Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (17 page)

seventeen

Nine thirty that night found me at a place I never thought I’d come back to.

Sticks and Stones was a local S and M club filled with both curious
50 Shades
looky-loos and hard-core BDSM devotees. I liked occasional silk-scarf blindfold-and-bondage recreation as much as the next person, but I fell into neither category: My ill-advised trip to the club last summer was a result of following a shy, circumspect client here to stop her from doing anything she might regret in the desperation of her relationship woes.

Which I had, but that was also the night I’d run into Chip Santana, a former client and inappropriate crush I’d nearly crossed ethical lines with once before, then severed contact with to maintain professional boundaries. Seeing him here had reopened that explosive can of worms—which had ultimately resulted in my breakup with Ben.

Good times.

I pushed all that out of my head, though, as I pulled my Honda into the ill-lit concrete lot outside the club.

“What the hell are we doing
here
?” Sasha asked from the passenger seat.

She and my brother had her own history with the place—after my memorable-in-the-bad-way evening here, they had decided to check things out for themselves, because apparently there was no sexual line they would not gleefully leap across (and then insist on telling me about in unwelcome detail). But Sticks and Stones proved too much even for them—they got groped like the newest inmates at Sing-Sing, and pushed their way back out the doors minutes after they’d gone in.

“Trust me, you guys—there’s a reason we’re here,” I said. It felt good to be doing something in my comfort zone, where I felt in control and competent, not the idiotic boob I’d acted like earlier in front of Ben and Pamela. I let myself out of the car and turned to open the back door, where Stu was still sitting, making no move to get out.

“Come on, baby bro. Trust big sissy,” I cajoled.

He looked to the front seat, where my best friend was also still planted. “Sash?”

“What are we doing here, Brook?” she asked again.

I leaned down to look at her directly. “I can’t tell you. I just have to show you. Come on.”

Sasha’s arms were crossed over her chest, her eyebrows pinched together. “Stu?” she asked. “What do you think?”

I watched my brother take a deep breath and manufacture a game smile. “It’s up to you, babe. If you want to go in, I’m with you.”

Sasha’s face relaxed like she’d had a mega injection of Botox, and then pulled into the reckless grin I absolutely adored. “What the hell. Let’s do this.”

I wanted to hug my brother: Stu had taken my admonition to heart and was trying to stop babying Sasha—pun unavoidable—and she looked like her old self again.

The inside of the club was just as I remembered: wall-to-wall bodies that seemed to close in as we made our way through the crowd, dim lighting, thunking bass, and hands roaming all over us, their owners invisible no matter how much we scanned our surrounds. The cool, moist air carried a musky scent and the underlying sharp tang of bleach. I turned to Sasha and Stu and made vague military hand signals—
You two, with me, that way
—and we pushed through to the back of the club and the warren of semiprivate rooms where the boldest took things a step further, and the voyeurs watched.

It got quieter in this part of the club, the walls sectioned off with office-cubicle partitions carpeted in thick sound-absorbing black carpet, and the crowd thinned the farther we ventured as the various fetish rooms winnowed out their aficionados. Finally we came to a back room, moving almost freely through the makeshift halls now, and we stood in the doorway taking in the scene.

At first it seemed like a toga party where only some of the guests had bothered to come in costume. But it took only a moment to figure out what we were looking at: About half the bodies milling around in the fifteen-by-twenty room were in street clothes; the other half wore diapers.

“What. The. Fuck,” I heard Sasha say beside me.

I let out a self-satisfied grin. “You said you’re afraid of babies and you only know how to talk to adults.
Et voilà
: adult babies!”

Stu looked shell-shocked. “That’s a thing. It really is a thing,” he was repeating, as if he couldn’t believe it.

“It’s a
lifestyle
,” I corrected. “And what we have here are a group of babies Sasha can
converse
with. I thought it might be a good way for you to learn to interact with infants in a way that feels more comfortable,” I said to Sash.

She turned a flat stare on me that I couldn’t read. “You are a total idiot,” she said calmly. “And also possibly a genius. This is insane, Brook—but it might be the perfect thing. Let’s do it.” And into the room she went.

It took Stu a few more moments, and possibly a loving shove from me, but eventually he followed her in and I trailed behind them, ready to help grease the conversational wheels if need be.

