Chapter twenty-five

The Ponce de Leon Co-Op
4514 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC
#512

Spencer

By the time he got home, Spencer had to admit, at least privately, that he did rather want to get high. Not as badly as he had after Emily's death or after JJ's betrayal, but he had to acknowledge the desire. He felt cold and tight and irritable and the thought of being able to lie back in his bed and float away sounded pretty wonderful right about then. The worst part of it was that he couldn't even go to Jerry to talk it out, Jerry closed on Fridays for dinner with his family, and he really ought to go home to give Helena some company, see if she wanted to go anywhere.

So it was with a resigned sigh that he opened the door, more or less expecting that the apartment would be cold and dark as always. Somehow he had not added things together right, or perhaps he was just tired, because he opened the door to light and warmth and some of the most savory scents in the air. The fireplace was going, for one, and there was something that smelled entirely too appetizing over the scent of a bakery. For a moment he stood there in the foyer utterly confused as to what was going on, before he shuffled over to divest himself of bags and coat.

Just as he was commencing shuffle Helena appeared in the dining room doorway. "Hello." She said warmly. "You look awful." It was said with the kind of concern that usually came attached with a query as to the health of the other, but that query never came.

"I feel awful." He agreed. "Not sick, just…" He sighed. He had never outright said this before. He didn't have to with Jerry and wouldn't with anyone on the team. "Sometimes that five year coin is a fight." He admitted.

"Let me help?" She asked, before holding up a hand, "While hewing to the nature of our agreement."

Well, since she put it that way, "All right." What did he have to lose? "But do you want to go get dinner first?"

She smiled at him. "Dinner's waiting. Go wash up and meet me in the kitchen."

At least they wouldn't have to go back out in that weather. He washed up as bidden, paused to loosen then remove his tie, and settled at the small kitchen table. As he watched, a loaf of crusty bread appeared before him, and butter and ice tea and bowls of some kind of soup thick with vegetables and chunks of beef. "You did all this? This bread is still warm," and smelled heavenly.

"Mmm-hmm, also pumpkin bread for tea and some chocolate chip cookies; I wanted to try some recipes and Garcia said you would eat just about anything," She settled across the table from him. "and while you were gone I sat through four online lectures, worked on my needlework case, gave the place a thorough cleaning, had tea with Sylvia and had a great time at the book club last night."

"Sylvia?"

"Sylvia Timmons, from next door?" Helena nodded to the window sill. "She swapped us for a larger pot."

The apple seedling was up to six or seven inches and had a number of leaves. Spencer just shook his head as he smiled. "I think we can blame Galahad's blood." Given that one of his Grandmothers might not have been entirely human.

"I'm not doing it deliberately." Helena replied. "Although I can recall that my Mother loved to garden, she could make anything grow."

"Well, if we theorize that one bloodline is carried, not expressed, that would leave three that would be extremely dominant. But even then, one would have to come to the forefront. Maybe hers was the bloodline from the Lady of the Lake. And given what the Bishop said about how Kat ran things, maybe she took after Bron the Blessed."

"And you think I take after Mary?" She laughed as he felt his ears burn. "Enough. How was the trip? Tell me what's going on in that head of yours."

Invited to do so, Spencer started talking. He talked about the case, yes, but also the unusual weather, the time of year, and the area in which the crimes had taken place. But somewhere along the line she nudged him into talking about other things, or at least starting to, Emily's death, JJ's betrayal, everything that had gone on that summer. He talked through the excellent soup, the still warm bread, a slice of the pumpkin bread while she washed up. He talked and talked until he finally fell silent, at least for now talked through. Finally she finished and he just sat, looking up at her, "Now what?"

"Garcia helped me order a few things while you were gone." She told him. "Now go take a bath. Twenty minutes at least, as hot as you can stand it, and leave that bag of herbs in there. And come back in shorts."

That stopped him. "I don't own shorts." He admitted.

"You own boxers. I'm not going to do anything, I won't even peek."

"You already have." He reminded her, leaving her laughing as he went.

Back when he had been shot he hadn't been home two days before he realized that the standard tub and shower combination he had at the time was not going to work. He couldn't wash himself while balancing on two crutches, couldn't get out of the thing if he sat down in it and it was too narrow for a tub chair. He finally broke down, dipped into the poker fund, and had it replaced with something called a walk-in tub. It was both narrower and higher that a standard tub, with shower enclosure around the top, with a door in the side that would seal shut. On the far end there was a built-in bench, with multiple grab bars. You got in, sat on the bench, sealed the door, and let the tub fill up around you. Or, if you happened to be in a cast or brace, leave the door open, brace your broken leg on a chair outside, and wash the rest of yourself with the hand held shower with minimal fuss. Or for the ultimate you turned on the overhead shower and sat under a warm rain as the tub filled up around you. But for now he let the tub fill, after a quick round with the hand-held to wash the remnants of the case and the trip off. The bundle of herbs in cheesecloth gave the water a gentle scent, made him feel like he was soaking in mild tea, but wasn't a bad thing. He sat there for the proscribed length of time and let his mind drift back over the case, and Helena's case, and whatever else wandered through. A one point he realized that, with the unseasonable snow, this was the first time he'd felt truly warm in days.

When the time was up he got out, toweled off, swapped contacts for glasses, and came out in boxers and a comfortably baggy shirt. He found that Helena had stoked the fire, leaving the room cozy, had changed aprons, and was sitting in the middle of his couch with a towel under her, a small stack at her elbow, and two covered bowls at her feet. She'd knocked the pillows to one end, set the small TV opposite. "Sit." She indicated. "I figured out how to use the DVD player, I put something called Mythbusters in. It looked interesting, not that I'm going to be paying too much attention at first."

