Something's Come Up (9 page)

“Who did you sexually harass, Stephanie Bonnie Mary Magdalene Brier?” I used her full name in an attempt to add the appropriate air of levity to the situation. “Did you feel up some poor priest?”

“Tell me how you got my email address, and I’ll tell you,” she responded, her rosy lips fixed in a delightful pout.

I shook my head. “I can’t reveal my sources.”

All expression vanished from her deceptively angelic face. She was off the bed, stripping my Red Sox shirt off in one fluid motion. “I have to go.”

I was ready for this and on my feet blocking her exit in mere seconds. “No. No you don’t. Have a simple conversation with me without acting like I’m blowing your cover with the CIA.”

“For fuck’s sake…” She peeked up from under her lashes with me, looking like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“Do I look like I’m joking?” I asked, folding my arms and leaning against the bedroom door.

“It was the captain of the football team, okay? His name was Ben Primeau.” She picked up her panties and started to put them on. “He and I had been...talking…since the first day of school...and sort of messing around for a couple of weeks. We agreed to meet under the bleachers after the homecoming game. He said he wanted to make out on the fifty yard line, you know, like every other fucking jock strap fantasizes about. But he was a senior and smoking hot, so I thought ‘what the hell’?”

I could feel my heart rate double. I was sure she was going to tell me he raped her and I would have hunted his ass down. So I was completely blown away but what she said next.

“I was psyched to lose my virginity to the big man on campus, but before we even got past second base, he came.
In his pants
.”

The incredulous look on her face was hilarious and I had to bite my lower lip to stifle a laugh. I saw her eyes narrow, daring me to chuckle. I didn’t.

“I was so pissed. So that night at the dance, during the homecoming court coronation, I sweet talked my two friends from the AV club into helping me change his name on the overhead slides to Benjamin Prematureejaculation.”

Shocked laughter escaped me and her serious expression cracked. She covered her mouth to hide a smile.

“That’s priceless.”

Her expression was grim again in an instant and she shook her head violently. “No. It was awful. My brother, Cedric, was in the running for Homecoming King, too, so I was sitting there with my parents, patiently waiting for all hell break loose. When Ben headed down the aisle with his escort, the slide popped up and the entire audience freaked! My mom was completely mortified. My brother, who is always the diplomat, picked up the nearest microphone and tried to smooth things over. Ben obviously knew I was behind it all, so I think Cedric’s attempt to defend him sent him over the deep end. He ran out of the gym like some villain in a Disney movie. Later that night, he tried to hang himself.”

“Jesus!” I blurted, knowing from the expression she wore she wasn’t playing.

“Oh, he failed spectacularly. He didn’t tie the knots tight enough. I imagine he was probably in too much of a
hurry
. So the dumbass bruised his neck a bit and that was it. But he told his parents
everything
. My parents got called in and the story spread around school like wildfire. My AV geek friends both got suspended and I got expelled.” She’d been dressing while she spoke and was zipping up her jeans. Her eyes darted around for her blouse, which I now held up in front of her. She plucked it from my hand and tossed it on over her head.

“Wow.” It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

“Yep.” She brushed past me and out into the living room where we’d abandoned our shoes during the grope-fest the night before. I scrambled into a pair of boxers and went after her. She was lacing up her second shoe when I finally found my voice.

“So, where did you go? Another Catholic school?”

“Public school. It was so much more my speed.”

“Who won?”

She stood. “Huh?”

“Who did they crown Homecoming King?”

“Cedric, of course,” Red scoffed, as if the question were asinine. She grabbed her jacket and purse and headed out the door without so much as a goodbye.

I
was sprawled across his dark, hot chest, holding the crop in one hand and running the fingers of my other hand up and down its length.

“How long have you had this?” I rolled over and trailed the tip of the crop down the center of his chest.

His almost-onyx eyes met mine. They were always darker after sex. “I bought it the day I left your place for the first time.”

“That makes sense; you wouldn’t want to use your old stuff on new girls.”

He sat up on his elbows. “I haven’t used one of those in years, Steph, and only with one other girl.”

I tilted my head. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Everything,” I huffed, rolling my eyes. “You obviously love it. What made you think I’d be into it?” I sat up and sat cross-legged, still unclothed.

He sat up, too, leaning against his superfluous headboard. Seriously, it was basically his entire wall. And padded. “Well,” he sighed in apparent amusement, “you let me spank you.”

I shrugged. “It’s hot.”

I hadn’t let anyone do that before him, but he wasn’t about to know that.

“I know!” He smiled broadly, holding his hands out like he was wondering why the hell more women wouldn’t participate.

“So. Why are you so old?”

“
Excuse me?
” He looked offended for a split second. “Why are you so young?”

I slapped his leg. “Come on.”

There were several theories I’d come up with about why he was so much older than his classmates. Though, I didn’t know exactly
how
much older he was, he carried himself as if decades covered the space between him and his friends.

He took a deep breath. “We’ve slept together for a semester and you’re just asking this now?”

“Well,” I ignored his question, “you’re not in the military…right?”

“Right.”

“And you weren’t in jail?”

“Ha! No. I’m not an ex-con.”

“Hmm.” I tapped my lip with the tip of my index finger. “I’ve got nothing. You are one cryptic son of a bitch.”

He reached down to the floor for his boxers, sliding them on as his face looked like he was carefully choosing his response. “That’s…by design.”

Adrenaline began to bubble in my stomach. “Intriguing. Lots of skeletons in your closet?”

“Just one.” His smile faltered as he said the words, and I wasn’t sure what to say.