But I should have known Sasha would take care of things herself—this was her gift, meeting strangers from every walk of life, offering them interest, respect, and no judgment, and getting them to open up to her. By the time Stu and I caught up to her she was already deep in conversation with three people—a tall, bald man in street clothes, a man wearing only a diaper and clutching a blankie over his shoulder like Linus, and a woman in what appeared to be a full-size onesie, a pacifier in her mouth.

“Hey, guys,” Sasha said casually as we approached. “This is Richard.” The bald man nodded in my direction and reached a hand to Stu.

“Hey, man.”

My brother managed the handshake and even a tepid smile. “Hi.”

“And this is his…what do I say?” she asked Richard.

“My baby,” he supplied helpfully, wrapping an arm around the woman. “Little Lulu.”

Sasha nodded. “This is Lulu,” she went on, “and this is Johnny B. Guys, Brook and Stu.”

Lulu just waved, fingers opening and closing as she sucked on her binky, but to my surprise Johnny B offered a hand to both of us.

“Welcome!” he said. “Sasha says you’re new at this.”

“Entirely,” my brother said.

“Don’t you have to talk baby-talk?” I asked, confused.

He grinned. “Nah, there’s no rules. You do what feels right, you know? Sasha here says she’s not real comfortable with kids and is trying to learn to be, so I turned it off for now.”

For a fleeting moment I wondered whether she’d actually told this group she was pregnant. If she had, it was the first time she’d said it to anyone besides me and Stu.

“So, what is it you want to learn about?” Johnny B asked, and then he reached into the front of his diaper.

My eyes widened in alarm—things were about to get weird—but he drew his hand right back out, holding a pack of Marlboros. “Smoke?” he offered us.

“Thanks, not for me,” Sash averred.

Stu and I also declined. Johnny B pulled a Bic lighter from the pack, but Richard put a hand on his to stay him.

“Hey, man, not in front of the baby—you mind?” he said, nodding toward Lulu.

“Oh, sorry—my bad,” Johnny B apologized, and the cigarettes vanished back into his diaper. “So what can we tell you, hon?” he asked Sasha.

His avuncular manner and demeanor coupled with the diaper and blanket were a bit disconcerting, but Sasha plunged ahead as if they were chatting at a family reunion.

“Well…I guess, why do they have to fuss at you all the time? What do babies
want
?”

Lulu giggled and batted the air, offering us a giant, vacant grin. Sasha lifted her eyebrows and turned back to Johnny.

His fingers snaked down into his diaper again, I hoped for the cigarettes, and then he seemed to remember the presence of Little Lulu, bringing his hand back out and instead raising it palm-up with a shrug. “Same thing anyone wants, really. Babies are just preverbal humans. We want the basics, of course—not to be hungry or thirsty or cold or wet. But we also want to feel safe and loved.”

Sasha frowned. “But what does that
mean
? I mean, I get feeding an infant, giving it a bottle, changing its diaper, et cetera. But…you can’t talk to it, or teach it anything, and it can’t tell you what it wants. What are you supposed to do beyond seeing to its basic needs?”

“Every baby is different,” Richard piped up. “My Lulu is a quiet little thing—no trouble at all. She just wants affection and to play and to be taken care of.” As he spoke he pulled Lulu in closer, and she snuggled up against him, cooing softly behind her paci. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “And that’s my sign to get my baby girl home to bed,” he said to us with a beatific smile, and then gently led her toward the doorway with a protective arm wrapped around her shoulders.

It was actually kind of sweet.

Sasha seemed to consider his words for a moment as she watched the cozy pair walk away, and then she cast a quick, apologetic look to Stu. “But how do you know you’ll be any good at it?” she said to Johnny, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her. “How do you know you have it in you to care enough about some helpless, demanding creature that you’ll actually do all that?”

My brother’s face blanched, but he stepped closer and rested a hand in the small of her back. I loved him for supporting her even when it clearly hurt him to hear her doubts.

Johnny smiled and gave her a kindly wink. “If you don’t mind my saying, hon, I don’t think you need to worry.” He brushed a quick comforting pat to her arm—thankfully with the hand that hadn’t been investigating his diaper. “If you didn’t have that in you, I don’t imagine you’d be standing here with us, working so hard to figure things out.”

Sasha’s face softened like butter left in the sun, and she blinked at him a few times. “Thanks,” she said quietly, and I saw Stu squeeze her waist.

