I check my phone, which happens to be conveniently resting on the cool room shelf where I left it and is almost out of batteries. Ten after seven. Shit. Dermot is going to kill me … or spank me. I rather like the idea of that second option.
The bell above the door rings and I crane my neck, listening for signs of my man. He knows where to find me, and since I can’t hear a pair of very expensive leather shoes walking across my floorboards I roll my eyes, just knowing I’m going to have to deal with some irritating hipster who ums and ahhs over spending twenty dollars on a bouquet. I really need to start locking my door.
“We’re closed,” I say from the cool room.
Nothing.
So I walk out and let the door slam behind me, wiping my hands on my apron and wishing like hell I didn’t have to deal with this right now. That’s the thing about floristry—people think it’s all roses and beautiful-smelling blooms, but it’s not. It’s messy, and it’s work, and sometimes it downright stinks, and no matter how you try you can’t get the stench of rotting flowers off of you.
“We’re closed,” I say again, exasperated as I round the corner and see Harley standing in the middle of my shop. He looks like shit—thin, gray around the eyes, and gaunt. I want to go to him, but my feet stay glued firmly to the floor. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood.” My brow furrows at that. He’s always in the neighborhood; he lives just a few doors down from me.
I swallow back the panic rising in my throat, because something is wrong, something is very wrong. This isn’t my Harley. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s right?” He gives me a small pained smile and takes a step toward me, but I hold my hand up for him to stop. “I had to come see you.”
“You had to come see me? Six weeks, Harley. I haven’t seen you in six whole weeks, and all of a sudden you had to see me? You look like shit, by the way.”
He smiles at that. Actually smiles. Bastard. “Feel it, too.”
“Good.” He flinches, and I soften my tone and say, “What have you done to yourself?”
He ignores the question and moves closer. “Can we talk?”
“I have a date.”
His brow creases, and he raps his knuckles on the counter. “With who?”
“With Dermot.”
Harley shakes his head, biting down on his lip before levelling his eyes on me. “The cheater, Rose? Really? Why him?”
“He never cheated on her, and nothing happened. He filed for divorce the second they came home,” I say, caustically. “You know what? I don’t even know why I’m justifying anything to you. Dermot isn’t the one who fucked me and didn’t return my calls. My best friend did that.”
His Adam’s apple bobs. “Rose—”
“You know I never could keep up with you and your fucking bipolar disorder when it came to me,” I say, and mimic his voice, “I want you; I don’t want you. Which is it, Harley? I’m getting a little bit sick and tired of being at the end of your puppet strings.”
“I want you, Rose. I’ve always wanted you. Since the day you pushed me over in that sandpit I’ve wanted nothing else, but—”
“Then why the hell would you do that to me?” My voice cracks until it’s shrill and doesn’t sound like my voice at all, but some kind of childlike cry. “How could you do that to me? To us? You knew how I felt about you.”
He nods somberly, but he doesn’t meet my gaze.
“Why?” I demand on a sob. “What reason could you possibly have for breaking my heart after I asked you not to?”
“Because I’m sick.”
Everything stops. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, everything. Just. Stops. And I know, I know in my heart and down to the very last cell that makes up all of me, that it’s the truth.
“Stage IIB seminomas.”
“What does that mean?” I cover my mouth. I’m certain he’s not speaking English anymore, and I silently plead for him to explain or to tell me he’s kidding. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe this is all some terrible dream and all I need to do is just wake up.
“I have testicular cancer, Rose. I had surgery to have it removed, but it’s spread to my lymph nodes. So now I get a cocktail of chemo pumped into my veins every three weeks.”
“Surgery?” I whisper, and he nods gravely. “When?”
“The morning after I made love to you.”
A horrified gasp escapes my throat, and I shove him hard. He stumbles. “You asshole! You let me think you were avoiding me, and you were in surgery? All this time you’ve been sick?” An odd, animal sound rips from my chest, and my legs go out from under me.
