All of You
Gina Sorelle
All of You
Copyright © 2014 by Gina Sorelle
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved.
Cover photography by Mats Bergström
Cover design by Lola Famure
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Other Titles by Gina Sorelle:
All of Me
Please visit my blog at:
http://ginasorelle.blogspot.com/
You can also find me on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/gina.sorelle
And Twitter at:
https://twitter.com/GinaSorelle
This book is dedicated to my husband, who will never read this dedication, this book, or probably anything I write. Ever. And that’s okay. I forgive him for not being into romantic literature, just as he forgives me for not being into the ridiculous movies and TV shows he’s into. The important thing is that he is kind, supportive, and has been the best cheerleader a wife could ask for – with my writing and everything else in life.
As always, C – “You Keep Me Safe, I’ll Keep You Wild.”
I’ve loved you forever and will love you always.
‡
“C
an you believe
this?” Stellan Ahlberg, lab research assistant extraordinaire and hunky Swedish émigré, asked as he shoved his iPhone under Kat Ciaramitaro’s nose. “Look at that!”
Kat reared back, turning her head. “I would, if you’d get the damn thing within my nearsighted range.” Stellan pulled back and Kat slipped her glasses on, eyeing the screen. “Looks like a bunch of pictures and captions.”
“Yes, Kat. It’s called Pinterest and it’s
full
of nerd power stuff. A ridiculous amount of fandom pins, too – you’d love the
Doctor Who
and Marvel ones – and a ton of science jokes.” Stellan glanced down at the screen and cracked up. “It says, ‘Come to the Nerd Side…We Have Pi.’” He looked up, grinning. “Where was this stuff when we were in school? Might have had a whole different experience.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t get too hyped up about that.” Kat sank onto her lab stool, stretching her left leg out before she slipped her goggles over her glasses and pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves. “You were still a flaming gay dude who spoke broken English and lived smack-dab in the middle of the good ole American Bible Belt.” Kat eyed him over the top of her glasses and goggles, lips curling. “Pretty sure no amount of ‘Nerd Power’ could have saved you, my friend. Sorry.”
Stellan sighed. “Yes, I guess you’re right. But it would have been nice to know other people like me existed…nerds
and
gay dudes.” He grinned. “Or, better yet,
both
– like me.”
“You actually make a valid point with that,” Kat said, reaching over to flip on the centrifuge. “People are always talking about how evil the Internet is, but think how comforting it must be for kids today – and adults, for that matter – to connect with other people they can relate to.” She shrugged. “Yeah, sure, there are tons of weirdo creepers out there, too, but that’s the price you have to pay for information, I guess.”
Stellan handed her the rack of test tubes she was looking around for. “You ever search around on MS sites?”
“I did when I was first diagnosed, but I didn’t find it particularly useful or comforting.” Kat carefully placed a test tube into each slot in the centrifuge and shrugged. “I trust my neurologist to keep me up-to-date on the latest treatments and options. No need to scare the crap out of myself reading about everyone else’s horror stories.”
It
had
scared the crap out of her, not to mention depressed her to the point of contemplating throwing her laptop out the window and hiding under the bed to wait for imminent paralysis and death.
As it turned out, she hadn’t broken a perfectly nice laptop or crawled under the bed. Really, what would have been the use? Her sisters would have found her and dragged her out, anyway. Kat
had
, however, gone through an emotionally difficult period following her diagnosis.
In her defense, being told you have a debilitating disease that will very likely incapacitate you and lead to premature death could have that effect on a person.
Kat watched the centrifuge spin around and around. “There is no
status quo
where MS is concerned and almost anything goes,” she said, more to herself than Stellan. “The disease varies so much from person to person that learning about other people’s experiences is moot. What happened to ‘Bev’ in Idaho isn’t necessarily – or even
probably
– what will happen to me, so why go there?”
Thinking about those early days right after her diagnosis had old, familiar fears and uncertainties rearing their ugly heads, flashing across her mind and flooding her body. She rattled the facts off like the shrewd scientist she was:
The odds of it remaining in a benign state are twenty percent. Therefore, there is an eighty percent chance of it progressing.
Progression would mean loss of mobility, bladder dysfunction, bowel dysfunction, vision loss, pain, fatigue, and, ultimately, death.
Pops would lose another loved one. He already lost Mom and nearly lost Stella…I don’t know how in the hell he would handle losing me, too.
Not to mention what my death would do to Gigi, Nina, Stella, Fi, Carla, Marco, Nathan, and the kids…
By the time Kat realized she was participating in the non-productive, soul-destroying cycle of worry, she was already chest-deep.
There was nothing insightful, enlightening, or new about the thoughts. She’d had them all – and a million more – every day for the past six years and they never failed to shake her to her core.
But she’d resolved a long time ago not to let them win. Not when she still possessed the cognition to fight them. Not when one day – in the not-so-distant future – she could very well lose that ability.
Until then, Kat was determined to kick ass and take names.
Even if it was her
own
ass and her
own
name.
“Kat?”
Stellan’s voice yanked her from the hamster wheel of obsessive worry and Kat glanced over her shoulder with a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Yeah. Zoned out on you for a minute there.”
Stellan waved off her apology. “Before I forget, I wanted to tell you that Sloan-Kettering called about the disruptor study. Anything in particular you want to pass along?”
“Nope, not yet,” Kat replied, turning back to the centrifuge. “Tell them I’ll be in contact as soon as I have some concrete data. Shouldn’t be more than a week. Two, at the most.”
Kat and her team had been researching certain gene treatment therapies for neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system, for over a year with limited success, but some new testing they’d recently completed showed promise.
“I really hope something comes from that last round of tests,” Kat said. “Stands to reason we’ll catch a break one of these days, right?”
“Yeah. Soon.”
When Kat turned back to respond, Stellan was already halfway across the lab.
Abruptly walking away mid-conversation?
Just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the socially-awkward, scientific crowd. And the only reason Kat was slightly less awkward was thanks to the wild extroversion of her family.
Growing up in an Italian-American household comprised of seven loud, opinionated people (six of them women) had forced Kat’s hand at a very early age. It had been get louder, more animated, and more talkative or get steam-rolled on an hourly basis.
Thankfully, Kat had always been a very fast learner.
But, regardless of conditioning, she was still the quiet one. The serious one. The logical one. The
only
logical one, other than her brother-in-law, Nathan.
Kat thought about how much enjoyment she and Nathan got out of exchanging exasperated, wry
WTF?
looks during family get-togethers and smiled.
Getting that guy as a brother-in-law had been like winning the stinkin’ lottery.
The centrifuge finally came to a complete stop and Kat removed all five test tubes. She placed them into a rack and meticulously piped out particle samples from each tube, inserting them into sterile tubes she’d be working with tomorrow. Samples labeled and racked and her workstation cleared, Kat rinsed out the used tubes and stored the new ones in the lab refrigerator.
After she’d washed her hands, hung up her lab coat, and grabbed her purse, Kat went in search of Stellan. She found him texting in a back break area.
He glanced up, smiling. “Christopher said Stella just ran halfway around the hospital in the snow to hide from Nathan. He stopped by and she was outside smoking, so she took off.”
“He catch her?”
“Oh, yeah. Jumped out from some bushes and scared her half to death.”
Kat scoffed. “Serves her right. I’m with Nathan on that particular issue. She’s a nurse, for God’s sake – she should know better. I’ve threatened to wallpaper her living room with necrotic lung tissue slides if she doesn’t knock it off. Pops,’ too.”
