by Aubrey Gross
Chase: That’ll work.
It was currently just after ten in the morning. Friday.
He picked up his range bag after pocketing his phone.
He hadn’t slept a damned bit last night. But hey, at least he now knew what he needed to do.
Yay.
Shaking his head to rid himself of maudlin thoughts—he really wasn’t a fan of the pity party that had been going on inside his mind this week—he walked outside, where Owen was waiting on the patio, gun case in hand and range bag slung over his shoulder.
“You okay?” Owen asked as they began to walk towards the shooting range that was set up on the other side of the barn.
Chase shrugged. “Not really. But it is what it is.”
They fell silent, caliche crunching under their feet and locusts rubbing their wings the only sounds for long moments.
“You know I’ll gladly give you a kidney, right?”
Owen’s statement caused Chase to stop in his tracks. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
Owen continued walking. “You didn’t ask me—I offered.”
“Still, though, I couldn’t—”
Owen stopped, turned around and walked back to where Chase was still standing. “Yes, you could. Don’t be a dick about it—you’re going to need a kidney, I have two that work great and only need one of them. That’s what friends do.”
Chase swallowed past the lump in his throat. “You don’t even know if we’re the same blood type.”
“Nope. Don’t care. I’m just saying, I would gladly give you a kidney, and you would do the same for me if you could. Now let’s go shoot some paper.”
~~*~~
“Chase wants to have dinner tonight,” Jo said as she sat down on the edge of Jenn’s bed. Instead of going to Gran’s last night they’d gone back to Jenn’s and indulged in Mudslides made with ice cream.
Jenn yawned and stretched. “So? That’s a good thing, considering y’all are together and all.”
Jo couldn’t fight the panic that somersaulted in her belly, though. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Jenn sat and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Okay. Why do you have a bad feeling?”
Jo shrugged and slid down on to the floor, her back against the mattress. She stared at the phone in her hands, the panic rolling through her. “I don’t know. I can’t quite explain it. But he’s basically ignored me all week, and then when he texted me a few minutes ago he was pretty short about it.”
Jenn slid off the bed and sat on the floor beside Jo. “I can see how that would make you nervous. But didn’t he also say he was going to spend a couple of days up at the ranch? Sounds to me like he’s coming home early because he wants to see you.”
“Or maybe he’s planning on breaking up with me and just wants to get it done and over with.”
“Way to think positive there, counselor.”
Jo sighed. “I know, I know. I just can’t shake the bad feeling.”
“Well, then, we need to make sure you change his mind if he’s planning on making the dumbest move in the history of the universe.”
“And how do we do that?” Jo turned her head and looked at Jenn, who waggled her eyebrows.
“We make sure he knows exactly what he would be missing.”
~~*~~
In the end, Jo opted for the cotton sundress and cowboy boots she’d worn on the night before the Fourth, when they’d made love for the first time. She figured it had worked once, so it would probably work again. Maybe.
Besides, it was casual enough that she didn’t come across as if she was trying too hard.
Even though she totally was.
Nervous, she wiped her palms on the skirt of the dress before letting herself into Chase’s house. Cool air and Winchester greeted her.
She scratched his head before heading towards the kitchen.
Chase was bent at the waist, removing something from the oven. She sniffed and realized it was pizza.
“Hey there,” she said once he’d set the hot pizza stone on top of the stove.
He turned around and smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. Panic rolled once again, and she fought to keep it at bay.
“Hey. How was your week?” he asked.
She set her purse down. “Okay. Gran’s doing really well. I missed you.”
He nodded, but didn’t say he’d missed her, too.
Oh, God, this really wasn’t looking very good.
“So, ah, let me just get the salad out of the fridge and slice the pizza,” he said before turning away from her.
He took salad and dressing from the fridge, set both items on the kitchen island where they’d made love to each other just a week ago one night while Matt was gone.
Had that seriously only been a week ago?
She watched as he sliced the pizza, and felt like her heart was being sliced right along with it. Tension tightened his jaw, and he was holding himself rigid.
Her eyes burned and she blinked away the tears that wanted to fall.
Winchester nosed her hand, and she absently buried it in his fur, finding at least a small amount of solace and comfort in the big dog’s presence. She wanted to sit on the floor, hold him to her and cry her eyes out.
But she couldn’t.
She wouldn’t.
Instead, she watched, as if in a trance, as Chase took plates out of the cabinet, forks out of the silverware drawer.
The smell of the pizza joined the panic in her stomach, making her nauseous. There was no way she was going to be able to eat.
In thick silence, Chase plated their food.
“Outside?”
Jo swallowed. “Sure.”
Out of habit she grabbed bottles of water for both of them, wishing she had something stronger.
They sat.
This is awful.
She wanted to cry, and she didn’t even know what it was she wanted to cry about.
They toyed with their food, neither of them even bothering to pretend to eat. Jo took a fortifying sip of water and finally said, “Okay, Chase, spill.”