Harley catches me up in his embrace. He sinks to the floor and cradles me in his lap, and then the tears come. Thick, fat droplets fall into my lap, soaking my apron front, and even though he’s just told me that he’s sick, I feel as though I’m the one dying. I’m no longer the sum of my parts, but I’m shattered, wrecked, ruined. I’m a million pieces broken off and scattered to the wind.
When I find my voice again, it’s quiet and wracked with guilt for all the terrible things I’ve said about him, all the horrible thoughts, all the hate and the anger. “Why would you keep this from me?”
“Come on, Rose. I couldn’t do that to you. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Then why now?”
He lets out a breath, and his shoulders sag as he slumps against me, and I know the reason without him having to tell me.
Because he doesn’t think he’s going to make it.
***
I lie on my bed, wrapped in Harley’s arms. His shirt beneath me is drenched. I didn’t know one person could cry so much. I didn’t know it was possible to have an endless stream of tears that just wouldn’t dry up. Apparently, I knew nothing. I don’t remember how we got to be here. I don’t remember much of the last few hours at all.
“I couldn’t say goodbye,” Harley whispers, his lips at my hair, his voice thick with emotion. “I can’t ever say goodbye to you. I couldn’t do it when I was eighteen, and I can’t do it now.”
“Then don’t,” I cry into his chest. He lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it, and it feels so right. The way it always has. “Don’t leave me, Harley. Don’t you dare leave me.”
“I’m going to try like hell not to,” he says, his torso trembling now, and I know he’s crying too.
Through the night, we doze, and when I wake around three a.m, I blink up at the canopy above my head, unsure if I’m awake or still dreaming. Harley has made a blanket fort around us, the way he used to when we were kids. I smile at his masterpiece with the twinkle lights he’s pulled from a mason jar on my bookshelf. He glances down at me and says, “You weren’t supposed to wake up yet.”
“Come back to bed.”
“In a minute. I don’t know how long it will be before I can make another of these,” he says, and his face crumples for just a second, a slither of time so small that I might have missed it if I’d blinked my eyes. “I want it to be perfect.”
“It’s perfect because you’re here.”
“Rose—”
“No, tomorrow. We’ll talk on it more tomorrow. For now, I just want to spend the night in our fort, away from …” I trail off, unable to give it a name. Unable to say that dreaded C word that’s taken so many beautiful souls way before their time. It can’t have this soul. I won’t let it. I’d sell my own before I ever let this sickness take his. “Come here.” I extend my arm out towards him.
He ties off the last sheet and climbs onto the bed. The fabric falls closed behind him as if it were a door shutting against the outside world. And how I wish it were—god, how I wish I could go back to several hours ago and unhear the things he said, but I can’t. I don’t know any of the details, and I don’t want to right now. It’s too raw, too real. I can’t think of it like that. I can’t think of Harley, my Harley, sick and pasty in a hospital bed, his muscles wasted away to nothing, the light from those beautiful eyes gone. I wo
n’t have it. So as he sits down beside me, I climb into his lap and take his face in my hands, memorizing every inch of that stubborn jaw and his slightly crooked nose from that time when he took a hit on the field in the tenth grade. I look into those perfect aquamarine eyes and I breathe his breath and lean in, kissing him full on the mouth.
His hands sink into the flesh of my hips. “Woah, woah, hey.”
“What? Does it hurt?”
“No, but I didn’t come here for that.”
I frown. “You don’t want to?”
He tucks a strand of errant hair back from my face and raises his eyebrows as he tilts his head toward his crotch. Beneath the soft cotton of my panties, I feel his erection straining against me. The look he sends me lets me know it isn’t a matter of not wanting to.
“What’s the problem then?”
“I just—I think we should take it slow. I just told you I had cancer, and—”
I cut him off again by smashing my lips down on his and shoving my tongue so deeply into his mouth that it elicits a moan. His hand comes around my biceps, and he pulls me away. “Rose, love, stop.”
