“Yeah.”
“I want you to feel how safe this place is.”
“Okay, okay, I feel it.” Eyes still closed, he scratched his knee, then stopped, because her voice was flowing over him like music.
“No one can touch you in this place. It’s yours and yours alone. No one else has the same safe place you do. No one knows where your place is. And no one can ever take it away from you.”
Her voice kept doing that hypnotizing thing—and, yeah, of course he figured out what she was doing.
But that didn’t seem to be able to stop him from putting this picture in his mind. The picture wasn’t Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
anything special. Just a rolling field, a meadow with wildflowers and tall sweet grasses, swaying in a spring wind. Aspens and poplars hemmed the far edge of the field, rustling and shivering in that same breeze. The sun beat down, softer than a balm and healing warm. A bird soared overhead. A fawn cavorted in the grasses. It was a busting-gut happy kind of scene. Nothing hurt. For some crazy, totally insane reason, nothing hurt.
His eyes snapped open. And found Phoebe, still sitting cross-legged across from him, her eyes on his face, her smile on his smile, her scruffy pups snoozing on both sides of her. He said heavily, “This is beyond weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“Nothing hurts.”
“That’s great.”
“No. You don’t understand. Imean it. Nothing hurts. Even myside doesn’t hurt.”
“Great.”
Before, Fergus thought he’d had enough. But now he’d hadenough. “This isnot funny. It’s impossible.
What’d you do to me?” he demanded suspiciously.
“You did it, not me, Fox. And the exercise won’t always work, but it’s always worth a try. So when you feel stress or pain coming on, give it a shot. Go to your safe place.”
“That’s a pile of hooey,” he informed her succinctly.
“Actually, Mr. Skeptic, it’s not hooey at all. It’s plain old physiology. When you feel pain or stress, your body tenses up. Those tense muscles and tendons essentially cause more pain—whereas when you feel safe, your blood pressure and heart rate both calm down. That helps your body loosen up. Which helps ease the pain. Any exercise that helps you relax would work the same way.”
He understood what she was saying. He’d just quit believing in Santa Claus almost three decades ago.
Determined to jolt himself back to sanity, he yanked up his sweatshirt on his right side to above his ribs.
There, in plain sight, was the needle-size fragment that had been working its way to the surface of his skin for hours now. As Fergus well knew, there was pain and then there was pain. This wasn’t bad pain. It was barely mentionable compared to the serious injuries he’d had. But it was what it was—an annoyance. It hurt just enough that he couldn’t get it off his mind, the same way it was impossible to ignore a sharp sliver.
Phoebe sucked in her breath when she saw the injury. “What on—”
When he made to poke the spot, she grabbed his hand.
“Are you nuts, Fox? Don’t touch that, for Pete’s sake! It’s an open sore!”
He was speaking to himself more than her. “Ican still feel it. It’s just…damn.You were right, Red.
Who’d believe it? It’s not gone, but it really is nothing compared to how much it was bothering me before.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. That ‘safe place’ exercise is one way to physically slow down your breathing and pulse. If you can do that, then you’re always going to win some over pain. It’s not a magic cure. But there are more exercises I can—” She gulped. “Look. Can I take that out? Or do you want to go to a doctor?”
He couldn’t twist well enough to see the spot very well—but enough to notice the sliver had broken through the skin. “If you’ve got tweezers, I can deal with it.”
She had tweezers. She had first-aid cream. She had red stuff to wash the spot. She kept him talking while she ran around, accumulating her little tray of supplies, making him explain about the dirty-bomb thing, how parts kept coming to the surface, how that was likely to happen for a while, how it wasn’t the end of the world, just disconcerting, and occasionally…gross.
“It’s not gross, Fox. That’s ridiculous. It’s just a sore. But how come no one ever tells us this kind of thing on CNN?”
“Beats me—what are you doing?” He was conscious that for all the touching she’d done to him before, she hadn’t actually put her hands below his neck. Not on bare skin. And, yeah, she’d seen him bare that day in the shower, but it wasn’t the same thing as having her eyes an inch away from his ribs. Her mouth, her eyes, her face, so close to his heartbeat. So close to his damned ugly scars. “Ouch,” he said.
“Darn—did that hurt?” she asked cheerfully, and bent closer with the tweezers again. He could see all that wild, thick red hair of hers, but not her face just then, not the sore. And out of nowhere she suddenly started singing the national anthem.
He forgot the sensitive spot where she was probing. Anyone would. “My God. Is there a cat in heat in here?”
“Fox. This is one long sliver. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?”
“Hell, no. I can do it myself.”
“No, you can’t. You can’t reach it on your own. It’s too far under your arm. Okay, turn a little more this way.” When he failed to, she picked up the lyrics. “…what so proudly we hailed…”
He used a cuss word. The big one. And promptly shifted his arm over his head promptly. “I heard you hum before. It was bad, but not this bad. I’ll sit as still as you want if you just don’t
