At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3)

by Brenna Aubrey

  She straightened and looked at me for a long, tense moment.

  I shifted weight on my legs where I stood. “Are you—are you okay with that?”

  Her mouth thinned for a moment and she took a deep breath before releasing it.

  “You can’t just do that…”

  I froze. Damn it… I’d fucked up again. I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about it. I was trying to be—I wanted to save you the trouble of having to do that. I know how hard this is for you…or at least I’m trying to understand how hard it is.”

  She frowned and then bent to sit on the bed and didn’t say anything. Then she patted the spot next to her. Slowly I sat down beside her.

  She looked up at me, grim-faced. “We can’t keep doing this—making the same mistakes over and over again. I know you meant well. I know you were trying to help…but look at this from my point of view. It looks like you were jumping on the situation and making that appointment so quickly because you were afraid I would change my mind.”

  I swallowed. Maybe that thought had been in the back of my mind, too, but it wasn’t the reason I’d done it. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.” Then I took a deep breath and let it out. My throat tightened. “You can, you know…”

  She tilted her head to the side a question in her eyes.

  Fear made my heart feel like it was spearing my chest with every painful beat. “You can change your mind.”

  She blinked, looked away. “Either way I choose, there’s somebody’s gaze I won’t be able to meet—either all of yours or my own, in the mirror.”

  I needed for her to do this—we all did—and so, giving her that out was all I could do. And yes, I’d said those words because I’d had to—because I had no idea what it must feel like to be in her position.

  “You’re strong, Mia. You’ll get through this and I’ll be with you every step of the way, if you want me…”

  Her eyes remained drenched in misery, but a faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Her head sank to my shoulder. “Yes, I want you…”

  I closed my eyes, turned my head, smelled her hair, that peaches-and-vanilla scent which overwhelmed my senses. This rush of protectiveness washed over me, infusing every muscle. But no matter how much I vowed to watch over her, I was helpless to protect her from the greatest threat of all.

  We made plans for me to pick her up in the morning and I left. There was an awkward moment where I think she wanted me to kiss her goodbye. And I would have, but Heath tucked his head in at that moment to make sure Emilia was okay—or probably to make sure I wasn’t up to something with her, given the glare he gave me.

  The second oncologist we had seen had given me the information for a doctor who would see her immediately for the procedure, given the circumstances. His office was the one I’d called that afternoon. I’d also called the oncologist to set up the follow-up appointment for afterward.

  I was at Heath’s place again early the next morning. It was a cold, crisp day that promised moisture later on. A dark, dreary sort of day. Suitable, really, for what we were about to do.

  I hadn’t let myself become emotionally involved. I was in problem-solving mode. I had to be the strong one for her. It was my job—one that I took seriously. I only hoped she could do what I’d asked her to do—to put her burdens on my shoulders. I was ready to carry that weight. Emilia had once called it a baby—a child, our child. But I’d refused to think about it that way. Instead it was an obstacle to her becoming healthy, a possible threat to her life. I wouldn’t think about it otherwise.

  We said little on the way to the doctor’s office. She kept her pale face pointed downwards, staring at the clenched hands in her lap. I didn’t bother with small talk. She never looked up once and that was the first time that I began to wonder what kind of long-term effects this whole thing would have on her, beyond the cancer. Would it affect her will to fight it? I clenched my jaw. One step at a time. We’d tackle that problem later.

  I filled out paperwork when we got there, leaving blanks for her complete with information I didn’t know, like medical history. She underwent a quick examination to confirm the date of conception. Then the doctor handed her a small plastic cup with two pills inside and a glass of water.

  “You’ll come back for an exam and more medication in two days and a blood test in seven. Remember to follow the guidelines in the paperwork if there are any unusual symptoms.”

  Emilia gave a vague nod and took the water in one hand and the pills in the other. The doctor left the room and we were alone. She hadn’t looked at me or directly addressed me since getting to the office. Now, she stared at the pills like they were coiled rattlesnakes.

