Slow Burn (35 page)

All I see now is a manipulative prick who didn’t have the balls just to come out and tell me he wanted me back. And then went about trying to prove his point in completely the wrong way. Force? Is he fucking kidding me? Who is this man?

Being a badass is one thing. Being an asshole is another.

I rush to the table and grab the phone, my fingers dialing without thought. “Please leave Dante or I’m pushing
SEND
right now on nine-one-one.”

He looks up at me, face red, teeth clenched, but disbelief still in his bloodshot eyes. I know he’s had run-ins with the law before, and this is the last thing he’d want. I step forward and pick his keys up from the hall table and take my house key off the ring before throwing them at him. They hit his shoulder and fall to the ground as he keeps groaning.

“Get out!” I scream at him as the adrenaline starts to fire now that I’m away from him and can physically react to the threats he threw at me.

He grabs his keys with one hand, his other still on his crotch. It takes a minute, but he hobbles to the front door and fumbles with the handle for a moment before opening it up.

“I’ll have your shit on the porch later tonight for you to collect.”

As he walks out, I hear my name as a murmur on his lips, and his tone sounds almost apologetic. A little too fucking late for that. I know he cares about me, know we had something once, but anything there could have been, he just killed by trying to force himself on me, and I think he knows it.

His lack of a fight tells me.

He tries to straighten up, his eyes meeting mine, and I see the apology there, but I don’t say another word as I slam the door shut and flip the dead bolt. The minute it’s closed, I sag with my back against the door, my body shaking so badly, I slide down until I’m sitting on the floor.

I sit there for some time, so many emotions ebbing and flowing that by the time I bring myself to get up, I’m spent emotionally and physically. I drop the phone from my hand and realize that my other is unknowingly and out of habit examining the breast opposite it.

It always comes back to this. No matter how perfect or how imperfect the person or the situation in my life, at the end of the day, the fate I’m waiting to be dealt is still there, hanging over my head.

“H
ad, I’m here. Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Rylee pulls her sunglasses from her eyes and angles herself so that she can face me. “Something’s up with all the cryptic answers you gave me on where we’re going, why you need me here.”

I look at my oldest friend and know I need the support and levelheadedness she’ll bring me. “I need you not to be upset with me because I’m already being eaten by guilt for hiding this from you … but just know I had the best intentions for why I didn’t tell you.” I watch the emotions flicker over her face and am reminded of Becks last night, her reaction similar to his in so many ways that I swallow down the double dose of guilt the sight brings me.

I can see her mind working, can tell she’s withholding the questions fleeting through her eyes, and appreciate her biting her tongue and keeping her need-to-plan-everything-the-hell-out ass quiet. She nods her head at me and says, “Okay.” Her eyebrows narrow as she reaches out and squeezes my hand. “You know I’ll hold your hand through anything, even negative blood test results,” she says, infusing her positivity into a situation she misunderstands.

“Thank you …” My voice trails off, and it’s all I can say
because if I lead her on any further, then I’m just being more of an asshole than I already have been. I have enough on my conscience, and I don’t need to weigh it down any more. “But this is more than a negative blood test result.”

Her body visibly jars from the suggestion in my comment, fingers squeezing my hand, a gasp of air inhaled. “Had …?”

“I found a lump, Ry.” My voice is so soft, it’s barely audible, but I know she hears me because she nods her head for me to continue. “I had it biopsied a few days before you got back—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I can tell she’s hurt I didn’t confide in her but also love that she doesn’t address it because she knows this is much bigger than that.

I lower my head and fight the tears that threaten from disappointing her before I answer. “I know you’re mad at me, but I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t bring myself to make you sad when you deserve all the happiness in the world. I mean, you’d just come back from your honeymoon. I wasn’t going to hit you with this.”

Her eyes well with tears as she accepts the apology I haven’t managed to put into words. “So you had the biopsy …,” she says, turning the focus back on me. “Now, why are we here? Do you know something already or—”

“No. Nothing. Results.” I’m reduced to one-word answers as the reality of what’s about to happen hits me. It’s almost as if telling Rylee has made this all real.

