Jake (5 page)

              Occasionally, an errant thought passed through her mind. Jake’s sense of humor—she’d seen a spark here and there, when the tone of their conversation became suggestive—or his quiet disapproval. He was definitely
not
impressed with her casual acceptance of her circumstances, and yet he had appreciated her plan of action. And there was a lot more to Jake. She had seen the shadow play in his eyes when he was stirred by a memory. Something or someone had caught up with him, only for a moment, but he had changed. Grown somber.

              Jake ran deep. And in that, there was no comparison to Trace. Her ex-husband had been all about baseball and when that was lost, so was he.

              Jake was made of stronger stuff than that. Whatever haunted him, was not consuming him.

              The thought was calming for Ivy. She knew more about Jake than she’d thought. And maybe she could fall back on another of her go-to mantras—proceed with caution. Although the idea of slow with Jake didn’t appeal to her at all.

              Ivy was checking over the last of her patient charts and sipping a cup of fresh-brewed coffee when Genny found her.

              “You’re not going to get anywhere without these.” The nurse held out the set of Ivy’s car keys. “That was some kind of car trouble you had last night.”

              A second nurse came up beside them. “I would love to look half as troublesome,” he agreed.

              “Too serious to be sunshine,” the nurse continued. “But I’m calling him Apollo anyway.”

              “My wife calls me Thor, the god of thunder. But that’s only when I’ve been very good.”

              They laughed and Ivy pocketed her keys.

              Genny watched her, shaking her head. “You’re not going to tell us his name? You’ve been with us, what—three years now?—and this is the first sign of life on the outside we see and you’re not sharing?”

              “When he becomes a household name, I’ll let you know it,” Ivy returned.

              “You just pick him up on the side of the road?” Genny persisted.

              Ivy shook her head.”He picked
me
up, and drove me all the way to work.”

              “How far was that?”

              “East of Riverside.”

              That announcement dropped their jaws.

              “No kidding,” Genny whispered. “Look at that, Stan, Ivy’s got the real thing.”

              “I don’t have anything. Not yet. Well, except my car. Did he say where he parked it?”

              “Blue three. North side.”

              Ivy thought about her options. She had Triple A, so it was either have it towed home or to the shop. At home, it would sit until Ivy had the funds to replace the tire and she would have to rely on public transportation to get to work. Not a very practical solution as sometimes she had only thirty minutes to get from her shift at Children’s to her part time at the rehabilitation center. So she was going to have to dip into the precious little that was in her savings account now.

              “You guys know of a good deal on tires?”

              “No need,” Genny replied. “His message was, ‘You’re good to roll.’”

              Ivy felt her eyes flare. There was no fixing that tire, but maybe Jake had managed to find a spare. He’d gone out of his way to do it, too. Again. And it made her a little uncomfortable. It must have shown on her face.

              “In the world of man-woman relationships,” Genny said, “this kind of thing is done all the time.”

              “But we don’t have a relationship,” Ivy protested.

              “Yet. This is the best part,” Genny warned, “when he’s working to win you over. He’ll do the unthinkable—leap tall buildings and all of that. Make a record of it, so you’ll have something to fall back on later. It dries up, all this romance.”

              “Now that’s not true,” Stan said. “I still buy my wife flowers for no obvious reason and tell her everyday how lovely she is.”

              “That’s why you’ve been married twenty-something years,” Genny pointed out. “You’re a rare breed, Stan.”

              “He fixed my car,” Ivy was still stuck on it.

              “You’ve got to do better than that, honey,” Genny advised. “Expect the sweet, the nothings and the somethings.”

              “This is a something.” It was pretty big to Ivy.

              “This is definitely a something. The man knows how to take care of his woman.”

             
But I’m not his woman. Not yet.

              Ivy said good-bye to her friends, grabbed her purse and walked off the floor. She boarded the elevator still feeling that Jake’s gesture was one of trespass. But that was ridiculous. His act of kindness seemed too close, too personal, she argued with herself, because no one, other than Holly, had ever extended themselves so much for her. And maybe she was putting too much weight into Jake’s actions. Fixing her tire was an extension of the man himself—that honor and follow-through she’d already noticed about him—and probably had very little to do with her. Maybe.

              By the time she got to the parking garage she was feeling better about the situation.

              Jake was a soldier. He helped. He rescued. He restored. It was who he was.

              Ivy had never been rescued before. She didn’t realize that it was all-inclusive. That the job wasn’t considered done until the problem was solved. She accepted that. Just as she accepted that people raised in loving homes were conditioned to expect it and that she and Holly, and a whole lot of other people, had to get used to it. And it’s not that Ivy didn’t extend herself in similar ways. Loaning her spare is what got her in this predicament to begin with.

              But all that reasoning evaporated when she arrived at her car.

              Her Patriot was sporting new tires. Two of them. Not a single, donut-sized spare, but replacement. New tread, shiny black. And her car had been washed, too. The film of dust coating the black paint was gone; the bird spatter, the streaks of desert across her windshield cleaned.

              For a moment Ivy lost her equilibrium. She actually felt the world around her tilt a little.

              She was overwhelmed. And she didn’t like it.

              She felt threatened, but why?

              Was it her independence that she’d fought long and hard to achieve and came to covet that she felt was under attack? Or was there more to it than that?

              She felt her feet slipping. She leaned backwards to compensate for the sudden change in gravitational pull.

              More. There was more going on. Genny’s words fluttered across her mind. Expectations. She was supposed to have them. From the sweet to the grand. Most women not only had them, but made them clear. Ivy knew this. Every time she picked up a fashion magazine there was at least one article addressing ‘what a woman wants’ or ‘how to set and expect…’ Was that part of the problem? Ivy had no expectations?

