Honesty is the best policy, the cliché databank reminded her, but that felt easier said and done somehow.
It wasn’t until they got up to leave that Amy was able to pull her hand back, grabbing her purse and crossing both arms over her chest.
“Are you up for some coffee? Dessert? A walk? The weather has been so great this week.”
Any resisted an eye roll. Yes, the weather had been great. Something they established in an earlier conversation. She thought of the word “yawn” until her body complied and actually yawned. “Man. I’m tired. I should get back.”
“Is it a busy week for the bed and breakfast?”
“This week I’m full,” she said, conveniently not telling him that one person had paid for all the rooms.
Amy’s heart sped up just thinking about Sy. Would he be waiting for her when they got home? Pull the age-old trick of flashing the porch lights if she stayed outside with Brandon too long? Amy didn’t even know if that was a real-life thing, or just in movies. She was already thinking about how she would escape any attempts at a good-night kiss from Brandon. There was no way she would let him be her first kiss. And if Sy was watching, Brandon might end up with a black eye.
“Your friend, the linebacker, he’s staying there now?”
“He is.”
“Is that normal? I mean, do you have a lot of famous guests?”
Amy shrugged. “Not usually. It’s pretty boring most of the time.”
“You said you were old friends?”
“Yep.”
“Just friends?”
Amy tried to figure out how to respond honestly but struggled. She didn’t even know the answer.
“It’s complicated, huh?” Brandon asked.
“That’s the best way to describe it.”
Conversion faltered after that and Amy wondered if Brandon could feel the lack of chemistry or if he was just scared of Sy. He didn’t try to hold her hand on the car but did insist on walking her to the door. She had to stifle a giggle at the way he scanned the bushes and then the porch, like he expected Sy to come jumping out at any moment. It wouldn’t really be surprising.
“Well,” Brandon said, smiling at her in a way that made her realize that he did not, in fact, realize the lack of chemistry, “how about we try round two next week? Maybe after Christmas?”
“I really don’t think—”
Running footsteps caught her attention just as Sy’s voice called out to them. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
Amy turned and tried to keep her jaw from hitting the ground. Sy jogged up to the front sidewalk and jumped the stairs to the porch. Shirtless, sweaty, and with a million-watt smile aimed right at her.
That’s it. She was going to kill him.
Or kiss him.
Either. Both.
Amy couldn’t stop staring. It wasn’t just all the muscles on display, which looked inhumanly perfect, but at the way Sy smiled at her. The pull toward him felt almost gravitational, like she couldn’t resist if she tried.
Brandon flicked a glance her way and dashed off the porch. “I had a lovely time!” he called.
“Thanks for everything,” Amy said, unsure if he heard because he’d already started his car.
Sy leaned against the railing, smirking. Amy glared at him, trying to keep her eyes fixed on his face and not the way sweat dripped down his massive chest. She didn’t think she was particularly into muscles or built guys. But she was into Sy.
If it hadn’t been inappropriate, she would have liked to stare, watching the way his muscles bunched and rippled as he moved. Like a scientific study or the way you appreciate fine art.
“Pleased with yourself?” she managed to say.
His grin widened. “Actually, yeah. I helped scare off a guy you weren’t going to go on a second date with anyway.”
Amy crossed her arms. “How do you know? You saw Brandon for like five minutes.”
“I can see it right …” Sy leaned in so close that Amy’s breath caught. He should have smelled terrible, but instead, she caught only a whiff of the spicy deodorant or cologne he used.
“Here.” Sy’s fingers touched the edge of her mouth. “You aren’t smiling.”
“Maybe I would have been if you hadn’t hijacked the date.”
“Please.” He rolled his eyes. “I could tell you were trying to let him down easy. It was all over your body language when you got out of the car.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Sy LaMarque! Were you hiding over there, watching?”
He didn’t even try to pretend to look sorry. “Busted.”
Amy wanted to be mad, but instead a thrill of pleasure lit her chest and she laughed at his boyish grin. “You are terrible!”
“Never claimed otherwise. Now, we better get you inside before curfew, young lady.”
He held the door for her and Amy caught an eye full of chest as she passed.
“Speaking of second dates…”
Amy turned back to face Sy, trying to keep hope from invading her chest or showing on her face. “Yes?”
Please ask me. Please ask me. “When is the next guy who isn’t right for you coming to take you out?”
Disappointment flooded her. He didn’t ask.
“Tomorrow night.” Amy spun, heading back to the kitchen and the master bedroom just beyond before she couldn’t hide her feelings any longer. “And I expect you to stay away. I might actually like the next guy.” Doubtful.
“Ames. Wait.” Sy caught her arm and forced her to turn. She wanted to look away but couldn’t stop herself from staring into his eyes. “How about a second date with me first? Then if you still think you want to go out with whatever-his-name-is, you can. But, at the risk of sounding cocky, I don’t think you will.” His smirk disappeared suddenly, and his gaze softened as he looked from her eyes to her lips. “If I’m being honest, I really hope you don’t want to go out with someone else.”
Amy swallowed as tension filled the air between them. He was so close that she could feel his breath on her cheek.
