Montana Desire

Chapter 21

Grant

A week passed, and though it seemed like hyperbole, it was the best week I’d ever had. There wasn’t a night that Cori and I didn’t spend either in my bed or in hers. Now that we’d both admitted that we didn’t want to hold back, and that what we wanted in the bedroom lined up exactly, we couldn’t get enough of each other.

It seemed too good to be true, the way we fit with each other. But waking up next to her made me happier than I’d been in a long time. Even when the pain came back in force. Which was why I was currently driving all the way to Bozeman to see a specialist. I hadn’t seen the doctor in too long, simply because I could be a stubborn ass about it.

The long drive wasn’t comfortable, but it would be worse if I didn’t do it now. My pain often cycled, and it would probably escalate tomorrow. That wasn’t particularly fun to think about, so I was pushing it aside.

Dr. Peak was former military too. Army Rangers. He had a good understanding of the work we did at Resting Warrior and knew what it meant to live with the consequences of being a soldier. He told it like it was, but he knew how to soften the blow just enough.

He also got plenty of shit about being named Peak and living in the mountains, but he was a good sport about it.

The medical campus was so familiar, I barely had to look where I was going to find his office. There had been a time when I was here every week, looking for a solution to the pain. That was before I’d decided to just deal with it. Clearly, that wasn’t working anymore.

If I was going to have a future with Cori—and every minute I spent with her confirmed that I wanted that—I didn’t want it to be marred by pain all the time. So I needed to get my shit together and try. The guys had been practically bursting with I told you so energy when they found out I was seeing the doctor and why.

At least when they found out about Cori and that we were now together, the teasing hadn’t been completely unbearable. That would probably change as we got more serious. I could just see the ways they would try to embarrass me for having wanted her for so long from a distance and finally sealing the deal.

But they would never know how relieved I was. It was one thing to imagine what it would be like with a person—even so much that you craved it. Actually being with that person, no matter how well you knew them, was different. So far, being with Cori was far better than I’d ever imagined. Just thinking about her put a smile on my face.

That same smile was reflected back at me when I went into the office and saw Edith, Dr. Peak’s receptionist. “Mr. Carter. Been a while since we’ve seen you in here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It has. But you’ll probably be seeing me a little more often now.”

She smiled and stood. “We’re having a slow day today, so things are ready. Come on back.”

We didn’t go to his office, but to the radiology suite. Another place I’d spent a significant amount of time. Getting onto the MRI table wasn’t easy today, pain sharpening with that particular movement. The one nice thing was that my head didn’t have to be inside the machine, and I didn’t have to deal with feeling like I couldn’t breathe along with everything else.

Hell, facedown like this? Give me a pillow, and I could take a nap.

The tech handed me the headphones that would keep me sane for the remainder of the scan. “Any music you want?”

“Anything but country,” I said. “Please.”

He laughed. “You’re living in Montana, and you don’t like country?”

“I don’t mind it, but it’s not what I want to have covering up the kinds of sounds the monster behind me makes.”

“Fair enough. We have a good rock station I can throw on for you.”

“Thanks.”

Generic rock came through the headphones, and it helped block out the screeching sounds that still came through the noise-canceling headphones. They were burned in my brain at this point.

I did actually drift off during the procedure, the music cutting off in the headphones the thing that woke me up. The way I jumped tweaked my back, and I grunted against the pain. “Fuck.”

“You all right?” the tech asked as I took off the headphones.

“I’ll live.” I eased myself off the table. “Thanks.”

He led me out of the suite and into a very familiar office. “Dr. Peak will be with you in a couple minutes. You can get dressed.”

Nothing like being in someone’s office in only a hospital gown. I cursed again, stepping back into my pants. It was getting worse. The drive home wasn’t going to be fun. But at the very least, I was taking action.

I’d just sat down when the courtesy knock on the door came before he pushed it open. “Nice to see you, Grant,” Dr. Peak said. “Been a while this time.”

“I know. Believe me, my balls have already been busted about it in case you were wondering.”

“Good to know,” he chuckled. “But I’ll need to do it a little too. Monitoring this is more important than you’ve made it. I know that you know that, but it needs repeating.”

I sighed. “Yeah. It seemed hopeless, and I let it get the better of me. I’d like to try again.”

“That’s a good thing, because you need to.”

Saying nothing was an excellent way to make people fill the silence, so I kept quiet.

