Love Unbound: A Valentine's Day Romance Anthology

by Dee, Cassandra

But my man is moving in a blur. As soon as he’s satisfied Dad will be at Cedars before we arrive, he punches up another number on his dash-mounted iPhone. I immediately recognize the name. Jim Selkirk is the bone specialist scheduled to operate on my father. But that’s not supposed to be for another month still, which Kyle swore was as early as humanly possible.

  A voice on the other end of the line stifles a laugh at something someone said wherever he is, before he says, “Hello?”

  “Jim. Kyle Channing.”

  “Cranny! Hey, we missed you at the symphony ball last week. We were all hoping to meet this mystery woman you keep -”

  “Jim, I really don’t have time. The woman you were just talking about. You know her dad? The one you’re seeing on the 24th?”

  “How could I forget? It’s not the craziest pre-surgery story I’ve ever heard, but it’s close.”

  “Well, he’s taken a turn for the worse. Like, bad. EMTs are taking him in right now. Jim, we gotta jump the line on this. You have to see him today.”

  I find myself fighting back last night’s dinner as Dr. Selkirk heaves a sigh. “Kyle, you know there are protocols in place. If we start playing favorites with patients, the AMA’s gonna be on us so fast you -”

  “This isn’t about playing favorites, Jim. It’s about prioritizing an emergency. Ralph Endicott has got to be seen today. He’s gotta get that surgery today, Jim. I’m not kidding.”

  “Look, man, I know you got a thing for the daughter. But I’m here with my kids, we’re heading down to the Laguna house for a long weekend. If it’s as bad as you’re saying, I’m sure they’ll call me, but -”

  “I’m in love with her! Do you hear me? I do not just have a ‘thing’ for this woman. I’m in love with her!

  My jaw drops. Neither Kyle or I have exchanged any type of promises or vows. And yet, now he’s declaring himself? On a car phone no less? But he’s not hiding it from my ears either. Even with the panic and terror jolting through every fiber of my being like electricity at this moment, the thrill of hearing this man say he loves me, and knowing I love him too, cuts through the fear like a beam of light.

  But at that moment, Kyle’s every atom is fixated on Jim Selkirk. “Now I know you love your kids, and your Laguna house, and your goddamn symphony ball. But I swear, if I don’t get to Cedars and find you scrubbing up, I will go to the AMA and tell them you turned away a dying man ‘cause you wanted to go to the fucking beach!”

  Kyle clicks off the call, closing his eyes as he struggles to pull himself together. He opens them again when he feels my fingers curling around his free hand.

  “You okay?” he asks me, giving my hand a squeeze of his own.

  “Yes,” I murmur. “I’ll be okay.”

  He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, not really sure how I feel about what I just heard.

  “You know, that’s not...really how I wanted to tell you I -” he stammers. For once, the big man is at a loss for words.

  “I know,” I reassure him. “But I’ll take it.”

  And at that moment, there are two things that are certain.

  One, the doctor will be prepped and ready for surgery before we arrive at the oncology waiting area.

  And two…Kyle was wrong.

  He is a miracle worker.

  I just hope Jim Selkirk is, too.

  * * * * *

  I’m so anxious by the time we arrive at the oncology department waiting area that I don’t even have time to fret about what the nurses must think of me, barreling up to their desk in last night’s dress, with bed-head, probably reeking of sex, to check in as Ralph Endicott’s next of kin. They probably think I’m the worst, most neglectful daughter alive.

  If he doesn’t make it out of this, I’ll probably agree with them. Because oh god, I was having sex while my dad was dying? He was leaving me a desperate voicemail while Kyle and I enjoyed each other’s bodies on the ship?

  But there’s no time to feel terrible. That’s for later. Dr. Selkirk comes out to see us, letting us know that unfortunately, we won’t be able to see Dad before they begin. His respiratory levels, pulse rate, and blood work have convinced the doctor of what Kyle tried to tell him: This surgery is not going to wait.

