The Heroic Surgeon

by Olivia Gates

  He buried his face in her neck, in her hair, his voice dark, ragged. “Tell me you didn’t mean it, amore. Tell me it was just something you said in the throes of satisfaction.”

  Suddenly she was angry. She tore at his arms and turned on him. “Why? So you’d feel better? I told you it has nothing to do with you. I shouldn’t have told you, I’m so sorry I have, but I’m not going to lie now and say it isn’t real. I know I’m not entitled to anything, but I’m entitled to my emotions.” She thumped her chest, hard, to knock back the heart that was struggling to erupt from her chest.

  Then she was suddenly scared. She needed more time with him. She had to reassure him, convince him that nothing would change. “I won’t impose my emotions on you in any way, Dante, believe me. I’ve loved you from our first day, but did I burden you with my emotions? I’m sure I didn’t. I have no expectations, Dante. None. We’ll go on as before, I’ll continue to be your lov—y-your…your sex partner and when you decide to leave I will still lie in bed and I won’t say a word to ask you to stay.”

  “You wanted to ask me to stay then…?”

  “Yes! But I didn’t, and I won’t. You’re free, Dante. No strings. It is my pledge, too.”

  He stood there before her, naked and precious, the substance of her soul and her despair. His hoarse groan was the very sound of desperation too. “But I don’t want you to love me!”

  She’d known that. But hearing him say it, and this way…Her own anguish bled out of her, black and wet and corroding. “What is this? What’s with you? What are you afraid of? That I’ll pursue you or make demands or scandals? I don’t even know where you come from. I don’t know if this is even your real name, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything. I have no use for anything. I will live here and I will die here and you won’t hear from me or see me again after you leave. I wanted the remaining time with you, but if you find the idea of me as a person with emotions, and not just your temporary nymphomaniac, so disturbing, so repulsive, then I’ll leave. Right now.”

  She could no longer see anything through the tears. But she could hear. Nothing. No answer. No telling her she was wrong, or to stay, for now, to continue their two months. Oh, hell. He probably thought worse of her than anything she’d ever tortured herself with. Blind, she turned to gather her meager belongings, stumbled and fell flat on her face on the ground.

  “Gulnar!” His shout broke over her, his hands snatched her up.

  She struggled with all her strength, knocked his hands off her. “You don’t want me to love you, fine! I hate you! Are you satisfied? I hate you because in a minute, with just one look, with one sentence you degraded me, made me feel more worthless—dirtier than even those who killed my folks and kept me alive to play with.” A hysterical cackle ripped out of her at his panting, horror-struck expression. “Don’t worry, Dr. Guerriero, I’m clean, if you’re thinking in belated horror about all the unprotected sex we had. I’m also using birth control. You won’t one day find a baby being pushed on you in your private clinic back in the States, a memento of your time here.”

  Something erupted from him. It wasn’t a sound. Just a terrible, devastating shock wave. It drove her to her knees. She rummaged after the articles she’d dropped, her hands useless. She was openly weeping now. “I know my place—my worth. I know m-my use. And I know I’ve…outlived it. I just hope you had some…fun. You’ll have…no trouble finding a replacement for…the remainder of the two months. Women like me—desperate bodies to slake your lust in—are a dime a dozen in refugee camps. I wouldn’t pick Helena, though. I think this is one…for fatal attraction scenarios.”

  Something huge and heavy landed just inches from her body. She wiped her eyes in fright and saw him. He’d fallen to his knees before her. And his face! Distorted beyond recognition, and—Oh, God, he was weeping, too!

  All her agony was thrust aside, making way for his. She surged up, threw her arms around him, contained him in a quaking embrace. “Dante, no, don’t—don’t, darling. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just a self-pitying fool and I didn’t mean it. I’ll never, never, never hate you. I’ll love you till my last breath but I’ll leave you alone, I won’t give you any trouble. And don’t feel bad about me, darling. You’ll forget me soon, so just forget me now…”

  He roared, harsh sobs shaking him and her around him. “Stop, stop, stop! Stop it, Gulnar, stop it. Oh, God, what did I do to make you feel this way? That’s how you think I think? That my mind and soul are infested with all this ugliness? This narcissism and cruelty and exploitation?”

