Heal Me - Chapter One, Part One

 

Carry on reading for the first part of chapter one of Heal Me, coming 1 April

CHAPTER ONE

“I want to go home.”

Matthew Harmon’s doctors—a Japanese woman who wore smart suits but always looked tired, and a guy with scruffy hair and worse shoes—looked at each other and then at Matt’s nurse for inspiration.

Matt’s nurse smiled like the accident that had broken his body had also destroyed his mind. “It’s a little early to be thinking about that, Matthew.”

“I’ll hire a nurse. Know anybody?” He couldn’t stay here anymore. If he did, he really would lose his mind.

She sighed. His doctors were beating a hasty retreat. When there was hard work to be done, they left it to the nurses. “I’ll ask around.”

“Do that.” Matt turned his head away and closed his eyes, his sign he was done talking. The trouble was, every time he closed his eyes, the flashbacks hit him.

He’d been lucid for the entire time he’d sat trapped in the front seat of his Lamborghini on the highway outside Moonlight Cove waiting for firefighters to cut him free. Everything hurt. His fingers told him the bones were sticking through his left leg in two places. His left arm wouldn’t work and hung at a strange angle from the shoulder. Every breath he took was agony and his mouth was full of blood. He had prayed to God for the first time in his life.

A week ago, when they’d pulled the tube from his throat, they’d explained his injuries. A shattered pelvis and fractured left femur. The left tibia and fibula gone too. The left shoulder was dislocated and the collarbone broken. His broken ribs had collapsed his lung and ruptured his spleen. Vague memories of being airlifted to hospital continued to come back. They told him he’d nearly died from his internal injuries on the way. In the OR, they removed his spleen and screwed his bones back together with such a large amount of metal work, he would never be able to walk through a metal detector at the airport again without setting off alarms. Acute renal failure developed before he even made it to intensive care, and the removal of his spleen guaranteed a bout of pancreatitis. In the ICU, he clung to life against all expectations. The doctors were amazed. They told him if he hadn’t been young and strong, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

They didn’t tell him about his face though. Not until he touched the dressings on it and started to ask. Then his nurse told him the detonating airbag had bruised his face, and flying glass had sliced him open from ear to mouth. It was okay, she said. It had been sutured. He would recover. He knew she was lying. His nurse had asked him on several occasions if he wished to see his face in the mirror when she changed the dressings. He told her no. He had once been handsome and attracted attention wherever he went. Now people would stare at him in the street for all the wrong reasons.

Matt felt for the control on his bed and eased his head down. A cast from foot to groin encased his entire left leg, and a sling held his left arm immobile. His ribs and the surgical wounds to his pelvis and left upper side of his abdomen caused him agony every time he so much as took a breath. Luck had smiled on him, they told him, even though he didn’t see it that way. He had no lasting neck or spinal injuries even though he could barely turn his head. He would walk again, eventually, so they said. He didn’t feel grateful.

He stared out of the window. His ground floor room overlooked a lawn where birds flocked to a feeder. He had watched them so many times, he had started to take note of which birds came. Sometimes a squirrel would be there too, stealing all the food. He loved seeing it. He’d never thought to put food out for animals in the immense garden he had at home. Never had he realized what a source of pleasure watching them could be. When you had nothing else to do, the creatures were some kind of lifeline, holding him to the real world.

He tensed as the door opened. He knew by now it was the physical therapist, a man who worked Matt like a drill sergeant and left him shattered and sweating every day. He had to get out of here. The worst thing about being in hospital was relying on people for every single damn thing. And when those things were personal things, it served to emasculate him. He shut his eyes as the physical therapist approached the bed with a greeting and through gritted teeth, he said, “I don’t want to see you today. Go away.”

 

The ambulance wound its way up the long drive to the house standing at the top. Two burly guys manipulated the gurney from the vehicle and trundled Matt to the door. He saw the flowers and cards standing on the table in the hallway. He looked up the wide, winding staircase and wondered how he was going to get up there. The guys simply collapsed the wheels and stretchered him up there and Matt closed his eyes and mouth and held in screams of agony as his broken bones were jolted. An electric bed stood in place of his ostentatious four-poster. He regarded it in distaste and dismay. All he had thought about was sleeping in his own bed. It had not occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to get in or out of it on his own. And why was it so fucking big? Had the hospital sent him a bariatric one? Then he noticed all the mirrors had been removed from the room as per his instructions.

