by Melody Grace
“I’m sorry.” I ignored the pang of guilt. After all, it was already buried under a nausea and dizziness that wouldn’t take another shift on my feet. “Can’t. You’ll be fine.”
I ducked away to grab my things before he could protest again. The walk wasn’t far from the café to the studio, but these days, it felt like a marathon. I wasn’t supposed to be walking far any more, my parents gave me plenty of money for an Uber or cab, but I trudged determinedly along the busy midday sidewalks, tracking the new failure of my body by how soon my lungs burned and my chest ached. Two blocks. One. Soon, I wouldn’t be able to make it out so often at all. Already, my parents were murmuring about moving me into their place, and I was crashing out there more often than not. An afternoon painting may have freed my spirit, but it left me with a weary debt to pay at night. I kept my head down against the wind and battled onwards, trying to hold onto that peace I’d felt on the rooftop, trying not to rage and retreat from the end.
This was it, Hope and I both knew. And I could either hold the truth gently, with grace and resolve, or waste these days to fury and wretched despair. I didn’t want to go like that, not after everything, so despite the echo of heartbreak lingering in my chest, I focused on the brittle chill against my cheeks and the sweetness of my coffee, still hot in my mittened hands. I clambered those last stairs to the studio, already thinking of the canvas waiting—a new year’s skyline, fireworks tumbling into the night—when I saw the door was open.
I stopped. “Hello?” My parents had come by a couple of times to check on me before, but they knew I didn’t want to be disturbed. “Who’s there?” I asked on the threshold, my voice catching. For a moment I wondered if the original owner was back to reclaim his territory, then the door swung wider and he was standing there: flooded with pale sunlight through the windows, burning up in the middle of the paint-splattered floor.
Theo.
My Theo.
My heart caught, wildfire in my chest. I’d made myself forget just what he did to me, but I felt it all rush back in a pure, sweet blaze. Honey racing in my veins, stardust bursting in every pore. His presence washed over me, everything I’d been ignoring since that night he walked away. I was dormant. I was empty. And then . . . then I was simply alive.
“Hey,” he said, and I took a quick step towards him like gravity, before I saw his body was still guarded, hands in his pockets, unsure. I forced myself to stop, suspended just a few feet away from him.
“Hey,” I echoed, a thousand questions racing in my mind. “What are you . . .? How did you get in?”
Theo held up a key. “I kept one, in case you lost yours.”
“Oh.” I gave thanks I never knew—that I hadn’t spent the past weeks waiting for the sound of it turning in the lock. I wouldn’t have gotten a thing done but sit in nervous, empty expectation, day after day after endless day.
I forced myself to put my coffee cup down and close the door behind me. I slowly shed my coat and scarf and mittens, while my head spun and my heart raced fast enough to skip right out of my chest. I tried to think clearly, but God, you don’t know what it was like, just being in the same room as him again. His body, right there, draped in worn corduroy and a soft knit sweater beneath his coat, blue enough to make his eyes sing a summer’s sky song. I ached to hold him, with a kind of sharp-edged desire I’d never felt before, something urgent. Necessary as air.
I curled my fingertips into my palms. “How are you?” I asked softly.
Theo gave me a smile that was ragged and weary at the edges. “Not great. You?”
“Not great.”
Sunlight spilled over us, the dim snow clouds gone for good this week. Everything was bright and crisp outside the windows, and Theo seemed to shimmer in the studio’s warm, dusty air. He looked at me, gaze searching, and it took everything I had not to reach for him and never let go. “How are you feeling?” he asked slowly.
I looked away. “It changes, day to day. It’s catching up with me now,” I admitted. “I always knew it would, I guess I just thought . . . I could hold it off a little longer, that’s all.”
“I did some reading,” he ventured, and I looked back. “They say the pain . . . the symptoms . . .” He struggled to find the words, and I knew why.
“It isn’t pretty,” I agreed.