  “Now this could take anywhere from twelve to thirty-eight hours,” warns the physician. I’m sure the nurses already have your contact number if you have to step out for -”

  “They won’t need it,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Familiar fingers grip my shoulder. I feel Kyle’s massive presence behind me, that safe, stable bulwark. “Neither am I.”

  Dr. Selkirk was wrong. It takes forty-three hours. And for that entire time, I don’t eat, I don’t nap, I barely even sit. My now-ridiculous-seeming heels practically wear a crease in the linoleum as I pace from the seating area to the water fountain I only use when Kyle forces me to take a drink. And he just sits and watches me. He doesn’t take any calls about business. He never picks up a magazine. Every hour or so, he offers to get me something to eat, to bring me a blanket, or something. I refuse, usually with just a shake of the head.

  As the surgery stretches into the second half of its second day, I slowly realize what I’m feeling, that gnawing blackness in the pit of my stomach. It’s not just sadness, or worry for my dad, or anger at cancer, or even sheer exhaustion.

  It’s guilt.

  I keep thinking about where I was, and what I was doing, when my father fell, when my father called, when my father needed me. The man who brought me into this world might be on his way out, and when I had to step up and be the caregiver, the nurturer I’ve pretended to be all this time, I was on a yacht with a pulsing cock down my throat.

  I slump down into the seat next to Kyle, burying my face in my hands. I can still smell his musk on my fingers. I can’t look him in the eye.

  “They gotta be close,” he says.

  “Mm.”

  “You sure you don’t want anything?”

  I nod, not lifting my head. There’s a moment of cavernous silence. Then Kyle asks:

  “Do you think you should maybe try to call your mom?”

  Oh my God. I hadn’t even thought about my mom since I got Dad’s voicemail. She and I haven’t spoken in well over a year, and all I know of her life at this moment is that she’s living in Amsterdam. I don’t know if knows anything about what’s going on back here. I don’t know if she knows Dad’s sick.

  And if she did, I don’t know if she’d even care.

  Before I can reply to Kyle’s question, Dr. Selkirk steps through the swinging doors leading back to the O/R. Though his gloves are off, there’s still some blood on his smock, and he looks, after nearly two straight days of surgery, nearly as spent as I feel.

  “Ms. Endicott?”

  I rise like a phantom from the chair. Somehow, the fact that he referred to me so formally is all I need to know.

  He barely gets the words “I’m sorry” out of his mouth before I’m plunging into a bottomless abyss. I collapse against the wall, a primordial wail ripping from my chest. Kyle races to my side, but as soon as I catch sight of those glassy black eyes, I whip into a spiraling frenzy of fists, pounding his forearms, his chest, barely missing the side of his head, driving him back, desperate to keep him from touching me.

  Kyle blocks my blows with one hand while waving off the security guard making his way for us with the other. “Sarah, Jesus! What are you -”

  “You! You asshole! You knew this would happen! You knew this surgery wouldn’t do any good, but you saw a chance to bang one more chick, and you jumped on it!”

  “No, Sarah, listen, it’s worked for other people. Your dad was -”

  “He was what, Kyle? Too sick to know a con artist when he saw one? I wasn’t too sick, but I just wanted this so bad, I went out on a limb, and I fell for your lies, and I let you use me. I let you use me, and then, when you got what you wanted, you let him die!”

  Kyle lets a tear or two of his own slip loose. �
��Sarah, I could never. My father was…”

  “Your father, I’m guessing, was someone you got to be there for when he needed you. And my dad died alone because you couldn’t keep it in your pants for one more night!”

  My words don’t make sense, but I don’t care. I slump back against the nurse’s station, sobs wracking my body like tidal waves. Kyle reaches for my forearm, gripping it with the lightest touch I’ve ever felt from a man.

  “Baby…”

  “Don’t you fucking ‘baby’ me again!” I grab a paperweight from the nurse’s station and hurl it through the glass top of the waiting area’s coffee table. Every person in the room jumps, and even I flinch as the pane shatters, magazines and a fake-fern planter scattering to the floor with the broken glass.

