Authors: Hurt
Why. Why the fuck had he done it? It just reminded her of what they'd been. Of what she'd lost.
Her anger numbed the pain as she struggled up to sitting, then standing. She'd tell him. He had no right. To give her orgasms like one more prescription. She didn't want his fucking pity or his goddamned charity.
Bursting with a thousand recriminations she went to the bedroom, sure she'd heard his tread recede off in that direction, but the room was empty. The bathroom.
Door pushed to. She waited a moment. God, even the silence pissed her off. She went 224
to the door, her privacy conditioning slowing her only slightly against her determination to have it out, her certainty that he'd forfeited all his rights to privacy by foisting himself on her when she was so vulnerable, and even a wicked little impulse to humiliate him by walking in on him using the john. She half hoped he was sitting down.
Tense and flushed he looked up as she pushed the door open. He went still.
Blushed. He was sitting on the edge of the tub, his hard cock in his fist.
There was a long, taut moment as she waited. Waited for him to babble some embarrassed excuse. Waited for him to tuck it away and zip up. But the moment ended, and he didn't do those things.
Holding her gaze, he moved his hand, down, up, stroking himself. His eyes wandered, down from her eyes, lingering at her lips, sliding down her body, then back again to her face, looking into her as he caressed and tugged his cock. And she remembered, he'd been gazing down when she entered, into the tub, where she'd been.
He'd been thinking of her while he was getting off. Her, now. Not her former self.
His cock still gripped in his fist he rose and closed in on her. She backed up. Felt the wall behind her.
"Stay."
It was a plea. He never pleaded. Fuck, he never even asked.
His left hand found her right, by her side, and held it. He tried to kiss her mouth but she turned her head, just enough to say “no,” and he kissed her cheek just by her mouth instead as he went on stroking himself, his breath catching, getting throatier, the sound of the friction between his palm and cock whiffing faster, faster. He groaned, 225
said, "Vanka, Vanka," then groaned again, loud, long, then slumped, letting his head sink down on her shoulder.
He straightened up, backed up, and, looking uncharacteristically vulnerable, gave her a tender smile. He pulled his shirt over his head and went to the sink. She looked down, expecting to see a splatter of his goo on her shirt, but she was clean. He finished rinsing up, ran a towel over his belly and chest, took her hand, and led her to the bed.
"I know you need time, Vanka," he said when they'd lain down together. "I don't mean to rush you. I just don't want you to write us off."
The next morning she asked him to leave. He gave her a long, steady look—one of his inside-looking looks—and then surprised her by saying “all right.” Then he surprised her again by leaving her alone. Every time her phone rang she thought it would be him. Or hoped it would be. But it was Brods or David or Nicola. By the time she went to bed, she missed him. Missed that grin, those black coffee-brown eyes, the way they looked into her, read her, anticipated her. She missed his voice and his touch.
It scared her, the way she was missing him. She was confusing kindness for something else.
By the time she'd had lunch the next day, she knew. He was gone. She'd driven him away. Suddenly, his kind nursing, his pity-inspired pseudo lovemaking didn't seem like such a shabby substitute for the real thing. She wanted him back, wanted the caresses, the little kisses on her neck, his purring innuendo in her ear. Even if it was a kind of lie, a kind of charity.
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Better that he disappear now, before she became totally dependent on him.
Before she needed all that instead of just liking it so much.
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Chapter Seven
Her body on fast-forward. Time, her life speeding forward and hurtling backwards with faint brushes of her fingertip over the mouse pad. Whole. Broken. Whole again.
Breasts bronzed by antiseptic and bared between blue surgical drapings, scalpel opening a seam of red. A pale pink nipple jutting for the red tongue, the open lips.
Gauze taped over two wide, lipless mouths sewn shut with coarse black thread.
A time machine. A portal to another plane. Her laptop, her editing software, dozens of mpeg files. Work was transcending the pain singeing her nerves, fading away from the frightening quiet of her house, the quiet of her future, transcending her hurting, broken, persistently mortal body and becoming a god, an immortal, a creator.
