by Leta Blake
“Leo, come on. That’s not fair. You played your part. I never wanted it to be like this. I just needed a little breathing room to do my work, to get my focus—”
Leo pushed at Curtis’s chest, yelling, “So, go! Go! That’s what you do best! Why would today be any different?” Leo got in Curtis’s face, spitting his words out slowly. “And after everything, why would I want it to be?”
“Leo—”
Leo shoved against Curtis again, and said, “You left us. You weren’t there. So just…go.” He moved back, shaking his head, his mouth trembling. “Go. I don’t want you here.”
Grant stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his chin down. He watched in blind rage as Leo clutched the doorframe to steady himself before retreating into his parents’ house.
Curtis called after him, “Leo!”
Grant blocked Curtis’s path to the door and narrowed his eyes. “Do you actually want to kill him? Because pushing him like that when his body is already breaking down is one good way to induce a heart attack.”
Curtis had the decency to look scared. But then Curtis was all about decency and the appearance of devotion. It undoubtedly played well in the celebrity rags. And yet when the going got tough, Curtis sold out.
“He doesn’t understand,” Curtis said, pitifully. “It’s not that I don’t want him. Or them. It’s that I needed time. Some space. That’s all.”
“And I care so little about what you need that I could not begin to express it. And as for Leo, it seems like he’s heard it all before. Is it any wonder, Mr. Banks, if he doesn’t believe you anymore?”
“Look, who are you to—”
“You know who I am to Leo. He told you to go.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Papa!” Lucky’s voice called out from the driveway, and Grant turned to see her running toward them, her dark hair streaming out behind her. “Papa! You’re here! I’ve missed you!”
Chuck walked down the driveway, a smile of greeting fading into an expression of concern when Leo stepped out from the doorway looking gray and tired. His skin was sweaty, and Grant wanted to check his pulse, but he didn’t want to scare Lucky.
Chuck said, “Hey, son, over lunch with me and Memaw Lucky remembered she left her Sammy Spider here, but when Memaw couldn’t get you on your cell, I offered to bring her over to grab it.”
“Yeah, I had my phone on silent,” Leo said, his eyes down and his shoulders hunched. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re here now.” He looked between Grant and Curtis, and then glanced at Leo again, his jaw setting in obvious annoyance. “I’ll just go in the house and grab it then?”
“Don’t bother,” Leo said. “I’ll get it. Thanks, Dad, for taking care of Lucky. I really appreciate it. But I think Curtis would like to spend some time with her now.”
Chuck nodded and patted Leo on the shoulder, jerked his chin Curtis’s way, and gave Grant what was probably supposed to be a reassuring expression.
“Thanks for bringing that check by for the housekeeper, son. I guess I’ll head on back into town and see if your mother can use any help in her office. Good to see you, Curtis. Grant. Love you, Lucky.” He looked back twice as he walked away, and it seemed to Grant like he had something more he wanted to say, but he held it back for now, whatever it was.
Lucky clutched Curtis’s neck in a massive hug. She grabbed his cheeks in excitement and said, “Papa, this is Dr. Grant! He’s so cool! He takes care of me sometimes when Daddy’s getting his treatment. He showed me this one room where we can see the operations and there was this man and his chest was open and I could see his beating heart! It was amazing, Papa! It was like, ba-boom, ba-boom, and so pretty!”
“Is that even legal?” Curtis asked, incredulous.
Leo ignored him and said, “Lucky, Papa is just here for a little visit while I’m in the hospital. He’s staying at a hotel. Do you want to go have ice cream with him? See a movie with him?”
Curtis glared at Leo before turning a sweeter expression on Lucky. “What do you say, Luckster? Ice cream with your old man?”
Lucky, to Grant’s surprise, seemed uncertain. She glanced between Leo, Grant, and Curtis, like she was trying to read their minds, and finally said, “Daddy’s sick. He needs me.”
“It’s okay, baby,” Leo said. “Go with Papa, all right? You’ll have a good time with him. Maybe you could spend the night with him in the hotel, and you could be with him tomorrow while I’m in the hospital. Would that make you feel better?”
