by Julie Kriss
I gripped my chair harder. My head was spinning. “Or I could get surgery,” I said. “Like Angelina Jolie. Right?”
His voice went low and gentle. “That is an option, yes,” he said. “There are also preventative drug treatments being tested. But Megan, that is not something you have to decide right now. It isn’t something you’d have to decide at all without extensive counselling, and without all the information available to you. You’re only twenty-three. Understanding your genetic profile this early means that there’s more time for you to think about your options.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me more.”
“Your file says you have no siblings,” Dr. Pfeiffer said.
I shook my head.
“That makes it simpler, because your sibling could have inherited the mutation as well, so we’d counsel the family. And if you’ve inherited the mutation, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll pass it on to your own children, so it can affect your decision to have children.”
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I hadn’t even thought about having kids yet, and he was talking about my passing a cancer gene on to them. I thought I might cry.
He patted my hand. “Did you father come with you today?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “I didn’t even tell him I was coming,” I said. “I don’t think he can deal with this. I really don’t. He’s sort of… stopped functioning ever since my mother died.”
“Okay,” Dr. Pfeiffer said reasonably. “He should be informed at some point, but you’re an adult, and you need to make that decision. Do you have a husband?”
What? Oh, God. I shook my head.
“A serious boyfriend?”
I shook my head again.
“Okay,” Dr. Pfeiffer said again, and I was glad that he gave this kind of news all the time, that he was so experienced with it. It was keeping me from falling apart. “There are three things I want you to do today. Okay? Just three things.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“First, the nurse is going to take some of your blood, and we’ll send it for the test. We’ll match your profile to your mother’s and find out if the genetic mutation matches. The test results will take a few weeks.” He watched me nod, then continued. “The second thing I want you to do is book some counselling for after you get the results. We have experienced counsellors here, Megan, and we deal with this all the time. It’s actually a requirement that you talk to one of them.”
“I’ll book something,” I said. “What’s the third thing?”
“I want you to think about the people in your life,” Dr. Pfeiffer said. “Think about a best friend, or someone close to you that you can rely on. Maybe that’s your father. Maybe it’s another relative, or a girlfriend, or a teacher, or someone at your church. I want you to think of someone you can trust, and I want you to tell them about all of this. Because you can’t go through this alone, without leaning on someone. You just can’t. Do you understand?”
Crazily, stupidly, the first thing I thought of was Jason saying, It seems important. Do you want me to come? But no. I wasn’t telling Jason. I could tell Holly—she was my best friend—but Holly was with Dean, and she’d want to tell him, and I’d have to ask her not to. I’d have to ask her to keep a big secret from both her boyfriend and her brother, because I didn’t want them to know. Did I want to do that to her?
I couldn’t think about that now. My mind was white space; I couldn’t think about anything. So I filled out paperwork, and signed consent forms, and sat in a chair while a nurse took my blood. And I took the stack of literature Dr. Pfeiffer handed me, and I wandered back through the maze of the hospital, blankly looking for the parking lot where I’d left my car.
It took a long time to find it. And then I drove back to Eden Hills, my jaw aching and my hands like ice on the wheel. I could deal with this. I could. I’d been through my mother’s death, after all, and nothing was worse than that. Nothing could possibly be worse. But in the back of my mind, I saw the vial of blood they’d taken from me, the label they’d put on it for the lab. For better or for worse, I’d set this in motion.
The clock was ticking.
Nine
Jason
As I’d predicted, my mother figured out that I was no longer working at the bank. I found her sitting in the kitchen one morning, dressed for work, waiting for me, her fingers drumming on the kitchen table when I stumbled out of the basement, where I’d set up my temporary bedroom.
“Sleeping in, huh?” she said.
I ran a hand through my hair. I’d taken extra shifts at Zoot Bar, and on the nights they didn’t need me I’d worked out a deal to work a neighboring bar for cash under the table. I hadn’t gotten home until nearly three o’clock last night. “I thought you were gone to work,” I said lamely.
“I decided to go in late.” Mom pressed her lips together and drummed her fingers again. “We need to talk.”
Holly and I had been raised by our mother alone. Our dad had taken off when Holly was eight and I was ten; he’d met some other woman, left our mother, and gone off to have a second round of kids. We’d never seen him again. Mom worked as a manager at the head office of a cosmetics company, and her hours were long. She’d done her best for us, considering she was a single mother who couldn’t supervise us all the time because she was busy working to pay the bills. Now she sat in the kitchen in her smart suit and heels, with her hair styled in a bob that made her look ten years younger than her age, and I felt a quiver of kid-fear left over from childhood as she gave me a steely stare.
“Jason, sit down,” she said, pointing to the kitchen chair across from her.
You’re twenty-four, I reminded myself as I pulled out a chair and sat down. Just remember you’re twenty-four, not twelve.
“I’m very worried about you,” my mother said. “You’ve seemed so… aimless ever since you came home from the Marines and ended it with Charlotte.”
“You don’t need to worry,” I said. I was wearing pajama pants and a zip-up sweatshirt over a t-shirt, and I zipped up the sweatshirt now, as if it would give me extra protection against this lecture.
