Besides, he would be excited by the news.
They had their patient one.
Rhobes, in all his arrogance, had been right about one thing. It was time to put Vita to the test, and the drug was her fucking baby, too.
After she sent the email, she got her assistant on the phone. “I need my lawyer. Now. I don’t care where he is on vacation.”
THIRTEEN
BACK AT C.P.’S subterranean lab, Daniel was having a bag of saline, a B12 shot, and a blood panel for breakfast. Not exactly Wheaties, but in his condition, the three-course meal was definitely for champions. Or someone who wanted to have enough energy to tackle a flight of stairs at more than a snail’s pace.
As he lay back in the hospital bed and stared at his bony ankles and his thick socks, he considered the merits of buying a new pair of pants. Like, sweatpants. $19.99. From Target. When he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d looked them up on his phone—but felt like he was cheating on QVC.
And it’d seemed like a waste of a twenty-dollar bill.
“What is?”
He glanced past his floppy pant legs at Lydia. She was sitting forward in the chair she always sat forward in, her elbows on her knees, her worried face pinched like she had a spike in the center of her forehead. Next to her, the built-in desk with its computer and rolling stool was a doctor perch waiting for a white coat. Undoubtedly, the vacancy would be filled soon enough.
“Daniel?”
“Ah, nothing.” Had he been speaking out loud? “Your head hurts, doesn’t it.”
Her brows popped. “I’m sorry?”
He pointed to the nape of his neck. “Tension headache, right? I can tell by the way your jaw is twitching, and you’ve got that pale thing going on.”
With a flush, she eased back and rolled her shoulders. “Oh, I’m fine. Really.”
At which point, the Jeopardy! theme started playing.
Closing his eyes, he cleared his throat and said weakly, “Lydia…”
There was a shuffle as she jumped up. “Do you need Gus? The nurse? Here, I’ll go get them—”
By the time he lifted his lids and opened his mouth to tell her he wasn’t stroking out, she was already leaning through the door and barking orders. No competing with that. He waited until she ducked back in and came over to the bedside.
“I don’t need Gus,” he said as she took his hand.
“Better safe than sorry—”
“I don’t need him!” As she recoiled, Daniel couldn’t decide which out of the two of them he wanted to curse more. “I need you, goddamn it.”
Lydia shook her head like she was trying to translate his words into a combination she could understand—and as she winced and rubbed the back of her neck, he wondered why he had to be such a dick.
“You have me,” she said with exhaustion.
“No, I don’t. I have a nurse who looks like you.”
“Daniel.”
The image of her covering her breasts in the bathroom would not leave his mind. Of all the side effects of the medication and the cancer, losing her while she was right in front of him had not been on any of the warning labels he’d seen. Then again, did the FDA screen drugs for that kind of shit? Nope.
And he couldn’t blame her. Not only was he impotent now… given the way he looked, he wouldn’t want to have sex with him, either. Could he fault her for not wanting him?
Maybe the truth was, he was just hurt. As much as he understood her reaction, it was still painful.
But sex wasn’t everything, right? The commitment was there, he didn’t doubt that, and so was her love.
“Or maybe I’m just a responsibility to you now.”
“What?” Lydia rubbed her eyes. Her face. “What are you talking about? Look, can we not do this right now—”
The door to the exam room flew open and Gus jumped into the room. Today’s t-shirt was a faded peach color and had “Harvey Milk for Supervisor” in two lines on the front.
“What’s going on?” the doc said as he checked the vitals monitor on what was clearly a reflex—given that Daniel wasn’t hooked up to it. Yet. “What’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” Lydia said as she fell back into her chair by the desk.
Gus didn’t look at her, but stayed focused on Daniel, his dark eyes narrowing like he was reading heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature from across the room. The Coke can in his hand was a reminder that that enormous power plant of a brain seemed to run on carbonated caffeine and carbs that came out of a vending machine.
“I’m okay,” Daniel said. Medically, that was.
Well, except for the cancahhhh.
Too soon? he thought to himself. Yeah, probably.
Gus did a back-and-forth as he cracked his Coke open. Then he took a drink like he wanted to give either of them the chance to change their mind.
“Well, anyway, I got your bloods back.” Gus went over to the workstation and signed in to the computer. “They look better already. How’s your eating? Your weight is low and I’m thinking we should add some Ensure throughout the day…”
The rest of the doctor-talk drifted away, becoming background music of no interest. Over on her chair, Lydia was nodding intently, still in that forward position, her eyes rapt as she focused on the screen. She was in what Daniel thought of as her uniform, trail shoes, loose Patagonia pants that were the color of a cream-and-sugar coffee, and a turtleneck in a heather gray that really brought out her eyes.
Her mouth was moving as she spoke. Then she licked her lips as if they were dry. Meanwhile, Gus was doing a lot of nodding and pointing to the screen, his blunt finger with its trimmed nail tracing over glowing lines of text and numbers—
Daniel’s first clue that he’d decided to leave was pressure on his mostly numb feet. Looking down, he was surprised to find that he’d shifted off the exam bed—and the next autonomous motion was his right hand going to his left forearm, where it peeled off the clear bandage that was anchoring the IV and took the needle right out of his vein.
He tied the tubing in a knot with his shaking hands in a sloppy fashion. The inefficiency was, as always, galling, but he didn’t want to leave a mess on the floor for Gus or his nursing staff to clean up.
Neither of the other two people in the room noticed him going to vertical, and an uncharitable part of him felt like that was apt. They were so focused on the lab results, they weren’t seeing him anymore, the physician/caregiver equivalent of nose-blindness to some kind of stink.
He thought back to standing with Lydia in the carport, the two of them embracing, coming to terms with shit—and then when they’d told Gus and C.P. what they’d decided. He’d felt like he and Lydia had an accord, like everything that had been a grind had gone smooth again. But that easy street hadn’t lasted and that was cruelest thing about their situation. With time running out, they needed to spend the moments that mattered together.
Truly together. Not as partners in a catastrophe, each brave-facing it and dealing with their truths on their own.
Daniel was all the way to the door, and even opening things up, when the other two got up in a rush and reached for him.
“No,” he said sharply as he took a step back.