I believed I did not deserve to love Belinda. I believed I should not allow her to love me. I held hard to the idea I should be content to ride out the remainder of my life without complaint, a burned-out case, an absurd hodgepodge of broken parts, a beggar who no longer wished for a horse. But she was also a woman, beautiful and vibrant, and I was a man—in a wheelchair, true—but a man full of heat and desire that sometimes rendered the chair irrelevant.