  “I can’t do this.”

  That same cold fear clutched at my throat. She was changing her mind. “Mia—”

  She wrinkled her brow, focusing on the pills, her hand beginning to shake. “I thought I could.”

  I gently put my hands on her shoulders and stooped to get on eye level with her. “Look at me.”

  But she didn’t. “August eighteenth. That’s the due date. I looked it up.” Her lip trembled.

  I moved my hands so that they were on her cheeks, holding her, trembling, in my hands. Finally her gaze met mine.

  The tears pooling in her beautiful eyes shredded my heart. Valiantly, she blinked them away and swallowed. I soothed her cheek with my thumb.

  “Adam…” she whispered. “I can’t…”

  My attention narrowed on her so that she was my entire focus, my entire world for those few critical moments. “You can. Mia, I need you—so much. Please.” My voice died out and I was incapable of saying a word with my throat closed up, clogged with fear and agony.

  She froze, her gaze dropping. Any color she’d had in her cheeks was long gone. She was so pale, in fact, that she looked like she might pass out.

  I swallowed. “Do you need a minute? I’ll step out…I’ll—I’ll do whatever you need. And—” I gulped air, suddenly feeling sick. “If you can’t…if you change your mind, I’ll be here for you for that, too.”

  Her eyes flew to mine—as if to ascertain whether or not I was serious. I was, but God—I prayed to any and all of them that she wouldn’t choose to carry to term. We stared into each other’s eyes. “You’d do that?” she choked out.

  “I want you in my life for as long as possible—one way or another. This is your choice. You know where I stand. But I can’t pressure you beyond telling you how much you mean to me. And I can’t even find the words to tell you that in any adequate way. But I’ll go and be right outside the door and give you a moment to figure this out.”

  “No,” she said, her voice half a shaky sob. “I need you to hold me. Please. Just hold me and don’t say anything.”

  I nodded, taking her in my arms. She turned so that her back was to me and I tucked her head under my chin, wrapping my arms around her waist. She felt thin, frail, breakable.

  “Tighter,” she whispered. The cure for all that ails me, she’d once said about my hugs. Now my words had no power. She knew what I wanted…but what I wanted meant nothing right now. I was lost, at her mercy.

  For long, silent moments, she was still, making no sound. She wasn’t weeping. She wasn’t shaking.

  Then after an agonizing string of minutes, she put the cup with the pills to her lips. She began to tremble and with a sob murmured quietly, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.”

  She jerked her head backwards, following up with the water and swallowed. Then she went limp in my arms. It really felt like she was coming undone. Every muscle shook. I buried my face in her hair and she was still. I wished, somehow, that there were a way I could transfer my own strength and health to her. For the battle she was about to face, she would need them. She’d need everything she could get.

  But first and foremost, she needed to heal from this. She needed not to blame herself. Even if it meant blaming me.

  She finally pushed away from me to go to the sink
and splash some water on her face. I noted that she still wasn’t crying—hadn’t shed a tear since telling me yesterday that she was going to go through with this. I didn’t know whether that was a good sign or bad.

  Bending over the sink like she might fall over, she looked sick. Then, she started to laugh—an ironic, wounded sound—like she was laughing and crying at the same time. “I’m sick as hell with morning sickness. But if I puke this up, it’s not going to work. How weird and ironic is that?”

  She put her face in her hands. I came up behind her. “You going to be okay?” It was a stupid question. Of course she wasn’t okay. On so many levels.

  Stiffening, she stepped away from the sink, away from me. “I’m fine,” she said in a flat, raspy voice. “Take me home, please.”

  My stomach dropped. “Sure. Can I—do you want me to stay with you?”

  She looked down. “I’m not going to be pleasant company.”

  “I’m here for you, not the other way around.”

