Full Tilt Duet Box Set

by Emma Scott

  But a part of me—the part that leapt for joy that she might stay—wanted something more with this beautiful, energetic, impulsive woman. My world had been fading to gray until she burst in like a bombshell of color and light, and dammit, I wanted it. I wanted to keep her in my life, even if only as a friend. It had to be only as a friend, and even that felt selfish and wrong. But maybe, said this little voice, I could be honest with her and let her decide for herself.

  But not here. Not in my plain, little apartment. I had to take her somewhere beautiful, to show her what I was holding on to and why.

  “Are you up for a field trip?”

  She nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  I breathed a sigh but it gave me no relief. “Get dressed. I want to show you something.”

  On the drive to wherever Jonah was taking me, my mind concocted a hundred possibilities for what he was planning to tell me. Something big. Something that warranted this excursion. And judging by the haunted look in his eyes, it wasn’t something good.

  My heart clanged against my chest.

  Calm down. It might not be as bad as you think.

  Whatever it was, I was going to listen. To be there for him. When I told him I was thinking of staying in Vegas, a future was born between us. Maybe a romantic one or maybe not. Just…being together. A bond. We had an undeniable connection.

  Soon the Eiffel Tower loomed on our right. Across Las Vegas Boulevard, the Bellagio Hotel and Casino was illuminated majestically behind its lake. Jonah turned into the casino entrance and parked.

  “Another water show?” I asked.

  He gave a quick smile. “Not tonight.”

  The water was still and dark as we walked along it. No colored lights or dancing jets. Shivers ran up my bare arms, despite the heat. Beside me, Jonah looked handsome in jeans and a black T-shirt. The medical alert bracelet on his right wrist caught the glittering lights of the hotel.

  The Bellagio’s air-conditioned lobby made me shiver harder. A few people crisscrossed the marble floors or waited at the registration desks. The refined ding of an elevator echoed off marble. Beneath my feet, a gorgeous mosaic spread out in all directions, leading to a lush seating area with potted plants. Beyond that was the registration area with elegant arches in pale cream and gold. A coffered ceiling made me feel as if I’d stepped into a Roman palace.

  Then my gaze was drawn upward, to the centerpiece of the Bellagio lobby, and undoubtedly, the reason Jonah had brought me here. The ceiling’s beams flowed toward a masterpiece of light and glass. Hundreds upon hundreds of what looked like upside down umbrellas, rippling along the ceiling in riots of color.

  “Fiori di Como,” Jonah said, walking beside me. “Flowers of Como by Dale Chihuly.”

  “Your idol,” I murmured, staring at the magnificent bouquet of delicate glass flowers bursting from the ceiling.

  “Seventy feet long and thirty feet wide,” Jonah said, his voice low and reverential. “Over two thousand pieces.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, then looked to Jonah. “Your installation is better.”

  He smiled, but it was a smile laden with something beyond sadness. Something so deep and profound, I longed to turn back, to find an exit and run away from whatever it was he was going to tell me.

  “Dale Chihuly is a true master,” Jonah said. “A virtuoso. I could only hope to create something like he has. Something more than just a beautiful piece of glass.”

  “Like what?” I asked in a small voice.

  “A legacy,” Jonah replied. “Let’s sit for a minute.”

  He led me to the plush maroon couches directly under Chihuly’s blown glass. The couch was soft and invited me to slouch into its cushions, but I sat ramrod straight, bracing myself.

  Jonah leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and turning his medic alert bracelet around and around. I could see him measuring words and assembling sentences, working up the courage to tell me something that was going to change everything.

  “If you’re going to ask me to marry you, the answer is no,” I said. “We hardly know each other. I need at least three more cupcakes.”

  Jonah laughed lightly.

  “That’s not it?” I said, trying to lighten the moment but my voice wouldn’t play along. “Are you gay?”

  Jonah looked at me then, his dark eyes warm and soft. “Strike two,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, swallowing hard. My next and last question stuck in my throat. Once asked and answered, my life would never be the same. “Are you sick?”