Lucky’s eyes went straight to Grant, and she seemed torn. Her hands clenched in Curtis’s shirt, and she finally said, “Okay, Daddy, I’ll go with Papa.”
“Give me a kiss,” Leo said, reaching out for her. He clung to her for a long time, burying his face in her neck, and then handed her back to Curtis with his face down and his voice tight. “Have a good time. I’ll see you tomorrow night, or the next morning. Be good for Papa.”
Curtis looked like he wanted to say something else, but Lucky had scrambled down to the ground, taken hold of his hand and started dragging him away from the house. “Come on, Papa. I want ice cream. Chocolate chip! And maybe a cone, okay? A waffle cone!”
Only as she climbed into the rented BMW with Curtis did Grant realize she’d left Sammy Spider behind. He hoped she’d be okay without him.
• • •
Leo held Sammy Spider close to his chest and stared at his parents’ coffee table blankly. Grant sat next to him studying Leo’s chin for signs of wobbling and saw only a slow burn of ongoing anger. Occasionally, Leo would shake his head, as if trying to make himself accept something that he didn’t want to believe.
Finally, Leo spoke, “Can you believe him? Can you believe that he just showed up here? Like… like what? Like I’m supposed to be happy about that?”
“Yeah, well, from what you’ve said about him, that seems pretty typical,” Grant commented.
Leo ignored that, saying, “I really did not need to see him today. And Lucky! She was just getting used to the idea that he wasn’t around anymore. I mean, he calls her every few weeks; he’s been pretty good about that. Better than he used to be, and I shouldn’t have given him a hard time about it. But to show up like this? She’s going to be so confused again!”
Leo looked fragile, physically and emotionally. Grant sat up to rub his back, but Leo tossed his hand away.
“Don’t,” Leo said. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”
“Why would I feel sorry for you?” Grant asked. “He’s the idiot.”
Leo shook his head again and covered his mouth with his hand. His eyes tumbled with emotions, like light on stained glass.
Grant wished he could go find Curtis and slug him. From what Grant knew about the situation Curtis had basically been designed as the perfect foil to Leo’s self-esteem, effortlessly saying or doing just the thing that would take Leo down again and again.
Leo said, “It’s always been on his terms. Right from the beginning. It was never about me, or what was good for me. He never supported me in anything, not unless it was reluctantly, begrudgingly given, and I just thought that of course that’s what I deserved. That’s what I was worth, obviously, because that’s all I was worth to him, and I loved him.”
Grant said, “He never valued you.”
“Wow. Thanks for the ego boost.” Leo sank back in the sofa, his skin sweaty and his pallor poor.
“You’re welcome,” Grant said. His hands itched for his stethoscope; he wanted to have a listen to Leo’s heart.
Leo whispered, “Because it feels so good to know the man you devoted part of your life to, built a family with, never really thought you were worth a damn.”
“His loss.”
And it was a huge loss. Grant was acutely aware of that fact. The idea of Leo no longer being in his life cut Grant down the middle. So, yes, what Curtis had let slip through his hands was huge, vast even, but the thing was—if Curtis had never truly understood or
appreciated what he had in Leo to begin with, not even in the losing of him, then Grant could only sneer. Despite being an almost-superstar who appeared to have the world at his feet, Curtis was the biggest fool he’d ever met. And Grant had met a lot of fools.
Leo shook his head. “Yeah, well….” He lifted and dropped his hands in defeat.
“It’s his loss,” Grant said again. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Yeah, well, tell him that.” Leo laughed. “You know what? Don’t. He’s certainly not the best thing that ever happened to me. What do I care what he thinks?”
Grant risked putting his hand on Leo’s shoulder again, and this time Leo let it remain. “Beats the hell outta me.”
“And you really think so?” Leo asked.
“What?”
“You think I’m the best thing that ever happened to somebody?” Leo gazed at Grant with his clear, gray eyes, half teasing and half begging Grant to say the right thing.
“Oh, wait, I was wrong. You are an idiot.”
