Quietly I sigh, glancing over at Becks to make sure he’s still asleep. I’ve already lost it once tonight with him, so this is the last thing I need him to see. He’s a patient man, but I think he just might give me the balcony exit if I lose it again.

As my shoulders sag, I tell myself one more time. I’ll examine myself one more time and then be done with it for the early-morning hours. I raise my hand and go through the motions, a slight sense of ease settling over me, when I just about stop and I feel it.

I freeze.

My fingers stop moving, the tissue still pinched between them. My eyes widen. My shaky inhale of breath fills the silence of the room.

My body stops, but my mind races as my whole world comes crashing down around me. I raise a trembling hand to stifle the choked sob that never comes. My eyes blur as I shake my head back and forth in shock, images of Lexi colliding against one another in my mind.

Time passes as I sit paralyzed with fear, numb with disbelief, and void of emotion.

Becks shifts in bed, and the movement jolts me to the here and now. I tell myself the lump is tiny, could be fibrous tissue, for all I know, but I don’t believe my own lies. I know it’s something more because I’ve made it a point to know my breasts in and out over the past year. I try to hold on, but I feel like my thoughts are slipping away from me as a false, eerie calm begins to settle over my body.

My hands shake and my mind tries to process but just keeps coming up empty. I won’t allow it to go where my biggest fears lies, so I focus instead on right now. On the man beside me. On how I just opened up my heart, invited him in, and told him we are, and then look what happened.

I rise from the bed without thinking of collateral damage or the fallout. Of Becks lying in bed asleep and what to say to him because there is nothing I can say but sorry—and sorry doesn’t cut shit right now. Sorry doesn’t ease the overwhelming sense of disbelief that has struck me. The overused word doesn’t ease the sting of loss, of watching your loved one die, or of leaving someone so they don’t have to go through it and suffer with you.

I keep my eyes averted from him as I pull my clothes on and dress quietly on autopilot, focusing on zippers and buttons, habitual actions. I have to physically think to do each thing, perform each routine movement because when I don’t, I find that I just stand there and stare out the window to the world outside.

Carrying on like everything is fine when it’s clearly not.

Once I’m fully dressed, shoes in my hand so I don’t wake him up with their sound on the floor, my feet are still rooted in place. My chest physically hurts, and my head is pounding. My eyes burn, and my heart feels like it’s being twisted, acid eating holes through the muscle at a menacing pace.

I glance over to Becks and stare at him through the light of the night from beyond the windows. There are so many things I want to say to him, but all I keep thinking is how I jinxed everything. Tonight I went against everything I had promised myself, and look how fate came with a cruel backhand to put me in my proper place.

I should be used to it. Expect it. Right when everything was okay with Rylee and Colton from their hospital stints—just when my closest friend in the whole world was looking toward happily ever after, my sister was staring down a loaded shotgun.

These memories flicker and then flood me—accompanying her to mammograms, then her double mastectomy, brushing her hair as clumps fell out, her fighting the fight and exhausting all resources—until I feel like I’m suffocating, reaffirming the fact that I can’t do this to Becks. A raw sadness marries with the grief I carry, and I tell him the empty words that I hate more than any others. “I’m sorry.”

The words feel like a noose closing over my neck.

I turn from the room and pad in my bare feet out to the family room, where I realize I don’t have my purse or my keys. I spot his wallet on the coffee table where he left it open when he pulled the condom out earlier and add injury to insult when I pull on the twenty-dollar bill partially exposed from it. I hate doing this, but I don’t have any other option. Just another reason for him to hate me even more. For him to validate his earlier accusation that I’m a coward.

Because if I didn’t acknowledge it before, doing this makes it pretty clear as fucking day that I am.

But I don’t know what else to do right now. I’ll pay him back. I look over my shoulder through the open doorway to where he sleeps peacefully, and then I walk to the front door and slip out to the streets below to hail a cab.

The guilt is heavy and oppressive, dropping through my soul and occupying my thoughts just as handily as the fear sitting in its worn recliner, where the feeling has made itself comfortable over the past six months. All I keep thinking is, he doesn’t deserve this.

Hell, neither do I.



Chapter 15

The room is cold, and the worn pad on the hospital’s gurney beneath me is anything but comfortable. Hell, if it were a mattress from the Ritz, I wouldn’t think it’s comfortable because I swear to God these cold, clinical walls of the outpatient procedure room suction every ounce of life from me with each passing moment.

The valium I’ve taken slowly kicks in as the nurse makes casual comments here and there, nothing I need to answer—just innocent conversation to fill the silence and pass time. She hums softly to herself now as she lays instruments on the tray beside me with a sterile clink. I can hear my phone buzzing in my purse, which is sitting under the chair across the room, and I swallow over the lump in my throat, hoping it’s not Becks. Again.

It’s amazing how many times someone can try to contact you in a seventy-two-hour period.

His first round of texts started at seven a.m. the morning I left; his messages reflected concern at first and then slowly morphed to frustrated anger the longer I ignored him. My lone response after the first hour passed was lame but honest all at the same time. I’m sorry. I thought I could do this, but I can’t was all my text said, and it did nothing to stop the barrage of his replies. And each alert, each ding, was like adding salt to my open wound because lying to someone else is one thing, but lying to yourself is impossible.