While she worked, she forgot how scared she was. While she worked, she didn't miss Galen so much. So, she seldom stopped, except to take her meds, or sleep, or to make herself eat. But as soon as she set her laptop aside and stepped away from the images, she was tearing apart and pushing together; the house felt big and empty and she felt small and weak. And she missed him.
Her heart stopped beating when, after three nights and two days, the phone rang and it wasn't Brods or David or Nicola. It was Galen.
“What time does your dad get in?”
A giddy flutter hit her belly and a warmth crept up her throat. “His flight's due in at LAX at two. So Sasha should have him here around four,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
“Well?”
“What?”
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“You promised I get to meet them. Remember?”
Because she was so happy to hear his voice, so relieved she hadn't driven him off for good, she knew it was stupid to say yes, Galen could come over and help her get the house tidy. That she was at her masochistic peak when she said yes, he could stay the afternoon and join the family for dinner. She was only making herself vulnerable to much greater pain a few days, a week or two later, when Galen would feel he'd done enough and disappear from her life.
So, when she hung up the phone, she walked to the bathroom. There, in the radiance pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling privacy window that made up almost the entire far wall, she confronted the mirror. Unbuttoning the flannel pajama top, she carefully shrugged it to the floor, not even noticing there was no pain, because her whole being was fixed on the bandages, their halos of bruises, and an unbandaged, cross-hatch mess of small incisions, like someone had attacked her with an exacto. It was nothing like looking at her footage. That woman was an estranged twin. A doppelganger. Her subject.
But now she was already crying, not even feeling sad for herself, but shaken by pity for her poor body, as if it was another person. She touched the small, thickly layered rectangle of white gauze just below her right collarbone, feeling the rigid round bulge beneath. The port for when she'd start chemo. It made her a little queasy, the idea of this alien object buried in her flesh. But her stomach seemed to be floating on a choppy sea as she peeled up the corner of the big bandage that covered her, armpit to armpit, looking like a tube top, if she didn't lift her arms. When she got a grip on the 229
edge of the bandage with her shaking fingers, she stared into the mirror and peeled the gauze back.
* * * *
"Good God, Vanka," he sighed at her ear, "you look good enough to eat."
The way he said it actually made her blush. Galen stroked and kissed her hair, asked her how the pain had been for the last two days, and told her in a teasing voice, when she said she was doing better with the mobility of her arms, that he was going to miss her needing sponge baths.
* * * *
Galen got up, came close, grinned down at her.
“You're beautiful.”
“I mean,” her voice caught. “Do I look sick?”
His playful grin went tender and he looked her over carefully. “No. You look a little tired. But not sick.” He kissed her forehead.
“You know, you don't have to stay. You could just meet up with us for dinner tonight and take a miss on the melodrama.”
“I know. I'll stick around.”
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She tried not to show her relief. If something happened, she didn't mind suffering through it by herself, whatever it was, But not with them. The thought of her dad scrambling for her pain meds, or trying to help her with her drain made her crazy with guilt.
The chime of the doorbell made her heart do a heavy thump. Galen went to the door, and Vanka worked at straightening and brightening and smiling while male voices volleyed greetings and introductions.
“Hi, honey,” her dad hailed, coming toward her with outstretched arms.
“Dad!” Sasha warned as Vanka stood, frozen between fear of an excruciating embrace, and her determination not to let her dad see even a flicker of fear or pain on her face.
“I know, the rib,” her dad called back to Sasha. “I can still give her a kiss, can't I?”
“Hi, Dad.”
He cupped her face in his big palms and planted a moist kiss on her cheek.
“I thought we agreed when you graduated high school, you weren't allowed any more sprains or broken bones.”
“I guess I'm grounded, huh?”