Mom pressed her lips together again. “I didn’t like to argue with you at the time, but I can finally say that I never thought she was right for you.”
She had no idea. “No,” I agreed. “She wasn’t right for me at all.”
“So, fine,” Mom said. “That’s over. Her loss. But now you’ve moved back in—”
“It’s just temporary,” I said.
“And you’ve moved into the basement instead of into your old room—”
“You put boxes of stuff from storage in my old room,” I protested. “And Holly’s old room is girly.”
“And now you spend all of your time either down in that dark basement, doing God knows what—”
“Mom.”
“You’re out all hours of the night, and you have a bruise on your cheek, and you quit your job!” she finished, her cheeks flushed. She really was worried, I realized.
“Um.” Maybe I should have had this conversation with her sooner, but I hadn’t known she was this concerned. “Technically, I didn’t quit the bank. I got fired.”
She leaned back in her chair and looked at me.
“I hated that job,” I said, not liking the look on her face. “You know I did. I’m not a bank guy. I never have been.”
“Are you depressed?” she asked. “It’s okay, you know.”
“No,” I said. God, I was an asshole, making my mother worry like this. I could be so oblivious sometimes. “I’m not depressed. I promise.”
“You smell like alcohol,” she said. “Like a bar. You go out late every night, and your clothes smell like a bar when I do your laundry, and it isn’t just once in a while, it’s all the time. If you’re developing an alcohol dependency—”
“Oh, my God.” I put my head in my hands. “Okay, look. Mom, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not depressed. I’m a bouncer. I smell like bars because
I’m working in one, not because I’m out drinking all night.”
“You’re working as a bouncer?”
I said nothing.
“You fight with drunk people? You throw them out of bars?”
When you said it like that, it sounded pretty dodgy. “The money’s good,” I argued. “And I don’t fight very often, really.”
“But you got that bruise.”
I rubbed my cheek. “It’s going away.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be violent. You never have been. And now you’re around drunks and… girls all the time. The wrong type of girls.” She paused. “I mean… some girls just don’t have good role models, that’s all.”
As humiliating as the situation was, it was kind of amusing to see my mother trying to be a loyal feminist while worrying about her son being corrupted by trampy bar girls. “What do you mean?” I said innocently. “I need a new girlfriend.”
She looked alarmed, probably picturing me knocking up some girl after I licked tequila salt off her tramp stamp. “Dear God, Jason, please be careful. Don’t throw away your future.”
Ah, this was the heart of it. My future.
My mother had always been the best kind of mom, but she pretty much figured I should be president, an Olympic athlete, and the one to cure cancer all rolled into one. There are worse things than having a mother who puts you on a pedestal—Dean, who grew up in foster homes, could tell you that—but I was starting to realize that I wasn’t going to live up to exactly what she thought I was. I hadn’t gone to college. The Marines had made her proud, but now I wasn’t a Marine anymore. She was starting to see that I wasn’t going to climb Everest while going to Yale and setting gold medal records at the same time.
I was going to do something. I had to figure that out. But it was going to be my idea, not hers. If only I knew what it was.
“Look,” I said to her. “I’m fine, okay? Stop worrying. I’m just doing the bouncer job to save up to move out.”
“There’s no rush,” she said quickly.
“There kind of is, since I’m twenty-four,” I said. “Oh, and I’m going to be away for a few days next weekend. Just so, you know, you don’t think I’m on a bender or something.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m taking Megan Perry to a wedding.”
“Megan? Holly’s friend?” Her eyes lit up a little. Megan was the right kind of girl in her mind.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s a family wedding, and she doesn’t want to go alone, and I said I’d take her. It’s really nothing.”
But after Mom finally hugged me goodbye and left for work, I thought about that. No big deal. It wasn’t. Megan hated me, and I owed her a favor, that was all. But before I could stop myself I had pulled out my phone and was looking at my text messages.
I’d told her to text herself her address from my phone, and she had. But of course she’d also added a message. Dear Megan, you rule, I drool. Love, Jason. It was totally juvenile, completely childish. I’d laughed at it for ten minutes when I first saw it.
I texted her now. Are you at work?
It took her a few minutes to answer, but it came back: Yes.
When do you get off? I wrote.
Another pause. Six. Why?
No reason, I typed.
There was another pause. I knew she was on the other end, promising herself she wouldn’t answer me. But finally she gave in and a message came through: Are you asking me on a date?
Oh, this was good. I thought it over gleefully before I answered. Careful. Your skirt is riding up and your crush on me is showing.
The reply was immediate: Oh my God, you are such an asshole.
I laughed, grabbing my phone and heading upstairs to take a shower. She didn’t text me again. Not that morning, while I raided the fridge and watched TV, and not that afternoon, while I went grocery shopping and did yard work, prepping my mother’s back yard for fall. That was fine with me. I could wait.
But at ten after six, my phone buzzed. Right on time.
Fuck it, Megan wrote. Come over.
Ten
Megan
I had no idea why I did that. None at all.
