Sloth (Sinful Secrets #1) (60 page)

I nod and cry and stroke his cheek.

He starts pumping his dick. I know what that means. He’ll get himself close and then I’ll ride him home. We did it more when he was sick.

A ventilator... fuck.

He nods, the signal for when, and I sink down on him, facing his feet. I bounce on him with practiced zeal, rolling his balls in my palm.

Kellan moans and bucks against me. Just when the monitors begin to peel, he spurts in me and grunts. My pussy quakes around him.

“Ahhh. Oh God,” I whisper. We cling to each other.

“Cleo baby?”

“Yeah?”

“During the CT... go get me... I want another robe... one with an extra tie... in case... the ICU.” His eyes roll slightly, and the pulse ox sounds its alarm.

Arethea comes running. They take him straight back to CT. I veer the other way, like Kellan said.

“I’M SORRY, MA’AM BUT
you’re not listed as a visitor.”

I thrust my arm out across the desk. “I have an armband. I’m with Kellan Drake. He had a bone marrow transplant.”

The woman scans the bar code on my arm band, and I hear a low, discordant thrum. “Your band expired, honey. If you want to get into the ward again, you’ll need to have your relative notify us.”

“I can’t! He’s going on a ventilator.” I burst into tears. “Please let me in, I have to see him now. I don’t have time to wait!”

“Sit down over there.” I fidget in a plastic chair as the woman makes calls. Then she beckons me to the desk. “Someone’s gonna come talk to you.”

A moment later, Arethea comes through the doors... pushing a cart. My belongings are heaped on it.

I clamp my hand over my mouth and have to struggle not to pass out.

“It’s okay.” She nods, and tears start dripping from her eyes.

“Arethea, what the fuck is wrong?” My heart is pounding wildly.

“He’s okay. Come here...” She steers me around a corner to a more private nook, and sits beside me on a leather couch, wrapping an arm around my back.

“Cleo—he doesn’t want to let you back in.”

“What?”

“He’s worried about this. This ventilator,” she says.

“Are you kidding me?” I feel a swell of, followed by a sharp ache in my chest. “Can’t you help me? Go get Willard!”

She shakes her head. “Yesterday, the going out. We all knew. I think he will change his mind. Kellan is strong. You might have to give him time.”

“Just give him time?” I start to sob. “I want to talk to him. I need to see him,
please!
”

“I am so sorry.”

“You can’t do this! You guys can’t just... throw me out!”

Arethea wraps her arms around me. I hop up and pace and try to reason with her. Cut a deal.

“He doesn’t want you in there. Not right now,” she says softly.

“Talk to Willard. He could let me in!”

She shakes her head. “Kellan is the patient. Cleo, we are with you... in spirit, but I can’t let you in. Not today. You want me to try to text you?”

“No!” I hold my head and sob so loudly, someone peeks into the little room to see what’s going on.

Arethea sits with me until she’s paged. She says she’ll try to text me. I nod, even though inside I hate her. I hate all of them.

He’s mine. Kellan is mine. I won’t stop until I get back in.

I don’t leave the transplant unit’s waiting room for three days. Arethea said she’d try to text, but I don’t see a message from her. I play on my phone and do sit-ups and change my clothes in a nearby bathroom, never leaving the area outside the locked doors for too long, in case he calls for me.

As for me, I call the ward incessantly. I talk to every nurse I know and beg them all. When someone walks through my waiting room, I try to talk to them. I call Kellan’s dad, his brother, leaving messages. I call Manning, Whitney. Nothing.

At the end of the third day, the woman at the desk appears in front of me with a short, red-haired woman, who explains that I can’t live here, as they put it.

I go back to my hotel for long enough to find an envelope with my name on it: a new notebook from Kellan. When did he find the time to write in this? I flip through the pages. Love notes. There’s an envelope as well.

Afterward
, it says. Fuck that.

I dress in something clean and go back to the hospital. I shower in the day and sleep in the main lobby at night.

The receptionist who sent me packing can’t help noticing I’m back. I tell her our story. She seems sympathetic but she never gives me any news.

Five days pass. I forget to eat, forget to sleep. My mother calls. My phone rings and rings.

Six days.

A week. Unfathomable.

I go wandering the city blocks. I call his phone, and call and call. I buy myself a neck pillow so I can sleep out in the waiting room. The receptionist is my friend now. She says she is praying for me.

Manning shows up on the eighth day, and Whitney on the ninth. Something Whitney says turns my friend the receptionist against me. I’m asked to leave the waiting room and not come back.

I wander the hospital halls. I wonder if I do this long enough, if I can catch his cancer. They would let me in, then.

