Page 8 of The Science of Attraction

Right?

CHAPTERTHREE

Liam

Paddy’sgood knee shook alarmingly as he rose from the shower seat and he started to topple.

Shit.I reached out to steady him.

“Don’t.” He threw me a pissy look and swatted my hovering hand aside, which only made him wobble more.

My frustrated sigh pretty much summed up our morning, or our first week, come to think of it. “If you don’t want my help, then you need to hold the rail.” I grabbed his hand and wrapped it firmly around the grip bar. “It’s too early in the day for me to wreck my back wrangling you up off the floor just because you’re too damn stubborn to accept help.”

He glared at me as he fought to get his words out, both of us knowing that wasn’t all there was to his reticence. “Leave... me... a-lone.”

Good God, give me strength.“Fine.” I raised my hands and leaned back against the vanity, close enough to grab him if he showed signs of crumbling. We’d been doing this don’t-touch-me dance for five long days and I was pretty much done with it.

The time we spent working through his speech therapist’s directives, Paddy and I got along just fine... well, mostly. He was stubborn for sure, and we butted heads regularly, but he wasn’t the first or the hardest nut I’d had to crack.

With his dense right-sided hemiplegia taking its merry time to show signs of improvement, Paddy’s speech was at least starting to make progress. It could’ve been a lot worse considering the size of his stroke, not that Paddy saw it that way. He understood what was being said to him, no problem there. But he struggled to get his own words out in a timely manner and sometimes chose the wrong word, or left out anisor athe, or saidrightwhen he meantleft, orglasswhen he meantmug, or slurred due to his noncompliant tongue. Things like that. But when I compared his speech to the recordings taken of him a month before, there was a definite improvement.

That was the good news. On the other side of the coin, when it came to working with his physical challenges, Paddy did everything he possibly could to keep my hands off him, even to the point of risking injury and a setback. The shower incident was simply one of many almost-falls he’d been lucky to avoid.

I’d given him the benefit of the doubt the first couple of days while we were getting to know each other, not sure if it was just his stubborn streak showing. But watching him let Norma and Jules and even Marty help him on occasion, I was all but certain that his issue with me was simply the fact I was gay, which meant he and I were about to have a come-to-Jesus moment very soon. It wasn’t possible to get Paddy moving the way I wanted to, the wayhewas so desperate for if he refused to let me fucking touch him.

He almost tripped over the non-slip mat and I started forward ready to grab him but he waved me off. He did it again on the lip of the shower because he didn’t lift his foot high enough, and I swallowed a sigh. Both times he recovered with the help of the new grip bars, but when he suddenly lurched toward the chair next to the vanity, I was forced to intervene before he ended up on the floor.

He froze in my arms, then tried to push me away. I held tight. “Stop it, Paddy.”

When I had him properly seated in the chair, I took a deep breath and counted to five. “Rule number one,” I reminded him. “Take it slow. Give your body time to catch up with your brain.”

He yanked the towel from the heated rail and jammed it over his junk before firing me another glare. “I was... fine.”

I eyed him pointedly. “You werenotfine. You need to doeverythingslowly, Paddy.Everything.Use the grip bars. Use your aids. Think about each and every step. Take a deep breath. Focus. And slow the hell down, keep?—”

“Sick... of... slow,” he grumbled. “Sick of...you.” He stared at the floor.

No surprise there.I sighed and handed him another towel. “Dry yourself off.”

He circled his hand until I turned away.For fuck’s sake.

I stared at the wall and listened to his grunts and grumbling as he dried himself. “You know, Paddy, I seriously don’t care what you think of me. I care that you learn how to manage your body to get as much independence as possible without breaking your damn neck. I care about you getting your life back, or as much of it as you can. But I can’t do that if you won’t let me help you. And to help you, I need totouchyou. To correct your posture, to straighten your hips and back, to guard against you falling, and for a dozen other reasons all meant to keep you safe and get you walking again and out of this house.”

He didn’t say a word and a minute later a damp towel landed over my shoulder. I bit back a petty retort, hung it on the heated rail, and turned to find Paddy sitting in a white singlet and struggling to get his boxers up his legs one-handed.

“Slowly.” I went to help him pull them up over his knees, but his elbow jutted out to stop me. “Shit!” My hand flew to my nose and came away bloody. “Dammit, Paddy.” I glared at him in the mirror, but he wasn’t meeting my eye, his mouth set in a hard line at odds with the high colour in his cheeks.

I rinsed my bloody hand under running water and inspected my bleeding nose. It stung like a bitch but didn’t appear to be broken. Small mercies. I shoved a wad of toilet paper up to stem the flow and pinched the bridge. That done, I took a deep breath and turned back to face him. “Happy now?”

He narrowed his eyes but said nothing, and for the first time since we’d met, he looked almost uncertain, his gaze sliding on and off mine like he didn’t know where to put it. I stared at him a moment just to make my point about how very pissed I was, and then I pulled up Norma’s vanity stool and took a seat directly in front of him.

“Okay, Paddy, that’s it. I’m officially calling time on this nonsense.”

He frowned but didn’t look away.

“I’m not going tomakeyou say why you don’t want me to touch you, but let’s just say I can make an educated guess.” I raised the rainbow wristband in front of his eyes. “Am I on the right track?”

He grunted, his distaste palpable, and I almost called an end to our contract right there and then. Jesus, his poor bloody sons.

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