“Meg, what’s with the archaeological dig in our freezer?” Erin asked as she grabbed the package of steaks to throw in the trash.
“There’s ice cream in here somewhere,” Meg snarled. When she turned around to sling a container of toaster waffles in the general direction of the garbage, Erin noticed the tears streaming down Meg’s face.
Ice-crusted pastries flew like frisbees at Erin. She dodged. “Whoa! Hey! Meg? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, God, Erin, I’m sorry.” Meg’s hands flew up to cover her mouth. It did nothing to hide the reddened nose and eyes. “I didn’t know you were over there.”
“No problem. What’s a concussion by waffle between sisters? I’ll forgive you if you’ll tell me what’s the matter.” Erin left the waffles where they landed so she could hug her sister instead.
Meg clung tightly. “I called our asshole parents to tell them about the cancer.”
“That explains it.” Erin rubbed her sister’s back. “Let me guess. They both offered to drop their lives and rush out here to support you through treatment. Oh, wait, no, that would be the non-shitty variety of parents.”
“Dad grunted and said, ‘Tough luck, kid.’ Mom said she hoped chemo would do the trick, and she’d send me a nice head scarf from Turks and Caicos to wear after my hair fell out. I want to scream.” Meg sniffled. “Why did I expect anything else?”
“Because you’re an optimist, sis-o. You see the best in people. Even them.”
“I was so stupid. I got my hopes up. This time, I thought, they’ll act like parents. Their daughter could die, for the love of pity. I thought they’d help.” Tears roughened Meg’s voice. “I can’t do this by myself.”
“What are you even saying right now?” Erin pushed her sister back by the shoulders, so they could look each other in the eyes. “You are not by yourself. You never will be. I am right here to help you.”
Meg’s lower lip quivered. “You can’t do this alone, E. You have a life to live, too.”
“The hell I can’t. You just watch me.” Erin cupped Meg’s face between her hands. “When we were kids, you took care of me. How many dates did you skip because Dad went out after work? How many times did you stay up late doing your homework because you’d spent your time making sure I got mine done?”
“That was different.”
“No. You took care of me. Now, it’s my turn. I will take care of you. Starting with going out right now and buying you new ice cream.”
“She deserved a full gallon of ice cream after that.” Shane reached out to tuck an errant lock of hair behind Erin’s ear. While the brush of his fingertip felt nice, the tenderness behind the gesture felt better still. “So did you. You took care of her for six months by yourself.”
“I was lucky. I had six months to spend with her.” She rested a hand on his chest again. You would have traded kidneys to have six more months with Greg. Don’t think I don’t realize that.
He laid his hand over hers. “It still had to be hard.”
“It was. Her health insurance was pretty bad. I sold off most of our stuff to pay for her care. Got a crappy apartment by the hospital for the nights they wouldn’t let me stay. I wanted to be close by.” She lifted a shoulder in a too-casual shrug. “At the end, we didn’t know how long she would hold on. We were fortunate. The hospital had good hospice counselors. They helped us through the worst of it.”
The worst. More double-edged memories, ones she held hard enough to cut her because they were some of the last she had of Meg. Meg, fragile and pale, gaunter each day that passed. Erin wondered when her sister would become transparent from the thinness. When would the illness steal enough of her that she would simply be gone?
“Soon,” the counselor said from the chair on the opposite side of the bed. “Soon, you need to make some difficult decisions. Or maybe they aren’t difficult anymore. Either one is okay to feel.”
“What about both?” Meghan said in her weak voice. “Is it okay to feel both?”
“Of course it is.” The counselor leaned forward. “Death isn’t all of one, or the other. You’re sick now, and miracles don’t always show up when we ask them to. It’s all right to think death might not be so bad one minute, then the next to want to put it off as long as possible. You can be angry. Sad. Scared. Relieved. And all at once.”
“But I need to make a plan for when it doesn’t matter anymore.”
