Page 22 of Falling With You

I loved my job, even if sometimes my own body hated me for it.

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t technically an athlete, working on athletes’ bodies was hard on my own.

My next patient was Chad, a former wrestler, and so sweet. He had hurt his shoulders and his back quite severely when another wrestler in his collegiate league broke the rules and did a few things that he wasn’t supposed to do.

Chad had been in a wheelchair for almost a year as he healed.

Now, Chad was walking and doing most things that anybody could do, but he still had some pain—something that was going to be forever now. An injury like that led to chronic pain, but that’s why Chad came in twice a week to make sure he didn’t injure himself further. He was still in his mid-twenties and had a long life to lead.

I just hated the fact that someone else’s mistake had hurt him.

I took my lunch after Chad had left, knowing I was late doing that. I still needed to feed my body and my soul.

My last client of the day was a man named Marcus, a former track and field all-star athlete that had torn his ACL and injured his hamstring while training for the Olympics.

Marcus wouldn’t be running in the Olympics anytime soon—or ever—and I didn’t know how to help him mentally with that. But other people at my clinic knew how to help me lead him towards the right therapist since we could help with the body here but only so much with the mind.

“It feels better,” Marcus said. “I let it run. You know, really run.”

I gave him a smile but shook my head. I had to be firm, even though I needed to be nice at the same time. “We need to go slow, Marcus. I know you hate that.”

“There’s nothing slow about me, Miss Knight.” He gave me a wink, and I just rolled my eyes.

“I’m sure, but healing takes time. And if you don’t want to have to deal with this again and again, especially at the exact wrong moment, you’re going to have to listen.”

We had gone over what his prospects were, and the fact that even with all the rehab and training in the world, his leg would never be as strong as it had been. We were going to try, but I wasn’t going to give him false hope. I also wouldn’t take his dreams away from him. It was a fine line, and sometimes I wasn’t the best at handling it.

By the time I’d finished with Marcus, I was tired and still had some paperwork to do. The others were going to need the pieces of equipment that I had been using, so I moved out of the gym area and into my office. I had a small window, but it wasn’t the biggest room in the place. I didn’t mind, I was rarely in it anyway. I went through my files, looked at what I was doing for the rest of the week, and tried to maintain the plans that I had for each of my clients. It wasn’t easy, trying to overlap what they needed with what they wanted, but sometimes, I could make it happen.

Being the person who had to tell others that maybe their dreams were over wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I hated being that person, but I also had to be the voice of reason and reality for others. I could help some reach their dreams, but most of the time, I was the one telling them that they needed to hold back.

And as someone who hated holding back herself, it wasn’t easy.

By the time the sun was setting, I was all packed and ready to go home. I nodded at my coworkers as I left and put my keys between my fingers as I walked to my car. I didn’t use my little cat ear thing anymore. It hadn’t helped me before, and I didn’t think keys between my knuckles were going to help this time if anything happened. Maybe I needed to get pepper spray. Or at least learn to use it. Or perhaps I just needed to be stronger. Or at a minimum, not afraid to walk to my car when there was still sun, and I was parked right under a light.

I hated this fear, but I didn’t think it was going away anytime soon.

The drive home took forever. Traffic and I never got along. By the time I got home, I just wanted to eat, bury myself in whatever leftovers I had in my fridge, and cuddle with my cats.

I grinned down at them as Baby ran towards me.

She’d had another name when I pulled her from the foster home, but she’d ended up being Baby. She pranced towards me, dancing around my feet, and I set my stuff down on the entryway table before picking her up.

“Did you have a fun day?” I asked, nuzzling the top of her head before petting her. She purred into me and started chirping.

I wasn’t really a crazy cat lady if I talked to my cats and they answered back, right? I mean, cats could totally talk. They understood you.

Right?

I really hoped no one else would ever answer those questions for me. Because I really didn’t want to know the answer.

I walked into the kitchen and shook my head. “So? Did we have a rave?” I put Baby down on the floor, and she purred near me before prancing off into a full gallop towards the living room.

“Well, at least some things don’t change.” I shook my head and started closing all the cabinet doors. Somehow, the cats had learned to open every single cabinet in the house. And when they got lonely or annoyed with me or each other, they would open the cabinet doors. The shelving units that I had inside the cabinets were those soft-closing ones, which meant that they couldn’t actually get into them themselves. It was great for organizing, but the cats hated it. It also meant that they just left the cabinet doors open, and I had to close them. I used to have child locks on everything, but my hands had hated it, and it only really discouraged me from getting into the cabinets rather than the cats. So, I had taken them off, much to my brother’s and sister’s amusement.

I picked up two of the water bowls on my first floor and cleaned them out to fill them up again, right as Danger and Moxie made their way into the kitchen. Moxie was my second youngest, a really quiet boy who was a little skittish. Although he wasn’t skittish when it came to the UPS man. Why, I didn’t know. But Moxie loved the UPS guy. Moxie didn’t like me too much, but I was gaining traction. It had only taken three years. Maybe in another three years, he would actually let me pick him up.

I took a couple of very soft steps towards Moxie and held out my hand. When Moxie sniffed it twice and didn’t back away, I counted that as a win.