He leaned down and his lips barely brushed my forehead, the same spot he’d first left his mark on me. “Yes. Yes, I do. Now sleep. I won’t go anywhere. I promise.”
Chapter 44
Time does heal all things. Days passed, my counts stabilized, my physical injuries mended, and Dr. Castillo took one last CBC, kissed my cheek, and then headed back to New York and his own family. “You call me. I won’t demand daily, but at least two, three times a week. And I’ll be checking in with these doctors, pincushion, so you be caref—behave.”
His exit, my healing, served to sharpen the focus on all the other aspects of my shredded life. The pain receded to be replaced by panic, the type that clawed me awake with worries half-formed on my lips.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know where I’m going to live—”
“I thought Vice President Forman offered you a place at his house,” Char said from his spot beside my bed. He never seemed to need context for my fears, no matter how random or interrupted our conversations were by sleep, medicine, his new Family responsibilities, his dual vigils at his father’s and my bedsides, or Whitaker’s endless questions.
“He did. But … can I live there? With Bob and his family?”
“I don’t see why not.” He pointed toward a stack of newspapers Bob and Whitaker had brought earlier. The headlines told my story, or told the version we’d agreed upon. They included words like “hero” and “brave.” Told how “The Last Landlow” or “The Lost Landlow” had been working undercover with the vice president to catch the bad guys who killed her family and to end illegal corpse transplants. I was officially—and publicly—pro–Organ Act.
Char fiddled with the sheet beside my hand. His fingers so temptingly close to mine, but since he was holding back, I felt like I needed to.
“You think I should move in with them?” I’d already had this conversation with Dr. Castillo and Bob … so many times with Bob.
“Yes, I think you should,” he reassured me. “You’d be safe—I have to admit, that’s what makes me happiest.”
“Whatever, you’re just glad I’d be in DC—and really close to Georgetown.”
He tried to look serious for a minute before relenting and letting his sheepish grin escape. “I’ve already Google-mapped a dozen routes from my dorm to Number One Observatory Circle.”
If I agreed, I’d be close to Char, I’d get to see Kelly and Bob. And, who knows, maybe Caleigh could become a friend. Also, I’d be in a place where I could be useful—working to change policy.
I couldn’t imagine going back home to the estate. I didn’t want to deal with the Family, not that there was a Family left. Miles had told me a couple of the clinics were operating autonomously, but most had shut. He was enjoying early retirement but said he’d help with whatever I needed and bring Thumbelina when he came to visit me in DC if I moved.
Of course Nolan was also in DC and calling and sending the most clichéd bouquets and chicken soup with get well cards on which the sole writing beyond the preprinted sentiment were my name and his. Oh, and “sincerely.” No doubt if I moved in with Bob, Nolan’s and my paths would intersect—but at least now we weren’t stuck in a teacher-student dynamic. Maybe, just maybe, he’d be more tolerable as an acquaintance.
“I can pretty much walk away from the Family Business forever,” I mused aloud. Except for him. Except for Maggie, who’d called and given me a scathing lecture before bursting into tears and telling me, “Next time you do something stupid, at least bring me with you.”
“I kind of am too. I feel so guilty about it,” said Char.
“Hey, your mom is insisting you go to school. I was there, I heard her.”
“But I don’t know how this will work—me being across the country at school and my mother in charge of the day-to-day decisions for the Business and my dad’s care—but she doesn’t seem daunted at all. She’s already drawing up plans for shifting more capital to research … and I don’t know what else I could do.”
“It’s only for—” I looked at him with a smile. “How many years is med school?”
He grinned back. “Say yes to the vice president. Come to DC with me.”
I traded a grin for a bitten lip and new worries. It sounded great in the hypothetical. Too great. “If I say yes, and I probably will, that’s not even my biggest fear.”
“What is?”
“Us. Is that lame? With everything else that’s going on, I’m worried about you and me.”
The corners of his mouth twitched, and he looked down, trying—and failing miserably—to cover the fact that he was beaming. “Whatever the opposite of lame is, that’s what that is.”
“I’m serious. I don’t know you. I barely know you at all.”
“You will.”
“But I don’t right now. And how can I have feelings for someone I don’t know?”
“You know the parts of me that are the truest. The parts that no one else but you has ever gotten to see.”
“You don’t know me either,” I whispered.
“I know you’re scared of dragons … but not coconut-flavored coffee.” His lips twitched in a self-amused smile before settling into an expression much more solemn. “I know you spent so much of your life being told to sit on the sidelines, yet you were brave enough to make it on your own in New York, brave enough to fly across the country to save me.
“I know you make friends everywhere you go. That your smile melts my heart. That you love your family so much. That you doodle anatomical hearts and flowers. That you eat your toast with honey and are not a diabetic. That you sigh in your sleep.
“Most of all, I know I’m in love with you.” He stated it firmly. Without hesitation.
“I—” Everything inside me felt calcified. Everyone who loved me most was dead. And my own emotions were scattered like a handful of sand held up in a breeze. “How do you know?”