              She definitely had no prior experience with this kind of care. Maybe Jake’s gesture was one more thing to chalk up to ‘the norm,’ as she and Holly called it. If they’d lived a normal childhood, Ivy’s world would not be so rocked now by this extension of kindness.

              Yes, she decided. She often found herself tracing emotions back to her childhood. Since leaving Trace and rebuilding her life, she’d gotten much better at identifying them and assigning them the right amount of weight. Baggage—she had to remember when she felt that dread rearing its head, to check her baggage. Like with anything else, she would get better at it with practice.

              Ivy took a deep breath and her lungs felt looser. She opened her hand and looked at the key resting in her palm. And after checking her baggage, she decided, she was going to find a way to enjoy her new destination. That would take some practice, too, but she was worth it.

              And the thought struck a chord with her. She felt its soft vibration from within, rolling out to her fingertips and down to her toes. Worth. Value. That was the more. Jake treated her like she possessed both. It was also the same old struggle. She’d thought she’d beat that into submission. She could tell herself ten times a day that she had value, that she was a good person with lots to give, but believing it required consistent reminders.

              New situations came with new tests. But she was a quick study. It’d only taken her a few hours to get Jake straight in her heart: she was wildly attracted to the man and maybe that was a good thing. He was certainly worth exploring. And that thought thinned the air supply and made her slightly dizzy.

              Ivy pressed the button on the key pad that released the door locks. Her headlights flashed and she opened the driver’s door, slid behind the wheel, and sank into the soft upholstery. A car that worked well, that got her from A to B no problem, was a gift. So she took a moment to appreciate it. The Patriot was her first vehicle. When she was a kid, they rarely owned a car, which was probably just as well as her mother was too drunk to drive or to know better. Trace had been stingy with the keys to his pick-up, but he had taught her to drive. When she was still in high school, and had completed the teen driver course, he’d taken her on the back roads until she was ready for her test. Driving was a gift of freedom, of autonomy.  And Jake had restored that. That was the complete opposite of threatening her independence. Another way of looking at the situation. A positive spin. Why couldn’t she have gone there first?

              Practice, she reminded herself.

              She took another breath, opened her eyes, and moved her purse from her lap to the passenger seat. That’s when she noticed the invoice. It was folded neatly in half and propped against the console, where Ivy couldn’t fail to see it. She plucked it from behind the gear shift and scanned the type and numbers.

              He’d left her the bill—of course he had. And that made her smile, which was like pulling

a ball of string—the remaining tension in her muscles eased. Jake understood there were boundaries. He’d proven that to her already on the drive to San Diego.
When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
When was she going to take her own advice? Ivy dropped her eyes to the bottom line and was relieved to see that the total wasn’t bad at all, after a deep military discount.

Chapter Five

              Ivy parked on the street three blocks from her apartment, which wasn’t bad. This close to the water, any kind of land was a premium. She pulled her overnight case from the back of the car and slid her purse over her shoulder before setting the alarm. Then she stood on the sidewalk, her face tilted into the salty wind. Her eyelids fluttered closed. She was tired. She was hungry. She had just six hours before she was due at the rehab center, but this moment was restorative. The damp sea air was like a spritzer.

              This afternoon she would work an eight hour shift, taking her well into evening. It’d be midnight by the time she returned to her apartment. The moon would be a huge silver coin in the sky and the sultry air would wrap around her with comforting familiarity. She would sleep for five hours and begin her work day again. Ivy loved her schedule—it was demanding and rewarding and kept her moving forward.

              Holly had started working again a year after the accident. Half days at first. She’d told Ivy that some days she started strong but ended up using her cane. It disappointed her, Ivy could tell. But Holly was so happy to have some normalcy back. She was a counselor who dealt with addictive behaviors. Sometimes she helped teens through drug dependency, lately, though, she’d confided in Ivy that many of her clients had cutting or other self-mutilating issues. Holly had talked about an upcoming conference—three days in San Francisco—with keynote speakers whom she respected. They would lay out new strategies for helping adolescents deal with the challenges and pressures in their lives. Holly wanted to go. They had brought up the website and Ivy had encouraged her to sign up. It would be her sister’s first trip since the accident and there would be some unknown challenges to her mobility—things Ivy took for granted, like walking up the skyway. And even if they thought it through, tried to puzzle out every possible roadblock and its solution, they were sure to miss a few. Holly would have to deal with them alone. Ivy knew she could do it. Her sister was ready.

              It didn’t surprise Ivy that both she and her sister had ended up in careers where they helped others. Sometimes it’s that shared experience—of having hit bottom, of having nowhere else to go but up—that helped pull another person out.

              Holly got as much out of her career as Ivy did. She’d noticed a change in her sister’s spirits since she’d returned to work. And that was probably why Holly had recently moved into a more demanding schedule, adding hours and even home and school visits to support her clients. She had daily physical therapy or gym time with a trainer specializing in sport rehabilitation. Her body was getting stronger and she was getting better with her prosthetic—good enough that she was already being fitted for her sport leg. A plaster mold had been completed and her visits with the prosthetist were coming more frequently. As grueling as Ivy’s schedule was, her sister’s seemed far more exhausting.

              Ivy climbed the stairs to her apartment and told herself that she was going to grab a quick snack then climb into bed without thoughts of Jake tempting her into a state of arousal. She’d spent much of her shift fantasizing about the man and right now she needed sleep.