“Five, maybe six hours.”
“All at once?”
Fuck. “No.”
She looked at him, facial expression unchanging. Her unruffled demeanor was the only thing that kept him here, going through the motions. He expected clucking and cooing, and got a calm, steady presence. She somehow managed to make him feel like together they just might get him through this.
“Maybe three hours a night. I catch a nap during the day.”
“We’ve talked about clean sleep habits,” she reminded him.
“I’m used to this,” he said. “I’m not a ten-to-six sleeper. I wasn’t before I joined the Navy and I sure as hell wasn’t afterwards.”
“You’re a civilian now,” she said imperturbably. “Work, school, relationships all function on a fairly standard schedule. Routine sleep will also help with the tremors.”
She just blurted things like that out into the air. The tremors. The shakes. The weakness, out there for everyone to see. He laced his fingers together to stop the shaking. He used to be magic with his hands, crazy coordinated, able to run and juggle at the same time. Other than snagging a Coke can out of midair last night, he dropped things, ran into things, knocked things off tables and ledges.
“Your doctor can prescribe something to help you sleep.”
“No drugs.”
“There are non-habit-forming treatments available,” she continued.
“No. Drugs.” He’d seen too many guys lost to prescription painkillers. He wasn’t going down that road.
Silence.
“I can’t go back into the field in any capacity if I’m taking drugs. They cloud your judgment.”
Silence. He felt his face flush. Sat back. Smoothed his palms down his jeans to his knees. Blew out his breath. Looked at the window, the picture on the wall, the tiny table at his left hand for a cup of tea or cocoa. Jesus. It was like being in Grannie’s house, except smaller.
He used to be able to sit still for hours. Not before he joined the Navy, then went through BUD/S. Before that he was a wild, out-of-control teenager, a constant source of despair and frustration for Rose, who’d all but raised him while their mother drank her days away. The Navy taught him control, taught him how to channel his energy, his emotions until he was a stone cold killing machine.
Now he couldn’t even control his hands.
“I thought you weren’t going back into the Navy.”
“I’m not. But the same applies for contractor work. A friend of mine and I were supposed to go to work for a security company based in Istanbul.”
“And?”
“He did. I didn’t.”
She made another note. “How are you, other than the tremors and not sleeping? Are you seeing anyone?”
He should consider it a victory that Colleen broke first. He gave a short bark of laughter, and once again dodged the question. “I asked someone out and got turned down.”
Colleen’s lips curved into a real smile. “It happens.”
“Not to me.” He wasn’t bragging, simply stating fact. He’d perfected the “bad boy with a heart of gold” persona early in high school. Over a decade later, it was damn near foolproof.
Her eyebrows flickered up, just a little. “Then it’s good for you to experience the occasional rejection, which is a normal occurrence for most people.”
He felt himself smiling back, liking the banter. “Is this part of my therapy? Getting laid?”
Normally he’d talk to a professional civilian female with far more respect, but anyone who treated cops for mental health issues had probably heard it all. She didn’t even blink. “Sexuality is a core component of an individual’s wellbeing,” she said. “It’s a basic human need, like eating or sleeping. I’m not concerned if you’re not sexually active unless it’s a change from your baseline behavior.”
He laughed. “It’s a change.”
“In what way?”
“You treat cops, right?” he said, looking at his linked hands. “You know about badge bunnies. SEALs have groupies, too. I could walk into any bar in town and find someone to go home with. Hell, I could do that before I joined the Navy,” he said, remembering.
She made a noncommittal noise. “It sounds like you have a pretty good relationship with your body.”
“I do,” Jack said. “Or I did.”
Colleen set her pen on her legal pad. “You’ve been seen by specialists who all agree there’s nothing physically wrong with your hand. Therefore, the tremor is in your mind, manifesting in your body.”
“Yeah,” he said brusquely. She wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t heard a dozen times before, from Navy doctors, civilian doctors in Virginia Beach and in Lancaster. If there wasn’t a physical problem, there wasn’t a physical solution.
“How active are you?”
“What do you mean? I run. Work out.”
“Do you push your body like you used to?”
“No,” he said slowly, seeing where she was going. “I don’t.”