Leo rolled his eyes.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to about a dozen somebodies, and while I might be the only one lucky enough to know it, it doesn’t make it less true,” Grant said, rubbing his fingers gently over the soft fabric of Leo’s T-shirt. He would have liked to work out the tight muscles of Leo’s shoulders, but he didn’t want to release additional toxins. Leo’s kidney was working hard enough.
“Thought you didn’t believe in luck,” Leo whispered.
“Maybe I need to change my stance on that.”
Leo smiled, and he let himself fall over into Grant’s lap, twisting until his feet were hanging over the edge of the sofa’s arm and his head was cradled against Grant’s legs.
“I’m so in love with you,” Leo murmured, gazing up at Grant with a soft expression.
“I know,” Grant said, and ran his fingers through Leo’s hair.
Leo smiled sweetly and after a few minutes his breathing slowed down.
Grant pressed one palm to Leo’s chest to feel his heartbeat and when Leo relaxed enough to fall asleep, he pressed a kiss to Leo’s temple and rested his own head on the back of the sofa.
Chapter Sixteen
Present
Grant thought he was going to have to kill Leo’s mother if she didn’t shut up and listen.
“What are you saying, Doctor? Are you saying something went wrong?” Meryl asked.
Chuck held Meryl, his strong arms around her sturdy frame, and said, “Honey, shh, let’s hear what the doctor has to say before we panic.”
“Panic?” Meryl reacted to the word like it was a bomb. “Do we need to panic? Grant? Dr. McGraw? Dr. Muresan? Do we need to panic?”
Grant glanced to Muresan, and then back to Dennis, waiting for someone to tell them something about what the hell had happened in there, and what the prognosis was, and whether or not Grant needed to go find a loaded gun and put himself down, because he was not doing this without Leo. If there was no Leo at the end of this, he wanted none of it.
But then he looked down the hall and saw Lucky standing there holding the nurse Carrie’s hand, looking terrified and abandoned in the shuffle as the doctors had exited the ORs. She stared right at him, and as his eyes met hers, they bore into him with a deep, old wisdom that made him feel sick to his stomach. He stared back at her, torn between going to her side immediately to offer some kind of reassurance that he could never honestly offer and staying to hear what Muresan had to say about it all.
“Mrs. Garner,” Dr. Muresan started for the third time. “Please, your son will need you to be calm and—”
“Forget that,” Grant interrupted. “Skip the niceties. Tell me what the hell went wrong in there, because from what I saw, it was—
“Grant,” Dennis cut him off. “Let’s focus on the situation at hand.”
Muresan took that opportunity to actually talk, thank God, and said, “Leo is stable. He had an unusual reaction on the table, and we suspect that he’s contracted a CNS infection—”
“CNS? What’s that? Is it serious?” Meryl asked, clasping James’s hand that clutched her shoulder.
“Central Nervous System infection, and, yes, it is always serious. For someone on immunosuppressants it’s even more so. He suffered a seizure on the table, and his blood pressure dropped a great deal. We believe, however, that we can control this infection—”
“How did he get it?” Meryl asked.
“There’s always a risk with long-term immunosuppressant patients for the introduction of—”
“The anti-rejection drugs for his heart made him susceptible,” Grant interrupted. “He could have been infected at any point recently—introduction of foreign bodies into the AV fistula—”
“But Leo is fastidious,” Meryl said. “He always cleans that carefully.”
“I know,” Grant interrupted. “There’s no telling how it happened. It’s happened.”
Dr. Muresan turned to Dennis. “We’re getting Dr. Lynn Gregor in from Raleigh via helicopter. She’s an expert at these situations. In the meantime, we have all hands on deck for Leo.”
Dennis clapped Muresan on the arm. “Dr. Muresan, aside from the uncontrollable—good surgery.”
Grant clenched his teeth, glared at Muresan, and said nothing.
Chuck said to Dr. Muresan, “This Dr. Gregor—she’s the best?”
Grant noticed Carrie walking toward them with Lucky as Muresan said, “She is.”
Grant interrupted. “Time for brave faces, Chuck and Meryl, here she comes.”