Because she’s my person.

We stare out the windows of the car for a moment in silence, watching the world around us move on while we think in slow motion. She squeezes my hand one more time and then opens the car door, leading the way, my nerves humming louder with each step we take.

The waiting room is empty, and yet we still speak in hushed voices about nothing important. Eventually we fall silent, busying ourselves by repeatedly checking social media
on our phones. And even though I don’t want him to, the only reason I keep checking is to see if Becks has messaged me. And how screwed-up is it that after the things I said last night, I’m just not sure whether I’m happy or sad about his lack of contact.

We’re called back after about fifteen minutes and ushered into an office space, where we take a seat across the desk from Dr. Blakely. I make introductions between her and Rylee, and all the while a voice is screaming in my head,
You hold my fate in your hands
.

After the niceties are over, Dr. Blakely folds her hands on her desk and looks at me, a soft yet strained smile gracing her lips but not easing the gravity in her expression. I know Rylee notices it too because she reaches over and links her fingers with mine.

“As you know, when we biopsied the lump, there was a possibility of it coming back cancerous.”

I grip Ry’s hand tightly because what’s coming next may make or break me. My ears buzz with noise, and my every nerve is on edge, waiting for the doctor to continue.

“The results came back, Haddie, and I’m sorry to have to tell you that we did find the tumor to be malignant.”

I freeze—my heart, my hope, my breath—as my world comes crashing down around me. Fragments of my life, my possibilities, my future shatter as they hit the bottom of my empty emotional well, lost to the darkness I can’t see through. The buzzing grows so loud that I see her lips moving but can’t hear her over it. My chest constricts, the pain of drawing in a breath so goddamn difficult, I convince myself it has to be from the parasitic cancer eating at my breasts, invading my lungs, and holding them hostage too. My thoughts spiral out of control. Everything I thought I knew now seems foreign, unknown, scary as hell.

It’s the lone sob that escapes from Rylee that snaps me back to the present. My tunnel vision zooms onto the sound even though I can’t tear my eyes from Dr. Blakely. Her lips
have stopped moving, the concern for me evident in the tears that glisten in her eyes as she allows me to digest what she’s just told me.

I’m not sure who is holding on tighter, Rylee or myself, but I hear the scrape of her chair and then feel her fighting out of my death grip. I release her hand reluctantly, only to feel her arm go immediately around my shoulders and pull me against the shuddering of her chest.

I clench my jaw, tell myself to let go, to embrace the numbing cold that feels like it’s beginning to seep into my bones. I rein it in—everything that I can—and lock it away so that I can deal with it at another time.

The time being
never
, but lying to myself is just par for the course right now, and frankly I might not be around to suffer the repercussions of my lies, so who the fuck cares?

As I look back at Dr. Blakely, my voice is loaded with emotion I can’t seem to feel. “Can you please go back and start over because I kind of stopped processing after the word
malignant
?”

She nods her head, glancing over to Rylee in a silent thank-you for her support, before bringing her eyes back to mine. “The pathology reports came back showing cancerous cells, and those reports in conjunction with the scans we did lead us to diagnose you with stage two.”

“We?” Rylee interjects with the question that’s on my tongue, but I can’t seem to get over the disbelief.

“Yes, my colleagues and I,” she says. I catch Dr. Blakely glance at Rylee and give her an appreciative smile before meeting my eyes again. “I actually was having a meeting with them about another case and asked them to review yours, as well.”

I stare at her, mouth agape, eyes vacant. I feel like a deer in the headlights, but the difference is, I’m not sure if I want to move out of the way or get taken down in one fell swoop. I blink my eyelids, and it feels like they are scraping over sand as I try to process this all and come up empty.

And I find that strange, considering my mind knew this; family medical history predicted this. But it’s one thing to feel it and think it, and a whole different thing to hear it stated as fact, have doctors meeting about you—or your file, rather, because your contaminated body isn’t there.

