by Alexa Land
“I’m sorry to make you give Bobo back,” he said embarrassedly. “That’s probably pretty cheesy.”
“Not at all. It was sweet of you to lend him to me. He was a good buddy while I was stuck in that place.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What did the drug do to you?” he asked.
“No idea, aside from making me puke my guts out.” I looked at Chance closely and picked up his hand. He looked paler than usual and his blue eyes were underscored with dark circles. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He absolutely refused to open up, no matter how much I prodded. I sighed quietly and pulled him into a hug. Trevor and Vincent arrived then, looking tan and happy after a vacation in southern California with their son, and Chance went around the table to visit with them.
I turned to Skye, who was seated on my left, and asked, “How’s postgraduate life treating you?”
“I miss Sutherlin, more than I thought I would. I really loved being a student. Not that I don’t also love volunteering at Zane, mind you. That’s a hell of a place you founded. You need to come by soon and take a look at what you started.”
“Oh, we will. So, what’s it like being a professional sculptor?”
He grinned at that. “I wouldn’t know. So far the only prospects I have are through friends. Christopher told me he’d feature a couple of my pieces in his gallery, assuming I make something small enough to fit in the door.”
“You made me that great tabletop sculpture for Christmas, you can totally do small-scale.” He’d rendered one of my murals, two boys running and holding hands, as a miniature three-dimensional figure.
“True. Also, Nana commissioned me to make a sculpture for her backyard. I don’t exactly work quickly, though. Those three things could take me the next year. Fortunately, my husband has money coming in from his dance classes, so I can just be a big leach and live off him.” He shot Dare a smile, and his husband leaned in and kissed his forehead.
“You’re not a total leach,” his brother River chimed in from across the table, his arm around his boyfriend’s shoulders. “You’re also helping Cole and me with our business.”
Skye nodded. “Oh yeah, that too. I have a pity job as a cater-waiter. It’s a damn good thing I have friends and family, or else I’d be taking the whole starving artist thing really literally.”
“No one’s starving on my watch!” River pushed a basket of garlic bread toward us and said, “Both of you, eat! Christian, didn’t they feed you in that place? You look thin enough to slip through the floorboards.”
Nana and Jessie burst in the door just then, both of them flushed and excited. Gianni trailed a couple steps behind them, looking more than a little irked. Nana rushed over to me and kissed my cheeks, then complained that I looked thin and practically force-fed me one of the slices of garlic bread. When they all sat down, Shea said to her, “Should we even ask what you’ve been up to, and was law enforcement involved?”
“They just jumped a guy on Market Street,” Gianni told us.
“What? Why?” Shea asked.
“He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘homosexuality is a sin’ so they pulled over and Nana got in his face. After a yelling match, she pulled the shirt right off him and dove back into the limo with it. Jessie sped away like they’d just robbed a bank,” Gianni said. “I swear, these two are going to end up in jail.”
“I’ve been to jail,” Nana said proudly, straightening the lapel of the demure blue suit she was wearing. “It’s not so bad. You meet some nice people.” She gave Shea a wink as she set her big handbag on the table in front of her.
“Okay, well, what if that asshole with the t-shirt had become violent? What then?” Gianni asked her.
Nana rolled her eyes, flipped open her handbag and pulled out a huge .44. “Bring it on, baby!” she yelled.
This was followed by a lot of chaos as Gianni and Shea both leapt up and tried to disarm her. Nana waved it around along with a laminated sheet of paper and told them, “It’s fine! I got a permit to carry concealed! See?”
Skye and I both burst out laughing and I leaned against him as I said, “God, I missed you guys.”
*****
When Shea and I got home that night, I pulled my phone from my pocket and realized I’d forgotten to charge it. He plugged it in for me and said as the screen came up, “You have a couple voicemails, want me to put them on speaker?”
“Sure. Thanks, baby,” I said as I started to change for bed.
The messages were both from Doctor Halpern, who sounded slightly more animated than usual. “I need you to come back to the office first thing in the morning,” he said. “We’re going to run some more tests.”
“Ugh, what now?” I grumbled, falling back onto the pillow. “Between Halpern and the final round of tests at the center, I’ve had so damn much done to me in the last couple days.”
“It could be important though,” Shea said, sitting beside me on the bed and brushing my hair back.
“I know. I’m planning to go, I just wanted to complain about it first.” I gave him a smile and pulled him into my arms.
“I’m so incredibly glad you’re back, Christian,” he murmured as he nuzzled my cheek.
“Me too. I missed you so much.”