The counselor fixed Meg with a look. “It always matters. This is your life. It’s your death, too. This is the most intimate choice you will ever make. Cancer stole a lot from you. It can’t steal your right to make this decision.”
Meg licked her lips. They were always so dry, now. Erin stood up to fetch the ice from the side table while her sister spoke. “I don’t want to leave Erin alone.”
“Erin will be all right,” Erin said. “As much as I’d like one of those miracles, the human body isn’t an engine block. I can’t bore out the rust, replace the spark plugs, and get it running again. Whoever designed the damn thing did not include a good part replacement warranty.”
Meg chuckled as best she could. “I’ll complain to the management.”
“Do that. It’s bullshit. But I’m not going to get a miracle, Meg. We both know where this is likely to go.” Erin spooned ice chips into her sister’s mouth. “Let me worry about me.”
Meg sucked on the ice a long moment. “What would you do?”
“I’m not you. It matters what you would do, not me.” Erin scooped up another bite of ice chips.
“Tell me.”
“You know what I’d do. I’d fight. Right up until death tried to steal my last breath. Then I’d mug the reaper for three more.”
Shane tugged her close again. A voice within her protested that she could take care of herself, that she had trudged this far forward alone and could continue on that way, that allowing another person so near could only lead to heartbreak. Then his arms folded around her and smothered that voice into silence. “You’re right,” he said. “The words ‘I’m sorry’ are the most inadequate words to say. But I am damn sorry you went through that alone.”
“That was how we did everything. Alone. We had each other, and that was all we needed.”
“Until you didn’t have each other.” He rested his cheek against the top of her head.
Until I didn’t have anyone at all. No family, unless you counted the rats in the walls. No friends, because they’d all belonged to you, Meg, and they ghosted when the first round of chemo didn’t cut it. The guys at the garage never gave a damn about me. No better way to seem pathetic and needy to a man who owns his own house and leads his own pack than to admit you’re a walking tabula rasa.
Shane held her without any judgement she could sense, though. In him, she found a kindred spirit who understood the gaping hole a death left behind. He’d lost one of his pack just a day ago, yet here he stood, enfolding her in strength he found in the depths of his spirit, to comfort her.
This is all I want. Family. A place where I belong. A person I belong with. One who wants me to come home to them.
“It was faster than either of us expected,” she said into the nascent silence. “We were watching her death on the horizon as it came straight at us, but when it arrived, it felt like an illusion that suddenly became real. It looked so far away until the moment it hit us. I only realized how close it had been after she was gone.”
Shane turned his face to press his lips against the top of her head. His breath gusted through her hair as he spoke. “You’d been treading water, trying to stay afloat. There’s not much perspective in times when you’re just trying to survive.”
“No. There’s not. All my focus was on her. Getting her through one more day. Waiting for a miracle, knowing it wouldn’t come. She didn’t seem to want to look at it, either. The advanced directive paperwork sat on the table without her touching it. We didn’t talk about it. Not until the last time we spoke at all.” Erin opened her eyes, but she didn’t see Sh
ane’s chest, or the living room around them. She saw a dim hospital room and her sister’s wasted form on the bed.
The night weighed more than those before it. Shadows lurked with gentle patience in the corners, awaiting a moment they knew would come. Meg had spent more time asleep than awake, and Erin couldn’t force her gaze away from the rise and fall of her sister’s torso. She felt like she willed every breath to happen, fought for each inhalation and exhalation, because Meg no longer could. Superstition whispered that if Erin looked away, the breaths would stop. If they could only last through the darkness, the light would bring hope they couldn’t see for the gloom.
Meg’s frail hand stirred in Erin’s grasp. “Erin?”
“I’m right here, Meg.” Erin leaned forward to better hear the faint whisper.
“The doctor was here earlier.” Meg forced her eyes open. “I think I fell asleep.”
“You did. It’s okay. I talked to him.”
“What did he say?”
