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Chapter Thirty-Four


Jaymie

Brian and Nick did talk. I don’t know what about. I managed to meander around the hospital long enough for them to have their privacy, eating a soggy chicken sandwich and drinking watery orange juice from a paper cup. By the time I got back upstairs, Nick was gone to his radiation therapy session and Brian was watching a basketball game on cable. When Dr. Stanley rolled Nick back into the room forty minutes later, he was tired and it only took a little bit before Brian decided he had to go and I was left alone with Nick, who was half asleep and nauseated. I rubbed his hand, my fingers running over his over-sized gamers’ knuckles, and we both stared up at the game Brian had abandoned on the TV, both too lazy to change the channel.

I looked over at Nick as he coughed a little, fatigued sort of hiccough that barely rattled in his chest. He looked so… worn out.

If I was your girlfriend, I thought to him, I’d tell you right now how much I love you.

He tried to shift his weight and he winced. I stood up, “Here,” I said, gripping his torso to help him in the movement, tugging the pillow in the direction he indicated, and adjusting the blankets around his body. My hand grazed his pelvis, and without really meaning to I felt his limpness and I blushed and pulled my hand away quicker than I really needed to, overcompensating by tucking the blanket under his knees and sitting back down without looking at his face.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

“No problem,” I answered.

He looked down at the blue blanket, whose texture reminded me of a waffle, but his eyes seemed to look past it. At the limpness, maybe. “One of the side effects of this thing is reduced sexual desire,” he said. “I was reading a pamphlet.”

“You can read?” I joked.

Nick smirked slightly, his lip only just barely turning up. “Well, I mean, you know. I’m not sure what this is gonna do to, like, us,” he explained. He cleared his throat. But, like his cough before, it was a pathetic sound that didn’t seem to really reach his lungs.

“We’ll play it -er- touch and go,” I answered, trying to be my usual gently teasing self.

Nick hesitated. “I’m just sayin’. Like… if… say, say you didn’t wanna, you know, stick around…”

Here it comes, I thought, steeling myself.

“...Like I’d get it. If you didn’t. Stay, I mean. Like if you wanted me to leave you alone. Not to drag you into all this. We were never supposed to be tied down. I don’t want you to feel like you - like you are. Tied.”

“I wouldn’t mind being tied by you,” I said. I hadn’t meant it suggestively. I’d meant the words the same way Nick had, meaning that I was willing to be committed to him. But I could see in his eyes that the words had come across suggestively to him, that he’d taken them to be a sexual comment, that, for the first time in all the time that I’d known him, Nick wasn’t in the mood. “I mean, I’m not going anywhere,” I explained.

“Okay,” Nick replied.

“I mean, unless you want me to go,” I said.

Nick shrugged.

“You can tell me if you do,” I told him.

“I don’t,” he said. And the moment he said it, I saw something in his eyes twitch and he looked away and took a deep breath. “Unless you want to.”

“I don’t,” I echoed.

“Okay,” he replied.

“Okay,” I replied back.

And somehow at the end of it I didn’t really have a clue what we’d really been talking about. But I didn’t know how to ask him, either. I felt like we were walking on emotional eggshells. I settled myself back into the chair and looked up at the basketballers running around after their little orange ball and the crowd acting all nutty and the jumbotron all bright and the announcers speed-talking, trying to keep up with the action. I didn’t know jackshit about basketball. It was one of those things that Nick indulged in that I didn’t really give much of a damn about. We’d had plenty of celebratory sex over the years because this team or that team won (or sad sex because they’d lost), -- (Though none of the basketball season sex was as intense as the football season sex. Those Buccaneers man… can’t they win a game once in awhile? I mean I’d love some hot, happy sex instead of weepy, losing sex guys!) -- but that was about the extent of my basketball knowledge.

Neither of us said anything.

Finally, Nick’s nurse came in and informed me that it was the end of visiting hours and smiled placidly while I gathered all my stuff.

“See you tomorrow,” I said to him.

“Okay,” he said.

“Maybe you’ll get to come home with me tomorrow, too,” I suggested, because he looked so blue. I smiled.

Nick nodded.

I felt bad, but there wasn’t anything else to say. Other than the L-word. And I couldn’t say that. So I didn’t. “Night,” I said.

