“I’m being realistic, Camryn. They’ve already told me that my chances don’t look good.”
“But there’s
still
a chance,” I argue, forcing back more tears and wishing I controlled their off switch. “Small is better than no chance at all.”
“If I let them operate on me.”
I feel like I was just slapped in the face.
“What do you mean,
if
?”
His eyes stray from mine.
I reach out and take his chin vigorously in my hand, turning him back to face me. “There’s no ‘if’, Andrew—you can’t be serious.”
Andrew reaches out for me and moves himself to one side of the bed. He guides me to lie down next to him and as I curl my body into his lying on his side, he lays one arm over me and pulls me close.
“If I had never met you,” he says, peering into my eyes just inches from his, “I never would have gone through with it. If you weren’t here with me right now, I wouldn’t do it. I would think it was a waste of money and time and would only put my family through a false sense of hope, dragging out the inevitable.”
“But you’re going to let them do the surgery,” I say suspiciously, though it’s more like a question.
He brushes my cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“I will do
anything
for you, Camryn Bennett. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care…anything you ever ask me to do and I would do it. No exceptions.”
Sobs rattle my chest.
Before I have a chance to say anything else, Andrew moves his hand across my cheek, pushing back my hair. He looks deeply into my eyes. “I’ll do it.”
I crush my mouth over his and we kiss feverishly.
“I can’t lose you,” I say. “We have the open road ahead of us. You’re my partner in crime.” I force a smile through my tears.
He kisses my forehead.
We lie together for a little while and talk about the surgery and the tests that still need to be done and I tell him that I won’t leave his side. I’ll stay here with him for as long as it takes. And we go on and on about the places we want to see and he starts picking songs out of the air that he wants me to learn so we can sing them together on the road. I’ve never been so willing to sing with him as I am right now. I would try to belt out Celine Dion or an opera singer—I don’t care. I would do it. I would most certainly send everyone screaming for the exits, but I would do it. A nurse comes in to check on him at one point and Andrew gains back some of his playful personality and he messes with her head, telling her she could join us if she wanted in a little ‘two on one’ action.
The nurse just smiled, rolling her eyes and went about her business. It made her feel good about herself and that’s all he was aiming for.
For a time, as I lay in this bed with Andrew, it feels like it did when we were on the road. We don’t think about sickness or death, and we don’t cry. We just talk and laugh and every now and then he tries to touch me in all the right places. I giggle and push his hands away because I feel like I’m doing something wrong. That he should be resting.
Eventually, I give in and let him. Because he’s persistent. And, of course, he’s irresistible. I let him finger me underneath the blanket and then I do the same for him with my hand.
After another hour, I get up from the bed.
“Babe, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” I say smiling warmly and then I take off my pants and my shirt.
He’s grinning from ear to ear. I knew that the perverted gears in his head would start churning before anything else.
“As much as I would love to have sex with you in a hospital room,” I say as I crawl back into the bed with him, “It’s not gonna happen; you need all your strength for your surgery.” I would totally have sex with him in this bed, but right now, it’s not about sex.
He looks at me curiously as I lie back down next to him wearing only my panties and bra and I curl my body against his like before. All he’s wearing underneath the knit blanket are a pair of thin blue hospital pants. I press my chest firmly against his and tangle my legs around his. Our bodies are perfectly aligned, our ribs touching.
“What are you doing?” he asks, growing more curious and impatient, but loving every second of it.
I move my free arm down and trace his tattoo of Eurydice with my fingers. He watches carefully. And when my index finger finds Eurydice’s elbow where the ink stops, I move it along my skin to pick up where his left off.
“I want to be your Eurydice, if you’ll let me.”
His face lights up and his dimples deepen.
“I want to get the other half,” I go on, touching his lips with my fingers now. “I want to get Orpheus on my ribs and reunite them.”
He’s overwhelmed. I can see it in his glistening eyes.
“Oh, baby, you don’t have to do that; it hurts like hell on the ribs.”