  “But Heath—”

  “—will understand, I’m sure.” I scratched my jaw for a moment, studying her, wondering why she was being evasive now. Was she already starting to blame me?

  I drove her back to the apartment. The cramps were already starting and she was as pale as a stone. I walked her to her room and she lay down on the bed without my even having to ask her.

  “I’m going to run out and fill your pain med prescription and get some other things. Text me if you need anything. I’ll be back soon.”

  I got back an hour later and gave her the medicine, which she refused to take, telling me it wasn’t that bad. She was curled up on herself in bed, her forehead clammy, and even I could tell the pain was considerable.

  “Mia, please take your meds.”

  “I will, just not now. Please don’t pester me about it?”

  I pulled out my laptop and used my special log-in to give her special access to Dragon Epoch. It was the beta version of the completely new and unreleased expansion that wasn’t due out for months yet. She sat up, somewhat interested as I showed her some of the new features. She leaned on my arm, breathing heavily. I fought with the urge to try to get some pills down her again, wondering why she seemed averse to pain medicine when she’d had no qualms about injectable medication during her earlier cancer treatment. Eventually, she slid down on the bed, eyes half closed.

  “Adam,” she whispered. I tucked away the computer and turned to her. “Can you hold me for a little while?”

  “Of course,” I said, lying down beside her. She turned toward the wall and settled back against my chest. “Are you okay?” I asked quietly.

  She took a long time to respond. When finally she answered, her voice was groggy, on the edge of exhaustion. “I need to sleep. For a long, long time. When I wake up, it will all be over. Maybe I’ll wake up and this will all have been a nightmare.”

  I didn’t answer, felt her go slack in my arms. I wondered which parts of this last year she wished away. Did she regret us and the pain our messed-up relationship had brought into her life? She’d fought so hard not to be pulled into this. Maybe on some level, she’d known something that I didn’t. Maybe, once she was well again, she’d decide this wasn’t healthy for her.

  I pushed that nagging fear aside, reminded myself that I was here for her. I was the healthy one. I’d protect her until my last breath, if it came to that.

  Chapter Seven

  Mia

  My body felt like it was breaking in half and my heart along with it. For a week I only left my room to go to the bathroom. Heath brought me food and so did Adam. And I ate a little, because neither of them would leave me alone until I did. But I didn’t take the pain meds and Adam actually started an argument about it before I shut him down.

  After that, I would take a few of the pills out of the bottle and throw them away when he wasn’t there to see. But he wasn’t stupid. It was impossible for me to hide the pain and he knew I wouldn’t be like this if I had taken them.

  After our argument, I only got the deeply concerned looks when he thought I wouldn’t notice them. I wasn’t against medication at all. But for this… well… I couldn’t explain it fully. Something inside of me strongly compelled me to feel everything, the emotions of what was happening, the physical pain. I was afraid to be numb about it. So I felt it all.

  Because one thing I couldn’t afford was to fall into depression. That would defeat the purpose of why I was going through all this in the first place—depression would only inhibit me from surviving the cancer. And I had to survive, especially after this. I’d done this for everyone who loved me so, because of that, I wouldn’t give up.

  But Adam didn’t understand and I lacked the words to explain it to him. All I could feel, in his every stiff muscle when he visited, holding me in his arms when I asked him to, was worry, concern, and yeah, deep guilt. It made it hard for us to talk and, to be honest, I don’t think either of us could have even if we’d wanted to.

  On one of the days when Adam had to put in a few hours at work in the afternoon, and when I was feeling well enough to migrate to the couch and watch TV, Adam’s cousin William paid me a visit with a plastic box tucked under his arm.

  “Hello, Mia,” he said with a nod as he sat down on the chair, facing me where I reclined on the couch. His mannerisms were formal and stilted in social situations. I was used to his autistic quirks by now but sometimes I think they made Heath uneasy. I sat up, racking my brains trying to remember if I’d brushed my hair that morning. I ran a self-conscious hand over it, gathering it behind me into a makeshift ponytail. William hardly noticed.