“Two weeks, young lady,” her dad teased. “This one,” he said, turning to Galen, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at Vanka, “skateboarding when she was eight, broken collarbone. Snowboarding when she was twelve, sprained wrist. Surfing when she was sixteen, torn ligament in her knee. When Sasha told me she'd cracked a rib I figured she'd tried to fall off Everest or something and break her skull.” Her dad turned 231
back to her, the blue of his eyes looking paler to her, his broad strength looking narrower and more vulnerable than it had six months ago. “Kick boxing?”
She mustered a sheepish grin, letting her guilt lie for her. She'd undo her deception in a little while. They went and sat in the garden, in the shade of the olive tree some purist had planted there behind the little stucco Spanish house. Galen brought Vanka a glass of water, and three bottles of beer. Her dad eyed her water curiously.
“Don't get any funny ideas, Dad. I'm on painkillers. I'm not pregnant.”
“That'd put the last nail in David's coffin,” Sasha said under his breath.
“Does she read your mind, too, or just mine?” her dad asked Galen, trying to make up for Sasha being a dick.
Galen smiled, turning to look at Vanka. “Vanka knows what I'm thinking,” he answered, laughter threading his words, “but of course, it's never much of a mystery what I'm thinking where she's concerned.”
Vanka and her dad looked at each other, smiling into their drinks as they took a sip to camouflage their amusement, while Sasha went red, his jaw clenched down on some chivalrous reprimand. Maybe Vanka knew, most of the time, what her dad and Galen were thinking, but it was Galen who knew, always, how to provoke everyone around him to whatever feeling he wanted. A funny little pride swelled up in Vanka, to see he could do it as deftly with a group as he could one-on-one. And a few minutes later, when Galen excused himself, as planned, on the pretext of having to make some phone calls, her hands and feet went cold.
“Dad,” she said when he'd finished relating a story about the kid that had sat next to him on the flight from New York. “There's something I need to tell you.”
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God, it was already there, the hurt. The fear that something bad had happened to another person he loved. She went on, terse and efficient, to get it over with as quickly as possible, knowing his fears were even worse than the truth.
“Dad. I have breast cancer. It's only stage one. No lymph nodes are involved, and it hasn't spread. They did a lumpectomy, and got a clean margin. Everything looks good, but just to be safe, I'm going to do a course of chemo, starting next week.”
He was silent, just staring at her, for what felt like five minutes. Processing. Then,
“Stage one?” His eyes were getting watery, and his voice was choked.
“Stage one.”
“Your PET scan's clean?”
“Yes.”
“No lymph node involvement?'
“No, Dad.”
“And the oncologist is satisfied they got it all. You got a clean margin?”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly, his head shaking, making him seem old and frail.
“You know, honey, when they diagnosed your mom, she was stage three. And your aunt Masha was stage four,” he said to reassure her, reassure himself.
“I know, Dad. My prognosis is really good.”
“So, you didn't really break a rib?”
“No, Dad. I just couldn't tell you over the phone.”
“No.” Then, “I guess you're not grounded, then,” he teased, obviously trying not to cry.
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“Dad.”
She winced as he visibly braced himself against more hurt.
“They did a test, because of Mom and Aunt Masha, because I'm so young. I've got what they call a BRCA2 gene mutation. So, even though they got all the cancer, even though I'm OK, that mutation means I have a high chance of having the cancer come back.”
“How high?”
“It's not exact. Maybe eighty-five percent. But if a woman has a mastectomy, if there's no breast tissue, it reduces the risk. By about ninety percent, they think.”
Again he nodded his head like a suddenly much older man. “You're thinking of doing it?”
“I already did, Dad.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he sobbed, the tears spilling onto his withered cheeks. He tipped his forehead to her, stroked her hair. “Sweetheart, I'm so sorry you're going through this.”
Later, in the house, Galen helped Vanka get changed for dinner out. She left him behind, in the bedroom to get himself cleaned up, and started down the hall to rejoin Sasha and her dad.
“. . . a pretty decent guy to me,” she caught her dad shout-whispering at Sasha,
“not that like that fucking coward, David.”