“Is that why you didn’t tell me?” Theo asked, looking wounded. “Because you thought I couldn’t handle it? Or that I wouldn’t stick around?”
“No!” My cry slipped from my lips, horrified. “God, no. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t tell anyone,” I swore to him. “I wanted . . . I just wanted to pretend I had more time, as long as I could. I know it was selfish of me, and I never should have lied. But . . .” I tried to find the words to tell him, a way to fit the vast expanse of my life into one small neat explanation that would help it all make sense. “The cancer, it’s been my whole life for years now. The only thing that mattered, every single day. No matter what I did, it was always there. It was always going to win. I couldn’t bear to go like that, so I came here to have something else. I wanted something all my own, before it took everything from me. Can you understand?”
Theo didn’t answer for a long moment, and when he did finally speak, his voice was tinted with a desperate plea. “I want to, Claire. God . . . these past weeks have been agony. I have so many questions, I don’t know where to start.”
“I’ll tell you anything,” I said, meeting his eyes. “I swear, I won’t ever lie to you again.”
He nodded slowly. “OK. OK.” Theo took a breath, bracing himself for battle. “Start at the beginning, and leave nothing out.”
So I didn’t. We sat there, cross-legged on the splintered floor, and I gave him everything, holding nothing back. Hope, chemo, the trials and more, I walked him through the footprints my cancer had imprinted on my life, year by year, day by dwindling day. He listened the way only Theo could: absorbing every breath into the depths of those gentle eyes, and when I finally reached the present day—my parents’ arrival, the quickening symptoms, my last-ditch race to reach New Years—I slowly stumbled to a halt. “I knew it couldn’t last,” I said, steady in the truth of my guilt and shame. “I knew I had to tell you, that you deserved to know the truth, but . . . I wanted it to be different, so badly. And when I’m with you . . .” My breath shivered, and my heart ached. “I could almost believe I’d live forever.”
There was nothing else to say. I fell silent, waiting on the tightrope of his silence again, wondering which way I would fall this time.
Theo looked down, tracing old paint stains on the floorboard, turning my confession over in his mind. “How can you even stand it?” he finally asked, his eyes searching mine. “How can you go work a shift serving coffee, and have dinner, and carry on like normal when all along . . . you’re going to be gone?”
That was the question. From the outside, it was unthinkable, how life could ever go on with a death sentence like this, but the first thing I found out, the very first thing after those words were set neatly on the hospital desk, is that it does. The AC in the car on the ride home was busted, and my favorite show still somehow danced on the TV screen; my body asked for food and relief. And so it goes. The sun rises in the morning and sets at night, and in between, the hours stretch, ordinary life stumbling on outside the windows with such reassuring regularity that in the end, despite the shock and grief and limitless anger, you find yourself slipping back into old routines as if nothing ever changed.
What other choice is there? Let the cancer kill me twice over: rip the present tense from me as well as my future? All I could do was fight for every moment of life, chase whatever sweetness I could claw bare-handed from the world.
Love, for the very last time.
“You think you can’t go on, but you do,” I answered simply. “And all those things that seem so normal—the café, my art—it all matters so much more. That’s why I came here, because I couldn’t bear to let it all slip away without even tryin
g. I just wanted to know what felt like, even just a taste. I never thought I’d find a life like this,” I added, my heart shivering with loss. “I never imagined I would meet you, or fall in love . . .” I swallowed back the words, the second time I’d let them fall in front of him, but Theo didn’t flinch. His eyes were hot on mine, still fighting this, I could tell.
“Your mom said there was a surgery . . .”
My head snapped up, and suddenly I realized, crystal clear as the dazzling sunshine outside the windows. This was why she’d done it. This was the real reason why she’d told. To use him against me, corral my love into her last-ditch try.
“No,” I said shortly. “It’s just a trial, they haven’t figured it out yet.”
