by LJ Evans
“Don’t start,” I said fiercely, bringing your lips to mine and kissing you hard. In a way that still made me tingle all over, and I knew did the same to you. You groaned and wrapped me hard in your arms that were still strong, but nothing like they’d been before.
“If it was reverse, you’d feel the same,” you said into my hair.
“Maybe. All I know is that I love you. I’ve loved you my whole life. This is where I belong. This is home.”
You nodded into my neck. I could feel wetness on my cheek. It was hard to believe they were tears. You didn’t cry. The god among men didn’t cry. But you were.
“It’s so hard to not be able to have any say in this. To have my body doing something I can’t will it not to do. What I really want to do is take you away, make love to you, and forget the rest of the world.”
“We will. We’ll do that. When this is over.”
“Okay… it’s a deal?” you said, trying to gain hold of your emotions.
“Promise?” I whispered.
“Promise,” you said. And God, I wanted it to be true. You’d never break a promise to me, would you? But sometimes, those promises aren’t really ours to make. I had to learn that the hard way.
That afternoon, even though I was panicking inside, I hid it. For you. For your family. I kept up that false smile and laughter that I’d gotten really good at the two years you’d been away at school. I was making you laugh, and Mia too. Marina and Scott were glad I was able to pull it off. Don’t ask me now what I said. I couldn’t tell you. It was just stupid stuff. But that was the point.
When they took you both in, we all sat in the waiting room, staring at books or the TV or our phones, but not really seeing anything. My mama and daddy tried to be the strong ones, but really, Mia and you were just as much their children as I was. We’d all been one big family.
Three hours and twenty-five minutes. That’s how long we waited to hear news on you. Mia was in and out sooner than that. We actually were just going to see her in the room they’d put her in after getting released from recovery when the doctor came in to see us.
He was smiling, and I felt like my heart was about to explode. Like it had many times at the sign of a doctor and you, but the smile reassured me just a little. He wouldn’t be smiling if it hadn’t gone as expected, right?
He told us it went well. That everything looked very positive, and somewhere in the back of my brain, I remembered the crossmatch test and that positive wasn’t always a good thing, but I shook it off. He shook our hands, smiling. Said you’d be in recovery for a little longer, and then we’d be able to see you.
In the meantime, we got to see Mia and let her know that her sacrifice had gone well. That made her smile. And we promised her a milkshake as soon as the doctor okayed it.
♫ ♫ ♫
When I first saw you, you smiled at me and said, “We made it,” weakly. It was hard to see you like that. Not the grinning, self-confident boy that I’d fallen head over heels for at the age of… well… all my life. But I knew you’d get back there. I knew that this was the first step. So, I nodded and kissed you.
You and Mia got to share a hospital room for a day. I stayed with you too. Not that the hospital folks really wanted me to stay, but they really couldn’t make me leave without calling security, and my mama had an in, so they pulled in a cot that they usually used for new fathers, and called it good.
I helped the nurses with the basic things that I could do for the two of you. Mia was released, but I stayed for the rest of your week in the hospital. I’d leave to shower and change when your mama or my mama was there, and then I’d be back.
We went through the training sessions that the transplant team did together because I wasn’t going to let you have any more secrets from me. They said that after you’d recovered, and after they’d cleared you, you could have a perfectly normal life. You still had diabetes. Still had to treat it with the respect it deserved and not ignore it, but you could get back to normal activities. Even sports. Just not contact sports.
I asked if sex counted as a contact sport and the transplant team got embarrassed. I laughed and said, just kidding. But I really wasn’t. I mean, you and I were both athletic, and things could get pretty hot and heavy.
What they said was that you weren’t cleared for any kind of physical activity yet. You made a joke about too bad they hadn’t told me that last night, and the team got embarrassed again. I smacked you playfully, making sure the team knew that you were teasing. But God was it good to see you teasing. To have a smile on your face. It felt like it was the beginning of a new road.
♫ ♫ ♫
When you came home, I was still terrified. Like if I blinked you’d fade away. We had tons of doctors’ appointments, and I went with you to all of them. Neither one of us was carrying classes over the summer. I still was coaching at Coach Daniels’ school, and he was pretty frickin’ amazing with the flexibility he gave me and still paying me for a job.
You. You were really trying hard to get back to your old, determined self. Like this was just some new playbook you had to learn. And you wanted your own space. Our own space. So, at about a month in, you and I started talking about moving out of your parents’ house.
We wanted to have a place where our life seemed like a Hollywood movie again. The one where we got to make love wherever and whenever we wanted and there was nothing but us. Our parents weren’t very thrilled. I think they weren’t sure you were ready for it. So, in the meantime, we slowly got you back into an exercise routine, and got your meals into a really strict schedule that we knew would have to be a lifetime in the making. Just like the meds would be part of your life forever.
We weren’t stupid. We knew that the ten-year survival rate for kidney transplant patients was only in the fifty percent range, but that was because so many of them were old. Or had serious illnesses that you didn’t have, right?
