Page 86 of Almost Home
Any second now, really.
I found a paper coffee cup and slipped it into a sleeve.
“This is a nice room.”
I gasped and flipped around. “Oh, Mr. Taggart, we typically ask people to wait in the—”
“Where is she?” His face twisted, morphing from something placid and ignorable to a sneering growl that sent my entire body into overdrive. Adrenaline crashed through me, and it clicked.
“You’re—you’re—”
His hand came up and revealed a handgun pointing right at my chest. “Take me to her. Now.”
CHAPTERFORTY-THREE
Wilder
The doc had let me babble on about Sarah almost the entire meeting. When I’d apologized for talking about her so much, she’d reassured me with, “This time is for you. Use it how you want.”
So I did. I ran through how great everything was and how hard I was trying to let something good just be good. But I’d talked through my doubts, too—that it wastoogood.Tooeasy. That something had to give and I hated the sense of impending doom I had about it all.
We’d talked through some of the reasons for that more than once, including an adrenal system that’d been trained to react in certain situations and that might just be leading me astray. I hated the thought that my body might be betraying me, but I’d felt that in very different ways at other times. Namely, my body wanted Sarah’s at all times and in all ways, even when my brain saidPump the brakes, genius. Take it slow.
I’d failed to take it slow. I’d confessed as much to the doc, and she’d simply asked, “Why do you need to move slowly?”
I stared blankly at her.
“I’m serious. Why do you believe you need tomove slowly, and I might also ask you to define the term.”
She’d done this at least once a session—asked me to define a word or phrase.
“I mean not rushing things—physically, emotionally, whatever. And I believe that because… because isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”
She tilted her head to the side, which I knew very well asked, “Why?” without saying it.
I inhaled, summoning the right words. “Because when you care about someone, you do things right. And by right, I mean… purposefully. With the right intentions.”
“And you can’t do something purposefully if you’re moving fast?”
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” I cringed as the saying left my lips automatically.
“Explain.”
“It’s a saying in the special operations community. Move slow, do it right the first time, and it all goes smooth. When things go smooth, they go faster, so you get fast by moving slow.”
She nodded as though this really did explain things. “And so you want to move slow in order to go fast with Sarah?”
I groaned and scrubbed a hand over my face. “That sounds like something a teenager would say, doesn’t it?”
She cracked a half-smile. “Is it possible that your way of thinking about things with Sarah is informed by how you thought of things with her when you were with her as a teen?”
I slumped back on the couch. “Maybe? Obviously, we didn’t move all that slowly considering she got pregnant and I’d planned to marry her before we graduated and join the Army to support us.”
“But didn’t you tell me you’d planned to go to college together and get married eventually, just not so soon? Couldn’t you argue that the years of friendship prior to your courtship would qualify as going slow?”
“Not by her parents’ standards, but I don’t give a damn about them anymore.”
“I might also submit that twenty years between interactions naturally slowed you down. So anything that happens now is, by nature and in an essential, time-bound, inescapable way, moving slow.”