He kissed the tip of my nose and asked, “Are you glad you participated in the study, though?”
“I am now that it’s over. I knew my tumor was fairly uncommon, but I found out I was the only person in the study group with that type. That made me feel like it was doubly important for me to be there.” I brushed my lips to his before asking, “So, what did you do to pass the time while you were staying in Palo Alto?”
“I got a two-month gym membership, I watched a lot of Netflix, and I drew. Mostly though, I just sat around missing you.”
“You were drawing?”
He nodded as his fingertips lightly brushed my bangs aside. “I really wasn’t up to going anywhere, so I just sat at my kitchen table and filled sketchpads.”
“What were you drawing?” I’d gathered one of his hands in both of mine and held it to my heart while his free hand tenderly traced the outlines of my face.
“I was working on ideas for a gay superhero. I was thinking maybe I could publish a comic book series independently someday.” I beamed at him delightedly and he said, “Don’t get too excited. It’s just a side project, no big deal.”
“It is a big deal. You’re going to do great with it.”
He grinned and said, “Thank you for always believing in me. I was used to people in my life always telling me what I couldn’t do. But not you.”
“They were all wrong. You can do anything you set your mind to.” I kissed the hand I was holding and said, “Hey, I was thinking. Do you want to go camping next week? I think we could both use some time in the fresh air, and you can bring your sketchbooks.” We’d gone for the first time in late spring, and when I saw how happy it made Shea, we’d gone back twice more.
“You want to?”
“Sure.”
His grin got wider. “It’s sweet that you humor me. I know it’s not your favorite thing.”
“My favorite thing is being with you.” I smiled at him and added, “Even if it does mean freezing my ass off in a tent.”
“It’s August now, your cute little ass is safe from freezing.” He slid a hand down my back and cupped it gently.
That was all it took to jump start my libido. I leaned in and kissed him deeply. Within minutes, we were both totally worked up, and he slid his cock into me. I sighed with relief.
*****
We went back to my doctor’s office the next morning as requested. The fact that he met us there on a Saturday and accompanied us to the imagining center was odd. I endured yet another MRI and when I asked him why we were doing it again, he said, “I need to verify an anomaly in the images tak
en yesterday.” That basically told me nothing, but he said it was ‘premature’ to say any more. He had me schedule an appointment for the following Tuesday.
*****
Tuesday morning, we were his very first appointment. He looked more excited than I would have thought possible, which is to say he was mildly excited. “Your tumor responded to the test medicine,” he told me. “I really didn’t expect such dramatic results.”
“Responded in a good way or a bad way?”
“It shrank approximately eight percent when compared to the images we obtained prior to the clinical trials.”
I leaned back in my chair and blinked at the doctor as I reached for Shea’s hand. “It shrank? That never happened before, not with any of the treatments we tried.”
“No, never. That’s a significant change in just two months. I really don’t want to raise false hope, but this to me is extremely promising.”
I took that in for a moment before saying, “But...the drug is still in testing. It won’t make it to market for years. By then it’ll be too late.”
“True. However, I’m on the advisory board for Sangene and was able to meet with the head of their research and development department yesterday. He’d already noted your results in the preliminary data from the clinical trial. You were the only participant with this type of tumor, and you showed the most improvement out of any of the test subjects.”
“So, what did he say?” Shea asked.
Halpern slid three grey plastic bottles toward us that had been sitting on the left side of his desk. “This is a six-month supply of the drug at twice the dosage you’d received in the study. Normally, the company wouldn’t be willing to alter protocol like this, but study participants in advanced stages with your particular type of tumor are extremely rare. I made the case that the data obtained from you could be extremely valuable, but if we waited until the Phase Three trials began officially we probably would lose you as a test subject.”
“Because I’d be dead by then,” I murmured and he nodded. “Is this legal? Won’t you get in trouble for giving me an unlicensed drug?”
“Sangene is allowed to file an addendum to their Phase Two testing protocols. They’re going to stipulate a longer testing period for subjects in advanced stages. Their lawyers will undoubtedly have you sign a fresh set of waivers, similar to the ones you signed at the start of the clinical trials, and I will of course remind you that there are potential risks associated with this. I also can’t guarantee that this will help, but at this point, I’d say it’s by far your best option.”
“If my tumor continues to respond to the drug, then what?”
“When you first came to me, surgery was already impossible because of the size of your tumor,” Halpern said. “It had sent branches deep into your brain by that point, to such an extent that attempts at extraction would have killed you. Those branches are responding to the drug and that’s promising. Best case scenario: if you continue to progress in a similar fashion, extraction might become a possibility. Keep in mind I said if. There are no guarantees, of course. But honestly, at this point we have nothing to lose.”