  “Yes, Kacey.”

  “How sick?”

  “Terminally sick.”

  The words dropped into the space between us like a grenade ready to blow. My chest constricted as if I’d inhaled subzero air. I nodded vigorously, spastically, as I tried to both process and reject the news.

  “Okay,” I said. I raked my hands through my hair and kept them locked behind my neck. “Okay. Is it your heart?”

  “Yes,” Jonah said. “Chronic transplant rejection.”

  My brain raced through everything I had ever heard about organ rejection, which wasn’t much. “I thought that was something that happened immediately.”

  “Acute rejection sometimes happens right after surgery. They give you drugs for that to calm the immune system down, and usually they work.”

  “But you take all those drugs.”

  He nodded. “I do. But instead of an all-out protest, my immune system has been chipping away at the heart over time, rejecting it slowly, despite the meds.”

  My arms crept across my middle, clutching handfuls of my shirt and hugging myself tight. “How do you know that’s what’s happening? You don’t look sick.”

  “Heart transplant recipients have to have a biopsy every month to test for this sort of thing. At my third biopsy, eight months ago, they found evidence of atherosclerosis, and—”

  “What’s that?” I said, my voice harsh and accusing, as if he were making words up.

  “Hardening of the arteries,” he said. “The actual diagnosis is cardiac allograft vasculopathy. CAV. The immune system attacks the heart, leaves scar tissue. The scar tissue builds up and starts to wear down the heart until it eventually fails.”

  I hated the ceiling then. All that brilliant color and joy and beauty. A party raging over the horror and unfairness strangling me. I looked at the plain buff floor, trying to breathe.

  “How…?” Again, I had to swallow the hard lump lodged in my throat. “How long?”

  “Four months, at this point. Maybe more. Maybe less.”

  My own heart went into free-fall, and my skin went cold, head to toe as if I’d been doused in ice water. “Four months?”

  Four months.

  Sixteen weeks.

  One hundred and twenty days.

  Four months was nothing.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, the words squeezed out of my chest. I felt the tears wet on my face. Felt a drip slide under my jaw and start creeping down my neck. I was crying. I was breathing and pulsing and living.

  And Jonah was dying.

  He reached a hand as if he wanted to comfort me, but let it drop. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  A bark of laughter escaped me, echoing off the marble arches. “Why? Why are you apologizing to me? And why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “If you could see your face right now, you’d know why.”

  The tears were dripping off my chin then. I just stared at him, open-mouthed and tasting salt.

  “Fuck,” he said, smashing a fist on the arm of the couch. “I fucking hate doing this to people. I hate what it does to you, and what it does to me. It makes it so goddamn real, when I’m trying to keep my head down and get by. Get through. Make it to October with a finished installation and…” He gestured to the ceiling above. “This. A legacy. I just want to leave a part of me behind that means something.”

  “Your schedule…” I said, using a bit of my sleeve to wipe my face. “Now I get it. But
I don’t get why you pushed all your friends away. To spare them? Don’t you think they’d rather decide for themselves? Don’t you think they’d want to be with you…?”

  “I know they do,” he said. “I had to tell my mother what I just told you. I have to watch my family and friends count down the minutes whenever they’re with me. The pain in their eyes, the careful words, the hugs goodbye that last a little too long. I take it from Oscar and Dena and Tania, I take it from Theo and my parents… I take it from them because I have to. Anyone else… I can’t stand it. I have my circle and that’s it. I don’t want to tell people outside the circle. I don’t want them to have to find out. I don’t let anyone in…”

  “And yet,” I said, gulping air, getting a hold of myself. “Here I am.”