Erin licked her lips. They’d gone dry. “He said you’re a tumor with legs. One bigass tumor who’s probably going to take over the world. I, for one, welcome our new tumor overlord. Remember that when you’re picking your evil lieutenants.”
A tiny laugh puffed out of Meg. “You’ll be my right-hand girl.” She paused. “I was afraid. Before. When they told me about the cancer.”
“Pretty sure that if anyone had a right to be afraid, it was you.”
“Do you remember when I was eight? I thought there was a monster under my bed that appeared when the room got dark.”
Erin chuckled. “I remember us shoving everything we could find under that bed, so the monster didn’t have room. Then we stole the emergency candles from the storm supplies to chase the darkness off, because Dad was too cheap to buy batteries for the flashlights.”
“Being afraid felt like that. Like the darkness in my room, only in my soul instead. The cancer felt like the monster under the bed. If I didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t hurt me. Except I knew it was always there.” Meg’s hand flexed in Erin’s, more a twitch than a grip.
“I’ll sneak in emergency candles if you want.”
“You don’t have to, E. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Erin’s chest constricted. “I am.”
“Oh, Erin.” Meg fought for a deep breath. For that moment, she seemed more solid, a stronger presence than she had been for weeks. When she spoke, her voice held a quiet, unmistakable strength. “Let us hold a candle to the darkness in our souls. Let us face it, and demand the monsters come into the light.”
Tears stung Erin’s eyes. She had to push the words past the lump in her throat that threatened to strangle her. “I’m not afraid of monsters, Meg. I’m afraid of— I’m afraid of emptiness.”
“Emptiness isn’t forever. It only lasts until you fill it. Then, it isn’t empty anymore.” Meg’s thumb brushed over the back of Erin’s hand.
“I don’t know what to fill it with.” A tear slipped down Erin’s cheek.
“Yes, you do. You fill it with the same thing it holds now.”
“What’s that?”
A sigh escaped Meg. It took with it the strength of presence that had animated her. “Love.”
Erin’s tears betrayed her. They fell unabated from her eyes and smothered anything she might have said. Meg didn’t notice the silence. She had slipped back into her own silence and the mercy of sleep without monsters beneath the bed. All Erin could do was watch the rise and fall of her sister’s chest and will every breath into being.
When the dawn came, even Erin’s will couldn’t command any more breaths. Only medical equipment could. The advanced directives remained ungiven. Doctors looked to her for answers she didn’t want to provide.
Difficult decisions, she discovered, waited like monsters under the bed. The sole way to banish them was to confront them.
“Let her go,” she said, in a hospital room filled with sunshine. “She wasn’t afraid.”
Life ended on so many levels when Meghan slipped into the light.
She hadn’t realized she’d been speaking until she felt the dampness of tears on her scalp and heard the ragged breaths rattle in Shane’s chest. Her own tears streamed down her face as a wound within her drained what had festered within it. In both of us. I wonder if either of us bothered to let this out. He needed it as much as I did.
Needed to lance their wounds. Needed each other.
She heard his breath catch in his chest before he said, “The day after Greg was gone, I was holding it together until this realization hit me. This was the first day of my entire life I would spend on the planet without him.”
“That realization hit me in the shower the day after she died.” Erin tightened her arms around his waist. “I’d never known a world that didn’t have her in it. Not from my first breath. Now I’d never have another day with her in the same world. It was so lonely.”
“And it never goes away. There’s always that place where they used to be that only holds memories now. You dream about them and you never want to wake up, because in the dream, they’re there.”
“It feels so real. You’re telling them everything you wanted them to know. They’re talking back to you like they used to. You can see them. You can smell them. I hate those dreams, because they leave me gutted. But I’m afraid of the day when they stop.” Erin repressed a sniffle. “Everywhere you knew has memories, and they won’t stop haunting you until you run away from them.”