“So, what was the consensus?” Rylee again, her voice strong as she plays the role of patient counselor, which she does every day of her life in her job, except this time it’s for her best friend instead of one of the abused little boys she’s responsible for.

“We believe we need to act fast. Looking at your family history, the cancer your sister and mother experienced was aggressive in all facets, so we want to make sure to hit this head-on and knock it dead without giving it a fighting chance.” I want to believe the conviction in her voice, the competency behind her diagnosis that we can knock it dead but have a hard time mustering up the enthusiasm to match it.

I zone out as she goes on about further lumpectomies followed by chemo and then radiation courses to force a response and then hopefully remission. I listen to time frames of treatment, and my head spins, thinking it’s not possible because I have a few more days before I can secure the Scandalous deal. Then my mind wanders to the health insurance plan I was luckily able to secure a few months ago to cover myself and any new hires I add on.

I keep half an ear on the conversation, knowing they are talking about my body, my life, and yet I can’t connect, can’t believe that I’m about to go through what I helped Lexi through. The brutality of it, the complete obliteration, the devastation of it.

And then I think of my parents. Oh, God, my parents. Having to tell them, scare them, watch them suffer through this for a fourth time in their lives, my mom blaming herself all over again as she did with Lex. How she carries her
death on her shoulders as if it were her fault. I fist my hands so tight that my nails break the skin, the sting welcome because I’m actually feeling something again instead of this droning buzz holding my body hostage.

I selfishly think of my body. My body, which will soon look like Frankenstein’s monster’s body, jagged pieces sewn together to make a whole. I know it’s vain, but the horrid images of Lex’s scars on my body that flash through my mind knock me back a step farther than I already have been.

And yet Rylee and Dr. Blakely keep talking about the logistics, the scheduling of it all, and then I think of Maddie, and it nearly breaks me. When the sob catches in my throat, both of them turn suddenly to look at me, and my decision has been made.

Screw the lumpectomies.

I want to live.

“I want a double mastectomy.”

I watch the approval flicker through Dr. Blakely’s eyes as Ry’s hand squeezes my forearm. “While this was going to be my next suggestion and the best course of action, I must advise you and make you aware—”

“I’m aware that my breasts are going to kill me if I keep them. I want them gone.” I make the assertion with more confidence than I actually feel, but my courage makes up for the difference because I’m scared so fucking shitless that my voice should be wavering with nerves instead of the tiny break it had. “Nothing helped my sister, but I want the fighting chance … so I want them gone as soon as possible. I need drastic. Lexi was gone in six months. Six months. I have a life I want to live. Things I need to do, and I can’t do them in six months because I haven’t even planned them yet, so …” My voice trails off as all of the things I’ve ever wanted to do flicker like a slide show through my head. The tears come now, a wave of hope trying to ride the rampant
storm of emotions waging inside of me. “I haven’t even planned them yet,” I tell them both again through the broken sobs.

I’m focused on the sky above us. The clouds float there so nicely, form a set of shapes, and then float some more to change to a different one. Wouldn’t it be so easy to be like that—change, shift, adjust—without so much as a thought of the next storm about to roll in threatening to decimate you.

Rylee allows me the silence to think, and I use it to listen to birds chirping and the leaves of the trees all around us rustling in the breeze. This section of the park is vacant at this time of day, and I’m so thankful that she knew I couldn’t face reality just yet.

She sighs, and I hear the sniffle she tries to disguise as she turns her head away from me where we lie flat on our backs on the grassy hill, looking up at the sky.

“I have to tell my parents,” I whisper, barely breaking the silence.

“We’ll go there next. I’ll go with you, okay?”

I murmur in agreement. I’m thankful she offered because I know she’ll be able to be the voice of reason when hell breaks loose.

“We have three weeks before the surgery and then two weeks after that before chemo starts.” I appreciate her matter-of-fact tone, her businesslike efficient approach to my treatment schedule makes it seem like it’s not happening to me. “We’ll figure out a schedule in the next week or two so that between your parents and me and Becks and whoever else wants in, you have all the help you need after—”