Just Try Me...

LILY LAY FLAT on her back, her physical therapist pushing her leg up over her head as though she were a pretzel, telling her to "work it, Lily, stop whining and work it," while pain seared a fiery line from her ass to the very tip of her hair.Lily would like to work him, all right -- right into a bloody pulp.Instead she gritted her teeth and told herself that this was the price she paid for stupidity.No self-pity, she decided as she began to sweat like a stuck pig, her tank top sticking to her skin, her leg quivering wildly as she stretched her abused, injured muscles... Damn, she hurt.Maybe retiring wasn't so bad. It wasn't as if it was the first time. From high school, she'd gone into expedition guiding, which she'd retired from to become a paramedic. And when she'd burned out scooping stab victims off the streets of Los Angeles, she'd retired again to become a wildland firefighter.And she'd loved it. Thrived on it, actually, moving from fire to fire, exploring Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming...a perfect fit for her restless spirit.Until she'd screwed up and nearly gotten herself killed. Nope, there was no sugarcoating this retirement; she was no longer a firefighter -- because of injuries, not by choice. She felt weak and insignificant, and at the age of twenty-nine-and-three-quarters, she wasn't ready for either. She wanted to be back out there, damn it, doing her thing, going where she wished, doing something she loved and was good at.But she couldn't have passed an agility test to save her life. Hell, she couldn't even touch her toes at the moment."Harder, Lily."She squeezed her eyes shut and stretched harder, feeling her muscles pull and burn. And yet still, beyond the pain, she also felt...itchy. She needed to be on the move, working with adrenaline as her daily friend. It was a pattern in her life, an affliction. It was who she was, what she did.Or who she'd used to be anyway -- a terrifying thought because...who the hell was she now? "Damn it,ow," she said to her PT, a gorgeous man who resembled Denzel Washington.Eric nodded in approval and backed off. "Was wondering if you even had a pain threshold there for a minute.""Got it, and we hit it."He smiled -- because it wasn'thismuscles they were torturing. "Wait here. I'm going to get you some ice."She'd spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital since her Screw-Up. Major, life-threatening injuries did that to a person. But she'd still not learned to be a good waiter. In fact, waiting was for sissies who needed a minute, and she absolutely did not. She had things to do, places to go. Rolling over, she pushed up to her hands and knees, still trembling like a damn newborn.Or a wildland firefighter who'd woken up in the middle of a full-blown flare-up, forced backwards by the flames, where she'd taken a fall off the cliff, hitting a few burning trees on the way down. Forty feet down. Anex-firefighter now, who couldn't move an inch. She collapsed to her belly, and lay there like a beached whale.Okay, so maybe she did need a minute.Around her the PT office buzzed with the low hum of voices, the whir of equipment. More people being pushed to the edge of sanity... Someone's cell phone rang. Lily hated cell phones. Truthfully, she wasn't crazy about anything electronic, which she supposed made her an outcast in her own generation.But give her a wide-open space with nothing mar-ring the sound of a soft breeze any day. Thinking it, yearning, she looked out the window toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, San Francisco didn't have a lot of wide-open spaces. Not the way she liked them anyway, the kind that took three days of walking to get to civilization.Nearby, something else beeped -- someone's Blackberry, or a laptop -- and she sighed, missing being outside. The mat beneath her smelled like the sweat and tears of all the previous patients Eric had worked over, and she crawled to one oShalvis, Jill is the author of 'Just Try Me... ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373792740 and ISBN 0373792743.