I ask every day about him. Sometimes janitors I recognize, a few times nurses. No one tells me he’s dead. So I assume he is alive. I write him letters. I send them. I start a list of quotes I wrote on the sparrows and one day, in a fit of delirious exhaustion, walk a few blocks down and get one tattooed on my ribs.

“Unless you love someone,

nothing else makes any sense.”

–e.e. cummings

My clothes hang loose. I find a pair of Kellan’s narrow-waisted longue pants in my bag and vow to never take them off. One afternoon—day twelve, I think—I take the subway to the Carlyle, where I still have a room, and shave my head. My mother comes and tries to make me go. She threatens me, like Kellan’s dad did him.

I call his dad’s office. I call Manning, begging. Whitney comes again, this time with a plane ticket home. I refuse it. She claims she doesn’t know how Kellan is. He made it through the first night on the ventilator, but no one is being updated.

He’s on a ventilator. Kellan is.

“So he’s in a coma?” My voice sounds dead and dry.

“Cleo... I don’t know.” She holds my hands. We’re in my suite at the hotel. “You need to eat.”

“I eat chili dogs. Did you know it’s my blood?” Tears leak from my eyes. “I made Kellan sick.”

“No you didn’t. CMV is common. Very common. He got it at the most likely time to get it.”

Whitney pulls me into her arms, and I sleep a little while. She takes me downstairs to the hotel restaurant. I push some eggs around and ask her to go with me to the hospital.

When we get there, she cries. “Cleo—I’m worried. You’re so much like I was.”

“Is he dead? Are you telling me that Kellan’s dead? I’m not like you! Lyon is
dead
!”

I run away and don’t come back to Memorial Sloan-Kettering for two days. One of them, I drink in central park. I call Kellan’s father’s office. I call and leave another message for his brother, Barrett.

Manning calls me, asking how I am.

“How’s Kellan?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Liar. Fuck you, Manning. I want to see Truman.”

Manning arrives with the dog the next day. Truman is wearing service dog clothes. “He’s a PTSD dog. Kellan’s service dog.”

I hug the dog. I fall asleep in the waiting room while Manning talks about... something.

I wake up in my hotel room. Manning wants me to eat soup.

I laugh. “I need a feeding tube, or TPN. An IV. I think I have cancer too.”

Manning’s freckle face goes serious and frowny. “Cleo, you have to stop. He wouldn’t like this.”

“Wouldn’t? Or
doesn’t
? Is he dead? Manning, tell me
please
!” I start to sob. Manning shakes his head, like it’s a shame, what’s happened to me. I shove him. “Just go away! If you know nothing, go away!”

That night, when Manning flies back home to man the grow house, I hatch a plan. I wait for my ex-friend the receptionist to leave her desk, and then I hit the “open” button on her desk and dash through the doors.

I run straight to Kellan’s room—our room. I throw the door open and nearly pass out from the rush of seeing—

Nothing.

Holy fuck. Our room is fucking gone. The bed is stripped.

Kellan is dead.

I scream and wail. The noises are so strange. They don’t even sound like me. A second later, nurses burst into the room. I don’t even look at them, just throw myself on our bed, clutching the railing as I curl into a ball. “I want to sleep here! One more night...
please!
”

“NO! NO, NO! CLEO!
Look at Arethea!” Tight hands grab my wrists. “Kellan is not here.”

“I know,” I sob.

“No! He is discharged! He is discharged!”

“What?” I sit up slowly. My chest is heaving. “What did you say?”

“He is discharged,” she says more quietly.

I note the nurses’ faces. Sad and sympathetic. They file out. The room goes still. I’m tired, so I lie down on our bed. No more sheets. Arethea reads my mind. She grabs a blanket from the closet. She lies on the bed with me and holds me while I cry.

“He doesn’t love me.” I sob violently. “He didn’t want me.”

“It’s not true. I held him while he cried for you. It happened many times.”

The apartment I’m renting is on the twenty-first floor of a new high-rise overlooking Central Park.

It’s strangely designed, with just three rooms, all made of mostly glass. The bed is just your basic full, and pushed into the corner of two glass walls, at the corner of the twenty-first floor. I could tint the glass, hide myself from binoculars and birds, but I can’t bring myself to do that. Not sure why.

I sit on the bed and look out over the city. The park is a dark splotch, with gold freckles: twinkling lights. All around it, buildings glisten. Between sky-scrapers, the sun rises and falls, tossing streaks of color at my windows.

Tonight I watched the sunset sitting cross-legged on the bed, and since then, haven’t really gotten up. I watch the world move out my window and am glad I’m so high above the city, so no one can see me.

I found a shirt of Cleo’s in my bags—a t-shirt that says GREEK SING—and I’m wearing it, even though it’s a small and I’ve already gained enough weight back to need a medium.