Sick Day

by Morgan Parker

  Locking the screen, I tossed the iPhone onto the heap of clothes and cast a glance at Hope while she slept peacefully on the bed before walking to the bathroom, naked and a little raw from my night with her.

  I closed the door as quietly as possible, hit the lights, and stood at the mirror. My reflection surprised me because it had a foreign familiarity, like when you don’t see someone for a long time but there they are, standing right in front of you. You know that face, you know that person, but it takes a moment or so for the walls to fall and for you to open your arms.

  Grinning, I realized this was what my life had been all about. I remembered this emotion, this immortality. I had known it fairly well in high school and the months leading up to my trip to Chicago, where I would try to bury this feeling deep down and never allow it to ruin my mind again.

  It was called love, and this feeling happened only with Hope. Without Hope, I would never know love like this again.

  Still staring at my reflection, I had my answer.

  I knew what had to be done.

  And my life, I realized, would be the happiest life anyone could ever imagine.

  } i {

  Chapter 40

  Crawling back into bed behind Hope, I saw that she had rolled over while I was in the bathroom. I snuggled up behind her, slipping my arms around her chest, her nipples brushing against the inside of my forearms.

  “Second thoughts?” she mumbled.

  “You’re my first thoughts, my only thoughts,” I whispered back, burying my face in her dark hair. I loved the smell of Hope.

  “What will happen once you go back?” she asked, her voice warming up to the conversation.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. Despite my confessions last night at Navy Pier, I didn’t want to think about Riley right now. She didn’t deserve this, not now. Not three weeks prior to her wedding day, not ever. “You?”

  Instead of answering me, Hope rolled over so that her face came within inches of mine. I adored this woman, every little detail, every inch and ounce of her. I reached out, extending the same hand that had slipped into her panties earlier, the hand that I blamed for tonight. My fingers traced her jawline all the way to her chin.

  “When I close my eyes, all I see and hear is you, Hope. Now I want to memorize how you feel, your soft face, these lines, and—” I stopped at the scar on her chin, “—and the blemishes.” I leaned in and kissed her chin, then had to fight the hunger to take her again. I moved my tongue along her neck, just for a taste.

  “Cameron,” she said. It wasn’t her turned-on tone, so I stopped tasting and stared into her eyes to see what was wrong. “What are we doing?”

  Her question made me uncomfortable. I shifted as a way to escape the mild pain. “This isn’t wrong, Hope.”

  She frowned at me like I had just insulted her. “I didn’t say anything about it being wrong. I just asked what are we doing here.”

  “This is us.” I twirled her hair with my fingers. “It’s what I’ve wanted from the moment I met you. Two weeks ago, when I saw you outside my townhouse in the rain, it came back to me. I love you, Hope. And you love me.”

  Her eyes danced from one side of my face to the other, surely testing the truth in what I had just told her.

  “What we’re doing is starting all over again,” I explained like it made the most perfect sense in the world.

  “This is what I wanted years ago,” she said, her face twisting with hesitation. “Now? It’s too late, Cameron. We had our shot, but we fucked up. I fucked up. You fucked up.” The pain in her words told me she believed her words. Or if she didn’t believe them, then she would fight pretty damn hard to make sure she believed them.

  I had no response but a half-grin that came from that other part of my heart, the part not reserved for Hope.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said, the tears from earlier coming back with a sudden ferociousness. Her hand slid across the sheets to find mine. “I never fought, Cameron. Maybe I should’ve. Maybe I should’ve taken that upon myself to fight for this love. And I blame myself.”

  “Don’t,” I told her, throwing her words back. “You don’t believe in fighting for love.”

  “I might not believe in fighting for love,” she admitted, “but I believe in fighting for you, Cameron.”

  I bit down on my lip. Her words were sweet, but I refused to shed a tear.

  Hope didn’t have the same luck; she cried for a bit, so I held her, let the warm tears roll across my chest on their way to the bed sheets. I hated her sadness; they contradicted the strength that defined her. And in that instant, the lost time of the last seven years became incredibly real. It was wasted, irrevocably lost, and it allowed me a glimpse into the future.

  I saw Hope as an old woman, grey hair and a face that, while wrinkled and a little droopy, remained the most beautiful sight my eyes would ever behold. I saw the vibrancy of her spirit, despite the frailty of her age. And, more important than any physical restrictions that time seemed to be imposing on us, I saw what true love was all about. Her beliefs were wrong. And I couldn’t let the next seven crucial years—or seventy, for that matter—escape us.

  “I fucked up, Hope,” I confessed, admitting to her as much as to myself. “But I’m here now.” I reached down and nudged her chin upward so I could kiss her mouth. “I’m here,” I promised.

  She sobbed a little longer before falling asleep in my embrace. Despite the loss of sensation in my hand and arm, sensing Hope’s ease while she dozed against me only reinforced why I seemed to be sacrificing so much just to be here with her. I loved her.

  This moment made the loss of the past seven years seem strangely worthwhile. Because here we were—the next seven would make up for it, and we were so lucky to have found each other now so that we could realize our mistake and take advantage of the years ahead of us. Now that we knew how important this was, there was no way we would ever let go.