“Or you wonder if you’ll ever be able to stop holding them tight enough to hurt,” Shane said. “If you’ll have to feel guilty for the rest of your life because you want to move forward. People say, ‘He’d want you to be happy,’ but you can’t explain that ‘happy’ had a different meaning in the days when he was alive. You don’t know how he’d feel about what ‘happy’ means now, because it means letting him go a little.”
She pulled back far enough to look up at him. Tears had left tracks down his face, too, and she knew the sorrowful expression that furrowed his brow. She’d seen it in the mirror enough times to recognize it.
On her face, she hated it. But on his, she wanted to stroke his forehead and tell him he wasn’t alone with the echoes in his heart. She heard her own, and now, she heard his as well. Pain shared created a harmony they both recognized.
“No one understands,” she said softly. “They think they do, and they’re wrong. No one knows except someone else who feels the same emptiness you do.”
Brown eyes met hers. “I understand.”
Until he spoke those words, she had never felt so vulnerable. Neither had she felt so safe in her openness. Her heart lay exposed to him, and he held it in his powerful hands with a tenderness that disarmed her. The fearful voice in the back of her mind that screamed warnings to keep herself safe faded beneath the rush of need for a connection, however brief, to someone who had walked through the same lonely hell she had.
“Then maybe it doesn’t have to be emptiness,” she whispered.
One hand lifted to cradle her cheek against his palm. “Let us hold a candle to the darkness in our souls.”
It seared through her with the fury of a wildfire, burning through the numbness she had fostered so carefully through five months and sixteen days. A soft noise escaped her as she surged upward to press her lips against his.
He pulled her close again, the arm about her waist refusing to allow her far from him as the kiss lingered. His entire body trembled, and in the depths of her desire-fogged thoughts, she wondered if she had frightened him. Then she heard his growl, low and quiet and full of predatory promise. No, she had not scared him at all.
She had awakened the wolf instead, and she was not afraid.
Her clothing felt suddenly tight, constricting, an old layer of herself she needed to shed before she could give herself to him completely. When the kiss broke and left them heated, she pulled her shirt over her head before her need for him pressed them together again. Hungry eyes watched h
er, the brown fading toward gold with his visceral desire. A low growl escaped him.
The garment flew as she discarded it. Then she was against him again before it could even hit the wall, shoving his shirt up to get at the skin beneath. Perhaps he had sought to fight his inner beast down, to remain careful and polite in this tender moment, but the touch of her skin against his set all that control aflame. He yanked his shirt off with impatience, the moment their lips parted to free his head from it an excuse to break, breathe, and adjust his grip on her.
This time, he lifted her off the ground, skin tingling where her chest met his. She wrapped both legs around his waist, clutching hard to stay against him while her arms hung on around his neck. One hand slipped up her back to unfasten her bra. He tugged at it. She writhed until first one arm, then the other came free. It was worth the inconvenient struggle to feel her breasts against his muscular torso, nothing between them now but the need to find a way to be closer still.
One hand clutching her back, the other holding her firm against his waist, he walked toward the hallway that led deeper into the house. She hardly registered the moment where his steps hitched, and his balance faltered for one stride before he braced her against the nearest wall. Then she forgot everything but the feel of his hand stroking the outer curve of her breast, or his hungry lips on her jaw and neck. She leaned her head back, baring her throat to the wolf. He rewarded her with heated kisses punctuated by gentle nips of his teeth, and the quietest snarl she did not need to be a wolf to understand.
This is mine. You are mine.
With both her hands, she caressed his chest, his shoulders, his neck. She cupped his face to pull him toward her throat again. This is yours. I am yours. Just don’t let me go.
He carried her down the hall as though she weighed nothing. For all the simmering need she could feel within him, he tenderly cradled her head and upper back with one arm to ensure he didn’t hurt her by knocking her against the door frame. Three strides through the doorway, and she felt them falling, tumbling down onto the soft bedding. Though he mitigated the impact of his mass atop her, she still felt him there, an arousing, glorious weight that pinned her to the mattress.
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