  “Here you are…” Jonah said, his eyes roaming my face. “Believe me, I didn’t want to let you in. But it was almost as if…”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “As if I didn’t have a choice,” Jonah said. “I tried to keep the circle closed and my walls up, keep to my routine…But you got in anyway.” He gently swiped a tear from my chin. “You feel it too, right?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Kace…” He shook his head, raked his hands through his hair, wrestling with himself. “I don’t want to put you through…what’s going to happen. That’s why I acted like such an asshole earlier tonight. I saw it unfold to the end, and I … I can’t do it to you.”

  We sat in silence. People came and went, passing our couch, oblivious to what was happening.

  “How do they know it’s four months?” I said. “How can they be that specific?”

  “They can tell. Although…”

  “Although what?” I said, grasping at the word like a drowning woman for a hunk of life raft.

  “I’m supposed to have a biopsy every month. So they can be even more specific. But I stopped going.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a fucking awful procedure and it lays me up for forty-eight hours. I have too much work to do at the shop to lose that kind of time. Secondly, I don’t need a biopsy to know. The symptoms will kick in.”

  “What symptoms?” I asked.

  “Fatigue and shortness of breath, mostly.” Jonah toyed with the medic alert bracelet. “I have those now, a little. I can’t run anymore, or hit the gym like I used to. But when I start to get tired doing little things, or find it hard to catch my breath for no reason, I’ll know. I don’t need to count down the days in the meantime.”

  A sliver of hope, a tiny flame in gale-force wind, came to life in my heart. “So… you don’t actually know. You have no idea how bad—or not bad—the cardio…the CAV thing is. Maybe it’s stopped. Maybe the drugs you take are working.”

  “Don’t…” he said.

  I barreled on. “You’re like Schrödinger’s cat. So long as you never get another biopsy, the lid on the box is closed. You could live a long time. Years, even. Happily in the dark.”

  He smiled a little. “Ignorance is bliss, right? But I don’t have false hope, and I don’t want you to either. I’m not in denial, but I’m not inviting in the cold hard light of day to torture myself. Can you see the difference?”

  I nodded, and he took my hand then. His fingers curled around mine and held on tight. His hand…Strong and solid. A burn scar on the pad of his thumb, a few nicks…but otherwise healthy. He has to be healthy…

  “I’ve tried to convince myself the doctors are wrong,” Jonah said. “But you can’t talk yourself out of the truth. I’m not without hope, but I’m realistic. They might be wrong. They probably aren’t. That’s my bottom line.”

  “But what if they are wrong? What if—?”

  He shook his head. “All I can do is live day to day… I take extra medications to try to slow the CAV down. I made my strict diet even stricter and I sleep in a recliner instead of a bed. Anything and everything to squeeze out a little more time to do my work and see that gallery opening.”

  I fought for another argument but I had nothing left. I exhaled roughly. “Can the record just show I got through this conversation without a drink or a cigarette?”

  He busted out laughing and our eyes met, a moment, a heartbeat, and then we were in each other’s arms, holding on tight.

  “Jonah…” I whispered against his neck.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t…I can’t…”

  He rocked me gently. “I know.”

  We stayed there a long time, until Jonah gave me a final squeeze and held me by the shoulders. “Let’s get back. It’s late. We’ll get some sleep and in the morning…”

  “Jimmy comes to take me to the airport,” I said. “What do I do then?”

  “You go with him. Talk to Lola. Decide to either stay with the band or work out how to quit if that’s what you need to do. You’ll find a way.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  I looked up at him sharply. “A little late for that, pal.”

  His smile was gentle and quiet, and his voice quavered as he spoke. “You’ll either keep in touch with me or you won’t. If you do, I’ll be here for you. And if you don’t, I’ll understand. I promise you I’ll understand. Okay?”

  I didn’t say okay. Not one bit of this was okay. My mind hadn’t wrapped around everything yet; I had more tears to cry but now my eyes felt drained and numb. We walked out of the Bellagio hand in hand, out from under the glass flowers; a garden that would never wilt or die.

  We went back to his place. Without discussion, I piled the pillows high on the bed so he could lay inclined, then I curled up next to him.