  Her arms squeezed him tighter, pressing his face into her bosom, quailing. “No, no. It’s me, it was my scars, my hang-ups talking, darling. I know you’re the most noble human being, the most self-sacrificing. I didn’t know someone like you could exist. It isn’t your fault that you don’t love me and I am not fit to love you. You deserve someone whole and healthy in mind and psyche, and I’m—”

  “Shut up, Gulnar,” he thundered. “Shut up! Are you totally insane? This is how you think of yourself? Can’t you see what you are? You’re everything that’s worthwhile. Everything that’s right and pure and human. Nothing is enough to do you justice. You’re all that matters. You think I don’t want you to love me—for me? I can’t let you love me, for you. So you won’t be hurt when I am no longer there…”

  She smoothed her hands down his cheeks, every tear she wiped away scorching away her skin, abrading one more layer off her shredded heart. “But I can’t stop loving you. I thought I loved Evraim. I thought when he died that I couldn’t risk loving again. But it took loving you to show me I knew nothing about love, that I can and will love, no matter what the risk. I will love you as long as I live because you’re why I’m alive. I accept that you’ll go, I won’t ask for anything…”

  “You will have everything I have to give. You already do. I just can’t give you me. That is why I want you to stop, take back the heart you gave me, protect it.”

  “I don’t understand. I told you I accept you’ll leave—”

  “I won’t leave. I’ll die!”

  Dante watched the effect of his words slashing across Gulnar’s face and wished he’d never met her. Never loved her. She’d conquered war, she’d survived displacement and abuse, she’d outlived all her loved ones. Until he’d loved her. And destroyed her.

  Her tears were now a steady stream. Were they changing color? Would they become the blood streaming out of his heart? He growled at the morbid thoughts, tried to disentangle himself from her clutching arms. This time they fell away, nerveless, powerless.

  The sound that came out of her wasn’t her voice. “What do you mean, you’ll die?”

  May as well tell her. She’d suffer for a while, then hope would die and she’d regain her will to live, separate from him. “I have cancer. Testicular. Third stage.”

  Her tears turned off. His did, too. This moment went beyond tears.

  He was letting her down. Like everyone in her life who’d failed to protect her, and themselves.

  He didn’t know how long she sat there staring at him, her face frozen, breathless, pulseless, like him. Then she spoke, thick and slurred. “Cancer is treatable now.”

  He got off his knees, slumped against the tent wall. He was still naked, and he suddenly couldn’t bear her eyes on him. Now she knew. He dragged the sheet over his lap. “I’ve had treatments. Six years ago, when I first discovered it.”

  Her sudden movement startled him. She surged from her kneeling position, erupted to her feet, came looming over him. “Will you tell me everything, or do I have to keep dragging it out of you?”

  A goddess. This was what one had to look like. Standing there in only her unbuttoned khaki shirt, her beloved, lush body bathed in peach and agitation. He wanted to drag her on top of him, remove the sheet and bury himself in her. This was where he wanted it all to end. But he wouldn’t do that to her.

  “Sit down. It’s a long story.” He waited until she knelt in
front of him again and looked her straight in the eye. “I once had it all—what society advertises as ‘all’ anyway. A rocketing career, a lot of money, accumulating offers, endless opportunities. And I had youth—and health, too. A surplus of it. I was thirty-five and was still competing in short-distance swimming championships—and winning.” He saw realization in her eyes as they roved the expanse of his swimmer’s shoulders and torso. He hadn’t known what they’d been for until she’d rested her head there, pressed herself to his heart.

  He ran agitated hands over them now, trying to put out the fire trails her gaze left behind. “I had patients flying me from all over the globe to perform the reconstructive surgery only I can perform. I had houses and estates in every country that took my fancy. I had an obscenely well-paid staff of twelve to organize my days for me. I had a glamorous wife who ornamented my bed, my many houses and public appearances. I had a mother who doted on me and four half-brothers and half-sisters who adored me. Then I felt a lump in my testis.”