The guys transferred him on a board to the electric bed. The mattress was rock hard and squeaked beneath him like he was farting. He saw a woman standing in the corner of the room and his heart sank. She stepped forward, smiling from red lips. She was a buxom blonde, looking like she was barely out of nursing school. Her uniform struggled to contain her ripe curves. He eyed her with distaste. This was what the hospital had arranged for him? Even if he’d been in full working order, she was not the sort of woman he went for. He preferred slim brunettes. And he didn’t need a reminder of his own uselessness. In his previous life, women like her would have been around him like flies around a honeypot. Now it seemed she looked at him with pity.

“Hello, Matthew. I’m Stacey.”

He shook his head. “Out you go.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“You’re not what I’m looking for.”

“Why?” She looked like she might cry.

“I need someone more mature. Better qualified.”

Her mouth opened, then closed again. She turned on her heel and left the room. The two ambulance guys were hovering nearby. “Dude,” one of them said, shaking his head. “I’d give my left nut to have her bed bathing me.”

Matt said nothing. He took his phone from beneath the blanket and googled nursing agencies for the local area. The drivers excused themselves as Matt explained to the man who answered the phone that he was looking for a home-help nurse with rehabilitation experience. The guy talked through a few options with him and Matt chose the most qualified with an assurance the nurse would be over that morning to speak to him.

Something occurred to him as he lay there in the silence. Although the nurse had been attractive and he had fucked women like her many times in the past when he wasn’t so choosy, her obvious assets had not given him an erection. He’d not had any in the morning when he’d woken up in hospital either. His doctors had warned him about it. They had told him nerve damage from his fractured pelvis could lead to impotence. He should have been grateful for still being continent, although he didn’t feel grateful. He felt robbed, with no guarantees from his doctors that sensation would return. He tried not to dwell on this issue. He didn’t need his equipment in working order at the current time, did he? He had to relax, concentrate on getting better. His body had had such a shock, why would his cock feel like coming out to play? Nevertheless, he pushed his right hand under the blanket and groped his groin through the shorts he wore.

Hello? Any signs of life?

His limp cock resembled a shrunken marshmallow. It had always been rampant, ready for action. He was well-endowed and he gave partners the time of their lives. At least he thought he did. He’d never really cared about anyone else’s pleasure. It looked like he might never need to now.

Footsteps on the stairs made him withdraw his hand. A short, dark-haired woman burst into his room like a hurricane.

“Matthew!” His housekeeper had been with him several years. She was in her late fifties, born of French parents with a slight accent, and treated him more like her son than her employer, which he didn’t mind too much, seeing as he barely saw his own mother.

“Hi, Severine.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you home!” Her smile fell. “Although you shouldn’t be.”

“It’s fine.”

She eyed him. “Is it? You don’t look fine. You look like you still need to be in the hospital. You’re so pale, so washed out. You look like a ghost.” She had sat by his bed every day while he was unconscious, so the nurses told him. When he came around, she had brought him all his stuff—pajamas, toiletries, books, his tablet—and a new phone to replace the one mangled in the crash.

“I’ll recover better in my own surroundings.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Did you just fire your nurse?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. “You’re the most headstrong man I’ve ever met. What am I going to do with you?” Severine saw it as her place to give him advice on most things, unsolicited. She often told him he needed to go out and find himself a wife, rather than rattling around this huge house alone as he had for so long. He saw her gaze on the scar on his face, uncovered for the first time. He could bet she wouldn’t be saying that again any time soon. No one would want him now.

“There’s another one coming.”

“And will you fire her or him, too?”

“Maybe.”

She sighed again. “I’ve made you a couscous salad with falafel and hummus for lunch. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine. And Severine, I need to watch my weight while I’m laid up. No treats, no desserts.”

She shook her head. “You know I only make you healthy food. A couple of my puddings isn’t going to hurt you. They never have before.”

Matt thought of the gym downstairs in his basement. He imagined the muscles of his powerful physique turning to flab. “No,” he said.

“As you wish.” Severine turned and left the room.

Matt’s gaze alighted on the top of the credenza that had once held his many colognes, hair styling products and face creams. He’d always spent a lot of money on his appearance. Was he a vain bastard? Almost certainly. They had all been cleared away. What sat in their place was medical equipment of every variation—wound dressings, boxes of cannulas and blood bottles, packets of sterile swabs and alcohol wipes. Ampoules of saline and water. And those goddamn bottles he’d been pissing in since they removed the catheter.

He closed his eyes and a flashback hit him. It was impossible to raise his spirits at all when his goddamn brain needed to replay the crash several times a day and even when sleeping, the nightmares gripped him from dusk till dawn. His mind was mangled the way his body was, obsessing and tormenting him, torturing him beyond all reason until he wanted to scream aloud, just beg it to please stop.  

 

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