But I put my phone down and crossed my arms so I wouldn’t pick it up again. I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment, fresh off my shift at Drug-Rite, looking at another evening alone with my thoughts. With my fears. I felt like I could jump out of my skin. I was alive with frustration, all of it skittering over the surface of my skin like electricity.
So, I chided myself. All Jason Carsleigh has to do is text you, and you give him a booty call.
Was that what that was? Was that how he would interpret it? Was that what I had meant?
I was lonely, and I wanted to talk to someone. Though if I was honest, I didn’t just want to talk to anyone. Not my dad, not Holly.
Jason.
It was because I’d left things unresolved the last time, I told myself. I hadn’t exactly been nice to him. We had some baggage, Jason and me, but I didn’t want him to think badly of me. We were going to have to spend five days together, after all.
And after my appointment with Dr. Pfeiffer a few days ago, I’d been locked in my thoughts, alone. Despite his annoying side, Jason had a way of dragging me out of my own head. Of making me think on my feet. Of almost—almost—making me laugh.
Your skirt is riding up and your crush on me is showing.
Maybe he was just being a dick. Maybe he was just trying to get a rise out of me for something to do. Maybe he’d come over here and expect to hang out and watch some stupid football game, friend-style. Maybe he wouldn’t come over at all. He hadn’t replied to my invitation.
I wanted to live in the moment, I reminded myself. And… I wanted to see him naked again.
I pressed my knees together. I was wearing a thin sweater and a jean skirt, the clothes I’d worn to work. A cotton bra and panties underneath. My hair was down and I had very little makeup on. It wasn’t exactly a seductive look. Well, that was too bad. It was desperate enough that I’d texted him to come over, which he hadn’t bothered to reply to. It would be even worse if I doused myself in makeup and dug out sexy lingerie from my drawer. Assuming I had any, which I wasn’t entirely sure I did.
I’d broken up with my last boyfriend over six months ago, and he and I hadn’t had sex for at least the last month we were together. He’d seemed to lose interest, which had puzzled me at the time—our sex life hadn’t exactly been gangbusters, but for a guy to stop sleeping with you was weird. Then I discovered he’d been cheating on me, possibly with guys as well as girls, and than he dumped me and ran away to LA with a would-be actress. And I’d been celibate ever since, unless you counted the day Jason Carsleigh had made me come with his fingers in about sixty seconds flat, harder than I’d ever been able to do for myself.
I faffed uselessly around my apartment, tidying, and jumped when there was a knock on the door. I thought briefly about not opening it, but then I did. And then I remembered exactly why I’d texted him.
Jason was wearing a black sweater and worn jeans. His dark hair was tousled and his hands were in his pockets. The line of his shoulders, his long legs, his dark brown eyes, the slight shadow of stubble on his jaw—just by standing there, he pressed every one of my buttons. Every single one.
He caught the look in my eyes and smiled at me. “What’s up, Megan?” he said.
I tried to act casual while I swallowed in my dry throat and my pulse hammered in my veins. “Come in,” I said, my voice almost normal. He followed me inside, and I covered my nervousness with talking. “I guess you had a relaxing day of not working, huh?”
“I work,” Jason said, but the argument had no sting to it. He was looking around. “You have a nice apartment.”
He was so big in my place. Tall. All that muscle. He didn’t have a huge physique, a massive chest or arms, but he was plenty big enough. He’d been big enough to pla
y football in high school, but the Marines had made his body like iron. I’d felt it through his clothes the other day. Yet I’d also seen him move with liquid grace, every muscle under control. He pulled his hands out of his pockets, and the sight of them made a hot pulse of memory start up between my legs.
As usual, I covered for the way he made me crazy with a dig. “I guess living at home puts a damper in your sex life.”
He turned to me and gave me a half grin that said my shots were going wide. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Not when the girl has her own apartment.”
I was speechless for a second. Get a grip, Megan. “Um,” I managed. “I asked you over because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, leaning on one hip against my counter, the movement doing interesting things to the flat ripple of his stomach beneath his sweater. “What?”
I took a breath and made myself say it. “I know I’ve been… short-tempered. Sort of crabby.” I tilted my head back for a second and made myself say it. “Bitchy.”
Jason frowned a little, the line of his perfect mouth easy to read. “I never said that.”
“No. You didn’t. That’s the thing.” I blew out a breath and plowed forward. “I have to admit that you’ve been almost nice.”
He was quiet for a second, and I knew he was searching my words for an insult. “Okay,” he said slowly.
“I have some stuff going on in my life,” I said. “Stuff that has nothing to do with you. Stuff that I haven’t told anyone.”
“So tell me,” he said.
It sounded so simple. But no. I had Jason Carsleigh in my apartment, sober and willing, and—if I was honest with myself—I was pent-up and horny and turned on as hell. If I started talking about cancer and genetics, he’d probably make a hasty excuse and get the hell out of here. No way was I bringing up the C-word right now, when I had my best shot at getting properly laid since that party five years ago. With—again, honesty—the man who still held the title of the hottest guy I’d ever seen.