Page 1 of A Case of You
Chapter One
Jeff moaned where he lay facedown on the bed. “Oh, my gaaawwwd. That feels soooo good.”
“Does it hurt?” Stuart asked.
“Yeah, but it’s the good kind of pain.” Jeff wrapped his fingers around Stuart’s hand and held on tightly. “Ooohhhh.”
Brandon sat on Jeff’s other side, on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay, buddy?” He brushed the hair from Jeff’s face. Jeff’s eyes were squeezed closed, his face contorted in a grimace.
“Uh-huh.Pleasedon’t stop!” Jeff let out another noise that sounded like a cross between misery and an orgasm.
“If it’s too intense,” Nate said, “let me know.” He adjusted another pressure cup on Jeff’s right shoulder.
“No, it’s great,” Jeff said. “Seriously.”
Jeff now had six of the cups on his shoulders, three on each side, each one with an acupressure pointer in it.
“Once I see how you respond to this,” Nate said, “we can maybe try fire cupping next time. But we can’t do that on a bed for safety reasons. I’d bring in my massage table and we’d do you in the living room or on the lanai. Someplace with tile floors, preferably.”
Emma and Grace watched from where they sat perched on the end of the bed. “That’s really cool,” Emma said. “I know all of us on the swim team were watching the reports about Michael Phelps at the Rio Olympics getting that done. Is that hard to learn how to do?”
“Well, it’s not rocket science,” Nate said. “To do it therapeutically, it does take some study. I mean, you can buy a kit yourself and learn how to do it. The kits are less than a hundred dollars. I donotrecommend trying fire cupping without getting properly trained first. You can seriously hurt someone if you don’t know what you’re doing. But, sure, with the pressure cups there’s not the same risk. You just put them where they will give him the most relief for whatever it is you’re trying to help.”
Jeff let out a long, low moan as Nate placed another cup, this time lower on Jeff’s back, to the left of his spine.
“That is sooo good,” Jeff mumbled into the bed. “Seriouslygood.”
“Happy to help. I wish you’d called me in sooner. Like I tell one of my other stubborn friends, who is also a client, don’t wait for the pain to get so bad you can’t function. That only makes it harder to recover. You should probably be seeing me at least twice a week right now, as bad off as you are.”
“I didn’t know I was as bad as I am until I couldn’t get out of bed this morning.”
“We have an appointment with his doctor tomorrow,” Brandon said. “I already called off work. I’m driving him. I think he crashed himself yesterday by doing too much out in the yard, then this change of weather on top of that finished him off.”
Brandon sent a pointed glare toward Jeff that he couldn’t see because of his position on the bed, but Brandon let his tone of voice convey it. “With no one else home to stop him because it was Monday,someonethought they could be sneaky and try to do more than they should.”
“That’ll do it,” Nate agreed. “I have quite a few clients with chronic pain conditions who are impacted by weather changes.”
Jeff’s Lyme disease had seemed to be getting better for a while. He’d started with oral medications after he’d collapsed with Bell’s palsy, which had scared the men but finally allowed his Lyme to be diagnosed. Weeks of oral medications hadn’t brought much in the way of improvement, so he’d had several months of IV drug treatment with a PICC line installed, followed by more oral medications.
That’s when Brandon and Stuart put their feet down and told Jeff he would quit working. He couldn’t be a mechanic with a PICC line, anyway, because there was too much risk of him accidentally yanking it out or it getting contaminated or infected from dirt or chemicals.
Brandon had married Jeff, putting him on his insurance so Jeff could still get treatment. Now, their inside joke was that Jeff was their little house slave. He did what he could as he felt up to it, sometimes having to be ordered to bed or the couch by Brandon and Stuart when he tried to do too much.
Now, Jeff was generally better, although he still had residual symptoms. The doctors had warned them it was possible he could have flares from time to time. Every patient was different. There were no magic bullets to knock out Lyme disease. And even then, he might experience residual effects of the disease for the rest of his life.
The other problem being that when Jeff felt good, naturally he tried to do more, instead of taking it easy to nurse the good periods and make them last longer.
He’d tackled yard work yesterday that Brandon had already told him not to do.
Correction, Brandon hadorderedhim not to do. Combined with a gorgeously cool fall day yesterday—that had turned into a harsher cold front overnight—it was a perfect storm of the bad kind of pain for Jeff today with damp, cold temps in the fifties, practically Arctic weather for Sarasota in early November.
Except Brandon couldn’t punish his stubborn beta slave and husband for overdoing it, because the Lyme disease was doing a damned fine job of that already.
In thebadways.
Emma, his daughter, and Grace, her girlfriend, both sixteen, seemed entranced by Nate and the cupping procedure. Nate also had his acupuncture kit with him and was going to do some of that to Jeff as well, once he had the cups in place.
“Did you girls get your homework done?” Brandon asked.
