She pauses a moment, her head swinging around my direction.
I hold up my hands in a what? gesture. “It was part of the deal when I bought the patents back. I said I wanted to know what I was buying and I wanted all accompanying research. I have copies of everything.”
This time it’s her shaking her head. “You conniving little…”
“Do you want to finish that sentence, or do you want help finding what you’re looking for?”
Her face stays hard only another moment before she breaks up laughing. “You’re incorrigible. But I guess you’re my incorrigible. Okay, get your butt over here and help me find what I’m looking for.”
I’ll accept any excuse to be close to her. I scooted over to her side.
“What is it that we're looking for again?” I ask as I start to sort through the endless shelves of binders. They could have sent the information to me digitally but that would’ve made it easy on me. Instead, boxes upon boxes of these binders were delivered.
“Ha! Sounds like Dad,” Daphne says before going a little sad. But soon she’s too busy flipping through binders, her eyes scanning pages, and she’s distracted, thank gods.
I grab a couple of binders as well, and am just about to ask again what we are looking for when Daphne suddenly slams down the binder she’s looking at and declares, “Ha! There! Look!”
I lean over her shoulder and look. At first all I can see is the page full of running columns of numbers. Gibberish. But then I look at the top and sides of the page and start to decipher what the numbers represent. What it all means.
“Holy…”
“Shit!” Daphne finishes excitedly for me. “Holy shit, right?” she whispers. “We’ve been using the wrong part of the plant. In the yew tree, the medicine is in its bark. We’ve been using the rose, but the real medicine is in the thorns.”
Twelve
Logan
No. It can’t be that simple. I tell Daphne as much.
But she just pounds her fingers at the numbers on the page. “We weren’t trying immunotherapy before. We were just trying to kill the cells. But now that we’re trying to insert living cells that reproduce and target the diseased cells, just look—”
She slides the notebook in front of me. “The properties of the blossoms and pulp that we thought we might have to try to figure out how to synthesize and allow to fix our longevity problem?” she shakes her head and thumps the binder again. “It’s all here already. We were just looking in the wrong place. Or, when we were looking in the right place, we were looking for the wrong thing.”
I keep staring down at the numbers. Could it be real, what she’s saying? Or is she just desperate and seeing miracles that aren’t really there?
Even more dangerous? What she’s saying makes sense.
A tremor works its way through my body. And it’s only then that I realize, deep down, I’ve been absolutely sure that I will lose her. That we’re living on borrowed time. That something and someone so good and precious could never truly be mine.
For all my brash confidence in declaring I would cure her, I knew in reality the fickle fates would snatch her away far too soon. But I ignored all my fear for her.
She needed strength and optimism so I gave her strength and optimism. And ignored my own underlying terror of what I was sure would come.
But what if that’s just my own fucked up past and not…real? What if she doesn’t have to die from this? What if I don’t have to be punished forever for my sins?
I can’t speak, can barely breathe as I hurry over and pull on a fresh pair of medical gloves, then get the blood drawing kit out and ready.
Daphne is quiet and wide-eyed as I approach her with the kit. I think the ramifications of what we might have just stumbled on are finally starting to hit her. But at least the blood draw is familiar. I wrap the rubber tubing around the upper top of her arm, find the vein, and draw several tubes of blood.
“Do we need to go harvest some vines and thorns from the greenhouse?” Daphne asks.
“No, I have some on hand already.” A good thing, because the process of distilling even a milliliter of concentrated oil from any part of a rose takes a lot of raw material and processing.
Daphne claps. “So we can really see if this will work?”
“The batch might be too old, so we might get inconclusive results, don’t get your hopes up—”
“This is going to be great. Stop being such a fart in a jam jar!”
Okay, that made me smile. “I can’t remember, is that one Scottish?”
“Welsh.”
Thirteen
Daphne
“Babe. Babe. Wake up. The results are in.”
I roll over and squint at Logan. He doesn’t look happy or sad. He just looks like Logan—intense. His intensity softens as he takes in my face.
“What is it?” I whisper around the terror in the pit of my stomach. “Did it work?”
He leans closer and for a horrible moment I just know he’s going to say it failed, and hold and comfort me.
But then he says: “It did, baby. It worked.”
I gasp as the fist around my middle abruptly lets go. “Oh my god,” I sag forward, into Logan’s arms. “Oh my god.”
There is so much to do, so much I want to ask him, but his mouth is on mine and in this moment I can't do anything but be with him.
I claw off the bed sheets and my clothes, and clamber onto Logan, our lips frantic on each other’s. He turns so we’re both lying side by side on the bed, still clinging to one another and kissing. I’m breathing him in, deep lungfuls of oxygen and Logan. He is my source.
“I need you,” he murmurs against my throat. He’s still half-clothed, but my hands are up under his shirt, stroking over his acres of muscles. I scoot into place under him and hiss when he breaches my entrance. I dig my nails into his skin, urging him faster. I want him to ride me hard and let our orgasms blow up like a summer storm, quick as lightning. I want to feel him the next day, and forever.
But he won’t let me. He sets the pace, brutally slow, surging into me with increasing force.
Pleasure surges, a white hot force burning through me. I convulse around him, and cry out as his cock continues to batter me.
Orgasms cascade through me, each greater than the last. They hit me from all sides and spin me sideways. The only constant is Logan, rocking over me, grinding against me.
When he finally comes, I hang on for dear life and hope this moment is real.
He collapses over me and I cling to him, not wanting him to shift his weight. He’s my rock, pinning me to earth. My knight who fought Death and won. Strange that winning feels as scary as losing.
I speak my worry before it chokes me. “It might not work again. I mean, we’ll have to run more tests.”
“Already started them.” He raises his head, and his certainty blows my doubts away. “But this is it, baby. We found the answer.”
And I know it’s true.
Logan
I look down at the beautiful woman lying in my arms and my mind starts spinning. I can’t believe we’ve found the answer after all these years. Now we just need to synthesize the production of our new drug.