“What?” He blinked. Swallowed. This wasn’t the reaction he expected.
“How do you know you love me?” My true question was trapped beneath my tongue: How do I know if I love you? So I asked a lesser version, “And what if you change your mind?”
“I won’t.” His gaze was a caress, roving over all of me, making each part of me ache with a desire for his fingers. But he was holding himself back, gripping the arms of his chair, and saying each word clearly. “I’ve fallen in love twice in my life. Once with a girl during a pretend game of hide-and-seek, and once with a girl who swept me off my feet on a New York City sidewalk.”
“I believe you swept me off my feet, actually.”
“Semantics.” He smiled. “I know I’m going to fall in love a million times in my life.” I was too surprised to form the word “what?” or remember how to exhale. “Maybe more than a million … but it will always be with you.”
Garrett had claimed to know me, but he hadn’t loved me. Not really. He wanted to protect me. He wanted to use me for my connection to the Family. He wanted to save me—and pretend that erased the fact that he hadn’t saved Carter.
I looked away from Char while I contrasted my feelings for Garrett with those for him.
It was hard to call them both the same word: “feelings.” One set was as ingrained in me as my fingerprints. Garrett’s presence in my life predated my memory. He was one of the last parts of my life from before.
And he was partially responsible for that. I couldn’t forgive him. It didn’t matter who his little f family was, that he’d been raised by a father who considered shooting Mick and knocking him unconscious acceptable cover-story collateral damage, or with brothers who made him feel like a weak failure, an outsider. I couldn’t forget his bystander role in making me an orphan.
Or his face as he crumpled on the ground embedded with a bullet meant for me.
Or the fact that he hadn’t stayed around to let me thank him and have the first of so many discussions we needed to have. Maybe he was scared of the things I’d
say, the things he would have had to. Or maybe he was scared for his safety. I hated that I didn’t know. That I may never know.
That I hadn’t gotten to say good-bye.
There wouldn’t be a clean break. I could no more sever him completely than I could untangle my DNA and remove whatever combination of nucleotides spelled out my skin’s tendency toward purple.
But that wasn’t love.
At least not in the romantic sense.
“You know me.” Char said it like a plea. Like a pledge. Like a prayer. “You know everything that’s important. We lied, but we weren’t pretending. At least I wasn’t. Everything I told you about me and you, everything we shared, those were the most real moments of my life.”
I heard his chair scrape closer, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the textured surface of the ceiling tiles. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, “I wasn’t pretending. Were you?”
The unguarded silliness of teasing him about coffee flavors, his sweet tooth, or his corny jokes. The candid opinions of our all-night conversations. The way he explained and loved all things scientific, but had watched a fairy-tale movie to better understand me. How he believed I could do anything, pushed me to define and pursue my dreams. The way his touch made me feel solid. Reassured me I wouldn’t slip away. That I was made of flesh and bone and had words with weight. Words worth listening to. Feelings worth considering. Skin worth touching.
And running through my veins, settled in every cell, was a desire to listen, to consider, to touch. To know and learn, to be surprised and challenged by this guy today and tomorrow and all the days beyond that.
The sensation of tearing my eyes from the ceiling and settling them back on his felt like coming home. I put my hand on top of his, plucking lightly on his fingers until he loosened his grip on the chair and flipped them over to interlace with mine.
“I love you.” It didn’t come out as the whisper I expected. The hesitation didn’t creep in until I added, “But I have no clue where that leaves us. I’m lost.”
I tightened my grip on his hand. Lost, but not alone.
“We’ll get to know each other,” he said.
Our faces were identical: dopey, love-drunk, smiles of relief and happiness.
“There’s one thing you have to understand, though,” I said.
He sat up straighter. “Okay.”
“You don’t get to decide if something is too dangerous for me. That’s never your decision; it’s mine. I get why you ran from New York; you thought you were keeping me safe and away from all this, but never again.”
His face was as somber as it had been the times he let me join him at his father’s bedside. The beeping and clicking of hospital machinery so loud as he stood statue still, and the closest he’d come to accepting comfort from me was to rest a few fingers lightly on the handle of the wheelchair I’d been seated in.
Char swallowed. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’m not asking, I’m telling you. You don’t get to choose to keep me on the sidelines. I’m not saying I want to go rushing into dangerous situations, but trust me enough to make my own decisions.”
He nodded slowly.
“And please don’t treat me like I’m breakable. You’re the only one who ever touches me, and I miss it.”
“I miss it too.”
I held my hands out, eager for a clasp and a kiss. They didn’t come.
“But you’re in the clinic, and you’re here because of something you did to save my life. I feel like I’m responsible for every spot of purple on your body.”
“No. You don’t get to take responsibility or guilt for my decisions.”
He lowered his chin and studied the floor—for the first time I could see shades of the painfully shy boy he’d been. I knelt up on the bed, taking his face in both my hands and turning it to look into mine. “It was worth it. You are worth it. And I want to be touched, does that count for anything?”