  Gulnar’s face settled into the neutral mask she’d presented him with during her daily visits in hospital. Was she withdrawing? No, no—but, yes, for her sake, let her drift away, let the illusion of loving him fade. He didn’t matter.

  “My wife was scared witless, said she’d never noticed anything. Probably because we haven’t been making love for over a month at a time, and when we did, she didn’t do much…exploration.”

  That got a response from Gulnar. She bit down on her lower lip—hard. Did she hate the idea of another woman’s hands on him, even in the past, even when he was telling her how disappointing it had been? Only fair. He felt like killing anyone who’d ever touched her, without—or with—her consent. He exhaled the wave of blinding aggression, continued. “I went in for tests and, yes, I had a tumor, and it had already metastasized, everywhere.”

  An intake of trembling air was her only response. He went on. “Lungs, liver, bones. Before debating treatment options I had to have the radical inguinal orchidectomy to remove the testis and the abdominal lymph nodes and find out what kind of cancer I had.” He could read what leapt into her mind. She’d had her hands all over him there, fondling, her lips suckling, and now her eyes followed, remembering…How ridiculous was it to get aroused while talking about the most emasculating experience a man could have?

  He shook his head. “Phil, my friend and urosurgeon, unasked, decided to substitute what he removed with an artificial implant. Didn’t want me to suffer body image problems. Didn’t want my young, passionate wife to miss out on the feel of an even pair. Not that he thought such trivial things would rock our stable marriage.” He huffed in sarcasm. “He also advised me for the sake of our future family to consider sperm cryopreservation, since permanent sterility was one of the possible outcomes of treatment.”

  Her lids lowered, then squeezed. Now she knew he hadn’t been a careless, selfish bastard, making love to her without protection. “The tumor was a nonseminoma, the worst prognosis type at stage three. Everyone advised me to go all out with high-dose systemic chemotherapy, radiation and autologous bone-marrow transplantation. They removed bone marrow before chemotherapy, treated it with chemotherapeutic agents then froze it. After the chemotherapy infusions destroyed what remained of my bone marrow, they re-injected it into me.

  “I had an almost fatal infection and after they resuscitated and stabilized me, they kept trying to vary the agents, the combinations, the dosages. Nothing seemed to be hitting me any less and the metastases were resistant. I went from two hundred and twenty pounds to one hundred and fifty in three months. I looked like a corpse and had the energy of one. I had originally decided to have my chemotherapy on an outpatient basis, but I was soon hospitalized. For six months. Until no metastases could be detected. During that time, I didn’t want anyone to see me. I told my wife and family to just phone me.”

  The memory of those days made him restless. Not memories of the degradation of disease and incapacity, not the dread of a long, agonizing decline before the end, but of discovering the truth about his so-called loved ones, the people in whom he’d invested such presumptuous faith, so much life. He got up, yanked on his jeans. Gulnar’s emerald eyes followed him, reddened, puffed, hanging on his every word.

  “Roxanne…” He wouldn’t keep calling her his wife. She’d never been his wife. Gulnar was. The one he’d pledged himself to. His only love. The one who’d inherit from him. He’d made all the plans. “Roxanne was horrified to see me the day I went home. She’d thought I’d be back to normal. She’d seen me once after I deteriorated and lost my hair and she’d thrown up then.” He skimmed his hand over his smooth head. “If you’re wondering. I couldn’t bear my hair when it grew back, so I kept shaving it. She thought I was crazy to prefer being an ‘egghead’ to my previous glossy black haircut.”

  Gulnar’s teeth made a curious sound. His lips quirked. “She couldn’t bring herself to come near me. When I assured her I wasn’t contagious she was enraged. I wasn’t painting her as a superficial flake. No woman in the world could bear seeing her husband looking like that. I excused her—really.”

  Gulnar’s eyes spewed forth wrath. She didn’t, huh? His lips twisted again. “Gulnar, in war zones, you see people mutilated, handicapped, emaciated, but a person ravaged by chemotherapy—it’s all in the transformation—it was horrifying. You see me now, when I’m 80 per cent of my old self. She saw a zombie.”