So I’ve turned my anger at myself onto him, blaming him for making me want something I can’t have right now. I’ll let it manifest into annoyance from his persistence and then irritation so I can pass the phone without wanting to pick it up to see if he has or hasn’t texted.

And I’m not even sure which one of those I want more: to be ignored or to be pursued.

The hum of the phone vibrating pulls me from my thoughts, and I giggle. I know it’s inappropriate for the situation, but the soft edges the valium gives me makes me feel warm and fuzzy that he’s calling me again. But I don’t want to giggle. I want to be angry with him for continuing to call and text me. I’m selfish, damn it. Can’t he see that? I snuck out in the middle of the night without so much as a See you later, Charlie Brown…. The giggles take over again at the thought of Snoopy and Charlie.

A momentary peace settles over me, and I definitely want some more of this shit they gave me. It’s more than just the valium, but whatever they put in that shot to relax me some … it’s nice. Like riding-on-a-cloud nice. Like “sinking into the mattress with Becks’s weight on top of me” nice.

Stop it. My voice is loud in my head, chastising me for the temptation of what I can’t have, what I refuse to let myself have. And it’s more than just his mighty fine dick. I snort out the laugh this time, which causes the nurse to look over at me and ask me if I’m having a good time by myself on the gurney. I just nod my head like a little kid and think, Well, it’s true.

And then the thought of him and his mighty fine dick rushes in with a surge of guilt like a buzz kill on my inappropriately giddy high. I wish he’d just be so angry at me that he stops calling and texting. It would make this all so much easier on me. Because if he’s mad, then it makes it easier to justify being a bitch to him like I’m being by ignoring him.

I thought that after he woke and realized I wasn’t going to answer his calls, he’d get the hint. I was proven wrong when the pounding on my front door commenced five texts later. Luckily, Dante was gone, or else I have a feeling I wouldn’t have been able to pretend I was not home. But fuck, wouldn’t that have been kind of hot if they’d fought over me? I giggle again as images flicker of bad boy versus good guy, and I think Orgasm-Inducing Becks just might be able to take Delectable Dante.

My eyes drift closed momentarily as the wonderful world of pharmaceuticals allows me to remember sex with Becks in 3-D fashion. Thank God, my nurse and my doctor are females because now I’m horny and have an easy-access hospital gown on.

Horny Haddie in the procedures room for all available hot male doctors, STAT.

I laugh at the thought, the drugs pulling me under their haze until my phone chirps, and pulls me from loopyville.

Oh, Beckster boy. He deserves an explanation. Thank God, Rylee is still out of range of cell service, or I’m sure he’d have called her. But what exactly is there to say to him? It’s not like I can give him a blow job as a parting gift, The Price Is Right style. “Next item up for bid is a blow job by Horny Haddie. Will Beckett Daniels come on down?” This time I slap my hand over my mouth because I laugh so hard and my head is so dizzy that I know the nurse must think I’m bat-shit crazy.

Well, she would be partially right because I kind of am. Especially now. Specifically for walking away from him, the quintessential good guy.

It’s not like I can answer my phone right now and say, Thanks for the quick fuck that was, like, porn star good and the shoulder to cry on like Oprah’s. It’s a little more than three days later, and I’ve already had my tit smashed flat as a pancake, then lubed up with gel and pushed around with the ultrasound. I mean, at least if I’m gonna get felt up, the technician could pinch my nipples or something, give me a cheap thrill. I snort again and can’t stop laughing because that was pretty funny. Even drugged I know that.

Oh. Maybe I can get them to give some of this shit to my mom, who’s wearing grooves in the hallway outside so that she can relax a bit because she’s telling me everything is going to be fine, but she played with her charm on her damn necklace when she said it. That means she’s lying.

Girls, Rover dug a hole under the fence and ran away, but I’m sure he found a nice new home to take him in and love him. Played with her necklace as Lex and I cried buckets of tears.

Haddie and Lexi, I’m sick. It’s nothing major, just something the doctors call cancer, but I’ll be completely fine. Playing with her necklace the whole time. Two relapses, twenty-three total rounds of chemotherapy, fifteen sessions of radiation, and a chestful of scars that make Frankenstein’s monster’s stitches look like scratches.

Haddie, Lexi’s going to beat this cancer, and we’ll all laugh about it later. Playing with her damn necklace. But she played with it at Lex’s funeral too. That meant she was hoping it was a lie, and well, fuck, it wasn’t.

Same necklace but different charm over time.

And I got the necklace act today. The bad track record of that stupid chain makes me want to rip it off and chuck it as far as I can so that I never have to see it again. Especially around me.

Wait. Maybe I need the necklace when I talk to Becks. Maybe he’ll catch on if I play with it when I tell him thanks for the good time, the two hours you allowed me to be a we are, before fate stepped in and put me in my place. Reminded me why I’d made promises to myself about not getting involved with anyone.

The door whooshes open and pulls me from my thoughts. “You ready, Haddie?” Dr. Blakely walks in with a relaxed smile on her face, and I want to tell her it’s okay to be worried because I sure as fuck am.

“Hearts and heels.” I exhale, thinking of Maddie girl. I want to ask the doctor something but I don’t remember what … oh, about giving me some of this on the take-out menu plan so I can have some of the special sauce when I need it to feel better.

A strained smile is on my lips as she snaps on her rubber gloves. “Did that valium help take the edge off?” she asks, causing me to snort out a sarcastic laugh as I nod.