  The security guard’s not waiting to see any more. He takes me by the elbow. “Okay, ma’am, let’s step outside and have a chat here.”

  I shake off his hand. “I’m going!” In a heavy daze, barely conscious of what I’m now doing, I stumble across the floor and snatch my bag from the chair where I’d been sitting. As I leave, I catch the admin nurse staring at me in shock, clutching a file folder to her chest, hands trembling in terror.

  “Don’t worry,” I snarl, waving a furious hand at the coffee table, then at Kyle. “He’s good for it. Haven’t you heard? He’s KC Cash!”

  This last word echoes through the dead-silent room as I storm out.

  I collapse in tears again before I even reach the elevator.

  When I fell asleep in Kyle’s arms back on his yacht, I felt like I finally knew what my life was going to be once my father was gone. Now, in the space of just a few moments, I’ve lost the only two men who mattered to me. And looking out at future, there’s nothing there, only the dark grey-black of utter solitude.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dad had it in his will that he wanted to be cremated, which is fine with me. The state I’m in, I couldn’t have planned any kind of a funeral. Fortunately, I have vacation time saved up from work, so a surprisingly understanding Derek grants me permission to take the next month off. A whole week goes by before I can bring myself to even set foot in Dad’s room. I’m relieved to see the EMTs took the time to clean up the mess he’d left on the floor. The Salvation Army pickup service saves me the effort and stress of taking his clothes to their delivery center, and I donate his books to the library, except the LBJ biography. After all, his bookmark’s only on page 255. He didn’t get to finish that one.

  Over the next few weeks, a steady stream of well-wishers drop by, all of them making sure their visit, “just to see how you’re getting on,” doesn’t pass without them hitting me up for some keepsake from Dad’s worldly goods. Personal knick-knacks, his dog tags, antique coins, even the old ashtray he saved from the Florida hotel where my mom and him stayed on their honeymoon: I let them all go, doing my best not sob openly, my heart on my sleeve.

  The relatives are the worst, cousins and nephews and my Uncle Jay, all pressing me with incessant questions about whether or not I’m going to sell the house.

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” they all say. “Now that he’s gone, you in a big family home like this by yourself. Single girl and all….” I know they’re not trying to rub any salt in the wounds. But the words do sting.

  After my explosion in the hospital, Kyle calls me almost every hour at first, hoping to share his sympathies, or beg me to take him back, or try to con me into sleeping with him again. I really don’t know. I never pick up. I never read his texts or emails either, and as the days go by, the outreach diminishes, until by the third week, I’m not hearing from him at all. He must have finally gotten tired of the hassle, moved on to whoever his next victim’s going to be. I remember his words to me that night on the yacht: If I want to sleep with someone, I can do that any night of the week. And in the past, I have. And in the future, I assume, he still will. So congratulations to you, sir, I guess. Congratulations on a life where absolutely everything you want goes your way.

  That third week is also when I’m visited by Mitch Brunner, the head of the local union. It turns out, without even telling me, they’d taken up a collection the day after Ralph passed, to pay for a memorial service they’re holding in a week’s time.

  “Nothing fancy, mind you,” Mitch says. “Just a couple sandwich platters, some of the guys maybe saying a few words. But I know you didn’t get to do a real funeral for him, so we just thought, this is our chance to give the man some kind of sendoff.”

  I honestly didn’t think I had any more tears left. Mitch proves me wrong, and I send him on his way with a hug and a lump in my throat.

  I don’t give a thought to the idea of breaking that promise until the night before the memorial, when I finally gather the courage to take down Dad’s old bedclothes. As I’m pulling the fitted sheets from the mattress, something clunks to the floor. Looking down, I immediately drop to my knees.

  It’s the iPad. The one I gave him for Valentine’s Day. The one he used to conjure Kyle into our lives.

  With trembling fingers, I pick the electrical device up off the carpet. Naturally, the power’s dead. It’s been running for a month now with no one to recharge it, to give it new life.