“Why did you ask her to marry you?”
“Don’t do this ...”
“When you left for Louisiana, you made me a promise—do you remember?” The question is rhetorical because I know he remembers it just the way I do, but he nods all the same. “You said when you came back, you’d put a ring on my finger. I know everything changed and we haven’t been that way for years, but why Alecia? Why not me?”
Silence surrounds us. It swallows us until finally, he says, “I couldn’t.”
“Was it because you didn’t love me enough? Or because you loved me too much?” I say, and I know my words have hit their mark because it’s as if I could pinpoint the second his heart breaks.
He runs his hand across my forehead, smoothing the hair back from my face. “I was terrified, Rose. Alecia had been at the doctor’s office with me when I found out, and it was the scariest moment of my life. All I could think about on the way home was your face, and how it would destroy you when I told you. I panicked. Alecia said yes. It was shitty. I hurt her, I hurt me in the process, and I hurt you. And I never ever wanted to hurt you.”
“Then why did you ask another woman to take my place?”
“Because I didn’t care about breaking her heart.” He cradles my head in his hands and presses his lips to my cheek. “But I sure as hell care about breaking yours.”
“Then don’t break it now.” I kiss his forehead, his nose, chin, and lips. “You do right by me, Harley Hamilton. You fight like hell, and you win, and then you put a ring on my finger because I’ve been waiting twenty-five goddamn years to marry my best friend.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Rose
In the morning, I hear the key sliding into the door downstairs and I roll over. I don’t want to deal with the world today, but apparently the world has other plans, because my mother sings out and I find myself wide awake and blinking up at the roof of our blanket fort.
“Darling, are you awake? I found a handsome gentleman waiting on your doorstep. It’s very rude to not answer your phone, Rose.”
Oh god, Dermot. I forgot all about our date. Oh shit. Where is my phone?
“Shit.” I sit up. The weight of everything that happened settle on my shoulders. I carefully climb over Harley so he doesn’t wake, and wrap the sheet around me. I’m wearing a silk chemise that I’d put on last night in order to be comfortable, and Harley, being Harley, never sleeps in anything at all, so though we didn’t do anything, I’m still wearing too little clothes to face my mother and Dermot.
I stumble out of the fort and come face to face with Dermot and my mother. Dermot’s features are full of concern, but Mom is staring wide-eyed at the blanket fort, because I’m pretty sure she knows what that means.
“Er … hi. What are you doing here?”
“My flight from LA was delayed. No one was flying in or out of SF on account of the fog. I couldn’t reach you on your cell.”
“Oh, I think it might still be locked in the cool room. Why didn’t you try the shop phone?”
“I did,” Dermot says, and I know I look guilty. Mom takes a seat in the wingback chair, with a rapt expression, watching our conversation unfold. Harley yawns and rolls over on the bed, causing the blanket fort to sway. “He’s here, isn’t he?”
“He …” I trail off. My heart squeezes painfully, because even if I tell him that nothing happened between Harley and me last night, I’d be lying. We may not have had sex, but I boxed up what was left of my heart and gave it to Harley for safe keeping. I love him, I’ve never stopped loving him, and judging by the look on Dermot’s face, I’ve broken his heart in the process.
He shakes his head. “Jesus Christ, I should have seen this coming.”
“Dermot, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I say, begging him not to turn away from me before I can explain. “We didn’t sleep together.”
“But you let him back in.”
It really isn’t a question, but I nod all the same. I feel as if I drive a blade right through his chest. Dermot has a knack for loving women who can’t love him back, and I’m just another one who’s screwed him over. Though I can feel the controlled anger vibrating off of him, he cups my face in his hands and kisses my temple. “Goodbye, Rose.”
“Dermot …” I begin, but what is there to say? I’m sorry? It’s not you it’s me? They’re all just words, and I think he knows that as well as I do.
He walks down the stairs, disappearing from my line of sight. A moment later, the shop door snicks quietly closed behind him.
