“I’m sorry,” he said roughly. “About the smoking.”
She took a deep breath. “What you put in your body is your choice.”
“If it makes a difference, I can only handle two draws on the damn things. Then, you know, the coughing takes over.”
Every time Lydia blinked, she saw the image of the tumors in his lungs, glowing on that laptop.
“So what were the results,” he asked.
“Not good,” she said. “Gus can give you the details.”
“He doesn’t have to. The fact that you aren’t yelling at me says it all.”
There was a rustling, and then a series of coughs—and it seemed the height of cruelty that the choking sound, that combination of gasp and wheeze, was what made her want to scream at him. What did that say about her?
“You can leave,” he told her. “Or I can. This whole thing has been… bullshit, really, and you can get out—”
“I can?” She looked over at him sharply. “Explain to me how that works—and no, it’s not about filling a suitcase and driving off. You think you’re not going to be on my mind anywhere I go? There’s no escaping you.”
When he winced, she cursed. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You just told the truth. That’s all—and I don’t blame you. If I could run from me, I would, too.”
As she tried to think of what to say, her focus lasered on him, in a way that suggested she kept most of his physical details dimmed these days because it was just too painful to catalogue the changes. Now, though, she couldn’t avoid anything about the way that his torso curved into an awkward S, the cabinetry behind him dictating his position, his body too frail to do anything but conform to its environment. And then there was his face, so pale now as to have a gray cast, the dark bags under his eyes a combination of exhaustion and malnutrition.
For a split second, an image of him from the first time she saw him barged into her mind. He’d come for an interview at the Wolf Study Project, and as he’d appeared in the open doorway of her office, she’d stumbled over her words. He had been so tall, so broad, his face glowing with health, his dark hair so silky and thick, his eyes a fiery hazel. Now, he was like an older, hard-lived relation of that other man, a stranger who shared many of the features and all of the coloring, but none of the youth and vibrancy.
With every fiber of her being, she wanted to go back to the previous him. She wanted to feel his strong arms around her, and smell his clean, fresh scent, and know that, come nightfall, she could look forward to the two of them getting into bed and messing things up in a good way.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said roughly.
“You should.” He shook his head grimly. “You really need to.”
* * *
Incompatibility was a divergence in Robert Frost’s forest full of roads, wasn’t it.
Daniel was not a poetry guy, but everyone had read that little ditty about the yellow wood, the two roads, the pairing off. Back when he’d been in his old life, on the very rare occasion he’d thought about affinity between two people in a relationship, he’d always assumed that it applied to matters of personality, habits, and values. Like, introversion and extroversion. Geographic location, jobs, marriage priorities. Kids. Religion. Cap-on, cap-off shit when it came to Crest.
For example, when he’d met Lydia, his Plenty of Fish profile, if he’d had one, would have been a real party: Introvert with extensive weapons training; no-roots drifter working for a shadow arm of the U.S. government; never, ever interested in taking a wife. No future plans, other than an expectation that he’d be executed in his sleep at some point.
Lydia had been a surprise in most ways, and a shocker in a specific one, but there had never been any issues with them getting along. They had been of like mind, and very like body, at the beginning. Now, though, they had diverged, and he was taking the road less traveled—and yes, it was making all of the difference. Unfortunately, his one-laner was a kick in the ass that came with an early grave—and the reason there was no more traffic currently on it was because the chances of someone his age getting catastrophic cancer was a lottery win in the worst possible sense.
The urge to apologize to her again for getting sick was like his cough, a returning spasm in his throat that he knew wasn’t going to be eased for long. Still, he swallowed the syllables as best he could because he knew actions, not words, were what mattered when you were making amends, and his immune system was just not up to the task of curing him. And neither were all the drugs he’d been taking.
“I think you should speak to Gus again about Vita-12b,” Lydia said in a low voice. When he started to shake his head, she cut in, “If you can smoke, you can be more open-minded about it.”
Her eyes, those beautiful whiskey-colored eyes, stared across at him so intensely, he felt like she’d taken his shoulders in strong grips and was shaking him.
“It’s our last option, Daniel.”
“No, it isn’t.” He made an attempt at sitting up again, but his torso, wasted though it was, somehow weighed seven thousand pounds. “The last option is to let go.”
She gasped a little, and tried to hide the inhale with the back of her hand. When she recovered, she whispered, “Don’t say that.”
“The truth is what it is.” He eased even farther back into the cubbyhole he’d fallen into. The position twisted his spine and torqued his hips, but relieving the discomfort wasn’t worth the effort it would take to straighten himself out. “Whether we talk about it or not, I’m dying, and we need to face that.”
“But you could just try Vita—”
“You remember how much fun we had last night?” He glanced out the open doorway of the walk-in to the bed that had been made—no doubt by her, even though C.P. Phalen had all kinds of staff. “God, it was so fucking romantic, you holding me over a toilet as I threw up bile. Really great. Was it good for you? I know I saw tears in your eyes, and yeah, sure, they were from joy. On my end, I was tempted to quit in the middle, I really was, but I persevered for your pleasure because that’s the kind of man I am—”
“Daniel.”
He closed his eyes and cursed. “You know, I remember when you used to say my name in different ways. Now, it’s just that one way.”
“Will you please just talk to Gus one last time?”
Daniel looked down his body. He was wearing an old pair of his cargo pants, not that he needed all those pockets for anything. The waistband was very loose, a requirement given how much his stomach bothered him—and something his weight loss conveniently provided—and beneath the cinch of his belt around the bones of his hips, his thighs and calves no longer filled out anything of the legs. It was like he was wearing someone else’s bottoms, and really, wasn’t that the truth?
“You know—” He coughed a little, and then stayed quiet for a couple of seconds afterward just in case the spasms bloomed into another round of respiratory Pilates. “I can’t remember the last time I had a meal that didn’t taste like metal. Or slept through the night. Or wasn’t consciously aware of my body’s every twitch and jerk.”