“But I want it and I don’t care how much it hurts.”
His eyes begin to water as he looks at me and then his mouth covers mine and our tongues dance with one another for a long, loving moment.
“I would love that,” he whispers onto my lips.
I kiss him softly and whisper back, “After your surgery, when you’re well enough then we’ll go.”
He nods. “Yeah, Gus will definitely need me there to make sure the placement of your tattoo lines up with mine—he laughed at me when I went in to get this on my ribs.”
I smile. “He did, huh?”
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “He accused me of being a hopeless romantic and threatened to tell my friends. I told him he sounded like my father and to shut the fuck up. Gus is a good guy and one helluva tattoo artist.”
“I can see that.”
Andrew spears his fingers through my hair, constantly brushing it back over the top of my head. And as he watches me, scanning my face, I wonder what’s going through his mind. His beautiful smile has vanished and he looks more intent and careful.
“Camryn, I want you to be prepared.”
“Don’t start that—”
“No, baby, you have to do this for me,” he says with worry in his gaze. “You can’t let yourself believe one hundred percent that I’m going to live through this. You can’t do that.”
“Andrew please. Just stop.”
He puts four fingers on my lips, hushing me. I’m already crying again. He’s trying to be as gentle with the truth as he possibly can be, holding back his own tears and his own emotions even better than I can my own.
He’s
the one who might die and I’m the one with no strength. It pisses me off, but I can’t do anything but cry and be pissed at myself.
“Just promise me that you’ll continue to tell yourself that I might die.”
“I can’t make myself say something like that!”
He squeezes me tighter.
“Promise me.”
I grit my teeth, feeling my jaw grind harshly behind my cheeks. My nose and my eyes sting and burn.
Finally I say, “…I promise,” and it wrenches my heart.
“But you have to promise
me
that you’ll pull through this,” I say, pressing my head underneath his chin again. “I can’t be without you, Andrew. You have to know that I can’t.”
“I know, baby…I know.”
Silence.
“Will you sing to me?” he asks.
“What do you want me to sing?”
“
Dust in the Wind
,” he answers.
“No. I won’t sing that song. Don’t
ever
ask me that again. Ever.”
His arms tighten around me.
“Then sing anything,” he whispers, “I just want to hear your voice.”
And so I start to sing
Poison & Wine
, the same song that we sang together back in New Orleans when we lay in each other’s arms that night. He sings along with me a few verses, but I can tell just how weak he really is inside because he can barely hold a note.
We fall asleep in each other’s arms.
~~~
“Got some tests to run,” I hear a voice say above the bed.
I open my eyes to see the ménage à trois nurse standing at the side of the bed.
Andrew stirs awake, too.
It’s late afternoon and I can tell by the view from the window that it’ll be getting dark soon.
“You should probably get dressed,” the nurse says with a knowing smile.
She probably thinks Andrew and I got it on in here at some point considering I’m half-naked.
I crawl out of the bed and slip on my clothes while the nurse checks Andrew’s stats and apparently gets him ready to leave the room with her. There’s a wheelchair near the foot of the bed.
“What kind of tests?” Andrew asks weakly.
The weakness in his voice causes me to look up. He doesn’t look good. He looks…disoriented.
“Andrew?” I go back over to the bed.
Carefully, he raises one hand to ward me off. “No, baby, I’m alright; just a little dizzy. Trying to wake up.”
The nurse turns to me and even though they are trained to appear relaxed and not show the true measure of concern in their faces, I can see it in her eyes. She knows something’s not right.
She forces a smile and goes around to help him sit up, moving his IV out of the way.
“He’ll be gone for an hour or two, maybe more, while they run more tests,” she says. “You should go grab a bite to eat, stretch your legs and come back in a little while.”
“But I-I don’t want to leave him.”