As we drove home from the doctor’s office that day, the three grey bottles lined up on my lap, I studied Shea’s profile and said, “I’m not sure what to think about any of this.”
He glanced at me and smiled before turning his attention back to the traffic. “I know you’ve always been afraid to get your hopes up, but this is exciting.”
“It’s possible nothing will come of this.”
“But what if it does?”
I rested my hand on top of his and said gently, “Won’t it hurt more if you get your hopes up and still end up losing me?”
“No. Losing you is utterly devastating no matter what precedes it, so I’m going to go ahead and get my hopes up for both of us.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
February.
It was hard to open my eyes, but someone was calling my name. I felt like I was swimming toward the sound of the voice—Shea’s voice—through murky water. Finally, I broke through the surface and managed to force my eyelids open.
“Hi sweetheart, welcome back.” My boyfriend was smiling. I blinked a few times and looked around me. We were in a hospital. Everything was pale yellow and way too brightly lit.
Doctor Halpern approached me. He was smiling, too. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen him do that before. “You’re still feeling the effects of the anesthesia,” he told me. “I’ll come back tomorrow and brief you when you’re more awake. For now, I just want to let you know the surgery was a success. I was able to do a clean extraction. We’ll still follow up with chemotherapy as a precaution to be certain nothing remains, but it’s looking extremely positive, Christian.”
I tried to process that. A couple nurses were moving around me. There was an IV stand, tubes, lots of machines...too much to take in.
After they left, Shea leaned over me and caressed my cheek. “Did you hear that? It was a success. He got the tumor.”
“What...what does that mean?” My voice sounded raspy and my mouth was so dry. Everything was still hazy, not quite in focus.
“It means you’re going to live.” Shea’s voice caught.
“I am?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
I wondered if I was dreaming.
*****
By the time Halpern came back the next day, I was propped up in bed and feeling a lot more lucid. Shea held my hand, his thumb gently caressing the back of it. My friends, mom and stepdad had left a little while ago, after deciding they were probably tiring me out. Shea had been checking in with my dad every couple hours, too.
Halpern answered Shea’s questions while I just took it all in. “There’s no way of knowing at this point if the damage that was done will be permanent,” the doctor said at one point. “Christian might regain some of his lost motor skills or he might not. We’ll have to wait and see.”
When Doctor Halpern left sometime later, Shea moved from his chair to perch on the edge of my bed and told me, “The human brain is capable of some pretty remarkable things, and I bet you’re going to regain much of what you lost. But even if you don’t, I’ll be right by your side to help, just like always.”
“You’ve been amazing throughout all of this,” I told him. “I’m so grateful for the way you put your entire life on hold and cared for me. It couldn’t have been easy for you.”
“I was happy to do it.”
“I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you. I wouldn’t have made it through those first few weeks of the clinical trials and found out what the drug could do for me if you hadn’t been there to support me.”
“Yes you would. You’re much stronger than you give yourself credit for, Christian.”
“I know I’m capable of dealing with a lot, but I also know I’m so much stronger with you at my side.”
He smiled and told me, “That’s right where I’ll be, always.”
“Ever since I was first diagnosed, almost four years ago now, I stopped thinking about the future. I just learned to live day by day. I never asked myself where I wanted to be in five years, or what I’d do when I finished school, or any of those things people normally think about. All of a sudden, my future’s been given back to me and I don’t know what to do with it, because I stopped asking those questions a long time ago.” I raised my hand, trailing the cords from an IV, and touched his cheek as I looked in his eyes. “There’s only one thing I know with absolute certainty. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I need you right there with me.”
“You have me, Christian, for as long as you want me.”
“I want you forever, Shea. Will you marry me?”
His face lit up with a breathtaking smile. “Of course I will.” As tears spilled down my cheeks, I pulled him to me and embraced my future.
The Beginning
###
Thank you for reading!
For more by Alexa Land, please visit
&nb
sp; http://alexalandwrites.blogspot.com/
Find me on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008216261875
And on Twitter @AlexaLandWrites
Books by Alexa Land Include:
Feral
The Tinder Chronicles
And the Firsts and Forever Series:
Way Off Plan
All In
In Pieces
Gathering Storm
Salvation
Skye Blue
Against the Wall
The Firsts and Forever Series will continue
as Christian and Shea get married,
Gianni finds the love of his life,
Chance seeks his happily ever after,
favorite characters are revisited,
and new characters join the Firsts & Forever family!