So, we just plodded along, recovering. Trying to be happy again. Trying to find that joy and easiness that had slipped away.
♫ ♫ ♫
You were cleared for some more strenuous activity, which lit up both our lives because, to tell you the truth, it had been getting harder and harder to keep our hands off each other. We’d lived through such an intense six months, from the time you’d be hospitalized in Virginia until now, that we wanted to work that out through passion and sin.
But that first night, I was still a little afraid to damage you. You pulled me close and kissed me with all the intensity that you had kissed me with that very first night in that very same room when you’d been in your football boxers and I’d been in my sexy underwear. But we finished the night with a passion that was full of all the emotions we’d been storing up for six months. We were spent and tired. In a good way, finally. I told you how much I loved you. You looked at me in that intense way that only you could do, put both your hands around my face and said, “How was I ever insane enough to think I could ever live without you?”
I grinned. Happy. “Because you were always an idiot when it came to girls.”
You kissed me and tickled me, and we actually had a wrestling match that we hadn’t had in a long time. You still won. Even weak as you were. That’s because I’m extremely ticklish, and you knew every spot. Some spots that you hadn’t even discovered until we’d moved away to Virginia Tech together.
The next morning, as I was in the kitchen about ready to leave for a session at Coach’s, you came in a little sweaty. I looked at you, and you seemed pale. I tried not to panic, but you were nauseous too. I called the doctor immediately. You said it was just that you were overly hungry. I didn’t agree.
The doctor had me bring you in. You weren’t thrilled. But I didn’t care. You said you weren’t going to live like this, with me waiting for something bad to happen every time you had a hiccup. I knew the meds were making you a little cranky. So, I just ignored it. And you did go with me. I didn’t have to argue with y
ou to get in the Jeep or anything.
♫ ♫ ♫
The doctor ran some tests. Blood, urine, etc. They didn’t come back in so good. They immediately put you in for a biopsy of the kidney. Didn’t even release you. Once again, I had to be the one to call everyone and let them know what was going on.
Your body was rejecting the kidney. We’d expected it. I mean, all transplant patients’ bodies reject the new organ at some level. That’s what a boatload of the drugs are for. To suppress the immune system. And acute rejection wasn’t something that you were past the stage of expecting. It just meant more drugs. This irritated you again.
But they let you go the next day, and that made me happy.
You recovered for another day at home and then insisted that you and I go out looking for apartments. You were so damned determined that we be on our own. It’s kind of funny, really, because hadn’t we really been on our own our whole lives? We’d depended on each other way more than we depended on our parents or other friends.
In any event, I caved, and we went. It wasn’t like we didn’t know our little town like the back of our hands, but we’d never really paid much attention to the apartments and condos that could be rented. We weren’t going out of town. We still needed to stay close. For our families. For your doctors.
It happened when we were out and about looking at those apartments there was no way we could afford. I know now that it was a failed attempt to reclaim some of our Polaroid moments of color and passion that had disappeared months ago with your kidneys. The sun streamed through a set of picture windows and highlighted you in a halo of light that captured my breath. In that moment, caught in the shimmery white, you almost looked like the football god you once were and not the weaker version of yourself you’d become. You gave me your slow, heart-melting smile as you grabbed my hand and twirled me around in the empty space until I was held tight against your chest, feeling at last like I was the only girl in your world.
You swayed me back and forth, slow and sensual, and for a second we forgot it all. We forgot the realtor, the year of doubt, and the harsh reality of the future. I let out a breath into your neck and thought maybe, just maybe, we were in the clear. We’d held onto each other through it all. You tipped my chin up, and I was caught, as I’d always been, in the sparkle of your beautiful, green and gold mosaic eyes. The only eyes that ever made me feel alive.
You kissed me, reaching down to the depths of my heart where you’d forever claimed every last tile on the walls of my soul. The realtor cleared his throat, but we just ignored him like we’d ignored everyone for that picture-perfect six months we’d been away at college. You smiled against my lips, and I couldn’t help but smile back. You whirled me again, but out of your arms, and then dragged me up the stairs at a jog.
I was smiling, still caught in that precious moment, when you turned to me again and whispered, “Cami,” and I listened because I always listened when you said my name that way and not the short version, Cam, that we both preferred. And this time, my heart melted for a totally different reason when your mosaic eyes turned to me with an indescribable look. It was like a switch had been thrown from that brief second of life below until now. Then you said something that would tear at me for the rest of my life. You said, “I love you, Camdyn,” before you crumpled to the floor.
An ambulance ride later, we were at the hospital. Again. How many times had we been there this year? It didn’t actually matter because I already knew. I already knew that this time it was going to be different.
You see, it was the only time in our entire lives you’d called me Camdyn.
♫ ♫ ♫
They wouldn’t let me see you. That still pisses me off to this day. That I didn’t get to see you. I’d ridden with you in the ambulance. I’d told you I loved you, but I wasn’t sure you’d heard it. I just wanted you to hear me again. Wanted to be able to look in those mosaic eyes and know that you really saw me like no one ever could.