“Do what she says,” Andrew mumbles and the more I hear him try to talk, the more fearful I become. “I want you to go eat.” He manages to turn his head to see me this time and he points a stern finger. “But no steak,” he demands playfully. “You still owe me a steak dinner, remember? When I get out of here, that’s the first thing we’re doing.”
He gets the smile out of me that he was shooting for, although it’s weak.
“OK,” I agree, nodding reluctantly. “I’ll be back in a few hours and I’ll be waiting for you.”
I move back over and kiss him softly. He looks deeply into my eyes when I pull away. All I can see is pain in his eyes. Pain and exhaustion. But he tries to be strong and a tiny smile tugs one corner of his mouth. He gets into the wheelchair and looks back at me once before the nurse wheels him out of the room.
My breath catches.
I feel like I want to scream out to him that I love him, but I don’t say it. I love him with all my heart, but deep down I feel that if I say it, if I finally admit it out loud, that everything will come crashing down. Maybe if I keep it within me, just never say the words, then our story will never be over. Saying those three words can be a beginning, but for me and Andrew, I fear it will be the end.
39
I WOULDN’T BE ABLE to eat if my own life depended on it. I only told Andrew that I would to satisfy him. Instead, I venture outside and sit in the front of the hospital for a while. I just don’t want to leave the premises while he’s inside. It took everything in me to let that nurse wheel him away from me.
I get a text message from Natalie:
Just landed. Taking a cab. Be there soon. Love you.
When I see the cab pull up to the front of the hospital, it takes me a second to go to my feet. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her; since we had our Damon issue.
But none of that matters to me anymore. It hasn’t for a while. Best friends, no matter what they do or how much they hurt you, it only hurts as much as it does because they
are
your best friend. And none of us are perfect. Mistakes were made for best friends to forgive; it’s what makes being a best friend official. In a way like Andrew, I can’t imagine not having Natalie in my life. And right now I need her more than any time I have ever needed her.
She runs across the concrete when she sees me, her chocolate-colored long hair blowing freely behind her.
“Oh my God, I’ve missed you so much, Cam!” She practically squeezes me to death.
All it took was for her to be here and I’m taking advantage of her hug and sobbing into her chest. I just couldn’t keep the tears contained. I’ve never cried as much in my life as I have in the past twenty-four hours.
“Oh, Cam, what is going on?” I feel her fingers comb through my hair as I cry softly into her shirt. “Let’s go sit down.”
Natalie walks me to a stone bench sitting underneath an oak tree and we sit together.
I tell her everything. From why I left North Carolina to meeting Andrew on the bus in Kansas and all the way up to this point, sitting with her on this bench. She cried and smiled and laughed with me as I told her about my time with Andrew and I’ve rarely seen her this serious about anything before. Only when my brother Cole got sent to prison and after my parents divorced. And after Ian’s death. Natalie may be a crazy, outspoken, party-girl that usually doesn’t know when to shut up, but she knows there’s a time and place for everything and in a time like this, all she gives me is her heart.
“I just can’t believe you’re going through this after what you went through with Ian. It’s like some cruel fucking joke that fate is playing on you.”
It does feel like that in a way, but with Andrew, it feels much worse than some cruel joke.
“Girl,” she says, laying her hand on my leg, “think about it: what are the chances that everything that happened the way it did, were just coincidence?” She shakes her head at me. “I’m sorry, Cam, but that’s just
too
much coincidence—you two were
meant
to be together. It’s like some wicked fucking fairytale love story that you just can’t make up, y’know?”
I don’t say anything; I just contemplate it. Normally, I would comment on her dramatic usage of words, but this time I can’t. I just don’t have it in me.
She forces my gaze. “Seriously, do you think you would be put through all this only to watch him die?”
Her using that word stings, but I hold it down.
“I don’t know.” I look out at the trees on the lawn, but I don’t really see them. All I see is Andrew’s face.
“He’s going to be OK.” Natalie cups my face in her hands and stares into my eyes. “He’ll get through this, you just have to tell death to piss off, that
you
got this one, y’know?”