  Right?

  Yes.

  That morning in the hotel room, with her dried tears on my chest, was the first and only time I ever forgave myself for allowing life to ever exist without her.

  } i {

  Chapter 41

  Sunday morning, after being away from Riley all weekend, I woke with a headache. Rolling out of bed, I poured myself a glass of water in the bathroom. When I returned to the sleeping area, I found Hope sitting up in bed, the television tuned in to The Weather Channel, her knees pulled up to her chest. The lack of focus in her face indicated she wasn’t exactly listening or paying attention to the long-term forecast.

  “Do you have Aspirin or Tylenol?” I asked. “I have a headache.”

  She shook her head.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her. The sight of her distracted me from the pounding in my head, but it also worried me because this wasn’t the woman I had made love to all weekend. This wasn’t the woman I had spent hours shopping with yesterday, laying on the grass in Millennium Park, listening to live music with at some of the best blues clubs around, and later drinking martinis with at the finest bars that Gordo had introduced me to. This was a girl borne of heartbreak, the Hope I had found outside my condo in the rain, the broken and insecure Hope I had expected after all of these years.

  “Where does this end for us?” she asked at last, easing her eyes from the television and staring at me, bold and serious.

  “Does it have to end?” I replied.

  “I’m flying back to Miami on Wednesday,” she said, her quiet voice coming apart. “It has to end. There’s no other ending to this story of ours.”

  “No.” I shook my head, arousing my headache from its dormant state so it could throb back to life, reminding me that I still hadn’t found a solution to the pain. I crawled closer to Hope, kissed her knees through the sheets, and studied those pained, hazel eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Cameron,” she whispered.

  “No,” I insisted. “We can make this work. We’ll make it happen. What are the chances fate
brought us back together? Here? Now? There’s a reason for it. We need to act on it before it’s lost.”

  “You’re getting married,” she groaned, turning her back to me and curling up on the bed.

  I slid in behind her, pulling the sheet up over her back for some reason I didn’t quite understand, and then wrapped my arms around her. “Hope, I can’t get married. That’s crazy. And I’m convinced that’s why you’re here. It’s why I’m here. The timing isn’t something either of us controlled.”

  She shook her head. “What’s marriage to you, Cameron?”

  I shrugged, more for myself because she wouldn’t see it, because I was unable to give her an answer. I knew what I wanted it to represent. But that ideology involved Hope, not Riley. “I want us, Hope. I want to wake up like this, minus the sad thoughts, but…this.” I squeezed her, embraced the weight of her against me. “Being here with you, being able to hold you, kiss you in the morning, do the things we did yesterday, the day before, and yeah, the sex is amazing, too. But this is what marriage should be. Don’t you think? Shouldn’t marriage be love?”

  Although I couldn’t see her face, I knew she had closed her eyes super tight and was weeping ever so faintly in my arms.

  “And if marriage is about love,” I continued, because I really needed her feel this, to want it and never let it go, “doesn’t that mean it should be about us?”

  Her subtle quaking subsided, and she wiped her face with her hands, eliminating the evidence of tears. “Where are the goals in that, Cameron?”

  “Goals?” I reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, kissing the exposed skin of her neck, that one spot where the vein would pulsate and tell me so much about her moods.

  “Yes,” she insisted with the edge of heartbreak. “Marriage is just two people with one common goal. Remember? It’s what I believe.”

  My heart ripped at those words, at her refusal to let go of those crazy beliefs from so long ago. I thought of other married people—my parents, my friends, even Gordo and his wife, Melinda. It broke me that Hope was right. Each of those married couples shared a goal. Gordo and Melinda’s shared goal involved their children; that goal explained why he had two nannies and probably explained why he had no issue burning so fast and hard through his severance.

  Riley and I had spoken of our goals, of working our asses off to establish a solid savings base before having children, and then reducing our lifestyle once those kids were off to school so we could bankroll even more money to finance a retirement someplace warm in the winter, then travel back north to Chicago (or wherever our children established themselves) in the summer months.

  “We had common goals, what happened to them?” I asked, my voice flat and as emotionless as I could manage.

  “They died when you disappeared.”

  “But I’m here now,” I reminded her. “I’m never letting go of you, and I swear that no matter what you decide, even when you fly home to Miami, I won’t stop fighting for you. You’ll see that your idea of common goals still applies to us.”

  “Our common goal was to meet up one year after college,” she reminded me with a sharp edge to her words. “That didn’t happen. Nothing you say can change that. We have time, the history of the past, however many years of my searching for you to contend with, Cameron.”

  I hated that she was so damn right about everything this morning. The ending to this weekend and our happy time together seemed more than just forthcoming, it seemed about as inevitable as breaking a bone or two after jumping off the Sears Tower. The time was lost, and we would never get those seven years back; I couldn’t argue about that.

  “Maybe it was never a common goal that we had,” she said, sighing.