  “How are you feeling?” he said, his eyes on the floor in front of him.

  William didn’t know about the pregnancy or specifically why I was feeling under the weather at this time. But Peter and my mom had told him about the cancer. They’d broken it gently but Mom had told me that he’d been very upset, suffering an anxiety attack. Peter had been able to calm him down but they’d all discussed it and decided it would be best if he didn’t visit me until he felt he could handle it.

  Apparently this was that day. So I was going to make extra sure to put him at his ease. While the thought of doing that should have exhausted me, it actually was comforting to know that I could step outside of my own misery and worry about someone else for a little while.

  “I’m doing just fine, William.”

  He nodded, bringing his eyes up to my chin before they drifted down again. He rubbed his hands across the front of his jeans and appeared out of things to talk about already.

  “How’s work?”

  He grunted and shrugged. “It’s okay. There is a lot to do. We have deadlines to meet for the new expansion.”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait until that comes out.”

  He frowned. “Well, unfortunately, you have to.”

  I smiled at his literal interpretation. I usually tried not to use figures of speech around William because they weren’t his forte.

  He rubbed his palms over his lap again a few times before bending to snatch up the box he’d set next to him when he’d come in. “I have something for you.” And he presented me with the box.

  I took it from him. “Oh, thank you.”

  It looked like a portable box for fishing tackle. I knew, because Heath had one like it, which was actually full of stuff he took on his camping trips. I gave William a fearful look and he said, “Do you want me to open it for you?”

  “Uh…no, that’s okay. You know I don’t fish, right?”

  William stared at me like I’d spoken to him in Martian. So instead of saying anything further, I opened the box. Inside, each tiny compartment that had been designed to hold fishing tackle items was instead filled with pieces of foam cut to fit each square. Resting in the middle of each piece of foam was a tiny pewter figurine—the figurines he loved to paint in his old room when he was visiting his dad’s house.

  I touched one, gently taking it out of its resting place
. “Oh, William…they are so gorgeous.” One dozen carefully painted figurines, all in different poses and portraying different types of characters. There was a jester and a knight in full plate armor, a scholar and a man holding a map and a sextant.

  “Those are the ones you’ve admired when you have visited.”

  I blinked, looking back at the box and noted that he was exactly right. These were the figurines that, in the past, I’d pulled off the shelf behind his worktable to take closer looks at them. Among hundreds of figurines that he’d had sitting there, he had remembered every single one I’d specifically admired.

  I took the figurines out of the box and arranged them on the coffee table in front of me. “I’m going to find a special place for these. So I can always see them. They must take forever to paint.”

  “Not forever. Or I’d never finish more than one. Depending on the figure, they take about six to nine hours to complete. First, I need to prime them with base paint, then I do the biggest amount of base color…”

  And he went on like this for about the next ten minutes, tirelessly explaining every step while I nodded and smiled and examined each figurine in turn.

  Heath brought him a beer at some point—maybe hoping that would break his monologue—but William didn’t quiet down until Adam arrived. And William grew visibly uncomfortable at the sight of his cousin.

  “Hey, Liam,” Adam said as he sank down on the couch beside me and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

  William gave Adam a cold nod. I raised my eyebrows and Adam frowned and pretended not to notice the brush-off.

  William looked at his watch and then, with dismay, at his nearly finished bottle of beer. “I need to wait another forty-five minutes or so to metabolize the beer before I can drive home.”

  “I think you’re probably good, William,” Heath said. “You’re tall and it’s just one—”

  But Adam cut him off with a hand gesture. “Yeah, best to drop it, Heath, and just let him stay. There’s no point in arguing it.”

  Heath got up to answer a text message and I reached out and took Adam’s hand. William watched with interest, so I held our hands up and smiled. “See, William? All’s good with us. You don’t need to be mad at Adam anymore, okay?”