Lucky clutched Sammy Spider in one arm and Carrie’s hand in the other. She didn’t take her eyes off Grant, not even when Chuck lifted her up, and Meryl told her that her daddy was out of the surgery and he was okay.
“Don’t lie to her,” Grant said. “She’s not stupid. You’re just scaring her more by lying to her.”
Lucky swallowed hard, and her lips started to tremble. Chuck cleared his throat and looked at Meryl, but then nodded toward Grant, agreeing with him.
“Lucky,” Grant said. “Leo had a problem, but we’ve got the best doctor in the entire world coming to help—”
“You’re the best doctor in the entire world,” Lucky whispered.
Grant’s throat went tight, and he had to clear it to say, “This lady’s better than me.”
“Don’t lie,” Lucky said.
“She’s better than me at dealing with CNS infections. She’s better at what your daddy has, and I couldn’t treat Leo anyway, even if I was the best.”
“Which you’re not,” Lucky said.
Grant swallowed. “Right. Not at this. She’s the best.”
“Like how Daddy is better at ping-pong, but you’re better at chess.”
“Exactly.”
“Will this doctor fix him?” Lucky sniffled against the top of Sammy Spider’s head. “Will he die?”
“No!” Grant said, so vehemently that everyone jumped a little. “Leo won’t die.” He said it like a promise.
Lucky stared at him, measuring Grant’s words, and she said, “Sometimes people tell lies by accident.”
Grant remembered when she’d told him something like that before and he said, “No. Not this time.”
He knew he couldn’t guarantee anything. He’d never made a promise like this before, but he couldn’t entertain the idea that what he said might not be true. He had to stay focused and make sure that Leo got the treatment that he needed, and that Lucky got her daddy back as soon as possible. There were no other options he was willing to consider.
Lucky nodded at him solemnly, as though they’d made a pact, and then she buried her head in Chuck’s neck and started to sob. Meryl comforted her, and Chuck stroked her back. Grant swallowed hard, and then turned on his heel, leaving them there with Dennis calling after him.
He headed directly to Recovery, because even though he knew Leo wouldn’t be waking up in an hour, wouldn’t be smiling up at him and asking for
that wonderful meal he’d planned, Grant still had to see him.
He had to look at him and know.
• • •
Two Months Ago
“She’s not in New York,” Leo said, drowsy from the sedative they’d given him for the more invasive tests. “At least not at the place where she used to be. Memaw said that no one in the…the hovel had any clue where Hannah might be. Hadn’t heard from her since before. Before…you know, before.”
It’d been a month since Hannah had bolted the night before the surgery. While Lucky had been eating ice cream with Curtis, and Leo had been sleeping on Grant’s lap, Hannah had signed herself out of the hospital, gone to God knows where, and didn’t seem to be hurrying back.
Conversations about Hannah always resulted in Leo losing his shit in some way or another, or trying to blame himself for Hannah’s behavior. Grant braced himself for it and sighed when it began almost immediately.
“I put too much pressure on her. She never should have felt ob—obli—obligated to give me a kidney,” Leo said. “If I hadn’t, she’d be here getting straight. Wait. She is straight. Getting… narrow. Getting good? What’s she getting, Grant?”
Grant didn’t say “drugs” and instead sat down next to Leo’s hospital bed and brushed Leo’s hair off his face. “Shh, you should be resting.”
“Sick of resting,” Leo said. “Wanna go home.”
“You and every other patient in this place,” Grant said.
“Tests are over. They should let me leave.”
“Not until the drugs wear off.”
“Yeah, I’m a menace to society,” Leo said loopily. “Menace? Menace. Why does that sound wrong?”
“Because you’re high.”
“Right!” Leo said. “You should use this opportunity to ask me inappropriate questions!”
Grant chuckled. “What do you suggest?”
Leo looked hilariously thoughtful as he considered. “How I keep my teeth so white? No, I know! Why I’m so darn attractive to you, even though I’m a mess?”
“Getting cocky, aren’t we?”
“Admit it. You’re kind of hot for me,” Leo tried to lean over, but Grant pushed him back against the bed. Leo took the opportunity to run his hand over Grant’s hair and breathe in Grant’s ear.