Suddenly a cloud shifted over Johnny B’s expression and his eyebrows furrowed in concentration or consternation—I couldn’t tell which. His mouth slackened slightly and his eyes lost focus, but just as I grew alarmed that he was having an epileptic seizure, his face cleared and he smiled like the sun had come out. “Oopsie!” he said in a high, silly voice. “I made a poopy in my di-di! I have to go get Mommy.” He skipped away from us into the crowd.

The three of us stood in stunned silence for a moment.

“Did…did that dude just
shit his pants
while he was standing here talking to us?” Stu said finally, his face poleaxed.

Sasha was watching where Johnny B had headed over to a very tall woman with a blond helmet hairstyle straight out of the sixties and was tugging on her arm for her attention.

“Well, no, because technically he’s not wearing pants,” she said calmly.

The woman nodded and indicated a corner of the room, where she led Johnny B by the hand. When they got there, he dropped out of our sightline while she rummaged in her enormous bag and came up with a box of Handi Wipes and what looked like a folded sheet.

Stu’s face convulsed. “That’s not…She’s not actually going to change his diaper right here, is she?”

Through the crowd I suddenly saw a pair of bare, hairy men’s legs shoot into the air, and the woman lowered herself to her knees in front of them.

“That’s it—I’m out,” Sasha said, and streaked toward the door.

Stu and I were right behind her.

eighteen

When we pulled into Sasha’s parking lot after fleeing Sticks and Stones, she was barely able to muster a good night for me. Stu hung back as she trudged into her apartment.

“I didn’t think we could make babies
more
frightening to Sasha,” he said conversationally, leaning down into my window. “Solid work, there, Doc.”

“This may not have been the best idea. I see that now,” I admitted. “But I mean, on the plus side, you know, there was a moment when…” I caught Stu’s raised eyebrow and didn’t finish the thought. “But overall, yeah, I guess maybe watching a grown man get his butt wiped in public isn’t the best—”

“Stop,” he said abruptly, shuddering. “I can’t have that picture back in my head again.”

I grimaced, then sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Stu glanced down to the asphalt, where I could hear his feet scuffing on pebbles. “Please don’t give up on her, Brook,” he said quietly, not meeting my eyes.

The irony struck me—Stu and Sasha had completely switched positions. Before they got together, it was Stu who’d always danced lightly around anything that smacked of commitment, and Sasha who’d spent her whole life chasing it. Now everything was backward—and they were both counting on me to make it right.

I put a hand over his on the windowsill. “I won’t, Stuvie.”

But failure weighed like lead in my belly.

My stomach clenched as soon as I saw Michael’s name on my caller ID Saturday morning. I wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened between us yesterday.

But he made no mention of the new vibe that had come up between us (literally), just shared unsettling news—the station was dragging their feet on an offer, and he thought it was time to play hardball.

“I think you should sit out the show on Monday,” he said.

I’d told him I was willing, but now that the decision was here I choked. “Two reasons why that’s a bad idea,” I protested. “A—I’ll lose momentum with my audience. And B—I’ll burn a bridge with the station.”

“A—No, you won’t. And B—No, you won’t,” Michael replied. “You’re highly visible through your column and no one’s going to forget about you in a week. And you’re not going to piss off the station—this is how negotiation
works
, Brook. You have to show that you have a bargaining chip in your corner or we’re at their mercy. Quit underestimating yourself—you’re the commodity here. They know that. Trust me.”

And weirdly, although it was something I never thought I would be able to say about Michael again, I was beginning to.

Meanwhile, he said, he wanted me to write a couple of the articles from the ideas I’d shown him for him to pitch to major media outlets with a slant toward dating and relationships—
SheKnows
,
HuffPost
,
Elite Daily
, and others. I suspected he was just trying to keep me occupied so I wouldn’t freak out about the radio station, but I was grateful for the distraction anyway—grateful that we seemed to be back on a casual, easy footing—and spent the morning brainstorming as I got ready for my Saturday group therapy.

With twelve other people’s issues to concentrate on, I had no time to sit and masticate on my own, and at the end of the three-hour session I was feeling juiced—invigorated by the progress some of the participants were making in moving past their heartache.

But that feeling lasted only until I got in my car and last night came crashing back. After the disastrous end to the evening, I knew my next approach with Sash needed to be much gentler.

