell into black moods where he would do nothing but grunt. He was rude at times, snapping at Jase for trivial things, like Jase forgetting to buy Carey’s favorite cookies after a trip to the grocery store. Jase seemed to take it in stride, although sometimes his jaw would tighten before he made a visible effort to relax and keep his voice even.

One night things got really bad. Carey’s progress at physical therapy seemed to have taken two steps back instead of even half a step forward. He’d been trying to push himself too hard, and his stump was paying the price. It was showing signs of developing pressure sores, and his therapist told him he needed to take at least a week off from therapy in order to let it heal. Pressure sores could turn into ulcerations and become dangerously infected, so Carey needed to rest it and use a prescription-strength antibiotic cream on the sores until they were completely healed.

The time wouldn’t be wasted, his therapist assured him, giving him plenty of home exercises to do so he could continue building up his leg muscles. He was also given strict orders to stay off of his prosthetic and only use crutches for at least the next seven days. Carey knew she was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. He hated lying around like a fucking beached whale or gimping around on crutches like a fucking… like a fucking cripple.

That evening Jase grilled them burgers for dinner and made homemade sweet potato fries to go along with them. Jase liked to cook, and Carey was reaping the benefit of nutritious homemade meals, starting to fill out a little from the scarecrow he’d been after all his time in the hospital. When Jase brought Carey his plate of food, he handed Carey a cold soda to go along with it.

“Can you bring me a beer, Jase?” he asked.

“Carey, you took a Vicodin earlier for the pain, and you’ll be taking one again before bed. No alcohol, man,” Jase replied easily, sitting down in the recliner next to Carey and taking a huge, messy bite of his burger. He chewed rapturously, making comments about how good it was. Carey knew he was trying to be cheerful for his sake, but at that moment that didn’t mean jack shit, and Carey was not in the mood.

“I don’t give a fuck if I shouldn’t have a beer. Bring me a goddamn beer, Jase!”

Jase put down his burger and looked at Carey steadily. “No beer, Carey. It’s not safe for you—”

“Fine, you fucking prick, I’ll get it myself!” Carey childishly flung his plate of food to the floor, the ceramic plate shattering, food flying everywhere. He grabbed for his crutches and pulled himself up, the abused muscles in his support leg protesting, cramping painfully, causing him to fall back on the couch. He repeatedly tried to get up with the same result, finally throwing his crutches across the room with a clatter and burying his face in his hands.

After a silent minute, he heard Jase move from his chair, and when Carey opened his eyes, he was kneeling silently on the floor cleaning up the mess. He didn’t say a word of admonishment, didn’t rail against Carey, didn’t give him the decking Carey so richly deserved.

“Jase,” he finally said thickly. “Why didn’t you let me die? Out there? You should have just let me die.”