  Why was he defending Roxanne? He knew why with her next words. “Are you trying to tell me I’d feel the same in her position? That this is the kind of horror you’re trying to save me? Dante—besides loving you, I do love your body, I am addicted to its pleasures, and it would pulp me to see its beauty destroyed, its power extinguished. But my torment wouldn’t be for me.”

  And there was all the difference. Roxanne had thought only of herself. Gulnar thought only of him.

  He couldn’t let her do that. He wouldn’t.

  He heaved in a shuddering breath. “Anyway, I told her my prognosis was fifty-fifty. I hadn’t even told her that my sterility, if permanent, wouldn’t mean we couldn’t have children when she said she couldn’t bear waiting for me to relapse. She decided it was time to also reveal that even when I was healthy I was a disappointing lover, and from then on my sex drive would diminish, even disappear. She’d been reading up on the subject.” He huffed a chuckle now. What a load of bull. It was all about who. At his fittest, Roxanne had put out his fire. Now Gulnar had him constantly burning. She’d been his first real sex, too. “In short, she wanted out.”

  Gulnar’s lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything. Her eyes said it all. He quirked her an indulgent smile. His virago. She’d defend him against everything. Even past injustices and injuries. And he believed she’d wipe them out, too. She already had.

  “I gave her an instant divorce and half of my possessions in settlement. I went back to work and for a year and a half I went for follow-ups. The only finding was that the sterility was confirmed. Along the way I realized I was living someone else’s life, doing it right only because I give everything my best. So I cut every professional tie and donated everything to charity. And it was then that I found out the rest of the truth.

  “My mother, brothers and sisters turned on me like rabid animals, filed a dozen lawsuits against me to declare me incompetent, to take control of my fortune, when they got it back from the charities I’d donated it to. I left them to it, walked out. I stopped my follow-ups and pledged whatever time I had left to live to worthier pursuits, to taking chances, as extreme as need be, to achieve all the things others’ expectations had stopped me from pursuing, to reach all the people who could have never afforded me in my previous fake life. And here I am.”

  Gulnar rose, came towards him, her eyes scorching him. “Yes, here you are. Four years later. Strong and healthy and beating the odds—conquering death even. If you’re not back to normal, it’s because you neglect yourself!”

  “Gulnar, it’s a matter of
time before I relapse…”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “I may have already relapsed, I just haven’t been checking up to find out. I may have cancerous recurrences all over my body as we speak…”

  “And you think I care? What’s your worst-case scenario? That you won’t last a year? I was trading my life for two months with you. What do you think I’d trade for a year?”

  Too much. Too much. Love, gratitude, pride, agony, desperation. He staggered around, tears pummeling their way out of his very depths again. “No, no, no, Gulnar. I’m not putting you through this. And I’m selfish, too. I can’t bear seeing anything but admiration and burning hunger in your eyes. I can’t see worry and pity and anguish replace that. Dying is fine by me, it’s torture I can’t stand. You said so yourself during the hostage situation. I’ve been through every physical and psychological agony. And you know what? They’re nothing compared to the month away from you, nothing compared to fearing for you on all counts. You may think you can bear it, seeing me fade away, but you won’t. I can’t—I won’t do that to you!”

  “Do you love me?”

  Her tear-drenched, suffocating question splintered his agitation, silenced everything. He swung back to her, saw his devastation reflected in her every quivering facial muscle. “Love you? Love you? No, I don’t love you, Gulnar…” She lurched as if he’d shot her, and he roared with it all. “I love cold days and cast skies, I love the night and children’s laughter, I love an exhausting workout. I love cats and horses and dolphins. I love a couple of friends. I thought I loved my family. And, hell, yes, I love life and I love myself. You, you—I have no name for what I feel for you. It’s all that I can feel, all that I never knew is there to feel. It’s infinite and unconditional. It’s blinding, agonizing, crippling, it’s exquisite and illuminating and empowering. It’s unadulterated ecstasy and pure torment—it’s all there. It’s everything. I’m only sorry it is so potent it made you love me.”