And so that afternoon found us in the outdoor play area of Fort Myers Pet Rescue on Six Mile Cypress, watching a crazed horde of dogs of every breed and age tearing around the confined area, giddy with their freedom.

“We depend on our volunteers to help care for and play with the animals,” my friend Angela told us, pointing at two women in their mid-thirties running the perimeter of the grassy area with a mini pack of dogs chasing after them. I’d met Angela at UF when she was studying to be a vet; she was now working as the shelter director, and had offered to give us a guided visit. “We’re overfilled and understaffed, and the more we can interact with and exercise the dogs, the less chance they’ll get kennel crazy.”

“Kennel crazy?” Sasha asked, frowning.

Angela nodded. “Barking, drooling, licking themselves raw—sometimes they just circle over and over. That can make an otherwise healthy dog unadoptable, and then…Well.” Her face darkened, and I knew she was talking about euthanasia—and judging by the dismayed look on Sasha’s face, so did she.

Time for a subject change. “Can we go see the puppies?” I said with hearty cheer.

Inside was a bit dreary—three-by-five gray concrete-block kennels were lined up at least twenty deep in row after row in the cavernous interior, and a cacophony of shrill barking echoed off the concrete walls and corrugated-metal ceiling. Sasha blanched and covered her ears, and I started to worry that this idea, too, would backfire. Angela led us farther into the building and through a set of double doors that led to a linoleum-floored area separated into larger cages by chain link. The noise decreased substantially as the glass doors swung shut behind us. Inside each fenced-off area, little squirming balls of fur wrestled and rolled and jumped all over one another. Sasha finally let out a smile.

“This is where we keep the puppies, so they’re not too scared or overwhelmed by all the noise and activity out there with the older dogs,” Angela explained. “As you can see, we get a lot of babies, but luckily they’re the easiest to adopt out. As they get older, it gets harder.”

Sasha snorted. “Even dogs suffer from age discrimination.”

“Can we play with them?” I asked.

“Sure,” Angela said, and reached to unlatch the cage nearest to us. “Go on in.”

I’d thought ahead, and warned Sasha to dress in casual clothes she didn’t mind getting a little dirty. Good thing—as the door swung open, a sea of furry bodies swept our way like Tribbles, schooling around our feet and yipping for attention.

I thought she’d be put off by the smell and the mess of dozens of not-yet-potty-trained puppies confined in this room, but to my surprise Sasha’s face lit up and she bent over immediately, coming up with a puppy in each hand.

“I want them
all
!” she said, holding up first one, then the other to her face so she could nuzzle into them.

I grinned and reached down for two puppy handfuls of my own. “Look at this little guy,” I said, holding a white one over to her so she could see the dark splotch circling his left eye. “He’s got a black eye.”

“Look at her,” she said, proffering one of her own, a dog whose face was nearly lost amid the puff of reddish-brown hair covering her body. “She’s more fur than dog!”

We babbled on this way for a while, cooing and exclaiming over each dog’s attractiveness and endearing quirkiness and general goodness, and when we finally plopped ourselves down on the bare floor to let the sea of tiny warm bodies swarm all over us, Angela grinned and joined us. We repeated the same sort of nonsense in each of the four cages, so that no puppy felt forgotten, and when we finally stood and stretched our cramped muscles to leave, more than an hour had gone by.

I walked a step or two behind the two women as Sasha chattered happily with Angela about pitching a story to the paper to help draw attention—and hopefully funding and volunteers—to the shelter.

Dogs barked and jumped and clamored for attention on either side of us as we walked down the aisle lined with kennels, but as I passed one concrete pen, a brown-and-black medium-haired dog caught my eye because he simply stood wagging his long tail, watching us pass with intelligent brown eyes.

“Well, hi,” I said, stopping. “You’re very well mannered.” I reached over the low gate to pet him, forgetting until too late that we weren’t supposed to do that.

But I wasn’t going to pull back now, as the dog moved more fully under my palm as if granting me easier access. I couldn’t tell what breed he was—he had the elongated nose and triangular ears of some kind of shepherd-y mix, but the tips flopped over like a spaniel’s, and one was set crooked on his head. I smiled, rubbing his ears and neck and cheeks as he never broke eye contact with me, and his feet never left the floor.

“Hey, Angela,” I called to where she and Sasha were almost at the end of the row, and they turned. “Who’s this guy? He’s so good.”