“What do you say, Ames?”
She shook her head. “To what?”
Sy smiled, a slow one that lit up his eyes. “To going on a second date with me and maybe telling all those app guys to get lost.”
“Yes, to part one. And probably to part two. We’ll see how the date with you goes first.” She shot him a teasing grin.
“Great. Breakfast is on me tomorrow, so don’t even think about making something. We’ll leave at nine?”
“Sounds good. Goodnight, Sy!”
“Night, Ames.”
Amy nodded and started backing toward her bedroom. If she didn’t get away from Sy right now, she might find herself confessing her feelings or demanding he tell her his. Or she might do what she’d been wanting to do since the end of their date earlier and kiss him. Better run while she still could.
Chapter 10
TEN
The phone woke Amy from a restless sleep. She was sweating, legs tangled in the sheets. Someone was chasing her. She fell and—
The phone buzzed.
She slapped at it trying to turn off the alarm. But it wasn’t an alarm. It was a number she didn’t know. Trying to send it to voicemail, she accidentally answered. She didn’t even have the phone to her ear but could hear a male voice calling her name.
“Amy? Amy?”
She managed to put the phone to her ear. “This is Amy.”
“Amy! I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Her heart thudded. She pulled the phone away from her ear to look at the number on the screen. “Dr. Harmon? This isn’t your office.”
“I’m calling from my cell. You wouldn’t answer the calls from our office.” His voice had that scolding tone, like she’d been caught sneaking cookies out of the jar.
Amy threw her hand over her eyes. “Sorry. It’s just Christmas and you know, family. I’ve been busy.”
He sighed. “I understand. But, Amy, you need to come in
this morning. We need to go over your results.”
The tears were already coming. When you spend enough time in hospitals with doctors, you know the drill. They won’t tell you bad news over the phone. Sometimes they didn’t tell you any important information over the phone, but if it was bad, you absolutely had to come into the office. If Dr. Harmon said, “this morning,” it was really bad.
Shouldn’t you get news that you have a cancer through a text or something one of those automated, robotic voicemails? That way you didn’t have to try and hold yourself together in front of a doctor who got paid to deliver this kind of news.
“I’ve got plans today.” Amy thought of Sy, her heart constricting in her chest. She could imagine it shriveling up into the size of a raisin, right below her cancerous breasts. “Can you just tell me over the phone? It would be so much faster.”
“You know I can’t. It’s enough that I’m calling you from my cell phone. You need to come in. I know you don’t want to. I know this timing is terrible. Just come in. We’ll deal with this together, okay?”
It was back. If it hadn’t been clear from his insistence that she come in, the softness in Dr. Harmon’s voice and his choice of words left her no doubt. After five years of remission, she had cancer again. This time in her breasts.
She hugged her free arm over her chest. Traitorous, stupid boobs. She wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t funny. Her breasts barely grew until sophomore year, after she went into remission and had gained some weight. It was like going through puberty at sixteen. Talk about late bloomer. Now she wished they hadn’t bloomed at all. But the cancer would have just found another place to nestle into her body. She was sure of it. After all, it owned her.
“Amy? Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Is nine o’clock good?”
Like there was a good time to go in and find out you had cancer. “As good a time as any. See you then.”
Amy hung up the phone and lay back in her bed. Tears pooled in her eyes, overflowing and rolling down her cheeks, over her neck and into her hair.
This was a moment she had always expected. Maybe she even willed the cancer into existence, being so sure it would return. Or perhaps it came back because she was finally happy. A tiny corner of her heart had found hope, allowing it to grow like a tiny plant in the cracks of a sidewalk.
These thoughts were superstitious and dumb. They weren’t Biblically or theologically sound. But part of her really did believe that it was her happiness that somehow called the cancer back. Amy preferred thinking about the cancer like this to recognizing that God had any hand in it. She had finally gotten to the point where she didn’t feel bitter sitting in church, but that might change.
What she knew now, other than the reality that cancer had come back, was that she couldn’t have a relationship with Sy. Even if he did have feelings for her. Unbelievable as it was to Amy, he really did seem to like her. But she couldn’t think about it, dream about it, or go on dates with him. It had to end now.
Cancer was demanding. It wanted every part of you. She had gotten away once, but twice? It reminded her of that movie where all the people were supposed to die, but didn’t, so death followed them around, seeking its due.
Amy looked at her phone, wiping her eyes to see the time. With traffic, she was barely going to make it to Dr. Harmon’s office on time.
She threw on some clothes and scribbled a note that she taped on Sy’s door, tiptoeing around the creaks in the stairs.
Have to cancel today. Something came up. Help yourself to whatever you want in the kitchen. Be back later, but don’t wait around on me. -A
The note didn’t have the word “goodbye,” but Amy knew that’s what she really meant.
“This is my recommended treatment plan. What questions do you have?” Dr. Harmon took off his glasses and leaned across the desk, trying to meet her gaze.
Amy didn’t look up, eyes fixed on the informational packet in her lap. She had ignored a lot of what he said, hearing only the important parts: chemo and radiation, then a double mastectomy, more chemo and radiation. Reconstruction surgery, if she chose.