I exhale a puff of air and glance at my mom. She’s looking behind me at the rustling fort. Though I know none of what just happened is her fault, it might have been nice to have a heads up so Dermot wasn’t faced with seeing that. I suppose, though, she wasn’t to know that I wasn’t answering my boyfriend’s calls while another man was occupying my bed.
Harley comes up behind me and pulls my back against his front. I’m not entirely sure where his clothes ended up last night, and judging by the way my mother ogles him, raises a brow, and swallows back her smile, he’s still completely naked. I glare at my mother, and she finally quits staring long enough to study my expression and clue in.
“Right, well I better get going.” She has her phone out, and if she hasn’t already, I know she’ll be texting Rochelle like a mad woman the second she leaves. “Bye, darlings.”
She blows us both a kiss and hurries down the stairs as fast as her Jimmy Choos will take her. I was wrong; she doesn’t text, but calls instead, squealing, “It happened, it finally happened,” before she’s even left the store.
Harley tightens his grip on my waist, leaning down to press a soft kiss on my shoulder. “You okay?
“Yeah, I just … God, it just sucks, you know? Feeling like you’re breaking someone’s heart.”
“I know, love.” And I suppose he would. He drags me back to the bed and we tumble into it, almost knocking down the walls of our makeshift house.
“Maybe we’re too old for forts and fairytales,” I say wistfully, snuggling into his chest.
“No one is too old for fairytales,” Pan answers back.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Rose
I wake with Harley’s body wedged against mine, his arm around my waist and his head resting on my pillow, and I know he’s not sleeping because his breathing is shallow and he’s not snoring the roof off of my apartment. I roll over and meet sad blue eyes.
“Morning,” I say. He traces patterns over my collarbone and down over my breast, circling my areola. I squirm and bat his hand away.
“What are you doing today?”
“Um, you’re looking at it.” I stretch in my bed and yawn. Harley’s hand slides in between my legs, and I squeeze my thighs tight. He doesn’t move against me, just rests there in “his spot”. A place to warm his hands, he’d once said.
And drive me crazy.
He runs his fingers through his hair and makes a fist, waiting until it’s just a few inches from my face before he opens his palm and several strands of hair fall onto my floral duvet.
“Oh, Harley.”
“I knew it was going to happen. I’m coming up on my third chemo session, so it’s kind of a given, and I don’t wanna hang onto it just for the sake of it, you know? Why prolong the inevitable?”
“You want me to cut your hair?” I ask, panic rising in my voice.
“Shave it, actually?”
“All of it?”
“Yeah, Rose.” He grins and kisses my forehead. “That’s usually what ‘shave it’ means. You think you’ll still find me attractive with no hair?”
“Are you kidding? It’ll even the playing field for once, and you and I might finally be on equal terms.”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty fucking handsome with a bald head,” he mocks, and I slap at his chest. He winces a little, and I bite my lip, worried I’ve hurt him.
“When do you want to do this?”
“Now. Only let’s get dressed and go over to my place. The two of us won’t fit in your tiny bathroom.”
I pout, and he pulls me closer. “While we’re on the subject of cancer shit, you think you can clear some time in your schedule for me tomorrow? There are some people I want you to meet.”
“Of course.”
“Cool. Bring a strong stomach though.”
I frown, not sure what he means by that, but I nod anyway. “And don’t wear fancy shoes.”
“Do you know me at all? I own like one pair of heels and I only bought those for your stupid pseudo wedding.”
“Right. For a minute there I thought I was talking to a real girl.”
“Fuck you, Hamilton.”
“Okay,” he says, and rolls on top of me. He swivels his hips. His rigid cock presses against me and I allow him to take me where he wants to, but too quickly he pulls away. “Hair first.”
I pout and climb out of bed after him. I don’t want to do this. Not his beautiful hair. But cancer doesn’t care what we want.
Harley & Rose Page 22