  I plug it in, and as the screen fires up, I see the windows Dad left open when he died. A YouTube page, with an episode of Banacek someone had uploaded. Solitaire, of course. And then one file, minimized at the bottom of the screen. I open it, and my breath catches in my throat.

  It’s a selfie of Kyle and I on a bridge at the canals in Venice Beach. We took it one afternoon when we went for a stroll there, about four days before our night at Perch. Four days before we had sex for the first time. Four days before I saw my dad for the last time. I remember standing on that bridge with Kyle, watching ducks glide by below us, and Kyle telling me about how he’d seriously considered making an offer on one of the houses along these placid waterways. When I asked him why he decided not to, he said, “Because if I lived here, I’d get to see this beauty every day, and feel this quiet. And then it wouldn’t feel special anymore.”

  That was the moment I had realized I was in love with him.

  Six days later, he was gone from my life. They both were.

  And again, there was only the grey loneliness descending onto my soul, making it impossible to breathe.

  * * * * *

  As I sit in my Civic, watching white-haired men and their pearl-wearing wives file into the union hall, I think about the last months my dad and I had together. Ralph Endicott was never one to let even something as dire as terminal cancer get him down, but even so, those last few weeks were different. The extra pep in his demeanor. How was almost always awake, waiting for me, when I brought in his breakfast. The way, on his best days, his smile would spread, as he talked about the stuff he looked forward to doing again, after the surgery “put the hitch back in my giddy-up.”

  I think about the joy he was able to experience, even as the cancer ate away at him. The renewed sense of purpose. The humanity he felt again.

  That was all thanks to Kyle.

  His promise to my dad, his sacrifice, gave a dying man something not enough people get near the end: The belief that everything’s going to be okay. My dad went to his grave holding out hope. For a new life for him, and a happy one for his Sarahbelle.

  Slowly, I take out my phone. I almost hit that contact number. But no. After all, as Kyle reassured me that night at the taco truck, it was only three months. I really hadn’t known him that long at all, when you think about it. My guess is, he’s probably changed the sheets on that yacht, and he’s back in the captain’s quarters with another pathetically grateful girl who has no idea her night with the king is going to be her only night with the king, before he chops her off at the heart, too.

  I look down at my phone screen. The memorial’s almost about to start.

  I try to pocket my iPhone as I get out of the car, but it tangles up in the shoulder strap of my purse. I pause, strug
gling to free the device from the strap.

  “I was starting to think you were never getting out of that car.”

  I look up, and my eyes grow wide as the owner of the voice steps out of the silhouetted doorway into the light. It’s a face I haven’t seen in far too long, and never expected to see tonight, here, of all places.

  “Mom?

  “Hello, sweetie,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. I’m not going to lie. Her time abroad has been good to her. Her hair looks lush and silky, her attire form-fitting and up-to-the-minute, and her smile warmer and more genuine than the tight grin she used to give my father over the dinner table. Still, it’s impossible to keep the shield from going up. For as little as Dad let it show, her leaving hurt him. And she didn’t leave because of anything he’d done. She left, more or less, because she was just bored. Bored of being a wife. Bored of him.

  Bored of me?

  “You look lovely,” she says, taking a tentative step forward. She senses the shield that’s gone up, and is smart enough not to violate it. “Even more grown up than I remember.”

  “Yeah, well, been the woman of the house for a while now, Mom.”

  She takes the dig in stride, only letting it dim her smile a little.

  “How the hell did you find out about this?” I ask her. “I’m sure they don’t publish the steel union newsletter in Amsterdam.”

  “It’s Antwerp, Sarah. And a lot of people in that hall tonight are my friends, too.”

  “Okay. Then, if you knew about him, why didn’t you come? You didn’t even call me. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because, sweetie,” she says, with another step closer, “we hadn’t spoken in so long, and I knew how you felt about how everything went.”

  “Everything you did, Mom. Everything you did. Don’t try to act like you leaving was something that just happened to us.”

  “Well, then I know you didn’t approve of what I did,” she says, emphasizing my chosen words. “And I didn’t want to interfere, even though I really -”