She walked back toward me, Sasha following. “Oh,” Angela said, “that’s Slick. The intake staff named him that because he’d been totally shaved when they found him. Probably fleas. No one’s even taken him out to consider him since he got here a few months ago.”

I frowned. “Why not? Look how calm and well-behaved he is. No sign of kennel craziness, even after all this time. He’d be a perfect pet.”

Angela arched an eyebrow and slanted a plotting smile at me. “Want to adopt him?”

I straightened and took a step back. “Oh, no, not me. Way too much commitment, and one that’s guaranteed to break your heart,” I added, remembering our family’s shepherd, Mugsy. Except for Sasha, Mugsy had been my closest friend, confidant, and playmate all my life. At age eleven, when he stopped eating and began wasting away, Mom took him to the vet and found out he had cancer—and Mugsy never came back home. I’d cried for weeks, until my mother finally barked at me to stop wallowing and “cowgirl up.”

“Too bad,” Angela said. “This dog’s older—probably around four, and most people want young dogs. And he has heartworm. He’d have to be treated, and that adds expense to his adoption fee—we don’t treat infected dogs unless they’re adopted, because we just don’t have the resources.”

“And that’s why I want to draw more attention to the shelter,” Sasha said, turning her back on me and continuing her conversation with Angela. “I’d like to bring a photographer in when I come, to add impact to the story, and…”

Their voices dwindled as they walked back down to the end of the aisle toward Angela’s office, but I lingered with Slick for a few moments.

“That’s a terrible name for you, buddy,” I told him. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”

He tilted his head as if considering that.

“You know, you might want to work on your showmanship a little. These guys are upstaging you. You gotta make people notice you when they come in looking for a dog, so you can get the treatment you need.”

He dropped his haunches and sat calmly, as if directly refuting my argument.

I reached in with my other hand so I could give him one last thorough head rubbing. “I know a dog who could teach you a thing or two about getting attention,” I told him. “Although from what I gather just from the little I know of you, Jake’s techniques might be beneath your dignity.” I stood to leave, and the dog rose to all four of his feet too, like a gentleman whose date had excused herself to the ladies’ room. He looked directly into my eyes with a gentle, inquisitive gaze, as if wondering why I was leaving when we were having such a lovely time.

“Take care, pal,” I said through a suddenly thick throat. “Good luck to you.”

Sasha chattered about the article she planned to write as we walked out to the car, the whole drive home, and as we sat in front of her apartment building when I dropped her off. When she finally wound down and looked over at me, her animated expression morphed into suspicion.

“What?” she said with a skeptical look.

“What?”

“You’re grinning like a damn fool.”

I spread my hands palms up, unable to remove the offending expression from my face. “You’re glowing.”

“Brook.” Sasha blew out a long breath, looking at my car’s headliner. “You ever feel like you know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing? And you absolutely love it?”

“Every damn day since I started my Breakup Doctor practice.”

She nodded emphatically. “I know. And I feel like that every time I write a story.” She laid a hand over her abdomen, casting me an apologetic look. “But not about this. I think that’s telling me something. Don’t you?”

Panic shot up in me, bright and hot as a flare.

“What? No! Sash, we talked about this—it’s just fear, perfectly normal.”

“No, Brook, I think it’s more than that. I—”

“Sash, listen to me—this is totally new, totally unknown, and I get why it’s freaking you out. Of course you aren’t excited about it yet—of course you don’t know whether you love it. You haven’t experienced it! You didn’t know before you turned in your first story that you were going to feel all those things, right?”

“I’d been writing in a journal since I knew how to write, Brook. I always loved it. I always knew it was my passion.”

“Sash, honey, this is…” I floundered for words to convince her, to quell this hiccup of nerves. “The way you were with those puppies…you came alive! You loved them! And you didn’t necessarily know you would.”

“Everyone loves puppies.”

“That’s not true,” I protested.

“Pol Pot loved puppies.
Hitler
had a dog.”

“Honey, you have to trust me here. You asked me to help you, and I am. Sometimes other people can see things a little more clearly when we’re too deep in our own concerns to be objective. You’ve got to just sit with this, okay?” I sounded wheedling, and I schooled my tone into something more confident. “Just wait it out. I know you. You know I do. I wouldn’t say all this if I thought that deep down, you really think marriage and kids are the wrong path for you.”

She chewed the inside of her lip. “Well…maybe…”