  I understood why he didn’t tell everyone his situation. Pain like this went beyond the realm of private or personal. It lived down deep, beneath everything superficial, and drew everyone who knew it down deep with it. It closed distances.

  We lay curled up in each other, and I laid my head against his chest.

  “Does this hurt?” I whispered.

  The rumble of his voice in my ear was drowsy. “No. I’m all right.”

  “Does anything hurt right now?”

  “No, Kacey.” Jonah stroked my hair, held me tighter. “Right now, nothing hurts.”

  He rose and fell with easy breathing. Beneath my ear, his heart beat strong and steady.

  A flicker of hope in me flared, determined to burn all night long.

  I looked out the window to see a black sedan roll into the parking lot of Jonah’s complex. Jimmy Ray got out, leaned against the fender and lit a cigarette.

  I turned to face Jonah at the kitchen counter. “He’s here,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I have to go,” I said, trying to muster strength for the decision that lay ahead. I’d gone to sleep last night floating on hopeful peace, and woke up feeling seasick. The impact of Jonah’s revelation descended like a storm howling through my head. Last night I thought I knew what to do. This morning, I didn’t know where I was and didn’t trust myself to be strong enough for anyone. The band, Jonah, or even myself.

  My only certainty was if I didn’t continue the tour while I tried to figure things out, the legal hammer would fall for breaking my contract, and I’d be left with no options at all.

  I turned from the window. “Let’s go.”

  Jonah touched my shoulder gently. “I’ll walk you out.”

  He carried my bags for me to the parking lot where Jimmy waited impatiently, the heat cloying and making him even more anxious than usual.

  I leaned close to Jonah. “I don’t want to say goodbye with him watching.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Need one more minute, Jimmy,” I called, my voice scratchy with the echo of tears.

  Jimmy checked his watch and mumbled something as Jonah set down my bags at the edge of the parking lot. We walked over to the small courtyard and I noticed he wore a light jacket even though the temperature must have been pushing 100°. He pulled a softba
ll-sized box from the pocket and held it out to me.

  “A going away present,” he said, a tremor at the edge of his voice.

  I took the box and opened it. The sun glinted off glass and tears blurred my eyes. It was the perfume bottle, finished and perfect. Elegant ribbons of violet and indigo swirled around its small, squat body. The neck opened in a flat circle and the stopper was a beautiful, clear marble. I held it up, letting the sun shine through the empty interior.

  Not empty, I thought. It holds Jonah’s breath.

  Afraid I would drop it, I put the bottle back in its box and held it tightly to me. I looked up at him. “I’m afraid,” I whispered. “I’m afraid if I go, I’m failing myself. If I stay, I fail the band. And you. You said hanging around hospitals wasn’t your ex-girlfriend’s thing. It’s not mine either. I’m so scared I’ll fail you if I stay.”

  His smile was so sweet and warm, but sad too. Yellow tinged with blue. “You can’t fail me. I don’t expect anything from you, Kacey. Only friendship, as much or as little as you want to give.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You will,” Jonah said. “Go to your room in your next house or hotel, away from the band. Shut the door and lock it, and in the quiet ask yourself what you really want to do. You, Kacey Dawson. What do you want for yourself? Don’t think about me or Lola or Jimmy or anyone else. Just you.”

  What I wanted. I thought I knew but could I come back here for it? Could I find the strength to stand on my own? And if I did, how fast would the four months go? Could I watch Jonah…?

  I shuddered, unwilling to even finish the thought, and the coward in me whispered I didn’t have the backbone for what I wanted.

  “Contracts are almost impossible to break,” I said. “I might be stuck no matter what.”

  “You might. But the right thing will always find a way.” He took a step closer. “Be safe, okay? Above all else, be safe.”

  I nodded and leaned against him. His arms went around me and I turned my face into his chest, inhaling deeply. I wanted to take some of Jonah with me, the part that kept me settled and calm and quiet.

  We walked back out to the parking lot where Jimmy was pacing in front of the sedan and tugging at his collar of his dress shirt in the heat.