He interjected before I had to fumble for filler. “I graduated from Princeton undergrad in 2006.”

I felt a juicy story coming on. “I was just a wide-eyed freshman in college then.”

He laughed. “I know.”

“So from Princeton to Colombia, huh? Not too shabby, Carrington.”

“Well, I had a two-year detour in Cornell’s medical school.”

I sat up and assessed his face for tells that he was fucking with me. When it was plain that he was dead serious, my eyes bugged out and my lips parted.

“
You
got into Cornell’s Med School.”

He nodded as he flopped back onto the bed, a cocky smile twitching on his lips. “I did.”

“And then...you just...left?”

He kissed my temple and lazily pushed a lock of hair off of my cheek. “Mmm hmm.”

I sat up. “Why? Too much of a pussy to take the sight of blood? Or were you afraid you wouldn’t look fierce in scrubs?” It made no sense. From the odd hours he kept, I figured he was a workaholic, and by the way he performed in the bedroom he was obsessively focused. Pace seemed like the last person who would just
leave
medical school.

“The family business didn’t suit me the way I’d hoped.”

“One of your parents is a doctor?” I moved up the bed so I was next to him, shimmying under the covers.

“They both are. My dad’s in research at a massive pharmaceutical company and my mom’s an OB-GYN.”

I cackled loudly at that. “Gynecology! How did
that
not suit you? Afraid you’d mix business and pleasure?”

“Fuck off,” he teased. “OB/GYN never interested me. Medical research did, though. So for the first two years of medical school, I got to work right next to my dad during breaks and over the summer.”

“Wow. Impressive for someone with no medical training.” I could just picture a 22-year-old Pace strutting into a research lab like he owned the place. And people believing he did.

He shrugged. “Nepotism. Surely you have some…expertise in that area?” He grinned, obviously baiting me.

“Point taken. So, you didn’t like the research? Too boring?”

“The exact opposite.”

I scrunched my forehead. He pulled his eyebrows together and sighed. I had no idea where he was going with this.

“Okay…” he started. “Have you have ever heard of neuroblastoma?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a kind of cancer that most often shows up in children. It’s the most common extracranial cancer. Outside the head. But, it’s
the
most common cancer in infants.”

My chest sank. “Like newborns?”

He nodded, running his hand over his face. “Yes, like newborns, young babies, toddlers… Anyway, it typically starts in the adrenal glands but can—” he stopped himself, seeming to back up a little. “Adrenal glands produce adrenaline in your body, right? So they send hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, which is adrenaline, and all kinds of shit through your body. They also affect kidney function, which is really secondary here, but the point is, a problem in your adrenal glands is a big fucking problem.”

I’d never seen Pace looking so serious or speaking so technically. He sounded like a doctor; a doctor that was about to deliver bad news.

He shifted to face me, capturing my full intention. “Neuroblastoma has extreme heterogeneity, which means the same kind of cancer can be caused by several different factors. So, while there are ways to treat the cancer once it’s present in the body, if you don’t know the root cause of the problem, all you’re doing is treating the mess at the end.”

“Wow,” I whispered, impressed by his unfailing intensity despite sitting nude with me in his bed.

“Neuroblastoma is categorized as low-risk, intermediate, and high-risk, based on how active the cancer is, how clear a cause might be, etcetera. The good news is that the low-risk kind is most common in infants and can have decent recovery results.”

I lifted my chin. “Something tells me you weren’t studying the low-risk neuroblastoma.”

He grinned. “It’s not that it’s not important research, and anything that’s killing people from the inside is worth working on until it’s one hundred percent cured, but I was interested in the hopeless cases.”

“Hopeless?”

“The kids in the high-risk category who are basically given chemotherapy treatments that merely extend their life. Sometimes for a year, but most often only for a few months. And most of those months are spent in a hospital.” His tone was clinical. Clearly practiced.

“If it’s hopeless, then why do parents bother to drag their kids through chemo and living in a hospital?”

He shrugged. “It’s not a natural human state to accept the death of a child. And, even though I’ve seen it from the other side—what chemotherapy does to children—seeing the desperation on their parents’ faces and the vulnerability in the kids’ eyes…I get why they do it.”

Pace closed his eyes for a long blink. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling like I should touch his shoulder or hold his hand. I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression, though.

“Also,” he continued, “faith plays a big role. Parents start their kids on medications they know will prolong life while they get down and pray for a miracle.” His lip curled a little on the last word, causing me to sit forward.

“So you don’t believe in miracles? What, are you atheist?” The hairs on the back of my neck instinctively began to rise.

“No. My Southern Baptist grandmother—she thinks I’m atheist. I’m more agnostic, and even that is cause for enough strife in my family.”

“Aren’t all doctors atheist?”

“My dad’s not. But that’s not the point here.”

“Then get to the point.” I lifted my eyebrow and he took an irritated breath.

“The fact is, advances in cancer treatment are happening every day. Those religious parents aren’t misled in their hopes that something will come out while their children are undergoing chemo that could really help them in the long run.”

I drew my knees up to my chest, wishing I had clothes on now. “So, for those high-risk kids, chemo is pretty much a Band-Aid?”

Pace rocked his head side to side and winced a little. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, but, yeah, basically. My point in telling you all of
that
,” he exaggerated, “was I was invited into a small group of scientists working on a breakthrough for high-risk neuroblastoma.”

“By your dad?”

“Nah. At that time he was doing research on stem cell transplants for all types of cancer.” He grinned and put his hand on my thigh. His palms were sweaty, which caused me to pay close attention to his next words.

“And?”