Spencer sat where bidden. "Did you watch any of it yet?"

"No. I figured I'd wait for you. Give." She tried to tug his left leg into her lap. "Uh-uh. Come on, give."

She tugged gently but insistently until he sighed and let her pull his leg across hers. "What are you doing?" He asked.

"Either something I learned from Grandmother or something I learned from Aunt Margaret." She adjusted a little, and then reached for something he couldn't quite see in one of those bowls. "And either I saw you needed it last night when I saw you walking around the police station or today when you came in. You know, whichever explanation works, they both fit."

He felt something warm drizzle just above his knee, and then her hands were lightly covering, sliding over everything. "What are you doing?" He repeated. It felt odd. Not in a bad way, but not something he was used to. He didn't usually like being touched and this was different.

"The same thing I used to do for Aunt Margaret. After forty plus years of kneeling on cold, stone floors she found it quite helpful." She was light over the joint, but then she moved lower and began to press deeper. "So when I was willing and she saw what I could do help she had a friend send her a book on the subject. Then Grandmother expanded on my lessons. All swollen, how have you been managing to walk?"

"I've been managing." He winced a little as she pressed in deeper and his muscles started to ache, kind of, or maybe they were stopping to ache. "That feels…."

"…like a muscle spasm, maybe four or five, which kind of explains a lot of things." She looked up at him a moment. "Go ahead and turn on the TV if you want a distraction."

"No, I'd rather watch you." With that he watched as she went to work, gentle and light around the joint, less so on the large muscles of his calf and thigh. She worked briskly at first, it seemed, to get things to start to loosen up, and then rolling the large muscles deeply to get the spasms to break. As they began to unknot she found points where she told him to breathe in then out, and on the out she dug in, remarkably painfully but when she released he could feel the warmth as the spots relaxed. Even thought it clearly wasn't sexual, he had never been touched so deeply, so very nearly intimately before, and he found himself falling under some kind of spell. She worked her way up his leg, not too close to the hem of his boxers on the inside, but very nearly under them on the outside of his leg. "That's not knee joint." He pointed out with a smile.

She returned the smile in question. "No, but it's the outside edge of tight. The problem is that you keep trying to keep up with everyone, Morgan especially."

Spencer frowned. "I can keep up with them." He never let the team down, not at all.

"Oh, I know." Helena replied as she worked her way back down, more lightly this time. "But not without some expense. For all the injuries everyone in your team has taken no one else took an injury to a weight-bearing joint. And you've gotten so used to ignoring the pain that you don't really register it anymore. So you push too far, I think, and then you get back to town and you finally stop and now you feel like hell and you want something to make that feeling go away, not realizing that it's pain."

For all that she was mildly chastising he was finding that he simply could not get upset with her at the moment. "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I think you might be getting a touch of arthritis in this knee. To compensate for it the muscles around this joint tighten until they lock. That puts strain on other joints and other muscles. By the time you're finished with a case you're stiff as a board all over, no wonder you feel awful. And then you get little sleep and I've seen the kind of food you all eat." She finished by gently stroking over it, and then used one of the towels to wipe off her hands and the excess oil. "And no one has ever shown you any other way to take care of yourself, have they?"

"No." He thought about it for a moment, and now that he did, it made sense. "And no one to really talk to." He admitted. "That's made it more difficult."

"I can imagine." She murmured. Rather than give him back his leg she went down into the other bowl, coming up with a covered, flexible ice pack, which went over his knee. "Stay. Twenty minutes." She smiled at him and nodded to the TV. "Might as well, I'm just going to make you stay here."

Good point. He relaxed back into the couch pillows and turned the TV on. "I didn't see any source of ice at the convent." He just had to point out.

"Cold well water; this is much tidier."

She held on to his leg for that twenty minutes as they both relaxed, every so often running her fingers under it to make certain it wasn't getting too cold. After the time was up she removed the ice pack and strapped his smaller brace around his knee. "I found this under the couch." She told him.

"I don't need that."

"It will help stabilize that joint, and keep it from being irritated and swelling again, and support the muscles so they don't have to lock." She ignored him and finished, before lightly rubbing his thigh again, this time more comforting than anything. "You're home now. You don't have to prove anything to me. Pause that?" She gave him back his leg, finally, depositing it on the large ottoman-cum-coffee table next to the other one as he paused the show. "How do you feel?"

Spencer considered this. Not cranky, he realized, not tired except in a good sort of way, not sore, not wired. Not anything in fact, except rather like he was melding into the cushions behind him. This is what relaxed feels like, he realized, it's a cozy sort of warm feeling like all your muscles are stretching nicely. "Good. Really good." And I no longer want to get high, he realized as well. I don't feel high, but at this point it's really easy to say no, I don't need to. "Thank you. I don't think anyone has…fussed over me like that before."

"Mmm-hmm," Helena gathered up the things she had been using. "I'm going to go wash my hands, then I'll be back with my knitting for the rest. Does this mean I won the challenge?"

"I think you did."

.

Personal note: So now that I have survived a very near electrical fire, having the building re-wired, the death of my computer, having to re-build all my files, the big hospital fund raiser for the year, the holidays, a bit of legal nonsense, not one but two head colds and nursing a sick cat back to health the story can continue.

I apologize for the delay.