by V M Black
I stepped forward, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. “Cora,” I offered.
“Yes, I know. Please, take a seat.”
I could make out the shape of the man behind the enormous, gleaming desk, but the discreet lighting seemed designed to conceal his face. Two massive, armless chairs crouched on their lion’s paw feet in the center of another thick rug. Cautiously, I took one, sitting on the very edge of the brocaded seat. The recessed light above me shone directly into my eyes. I squinted to see beyond it and could only get the impression of wide shoulders and dark hair.
“Mr. Thorne, I’m sorry. I think there must have been some kind of mistake,” I began.
“There has been no mistake.” That voice again—warm and amber. It was effortlessly intimate while being entirely polite.
I shivered slightly and wished that the door was still open to the reception room.
“I have your medical record here, Ms. Shaw,” the man continued. Hands emerged from the shadow—strong and masculine, with long blunt fingers. He flipped open the laptop in front of him with a carelessly graceful gesture, and in the sudden glow, I could make out his features.
I swallowed hard. His dark hair was swept immaculately to the side, a long jaw and broad forehead balanced by an elegant, slightly aquiline nose. It was a face of a Renaissance Italian aristocrat, and it was every bit as handsome now as it would have seemed then.
I wished suddenly that the gorgeous rug under my feet could swallow me up.
“Cora Ann Shaw. T-cell prolymphocytic leukemia. Terminal. Is that correct?”
The cold summary hit me like a blow. I opened my mouth, and for a moment nothing came out. He raised his gaze to meet mine. His eyes were icy blue, and they seemed to look right through me.
“Yes,” I breathed. “That’s right. Dr. Robeson said you could help me.”
“You must understand that you must first pass the initial tests,” he said, his brow low and stern.
“I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t.
Mr. Thorne opened a drawer and took out a small black case. He stood and circled the desk until he stood above me, so close that I might have reached out and touched the hem of his pinstripe suit jacket. He was, I thought inanely, quite tall.
He set the case on the edge of the desk and unzipped it, opening it to reveal a kind of blood collection kit. I sat up straighter. With the alemtuzumab, I had become used to regular injections, but I still wouldn’t say that I was exactly blasé about needles.
“The results of the screening will indicate if you are a good candidate for the procedure,” Mr. Thorne said. He selected a needle from the array inside the case, locking it into a holder. “But you must understand, even if the outcome is encouraging, the treatment is only successful in a small minority of cases.”
“How small?” I asked, as much to distract myself from his preparations as out of a desire to know the answer. I could always Google for details later.
“One in a hundred,” he said. “Perhaps less.”
“Oh,” I said in a little voice. “That is small.”
“And if the procedure is unsuccessful, it always results in death,” he continued.
“Wait, what?” I was taken aback. “So a one percent chance of cure, and a ninety-nine percent chance of death? That doesn’t sound like smart odds to me.”
He looked up from the needle. His gaze pierced me, his eyes deep and hollow. As handsome as he was, he didn’t exactly look the picture of health, either. “What are your chances now?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. My chances were exactly nil. Put that way, gambling on an outside chance didn’t seem quite so insane.
“That is why we only select terminal patients,” he said, pulling out a glass blood collection tube.
“What about relapse?” I demanded. As a cancer patient, I’d learned that the disease could lurk in my body for months or years, undetectable until it spread out again to kill me.
“There is no risk of relapse. If you are cured, you are cured.” That mesmerizing gaze caught me again. “Forever.”
He dropped to one knee next to my chair, and my heart did an unexpected backflip. Oh, God, he was a beautiful man, more beautiful than he had any right to be. I tried to think about something else, anything else, because this certainly wasn’t the right kind of response of a patient to her doctor. But this close, I could smell his cologne, all sandalwood, leather, and musk, and my mind refused to obey my order to find something else to dwell on. Pink elephants, pink elephants, pink elephants...
How old was he? I wondered. He carried the authority of an older man, but this close, I could see that his pale skin was almost inhumanly flawless, not so much young as...perfect.
Damn.
At least it was too dark for him to see my furious blush.
He held out a hand. I stared at it for a moment before I realized that he wanted my arm.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” I asked.
“I am not at risk of blood contamination,” he said, sounding unaccountably amused.
For some reason, I believed him, even though I had no reason to. I gave him my arm, inner wrist facing upwards. His fingers touched my skin, cool and commanding, as he slid the sleeve of my sweater up to bear the crease of my elbow. It sent a deep shiver through me, a tightening in my center that made me blush even harder. My jacket slipped from my lap to crumple on the floor between us. I tried not to look at him, but I could not stop myself from staring at the top of his head with such intensity that I was half-surprised that his impeccably combed hair didn’t combust.
He’s about to stick you with a needle, you idiot, I snarled at myself. Don’t you have any sense or dignity at all?
He looked up at me, one side of that delicious mouth quirking, and my breath tangled in my lungs. No, no I don’t, I thought distantly. No sense or dignity at all.
Mr. Thorne wiped the inside of my elbow with an alcohol-soaked swab. The smell of evaporating ethanol turned my stomach a little.
“It won’t hurt,” he said, discarding the swab and taking up the needle. “I promise.”