  But then I had something, a rebuttal. “Where does delusion play in to this equation, Hope? Because a common goal shared between two people is often the work of a common delusion.”

  She never missed a beat. She let out a deflated exhale. “Our delusion was that we’d come back, find each other, and pick up where we left off. That we’d be together until the end of time.”

  She rolled over, and at that moment, as I stared into her hazel eyes full of acceptance and closure, I knew that I had lost her. She had shut me out at some point between last night’s freedom and ecstasy and this morning’s headache and melancholy.

  Do I give up, or do I fight?

  “You look lost, Cameron,” she said, rolling her fingers along the inside of my forearm. I reveled in the sensation of her touch, wondering why she never admitted—ever—to still loving me.

  “I am,” I admitted, my throat tight, the words quieter than a whisper. “Here you are, and I feel like you’re gone. Like no matter what happened this weekend, no matter what I say now or ever, you’re gone.”

  Still sliding those fingers along my arm, still the tingling of pixie dust in their wake, she came across as extremely calm. I didn’t understand it—was it that old fucktart or was she truly done with our love, with me? “You’re getting married in a few weeks,” she admitted with the emotionless objectivity of a third party.

  I chuckled. Partially because she knew what I really wanted here, she knew that I would run away with her. She didn’t even have to convince me to back out of my engagement. Yet here she was, ignoring all of that and pushing me back to Riley.

  “What do you want me to say, Cameron?” she asked, her face so cold I wanted to believe I was dreaming. Where was Hope from last night? From that night on the wet grass? Why didn’t she love me like I loved her?

  I felt the air draw from my lungs in one long, depressed breath. I turned away, stepped out of bed, and walked to the chair were I had placed our clothes. “You’re not fighting, Hope.”

  “What should I be fighting for, Cameron?” she asked, tired.

  I didn’t answer her. Stepping into my pants, I wondered if this sight of her alone on the bed would be my last. This morning had been something of a huge surprise to me as it was…never seeing her again would not have come as much more of a shock.

  “I don’t believe in fighting for love,” she admitted. “You taught me that.”

  “Then don’t fight,” I replied, my tone stern enough to let her know I wasn’t fucking around. I motioned at my own body. “Don’t fight for love, because it’s here, right in front of you. This, whatever this is and was over the weekend, is here.”

  She only stared back.

  I pointed straight at her to make my position known because the cracking in my voice would definitely not be enough to get the message through to her. “But don’t fight for it to go away either. You can’t fight one way and not the other, Hope.”

  She watched me in silence, shaking her head. “What do you want to hear, Cameron?”

  I pushed my arms into my shirt with abrupt thrusts. “I want to hear that you will be here in a few hours. That this isn’t over, that we’re just starting, and that you’ll fight as hard as I am.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, frowning.

  I returned to the bed, kneeling on the mattress to get close enough to Hope so I could kiss the top of her head.

  She didn’t flinch, didn’t look up, but she asked a quiet and quick, “Is this it?”

  “You might not want to fight today,” I told her, still angry, “but what we have? This doesn’t happen in most people’s lifetime. I’m not letting you go, Hope. I’ll fight for this, for us, for the rest of my life if I have to.”

  Refusing to meet my eyes, she lowered her head to the pillow and rolled over. I watched her for a few seconds, watched those shoulders shake as she wept.

  “Just be here when I get back,” I demanded. And then I left, fearing what faced me back at home, but more determined than ever to make things right with these conflicting promises I had made.

  } i {

  Present Day

  Chapter 42

  12:13 PM

  I find Hope across the street, sitting on a garden ledge at the base of the John Hancock Center. As I
approach her, relief floats across my face, and I feel slightly at ease with the fact that she hasn’t run back to the office. Or away. Instead, she remains here, sitting and waiting for me.

  “Can I sit?” I ask, nodding at the space next to her.

  She shrugs, so I sit down and follow her gaze up the crisscrossing surface of the black John Hancock.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she says, her voice peaceful. “You see it from the sky, and it looks so flat, almost like glass. But up close, you see all of this iron, and it’s pretty but not exactly perfect, is it?”

  “What you said at the restaurant—”

  “This building is a lot like us, Cameron,” she says with a tired sigh. “From the distance, all we remember are those moments of perfection. The fucking, the promises, the so-called love. But up close like this?” She shakes her head. “We’re flawed, rusted, and old news.”

  “You never told me that you love me, not since high school,” I say at last. “Even after everything we’ve been through. Today at lunch was the first time I heard you admit it. Why would you let it go that long, Hope?” I can feel my heart beating harder at the memory of those words, the impact they had on me. “You talked about wondering for all of those years, wondering what you did wrong…what about me? Even for the past three years, I would’ve chased you to the end of the world. I still would.”

  “But you didn’t, Cameron. And that makes us flawed,” she admits with a tired breath.

  I shake my head. The possibility of denial doesn’t escape me, but I know what my heart tells me, and it’s not that we’re flawed. It’s that we never gave it a chance in the first place. “Why, Hope? What makes us out to be so flawed when we haven’t even tried?”