“Of course—” He quickly, lightly brushed the tips of his fingers across the back of mine before folding his hands in his lap. “But I bet I’ve left bruises before.”
“Nothing major. At least not after the whole meeting-by-full-body-collision.”
Char winced. “Can you … teach me how to touch you without bruising? How much pressure does it take?”
No one had ever asked me that before. Even with my parents it had seemed easier to avoid physical affection than take a risk. But it wasn’t all that risky if we established limits, if I knew my counts—currently over a hundred thousand thanks to miraculous, marvelous infusions. I shifted to the side of my bed and patted the space beside me. “Come here.”
He hesitated for just a moment before looking me in the eyes and nodding once.
“Lie back,” I said. Char’s shoulders took up most of the width of the bed, but sitting up, I fit like a puzzle piece next to his waist. My legs folded up beside him, tracing the line of his outer thigh. “Give me your arm.”
He smiled and held it out. I lowered it to rest on my lap and then placed both my hands on top. I loved the way his skin looked against mine. It should have made me feel pale and sickly, but it didn’t. He always seemed to radiate vitality, and it felt like I could absorb it, steal it from his pores and the cords of his muscles.
“Don’t move,” I teased, watching the corners of his mouth tip upward.
“Are you going to tickle me?”
“Are you ticklish?” I didn’t know this. It seemed like something I should know already. But we’d get there.
I didn’t tickle. Instead I circled one arm around his waist, sneaking my hand beneath the hem of his T-shirt to stroke his skin with my thumb. I used my other hand to trace the pattern of muscle and veins down the inside of his arm—watching my touch raise goose bumps along his warm skin.
He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply.
“Light touch is almost always okay. None of this would bruise me.” I bent and kissed the skin at his wrist, where his pulse raced beneath my thumb. Char gasped.
“As for adding pressure—slow is always better.” I inched my fingers up his stomach to his shoulders, leaning over him so I was supporting myself with my arms and my hair hung down around both our faces. “As long as my counts are under control, slow, steady pressure shouldn’t leave a bruise.”
I lowered myself softly onto his chest, nuzzling the line of his jaw with my nose, my mouth. I could feel him trembling. Gripping the blankets with both fists.
“Think you got it?” I asked. “And you can always ask if you’re not sure.”
He breathed out the word “okay,” and I felt his chin drop slightly until it rested against the top of my head and his fingers relaxed on the blanket and inched closer to my sides.
But they stayed on the sheets.
“Do you need me to give you a countdown?” I teased.
“Maybe,” he said, brushing his lips against my hair.
“How much time do you need to prepare? Should I start at ten, or three? Or will a ‘ready, set, go’ work?”
“Ten,” he answered, but I could hear the smile in his voice.
Ten more seconds was too long to delay a hug I’d been waiting my whole life to receive, but I pressed my lips to the skin below his ear and whispered, “Ten Mississippi, nine Mississippi—”
His laughter rumbled from his chest, shaking us both.
“Eight Mississippi, seven Mississippi, six Mississippi—”
And then his palms were tentatively skirting over the fabric of my shirt, sliding down my back, settling on my waist with the perfect amount of pressure to make me feel safe and here.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “Not even one more Mississippi.”
Once upon a time I was a seventeen-year-old. In love for the first time. In life for the first time. And quite determined to have some “happily” in my ever after.
Author’s Note
While Penny and her family are pulled from my imagination, several aspects of thi
s story are real.
Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, also known as Immune Thrombocytopenia, is an actual platelet disorder. To learn more about ITP, visit: www.pdsa.org or www.itpsupport.org.uk.
Organ and tissue transplant regulation are currently controlled by the FDA (FOTA is an agency that exists only in my imagination and on these pages). The level of oversight and testing varies greatly between tissue and organs, and many of the problems presented in this novel have a basis in reality: There have been cases of diseased tissue infecting a recipient; there is a black market for organs; stolen cadavers have been used in transplants; there are instances where patients have been rejected from transplant lists because they have disabilities.
And, unfortunately, there are far more people who need transplants than there are organs available; far too many people who die before reaching the top of the transplant list.
If you’re interested in learning more about organ and tissue transplants, I recommend NPR’s fascinating series on the tissue transplant industry: www.npr.org/series/156935894/human-tissue-donation; the documentary Tales From the Organ Trade; and the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network website: http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov.
And, of course, please consider signing up to be an organ donor—www.OrganDonor.gov.
Acknowledgments
I loved fairy tales when I was a little girl—I still do. But when I was young “The Princess and the Pea” had to be removed from my bedtime story rotation. Instead of easing me into slumber, this story woke up so many questions.
Seven-year-old me would’ve told you that Hans Christian Andersen started at the wrong place and focused on all the unimportant things. The story is called “The Princess and the Pea,” yet it’s hardly about the princess at all. We never learn why she was alone on a cold and stormy night. No one asks what happened to her family or if she’s okay. We’re never told why she bruises so easily, or if she wants to marry the prince. And then there was the fact that always bothered me most: Why does her ability to bruise make her desirable?
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