“Your scans are…concerning, Grant. The shrapnel is a lot closer to your spine than the last time I saw you. The fact that it’s moving that quickly isn’t a good thing. If we don’t keep monitoring you, and you don’t keep going to physical therapy, it could paralyze you.”

I swallowed the punch of adrenaline and fear at the idea of being bound to a chair. When my mobility was limited from pain, I already struggled. In a wheelchair? I would go insane.

“There are surgical options, but you know that comes with its own risks.”

“Is it a done deal?” I asked.

Dr. Peak folded his hands in front of him. “How do you mean?”

“Is the shrapnel paralyzing me an if or a when?”

“That’s hard to say. Depends on a whole bunch of factors.”

Raising an eyebrow, I stared at him. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it for me.”

“I’m not.”

“Then give me your gut feeling. I don’t do well with ‘it depends.’ If you were in my position, would you be throwing your energy into stretching and physical therapy, or would you be looking at the surgery before it’s too late?”

He inclined his head. “I would be looking at the surgery. If only because the sooner you do, the easier it is. The closer that shrapnel works itself to your spine, the more risk the surgery carries, and the more likely that you end up paralyzed anyway.”

Shit. That was both the answer I expected and the one I least wanted to hear. No one wanted to know that an incredibly dangerous surgery was really the only way they could have a normal life again.

“All right. How do I investigate that?”

“I’ll set you up with a referral to a surgeon. She’s based out of Arizona, but she comes up north for consultations regularly, so I’ll see if she has room for you soon.”

That was good. I had some time to wrap my head around it before I spoke to the doctor. “That sounds good.”

“Grant, I want you to know that this isn’t hopeless. I’m optimistic about your possibilities, and I don’t want you to think that I just handed you some kind of life sentence. We’ll find a way to fix this for you.”

“I appreciate that.” I put more enthusiasm into the words than I actually felt. “Anything else I need to do before I go?”

He smiled. “Promise me that you’re going to go back to physical therapy?”

“How did you find out I wasn’t?”

“I took one look at you. And even if I hadn’t, they followed up with me months ago, wondering where you’d gone since you wouldn’t answer their calls. Or mine, after that.”

I winced. “Yeah. Well, I promise I will call them.”

“That’s all I ask.” He stood and held out a hand to shake mine. “Whatever happened to turn your mind around on this, keep doing it.”

“Not a what,” I said. “But a who.”

That made him smile wider. “Then she must be one hell of a woman.”

That she was. I made sure I had another appointment scheduled in a couple of months before I left the office, though I hoped I would have made contact with the other doctor before then.

As I walked outside, I dove to my right, flattening onto the grass. It took me seconds to realize that I’d reacted to a sound before my conscious mind registered it. A car drove by. Backfire. Fucking shit.

My heart raced, and pain seeped in as the burst of adrenaline wore off. This was the part I hated the most. Dealing with my injuries always brought it all back up. My reactions were off, and I jumped at nearly nothing. I would be lucky if I didn’t have nightmares.

“Hey, you okay?” The question came from a man walking into the building.

Of course he would ask that, since I was currently flat on my back, looking at the sky. “Yeah. I’m good. Thank you.”

He gave me a look that told me he thought I wasn’t telling the truth, but he kept walking. Good. The last thing I wanted right now was anybody looking at me.

Slowly, painfully, I got myself up off the ground and over to my truck. It was a four-hour drive home, and I wasn’t looking forward to it with my mind like this. Already, I was seeing flashbacks and images that I’d worked hard to eliminate from my mind.

The sun bright that morning, everyone smiling as we loaded up to head back to base. Our mission was over, and we were going home.

The highway stretched out in front of me, and I tried to focus my mind on the here and now. But the mind was a funny thing when it came to trauma. All my work at Resting Warrior, and my own personal work with it, already knew that. It didn’t want to be here in this moment.

I dozed in the back seat of the Hummer, hands still on my gun. This was a safe area. Or safe-ish. We didn’t expect any trouble on our drive. Just the locals we’d been interacting with for a few days.

Nothing on the radio helped. Not even the abrasive honky-tonk country station that I found and was so awful that I thought it would knock my memories clear from my head.

One second I was looking through a tinted window at a desert sky, and the next, everything was motion and sound. Metal screeching and my body being hurled like a rag doll through the air. My head slammed into the glass—thank fuck for combat helmets.