“But she said, there was a chance—”
“It’s not real, Theo. She’s desperate now, she’ll do anything to try and keep me. She doesn’t understand, it’s no use.”
“And you’re OK with that?” Theo was trying to understand; I could see it in the agony of his face. And even though I’d spent the past week trying to feel it, accept my fate however fast it came, it caught in my throat, a bitter protest I couldn’t swallow down.
“No. Not yet. But I have to be.”
He took another breath, and I longed to touch him. To feel that steady rise and fall pressed against me, nestled safely in the crook of his arm. But our hands both slid flat against the floor, our bodies mirrored, the line between us still marked.
“How much time do you have left?”
“A little while.” I closed my eyes then, I had to. It hurt too much to look at him and tell him my final calendar, red crosses marking down the days. “A few weeks like this, until the symptoms get too much for me. Then I’ll be in bed, the hospital maybe, on painkillers, a ventilator to help me breathe.” I was matter of fact, but my voice cracked to think of it. “Sometimes you go fast, the body just shuts down, but sometimes . . . you can drag it out a few more weeks after that.”
“Claire . . .”
His voice came, closer, and the whisper of his breath warmed my cheeks. When I opened my eyes, he was in front of me, so close I could see the grey flecks shivering in his eyes. So close, I felt his next words more than heard them.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his features crumpling with despair. He cradled my face, forehead resting against mine. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I split open, chest wide with the ache and the glory of it. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Theo. You’re all I ever wanted in the world.”
He kissed me, soft and searching, and I melted into him without a sound. We were weightless there for a moment, an infinity, strung on the sweet caress of his fingertips and the taste of his lips against mine, and then we fell. Hot mouths and reaching hands, and an intensity that burned me from the inside out. I pressed myself to him, imprinting this moment into the darkness of my mind, spelled out in glittering sensation, every breath, every beat.
This was what I’d lived for. This was all that mattered in the world.
When we finally surfaced again, I was raw and trembling, and I saw it in Theo’s eyes: he felt it just the same.
“How many things do you have left on the list?” he asked, and I was so lost in the feel of his hands stroking over mine that my brain stuttered, one step behind. I looked at him, blank, and he smiled. “Hope’s list. That’s why you brought it, isn’t it? To finish every entry, before . . . the end.”
The list. I nodded. “A few things left, I didn’t know how to try them. Skinny dipping at dawn, see the top of the world,” I remembered sadly. “She got more abstract in the end. She wanted to taste it all.”
“So we’ll find a way.” Theo lifted my hand and brushed a kiss on my knuckles—quietly determined. “We’ll make it count.”
We . . .
“Together?” I asked, my heart catching, snagged on the hook of that one precious word. It was more than I could ever ask, but he offered it all the same, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Together,” he whispered, his eyes true, and I knew we were bound in this forever now.
I’d love him until the day I died.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Theo walked me home, and arranged to meet me later with a mysterious text, just an address:
800 Boylston, 6pm.
“Dress up,” he’d told me with a wink, so I spent an hour tearing through my wardrobe and wrestling with hair and makeup, anticipation sparkling sweetly in my veins. Mom found me with Tessa, deep in her closet, searching for a dress of hers that would fit my taller frame.
“You’re going out?” Her voice was disapproving. “You said you couldn’t make dinner; I wanted to check you were feeling OK.”
“I’m fine.” I turned. “Just a little tired, but I took a nap, I won’t be out long. Just dinner with Theo,” I added, already looking back to check my reflection. “What do you think? It’s not too short?”
“It’s perfect,” Tessa declared. Simple navy chiffon spilled over my body from a strapless bodice. “I wore it to department cocktails last month, it’s super-comfortable. And I think I have some shoes somewhere . . .” She began rooting through some boxes in the back of the closet, while I twisted this way and that, trying to settle into the sophisticated swirl of fabric against my skin.
“What do you think, Mom?”
Her frown melted, just a little. “You look beautiful, honey. Where is he taking you? I didn’t know you two were . . . talking again.”