“Night,” he mumbled.

And I left. I felt like crap, but I left. I don’t know what it was about that particular parting that made it more painful than any of the others, but there was a lump in my throat that grew larger and larger as I went down the stairs.





Nick

Thank you for holding my hand, I love you.

Don’t move out, don’t leave me, I love you.

I’m only trying to protect you, I love you.

Don’t go. I love you.

I watched her back disappear around the corner of the door, and I wanted to shout out Come back! I love you! But I didn’t. I just stared after her, sick to my stomach from holding it in, and turned to look back down at the blanket and fiddled with my fingers.

“So, how are you feeling?” the nurse asked. She moved in with her little rolly cart and started hooking up the ET finger and uncoiling her stethoscope.

“I love her,” I said.

The nurse blew hot air onto the plate of the scope, like I hadn’t said anything monumental at all. Like it didn’t really matter. She reached over and helped me lean forward. “I meant how you’re feeling about your radiation,” she said, pressing the scope to my back. Despite having tried lamely to warm it, it was cold and made me jump when it pressed to my skin.

I wondered if my heart was beating Jaymie’s name. It felt like it might be.

“I dunno, I’m really tired. Like my body is. I feel like I might throw up a little. Like I want to throw up but there’s nothing in there to throw up.” That was probably more to do with Jaymie leaving than the radiation, I thought to myself. The nurse pulled away the scope and gently guided me back to my pillowy resting point, looking at her cart, at the result of the ET finger clip and got the cuff for the blood pressure out. “It was different than I expected. It was like being microwaved for a couple minutes. I always pictured radiation as some like really crazy painful needles and stuff.”

“The painful part is the side effects.”

I shrugged, “They don’t seem so bad.”

The nurse was pumping the cuff.

“I feel shitty, but I mean better than I thought I would.”

“For now,” she replied.

You’re a ray of sunshine, I thought.

Unfortunately, she was right. By two in the morning, I was holding one of those pink plastic tubs and hurling, squeezing my eyes shut because even the muted, yellow light from the hallway was too bright. I clutched the edge of the bucket, my knuckles white from trying to remember not to let the bucket tilt too far to either side. I looked miserably up at the clock and willed it to move faster, so Jaymie could come back because I really, really missed her and somehow everything seemed more damning without her there. I missed the way she broke the silence just by breathing and the way she had squeezed my fingers earlier when I coughed.

I lowered the bucket as the nausea settled a little bit and let it rest on my knee. I glanced over at my cell phone sitting on the night stand.

Careful not to tip the bucket, I picked up the phone and pulled up my messenger.

TampaBuccsFan28: u up?

I waited. While I waited, my stomach twisted again and I lifted the pink tub to my chin and felt my organs all clench around the emptiness that was my insides. There was nothing left in there for my retching to produce, but that didn’t keep it from attempting to turn inside out. I closed my eyes. I’d been like that a couple minutes when I felt my phone vibrate against my leg. I looked down.

PurpleNailPolish: hey
TampaBuccsFan28: hey

I wanted to keep the excitement to a minimum on the screen. I didn’t want her to think I was being too clingy, that I was gonna back out of my promise to let her go if she wanted to go. But as casual as my answer in type appeared, my skin kind of burned with excitement that Jaymie was on the other side of the screen somewhere, thinking of me just like I was thinking of her. It made me feel better to picture her looking at the text.

PurpleNailPolish: Why are you still up? shouldnt you be sleeping?
TampaBuccsFan28: probly… sick tho
PurpleNailPolish: :(
PurpleNailPolish: Im’ sorry.
TampaBuccsFan28: me 2
TampaBuccsFan28: i feel like shit
PurpleNailPolish: hugs

It was just a word on a screen but I felt some kind of strange warming comfort from it. I put the tub on the rolling table top and leaned back into the pillows cautiously, afraid the motion might upset my stomach again. I made it without my stomach rolling over again, though, and I breathed relief at the feeling of my weight being supported by something besides myself. I felt myself turn to jello against the mattress, a thin layer of tears just rimming my eyelids.

TampaBuccsFan28: i miss u

I hated myself for saying it the moment I hit the send button. But it was too late to take back.

PurpleNailPolish: I miss you too.