He sighed before turning those warm brown eyes on her, their depths filled with so much uncertainty and confusion and pain she wanted to gather his head to her bosom and simply hold him.
“How much do you know about why I was sick as a kid?”
She wracked her brain, trying to remember everything she’d been told or overheard. “Not much, honestly. You never seemed to want to talk about it, so I tried to respect that. All I know is that you had a lot of surgeries and that it was something involving your kidneys.”
He nodded. “The very basic answer is that I had a type of reflux that caused urine to backup from my bladder into my ureters and kidneys. They didn’t know what was wrong at first, thought maybe I had some cysts or some sort of growth, thus the first six procedures. The doctors finally figured out what was wrong, and did the first reconstructive surgery. That one didn’t hold, so they had to do another one.”
“That had to have been horrific.”
“It was.” He took a deep breath. Exhaled. “The issue is that because it took so long to get a proper diagnosis, and then with the first surgery not working, the reflux caused some kidney scarring. We knew then that the scarring could cause some long-term health problems, but since I was young, otherwise healthy and active the doctors were all hopeful that I either wouldn’t have long-term issues, or that I could lead a normal life for a very long time before I did start having issues.”
She didn’t like the sound of where this was going.
Chase fiddled with his bottle of water, now unable to meet her eyes. “Not long after I finished college, I found out I was in Stage 2 Chronic Kidney Disease. I managed it with diet and exercise, and didn’t hit Stage 3 until about two years ago. For wh
atever reason, it’s been a fairly rapid decline since then.”
Jo swallowed, her thoughts pinging around her head. He’d been sick this entire time and she hadn’t known. How had she not known?
“Six months ago I was in Stage 3. When I went in for another check up with my nephrologist on Monday, he told me I’m in Stage 4.”
She blinked back tears. “So what does that mean?”
She knew nothing about Chronic Kidney Disease.
He couldn’t meet her gaze. “It means I’m getting sicker. I could throw a bunch of technical medical terms at you, but I won’t. Suffice it to say, my nephrologist thinks I’m probably a year away—at most—from needing a kidney transplant.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him, comfort him, but the wall he’d put up around himself let her know that her sympathy either wasn’t wanted or couldn’t be handled right now. There were so many thoughts flying through her head she didn’t even know where to begin.
Chase apparently took her silence as a signal to continue. “Obviously, I may not be able to get a kidney quickly—that would depend entirely on being able to find a live donor—which means I would have to go on dialysis while on the transplant list. Dialysis isn’t pretty. It isn’t easy. It’s kind of like what I imagine a circle of hell to be.”
“Circle of hell, huh?” Her attempt at levity fell pretty flat.
“You just sit there, hooked up to a machine for three or four or however many hours for three or four days a week. It wears you out, makes you tired. Yeah, there are other options like at-home dialysis or peritoneal dialysis, but neither of those are exactly a walk in the fucking park, either.”
She couldn’t not touch him anymore, so she placed a hand on his knee. He flinched.
“Let me help you, Chase. I don’t know anything about kidney disease or transplants or dialysis, but I love you and you don’t need to go through this alone.”
He finally looked her in the eye, and the anguish she saw there made Jo felt like she’d been punched in the heart.
“I can’t do that to you Jo.”
“Can’t do what to me?”
“Make you go through that. It’s not fair to you. You didn’t ask for this. You thought you were getting someone who was whole and healthy and who would grow old with you and give you babies. I’m not whole and healthy. I may not grow very old at all. And babies? There’s no one else I would want to be the mother of my children, but what caused this is genetic and I can’t take that chance. I can’t do that to you, or any children we might have in the future.”
Tears were slowly sliding down Chase’s cheeks. Jo reached out and wiped them away, sniffling against her own. “We can work all that out. If you get a transplant, you’ll live and I’ll get to have you for a long time, right?”
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Most kidney transplants last ten to fifteen years, some twenty. I could probably get another one in my fifties or sixties if I took care of the first one and did everything right, but after that…the boards that make those decisions tend to favor younger transplant recipients, and older patients don’t handle the surgery as well.”
“So I could still have you well into our seventies, maybe even eighties, right?” She couldn’t imagine spending her later years without him, not when everything in her cried that this was the man she was supposed to spend the rest of her life with.
“That’s not fair to you.”
“What isn’t fair to me, Chase? Because from where I’m sitting, this isn’t exactly fair to you, either.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t about me. I’ve known this was probably my reality since I was a teenager. I’ve had time to prepare for this, to adjust and to plan. I’ve tried so hard to not let anyone get too close, because I didn’t want to have to sit across from them one day and have this exact same conversation. Because it’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not. But life often isn’t fair.”
“I can’t put you through this.”
“You shouldn’t have to go through this alone. Let me help you.”
He pushed her hands away. “I can’t, Jo. You deserve…” he raked his hands through his hair, absently brushed the wetness off of his cheeks, “you deserve so much more than this, so much more than what I’ll be able to give you.”
