Page 33 of One Night with the Doctor

She shrugged. ‘I felt for you. I wondered if you were ever as scared and confused and worried as I used to be. I wondered if he was… violent.’

Sebastian placed his beer on the table between them.

Like the lights reflected in the polished glass surface of the Yarra, he could see the empathy shining in her eyes. It wasn’t a subject he often talked about because people didn’t understand.

Not really.

But he knew she did. And after talking about it already today, albeit in an abstract kind of way, he felt strangely compelled to tell her more.

‘No,’ he murmured. ‘He wasn’t violent, just… dysfunctional. He had bouts of crippling depression and suffered from night terrors. He was severely agoraphobic. He couldn’t work. He had chronic indigestion. He smoked and drank too much. But he wasn’t a nasty drunk. If anything, I was probably… ignored. It was as if I was… invisible a lot of the time.’

Callie grimaced. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I think the fact he was an older father, forty-two when I was born, probably didn’t help. There was no relationship, no connection, no bond with me before he went off to war.’ He shrugged. ‘And by the time I was on the scene, the damage had already been done. My mother did the best she could but she didn’t know how to cope with a husband who had become a stranger and a late in life child.’

‘Wedding vows don’t come with PTSD manuals,’ she murmured.

Sebastian gave a half smile. ‘No, they don’t.’

‘I notice you didn’t draw any parallels in your paper between the Vietnam experience and your own experience with counselling veterans from Afghanistan.’

Sebastian dropped his gaze. ‘I didn’t want to dilute the paper’s focus. But rest assured, PTSD is alive and kicking among our military personnel.’

He took a deep pull of his beer as the skin on his scalp and at the back of his neck crawled. An image of an explosion flashed in his mind’s eye. He gripped the bottle tight, hyper aware of Callie’s gaze on his profile.

‘Don’t the defence forces have their own psychs? I didn’t think they outsourced.’

Sebastian kept his gaze firmly planted on the Yarra. ‘They do.’ His lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘But my reputation preceded me.’

She frowned. ‘Sebastian?’ She reached out her hand and covered his. ‘Are you okay?’

He nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You know,’ she said her thumb absently rubbing over his knuckles, ‘someone very wise once told me that sometimes it’s easier to talk to a person you don’t know that well.’

He looked down at her hand. A hand that had touched every part of his body. A hand that knew him pretty damn well. Each pass of her thumb felt like a stroke to his belly. ‘Really.’ He glanced at her with a reassuring nod and smiled. ‘I’m okay.’

She didn’t look like she believed him but she did drop the subject. Not his hand though. ‘It must be a bit of an anticlimax, working at Jambalyn, after all that adrenaline.’

Sebastian’s breath grew thicker as her touch continued. Working at Jambalyn had been a godsend.

‘Jambalyn has been a fantastic experience. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last ten years intensely focused on counselling people with severe PTSD. It’s been a lot and I was feeling a little burned out. Plus I needed… I wanted… to be somewhere where positive outcomes were tangible. To see that people can recover or at least manage their lives productively. I didn’t want to be the Sebastian Walker, PTSD guru. I wanted to get back to the basics.’

‘That seems like a very reasonable aspiration,’ she murmured. ‘It isn’t always a picnic in the community, though.’

Sebastian was mesmerised by the circular motion of her thumb against his skin, his gaze glued to the action. ‘No, I know that. But it’s good to see, to know that there is hope.’

Where he’d just come from, there hadn’t been a lot of that.

Her drugging caress absently stroked down his fingers now. ‘It can be very rewarding,’ she agreed.

Sebastian almost groaned out loud. He was trying really hard here but a man had limits and he was reaching his fast. ‘Callie…’

The thick plea in his half whisper/half groan scorched right through to Callie’s womb and brought her attention to the liberties her thumb was taking.

What the hell?

She’d moved this into personal territory. Sebastian had been perfectly content talking about the conference and she’d gone and dragged them in to murky waters.