“He didn’t say, he wants it to be a surprise.”
Tessa bobbed her head up with a diplomatic smile. “Here are the shoes. Hi Mrs. Fortune,” she added.
“Hello, Tessa. Back in classes?”
“Yup,” she sighed. “It’s twenty-four seven, barely a moment to rest. In fact . . . I’m already late for study group.” She passed me the pumps and gave a wink. “You look incredible, go knock him dead.”
I heard her clatter out of the apartment as I set about twisting my hair up and slipping on the strappy shoes. Mom stayed in the doorway, watching me.
“Don’t,” I said without looking.
“Don’t what?”
“Please don’t try and take this away from me.” I glanced up. “I have my prescriptions, and your number, and Doctor Benson’s too. I’ll take a cab and walk slowly and not stay out too late.”
“I’m just worried, sweetheart. You’re pushing so hard.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” I countered. “Just sit around, waiting to die?”
It was a low blow, and we both winced to feel it.
“I’ll be careful, Mom, I promise.” I softened. “Theo will take care of me, you don’t need to worry.”
“I’ll always worry, it’s my job.” But she let me be as I fixed my makeup and slipped into my coat, and even waited on the frozen corner with me for a car. “Be good,” she warned me, holding the door for me to slide inside.
“I’ll try not to elope to Vegas and get another tattoo,” I teased, just before I slammed the door behind me. Still, I heard her voice echo after us with shock as we drove away.
“Another tattoo?”
Theo met me in the lobby of a sleek, fancy building downtown. He was clean-shaven and pink-cheeked from the cold, glowing under the shimmering chandeliers.
“So what’s the big surprise?” I greeted him with a kiss, feeling effervescent, already walking on air.
“You’ll see.” Theo offered me his arm, an old-fashioned gentleman, and I slipped my hand through it, nestled in the crook. “You look beautiful,” he added, leaning close to whisper in my ear, and I flushed, my heartbeat racing, my blood running hot in my veins. It felt like our first date all over again, just as giddy and quick, and I had to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, unsteady on my borrowed heels as he led me across the lobby. “Hungry?” he asked.
“A little,” I said, but it wasn’t the kind dinner would sate. My stomach was tangled, and it t
ook every last measure of self-control not to take his hand right now and tug him closer for a reckless kiss. We stepped into the elevator, and Theo hit the button for the top floor. “Fifty-two?” I read off the dashboard, but another couple crowded in beside us before he could answer, and I stepped back, into Theo’s embrace. His body was flush against mind, his hands resting softly on my waist as he traced slow circles just inside the thick flannel edging of my coat. I could feel him through the thin silk, the burning path against my skin, and it was agony to stand so close, so strangely intimate, and all the while these strangers beside us murmured about a party next week, and who was going to tell Doug about the new promotion. The threads of heat snaked through me, radiating out from that single tiny touch, and by the time the elevator arrived at the top with a cheerful ding!, I was trembling, so aware of Theo’s body against me, it felt like my desire was splashed scarlet across my face for anyone to see.
“What do you think?” Theo’s voice came, and I blinked, the world around me rushing in again, bright with the warm glow of lights, the ring of china, and gentle conversation. And the view, my God, the view.
I went to the windows, drawn without a word. Boston lay spread before me, glittering in the dark: golden grids twisting out to the bright highway, and the dark shadows of the country beyond. Miles and miles of it, the black landscape shot through with white and red and neon green, so far below us, it seemed like a dream.
“The top of the world,” I realized, turning to him with amazement. “How did you . . . ?”
“I thought of it as soon as you said.” Theo joined me, triumphant. “It’s not Mount Everest, but it’s something.”
“Are you kidding? It’s incredible.” I threw my arms around him then, not caring if we drew stares for my hot, quick kiss. “Thank you.”
“I booked us a table. The whole restaurant revolves,” he added. “But slowly, so you can get every view.”