“Success rate?”
“Very good. I’d say upwards of seventy percent for people with a similar growth.”
“Seventy percent success for how many years? What’s the expectancy after?”
“You can really never say definitively ...”
“Seventy percent for what life expectancy?” Her voice was unrelenting.
Dr. Harmon sighed. “Five years. Ten. Longer. These are good odds, Amy. You already beat this once. I know you’re a fighter. There’s hope.”
“I hate hope,” Amy said. “And I used to be a fighter. I’m not sure I am anymore.”
She stood, meeting Dr. Harmon’s gaze for the first time in the twenty minutes since he started explaining about her breast cancer. She suspected he saw her as something of a daughter. She was his miracle patient. Articles had been written about his successful treatment of her rare childhood cancer. She wondered if he took its return as some kind of personal failure.
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Amy held up her hand. “Don’t worry about it. I know the drill. I’ll make an appointment at the desk. Merry Christmas.”
Amy slammed the door behind her and walked out of the office. Straight past the front desk where Dr. Harmon’s secretary was on the phone, twirling her hair around a red and green holiday pen. Taking the elevator down to the third floor, Amy walked to the open area near the gift shop and the food court.
This was one of the top cancer hospitals in the country and the lobby looked like it was for a swanky hotel. The ceilings soared overhead with giant windows looking out over Houston. Atriums held climbing vines and blooming flowers. Leather couches and armchairs were scattered around the room.
Amy sank into one of the leather couches, staring across at the giant fish tank stretching up from the floor. When she was younger, she loved to come down and see the fish. A vivid memory struck her: standing next to the tank with one hand pressed to the glass, the other clutching an IV stand.
“Don’t knock on the glass,” her mother had called out. “It scares the fish.”
But Amy wasn’t knocking and hadn’t planned to. A few of the brightly-colored tropical fish swam by, looking like they were trying to nibble on her palm through the glass. She remembered wondering what the fish saw when they looked out. Did they feel trapped in their watery glass box? Did their life seem small to them? Or full, because it was all they had ever known?
She had envied them then, and still did. Their world might be small, but they had no worries. They didn’t know about the life outside that they were missing.
While Amy, on the outside looking in, had a whole host of things she was missing in her life. She saw them all around her, all the time. Healthy people, living normal, healthy lives. The fish might not know, but Amy did. She could look outside of her own invisible box and see the life she wouldn’t get to live because cancer consumed it all.
Amy hung her head and tried to hold back another round of tears. Silently, she prayed. I know I said I should stop praying just when I’m desperate. But God, I really am desperate.
Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Unexpected traffic on the way home gave Amy a lot of time to think about how to break the news to people and when. Maybe too much time. As her car inched forward on I-10, Amy made a mental list.
First, she should call her mom. Honestly, she should have done so before now, but she hadn’t mentioned the biopsy to anyone. Not even Jessica knew. The benefit of finding out that she had cancer was that they couldn’t be mad at her. People weren’t allowed to be angry with you when you had cancer. Those were the rules.
But Amy didn’t want to tell her Mom. Or Jessica or Delia. Not just because the conversations would suck, but because that made it more real somehow. As though keeping it to herself held the cancer cells at bay. They could
only replicate when you believed in them and told other people who also believed in them.
Again, she was being ridiculous in the way she thought about cancer. She needed to be mature, do what Dr. Harmon said. She couldn’t pretend her cancer away.
But it was Christmas! She didn’t want to ruin the holiday with the news.
Amy snorted, imagining putting notes in her mom and Delia’s stockings: Merry Christmas! I’ve got cancer. It would be worse than coal.
Dr. Harmon wanted to start treatment the next week. Amy hadn’t scheduled her blood work or anything else, but she knew he would keep calling and hounding her once he realized she left without making any appointments.
What about Sy?
He had texted and called a few times that morning, asking if she was okay, where she was, and making jokes about giving her low reviews on Yelp for not providing breakfast and for standing him up on their date.
She had to tell him that there would be no more dates. No one wanted to start a relationship with someone about to begin treatment for cancer. Seventy percent was high, but Amy couldn’t turn off the part of her brain that did numbers. It meant that thirty people out of one hundred wouldn’t make it. And, even if she was one of the ones who did, Dr. Harmon didn’t even give her a great time period. Could be five or ten years. Maybe a full life. Maybe.
It also could not work at all. Or give her one or two miserable years.
Back in the day, Amy got to know a few people during chemo who ended up stopping treatment. Usually because it stopped working. Quality of life on chemo wasn’t good. A few rare people hardly seemed to get sick. Amy met one woman in her twenties who never even lost her hair. But Amy could still remember the bone-deep exhaustion after treatment and how she couldn’t keep food down. The way her brain felt foggy.
Just thinking about it made her feel nauseated. Was she ready to go back to that life? The cancer life?
Did she have any other choice?
Up ahead on the highway, Amy saw flashing lights, the cause of all this traffic. It looked like a wreck taking up a few lanes. Everyone was merging left and she joined her lane in flicking on her blinker, searching for openings between cars. People kept moving by, closing up the space and refusing to let her over.
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