By the time the doctor came out, Marina and Scott had arrived. They were haggard, just as I was, from the constant back and forth. And on top of that, the doctor wasn’t smiling. I sat down hard on a side table that swayed under my weight.
“It doesn’t look good.”
“What do you mean?” Scott asked. Always looking for the facts, your daddy.
“We can’t get him to wake up or respond to anything we do. The kidney seems to be in full rejection. His body is going into shutdown mode. We aren’t exactly sure why. We’ve loaded him up with a new round of immunosuppressive meds. We’re hoping that they’ll kick in and bring him back around.”
We all just stared at him. Not sure what all of that meant.
“And if they don’t?” It was Marina who said it. Your brave mama, asking the thing we knew in our hearts but didn’t want to know.
“If they don’t, he won’t wake back up.”
♫ ♫ ♫
I wanted to pound something. I wanted to pound something until my hands were bloody, and you had to wake up to kiss them better. And I wanted to run, but the only place I’d ever run was to you. They weren’t going to let us in to the critical care ward, but I started screaming like hell that I wasn’t going anywhere till they let me see you, and because everyone knew my mama, they let me in to see you.
You were on tons of wires and machines again. I didn’t care, I crawled right up with you like I always had, and I moved your arm so that the weight of it was over me. And I begged and pleaded with you.
“Please don’t leave me, Jake. Please, please, please don’t leave me. You are all I’ve ever known. You are the only thing I’m on this earth for.”
And then I started to cry. The tears I rarely cried but when I did, they were always for you. Your mama tried to pull me away, your daddy tried to pull me away, the doctor begged, but I wouldn’t budge. I wasn’t going anywhere. They couldn’t move me. Not until the machines started flatlining, and I didn’t have a choice because it was the only chance I had of them saving you.
My mama came and swept me into her arms, and I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying and crying and crying. Because I knew. Like I’d always known the truth about you.
You were gone.
When they came out to tell us, I already knew, and before they could stop me, I’d pushed my way past them and back into the bed with you. A bed where you wouldn’t ever reach over and hold me again. A bed that you’d died in without even waking up those beautiful mosaic eyes to let me reply to that last “I love you” that you’d given me.
I don’t know how long I lay with you like that. Eventually, my mama and daddy came, and they pulled me away from you. Said I had to let them take care of you. But they hadn’t. They’d already let you die.
♫ ♫ ♫
I don’t know how they got me home, but they did. I, honest to God, don’t remember it. I do remember walking like a zombie out to our tree house and climbing up into it and looking up at the stars. Somewhere out there was the star you had named for me. Would you be there? Would you be there looking at me? We’d never spent any time talking about God or life or after life. What did I know about it?
I cried again. More than I’d cried over you in my entire life. More tears than I thought a body could hold or make. But none of the reality of you being gone had hit me yet. These tears were for what would come. That future moment. Because right then in the tree house, nothing was really real yet. All I knew was that when it grew cold, there was no one there to toss a sweatshirt up that smelled like chocolate cookies and boy.
My mama brought me a blanket and a pillow. She didn’t even try to get me to move. She just gave them to me, rubbed my face with her soft hand, brushed my hair away from my face, and let her own tears fall on me. Their salty water mixing with my own.
She left me there. Because she knew I didn’t want her. I wanted the person who I’d always belonged to more than her. I wanted you.
♫ ♫ ♫
S
o many people came to your funeral. So many, many people. You were still a god among men. Except now you weren’t among men. Now you were a legend. Everyone had Jake stories to tell. Stories of you throwing a football, or making a joke, or saving them from making a fool of themselves. They talked to me about how you’d always talked about me. About how they’d always seen us together.
What a joke.
Wynn came home for the funeral. She hugged me, and sat with me, and made sure I was presentable. In black. A little black dress that made me think of another little black dress and the grin on your face as you watched me change out of it in your daddy’s truck with the air blowing around us. The day that I had thought was a beginning.
♫ ♫ ♫
The pain I felt. It was like no other I’d ever felt before. Breaking my toe or spraining my knuckles on Brian’s face. Not even the twisted pain in my stomach of watching you kiss another girl. God. I think I’d have taken that then in a heartbeat. Just to know you were back. To know that I could watch you while you did that. Kiss another girl. Because at least it would mean you were here.
I honestly don’t know how I made it through any of it. I went where they told me to go. I walked where they wanted me to walk, and I greeted the people they wanted me to greet. I don’t even know who was there. All I know is that a lot of people came. I didn’t truly see anyone. I tried to get up and talk about you at the service. To say something amazing because you deserved that. But I just ended up in front of all those people, crying my heart out for you till my mama came and got me. I made them play “Long Live” and then cried as the words washed over me because you wouldn’t be there to fight off the pretenders or the dragons, and there would be no children to remember our name. And all I knew was that I’d had the time of my life with you. And that, that life was now over.
Long Live
“But if god forbid fate should step in
And force us into a goodbye…
I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.”
- Taylor Swift