Page 25 of Break For Me
The denim is stiff with dried blood. It resists. I have to work it down over his massive hips.
His thighs are immense. The quadriceps are so heavily developed the fabric catches on the thick muscle. I pull the jeans over his knees and calves.
He’s wearing nothing underneath. I drop the heavy denim on the floor. The man on the cot is completely naked.
My clinical training tells me this is just a body. Two hundred and forty pounds of human anatomy. Skeletal framework. Muscular system. Integumentary covering.
My clinical training is a liar.
The sheer scale of him is the first thing that hits me. He is too much of everything. Too wide. Too dense. Too physically present.
The cot frame bows dangerously under his weight. His long legs extend past the end of the frame. His broad shoulders span the full width of the canvas.
The prison tattoos look different in the low, flickering lantern light. The Madonna on his chest seems to breathe. Her praying hands rise and fall with his laboring lungs.
The scars are a topographic map of violence. The puckered divot on his right chest—an old gunshot wound that healed without a surgeon’s touch. The long, thin surgical line across his lower belly.
And on his left flank, a tight cluster of small, perfectly round burns.
Cigarette marks. Hypertrophic skin, raised and shiny.
The pattern is deliberate. Someone used him as a ledger for their cruelty.
Garrett returns with the basin of cold water. I soak a towel and wring it out.
I start at his forehead. The cloth against his burning skin produces an audible hiss. The extreme temperature differential creates a small cloud of steam that curls off his body.
I draw the towel down his temples and his jaw. I wipe the thick column of his neck. His pulse beats heavily against the wet cloth.
I move to his chest. The pectorals are dense plates of muscle. The dark hair is coarse. His nipples contract instantly from the cold.
The Madonna. The surgical scar. The hard ridge of his sternum.
I press the cloth against his flanks and his obliques. I reach the sharp crease of his hip. The skin is thinner here. The powerful femoral pulse hammers against my fingertips.
I rinse the towel. I soak it again. My hands are functioning. My breathing is controlled. I am a physician performing a medical procedure.
I move to his thighs. The quadriceps are immense. I need both hands to span their circumference. The muscle beneath my hands is firm and incredibly hot.
I work the cloth along his inner thigh. This is where the cooling will be most effective. The skin is different here. Softer. Less scarred.
I feel the adductor muscles tense under my touch.
I move the cloth higher. I need to cool the groin—the area where the major vessels run just beneath the surface.
I wring the towel and press it against the crease of his groin. My knuckles brush the junction of his thigh and pelvis. I reach for the other side.
He’s hard.
The erection is sudden. It’s an involuntary vascular response to the high fever and the constant, stimulating touch. I’ve seenthis happen in ICU patients. My medical training knows this. My hands know this.
My hands stop moving.
His eyes snap open. The glassiness recedes. Consciousness registers the cloth, my hands, and his own body’s betrayal.
Something dark and ugly moves across his face. Shame. Rage. It’s the expression of a man being betrayed by his own flesh.
"Don’t." His voice is shredded. A barely audible rasp. "Don’t look at me."
