Love, Like Water by Rowan Speedwell Read Free Book Online Page B

always around. The others didn’t seem to have anything to do with Joshua.
    He always waited until the last of them had gone before venturing out of his room. He’d stayed on the first floor—being down the hall away from the kitchen and having his own bathroom gave him a feeling of privacy he hadn’t had in a long time. It helped that, after that first day, neither his uncle nor his housekeeper came in without invitation.
    Even when Sarafina wanted to dust or do laundry, she always asked his permission first. He was quick to grant it, just as he was quick to come out when the last of the hands had finished breakfast, so that he could eat and let Sarafina clean up without dragging out her morning. It was bad enough she had to fuss over him like that—he’d never had anyone wait on him like she did, and it made him uncomfortable. Just not as uncomfortable as eating with those strangers would. Sometimes he offered to help, but she always shooed him out onto the porch or into the cavernous living room.
    Tucker hadn’t seemed eager to let him help either, with the ranch or with the bookkeeping. He was blunter about it than Sarafina was, telling Joshua point blank that he didn’t want him stuck in the office until he was in better health. He did promise to have something for him to do by the weekend, and in the meantime, he told Joshua, he’d have to entertain himself with reading or watching movies streamed from Tucker’s Netflix account.
    He’d tried the movies, but his attention span was nonexistent, and he ended up shutting them off more often than not. He did manage to get all the way through Brokeback Mountain , but it was such a sad ending that he went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for hours, and couldn’t bring himself to watch anything at all after that. The books in the house were mostly about ranching, and he supposed he ought to try reading some of them, if he was going to stay here, but when he tried, the words swam in front of his eyes and he’d given up in frustration.
    A book on the native flora and fauna of New Mexico caught his eye. It was mostly pictures, with short descriptions beneath each photograph. That he could manage, especially since when he got tired, he could just close the book and pick it up again when he woke up from his nap. He didn’t have to think or remember or analyze; all he had to do was take in the information and store it for later. The ranching books all seemed to work from a supposition that the reader already knew something about ranching, so the text didn’t make sense to him, but the picture book was easy.
    That was what he was reduced to: easy.
    He’d never taken life easy. He’d graduated college by twenty, gone straight through the police academy and into a job with the Cincinnati PD, and when his lieutenant recommended him for the FBI, he’d not only gotten into the academy there, but ended up one of the youngest field agents in the Bureau’s history. His weird memory had helped, but so had his will and his brains. He wasn’t used to easy. He didn’t want easy. But his body was fighting him all the way. Not only with the weakness, the weariness. But even though he’d gone through rehab, even though the doctors and therapists had told him the need for the heroin was all psychological at this point, he still felt the need for it. Sometimes he felt like he was quivering under the skin, his muscles and tendons twitching uncontrollably like a horse trying to dislodge a fly. Sometimes his nerves buzzed all over until he thought he’d go insane from the sensation. And other times he just hurt, like an old man with arthritis.
    He knew his uncle was just watching out for him, that he meant to be kind. That he really did want Joshua to rest. Joshua wished he had the energy to argue with Tucker, to make him put Joshua to work, but it was far too difficult. And if even asking to work was too much effort, maybe Tucker was right to keep Joshua resting.
    But it