She felt the tears falling from her eyes, the sting in her nose and the pressure in her chest as if from far away. She could feel her heart breaking, cracking in two at the clear anguish written all over Chase’s face.
I didn’t just find you again only to lose you again.
“I love you. So, so much. Words can’t express just how much I love you, Jo. But I can’t do this to you. So I’m asking you—no, I’m telling you—just walk away. Please, if you love me, just walk away, because as much as I don’t want to say good bye to you right now, I know that saying good bye thirty years down the road would hurt even more. At least right now you could love again, find someone else who is healthy and whole and who will grow old and gray beside you and who can give you children if you want them, because you deserve that.”
“I don’t understand this, Chase. I love you, and the only person I want is you. I want to love you for as much time as we have together—whether that’s one year or thirty years or God willing more than that. You’re asking me to give up on us—on you—and I can’t do that.”
“Please don’t make this harder than it already is. One day, you’ll thank me for this.”
“No, I won’t.”
You’re being stupid.
She wanted to say it out loud, but knew that now was not the time. Somehow, despite the despair and the breaking heart and the tears and the panic, she knew that now was not the time to tell him how incredibly, utterly stupid he was being.
He stood, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles were white. “Please, Jo. Just leave.”
She stood, too, slowly cupped his face in her hands. He tried to avoid her gaze. She wouldn’t let him, forcefully tilting his chin down and putting her nose tip to tip with his so that he had to look her in the eye. “I love you, Chase Ashley Roberts, and I’m not giving up.”
She kissed him then. Soft, the barest of brushes of lips against lips, their tears mingling together for brief moments before she pushed away, walked back inside his house, gathered her purse and walked out, leaving her heart at his feet.
~~*~~
Jo didn’t remember getting in her car.
She didn’t remember starting the ignition, or driving to Jenn’s.
She didn’t really remember walking up Jenn’s front walk and ringing the doorbell.
So when Jenn opened the door, Jo was a bit surprised to see her best friend standing there, a look of surprise on her face before Jo promptly burst into tears.
Jenn ushered her inside, closing the door behind her.
“Did you know?” Jo choked out.
A look of confusion passed over Jenn’s face.
“Know what?”
“That he’s sick?”
“Who’s sick?”
Jo felt like she was breaking into a million tiny pieces, and those pieces were slowly being scattered by the wind until soon there would be nothing left.
“Chase,” she choked out.
Jenn guided her to the couch, and Jo suddenly realized that they weren’t alone, that Matt was also there, sitting on one end of the couch, watching her warily, like she was a rabid raccoon about to attack.
She turned to Matt, pointed her finger at him. “You. You knew, didn’t you?”
Matt swallowed. Nodded.
Jo lunged for him, but before she could inflict any real damage he wrapped an arm around her, pinning her arms to her sides, and used his free hand to rub her back. In a soft, soothing voice she never would have expected from him, he said, “Just calm down, Jo. Breathe. That’s it. Breathe.”
All those millions of tiny pieces inside of her broke loose a little more, and Jo found herself burying her head on Matt’s chest, sobs wracking her body.
I’m getting snot all over the highest paid pitcher in MLB history.
Slowly, as if waking from a nightmare, the sobs quieted. She felt tired. So, so tired.
Jenn sat down beside her, and Matt kept rubbing her back.
“You’re kind of good at this whole comforting thing, y’know,” she mumbled against his chest.
Matt snorted. “It’s one of my secret talents.”
“I’m afraid I got snot all over your shirt.”
She felt him shrug. “That’s okay. I have plenty.”
She pulled back and looked. He was wearing a 2012 World Series t-shirt. The year the Wranglers won. “It’s your World Series t-shirt!”
He smiled at her. “Jo, it’s okay. I literally have a dozen of these. At least.”
Embarrassed, she grabbed a tissue out of the box on the coffee table so she could blow her nose. “I’m sorry I attacked you.”
“It’s no biggie. I have to admit, I was kind of impressed—I don’t think I’ve seen you that worked up since the time I stuck frogs in the back of y’all’s bathing suits.”
“Still, though, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s okay. So what got you so worked up to begin with?”
She looked from Matt to Jenn, for the first time realizing that she’d possibly walked in on something between the two of them. “Was I interrupting something?”
“Nope. We were just watching the game.”
The TV wasn’t on. Jo looked from it to Jenn, who at least had the decency to blush.
“We were about to watch the game. I just got here,” Matt said. Covering for Jenn, Jo was sure.
Whatever, though. As much as she wanted to solve the mystery of Matt and Jenn, Jo was too heartbroken and too shattered to care beyond some good-natured teasing. Defeated, her shoulders fell and she slumped into the couch cushions.
“So what did you mean, Chase is sick?” Jenn asked, worry in her voice.
Jo rolled her head and looked at her best friend. “So I take it you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
