A little while later, Carla nudged him awake. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing to exhaust yourself today?”
Dazed, Jed lowered his arm. The bright light of the room hurt his eyes. “I’m all right.”
Carla grinned and held out her hand to help him up. “Sure you are. That’s why you just snoozed through an hour of muscle manipulation.”
“I wasn’t asleep.” Jed braced one arm behind him, accepted her hand, and sat up. He rarely let anyone help him, but he got a strange kick out of letting his petite therapist yank him upright.
Carla bustled quietly around him, tidying up and resetting her room while he got dressed and took a moment to steady himself. When she was done, she pulled up a chair and scribbled at the notes in her lap until he was sure the room had stopped spinning. “So,” she said, her attention trained on her work. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Jed smirked. Carla was as inquisitive as he was private. Many of her questions went unanswered. “About?”
“Don’t be a dick. What have you been doing to wear yourself out?”
His grin widened. Despite the setting of their relationship, he found her blunt candor comforting and familiar. It reminded him of both his old life and the new life he was forging with Max at the cabin. “I had to go to Seattle today.”
“Seattle? Why?”
“Work.”
“Work? I thought you were discharged?”
“Not Army shit,” Jed clarified, though in truth, discharged he might have been, his job was far from done. “I got offered a translating contract for an NGO in Sudan.”
“NGO? That’s a nongovernment organization, right?”
“Right.”
Carla set her notes aside and leaned forward. She was curious, he could tell by her tilted head and open hands. “Something close to your heart?”
“Used to be. Not sure I can take the job, though.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have a laptop, Internet access….”
Truth was, Jed wanted to take the job. Not because he needed the money, or because translating public health documents was particularly stimulating, but because he needed to dosomething. With dark dreams haunting what little sleep he got, he needed to flex his brain before he lost control of it completely.
“Max had an Internet connection for a while. I don’t know what happened to it, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you set it up again.”
“Wouldn’t do me much good without a computer,” Jed countered.
“So buy one.”
Carla reached behind her and retrieved the smallest laptop Jed had ever seen. He eyed it warily. He’d handled the most dangerous weapons in the world, but he found domestic technology perplexing. The computer was tiny. He was sure he’d break it.
Carla flipped it open and pulled up the website for an electronics store. Somehow she needled Jed’s credit card from him and bought him a laptop that seemed not much bigger than hers.
“Man, you’re a pushover. Thought you Special Forces guys were hard as nails?” Clearly pleased with herself, Carla handed the card back. “If the Internet thing doesn’t work out, you can always print your work here, come to my place, whatever. We can work it out.”
“You know I’m gay, right?”
“Fuck off.”
For the first time in days, Jed laughed. It hadn’t taken long for Carla to topple down the walls he’d spent years building around his sexuality. She was more like Dan than she probably cared to admit. Jed slid off the bed and planted his feet on the floor. Dizziness washed over him. He steadied himself on the edge of the bed, but he felt Carla’s sharp gaze all over him.
“How’s that pesky anemia coming along?”
Jed shrugged. It had been a while since he’d bothered to check.