I started to protest such an absurd claim, but just then, the needle met the skin above my vein. Something else happened at the same moment—some sensation that came from the touch of his hand against my wrist. It spiraled outward, up my arm and deep into my center, rippling back up into my head so suddenly that I gasped. The needle pushed through my skin at the same moment that a hot wave came over me, carrying the pain of the needle and turning it into a deep, twisting sensation that sent my heart racing as heat flooded my groin.
I stared at the needle as the shivering reaction swept over me. My skin was burning, my body flushed against the impossible coolness of his fingers. The blood collection tube was almost full. Swiftly, Mr. Thorne pulled it free, then slipped the needle from my vein.
“No—” I said involuntarily as the sensation was cut off. I needed—I needed it back. I needed him.
What was wrong with me?
I turned my bewildered gaze to Mr. Thorne. His face was still as pale as ivory, but there was a dark glitter in his hooded eyes that matched my need and sent my heart skittering out of control.
“What did you do to me?” I whispered.
“You would say yes,” he said, the dark hunger of his voice tinged with an infinite sadness as he stood and discarded the used needle, setting the blood collection tube upon the desk. “If I told you right now that I knew you would die, you would still say yes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, even as my body said, Anything, anything at all...
He bent over me, and I tried not to breathe the scent of him. He touched the drop of blood that had formed upon the needle’s exit. I could hear his breathing now—irregular as mine had become. With the tip of his forefinger, he scooped up the droplet. Mesmerized, I watched as he lifted it to his mouth. Holding my gaze, he parted his lips just enough for the blood to reach his tongue.
“Go,” he ground out. “Go now, before I damn my best intentions.”
It was as if some invisible bonds that had been holding me to my chair had been broken. I sprang up, snatched up my jacket, and fled, banging through the tall mahogany doors and not stopping until I jabbed the down button on the elevator.
“Goodbye, Miss Shaw,” the secretary said unconcernedly from behind her desk. “You can expect the results within a week.”
The door slid open, and I stumbled into the elevator compartment, slapping at the ground floor button frantically until the doors finally, reluctantly closed.
C hapter Four
The elevator began to move, and I let out a breath of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
What the hell had just happened?
That man—Mr. Thorne—clearly he’s some kind of perv, I told myself. He’s dosed me, roofied me or something.
How? I asked myself. With the power of his hands? Oh, God, that was what it had felt like. I lifted my hands to my cheeks. Even now they were flushed. And he had felt it, too. I knew what desire looked like, and that impossibly handsome man had desired…me.
I stepped from the elevator back into the lobby. The receptionist looked up and greeted me with another perfect smile. “The car is waiting for you, Ms. Shaw. You will be taken back to your vehicle.”
I nodded to her and went outside. The Bentley hummed at the curb, and the chauffeur opened the door at my approach. Dumbly, I sat inside, and the car rolled away.
My body ached, but it ached with a far different kind of pain than that which had become my constant companion in the last few months. It was a part of me that I had thought had died, stolen by the sickness months ago. Now all my nerves were awake and singing, and I had nothing to tell them because they only wanted one thing.
Him. That man, Mr. Thorne.
I hardly noticed when the chauffeur pulled up behind my battered Ford Focus in the parking garage. I didn’t even think to ask him how he knew where I was parked or what my car looked like. I was far beyond wondering about those kinds of things.
I managed to get to my feet, fumbling for my keys. By the time I had opened the driver’s side door, the Bentley had purred out of sight. I collapsed in the chill of the driver’s seat, my breath clouding the windows as I wondered if I had just imagined everything. I pushed up my sleeve and started at the tiny needle prick there, and a shadow of sensation went through me again.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, leaning my head against the edge of the steering wheel. My phone dug into my stomach, which reminded me—Lisette.
Abruptly, I opened my eyes and started the engine, the car coughing to life in the cold.
What the hell was I going to tell Lisette?
***
“I’m back!” I called as I stepped into our campus apartment.
Lisette looked up instantly from her laptop. “Hey, Cora’s here,” she said to the faces on the screen “Gotta go.”
“Hi, Cora!” the faces chorused, waving with forced cheer. “Bye, Cora!” Hannah and Sarah hung up.
Lisette opened her mouth—to scold me for my strange texts, no doubt—but taking a look at my face, she seemed to change her mind and treated me to a brittle smile instead.
“I grabbed some extra dinner for you at the dining hall,” she said, patting the foam takeout box. “Eat. Chelsea and Christina are already gone.”
Chelsea and Christina were our other two roommates. For our senior year, Lisette, Chelsea, Christina, and I had ditched the dorms, which were dominated by underclassmen, for an on-campus pre-furnished apartment. There were four tiny bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a common kitchen and living area.
I felt a stab of guilt. Chelsea and Christina were probably already out drinking, but Lisette had put her own plans on hold to wait for me to come back.
“You don’t have to stay in because of me,” I said. “It’s Friday. Sarah and Hannah will probably have a dozen people in their apartment by now.”
“Maybe we’ll go later.” She shrugged. “So, what did the doctor say? Your texts didn’t tell me anything.”
I flopped onto the couch, kicking my feet up on the coffee table. I buried my chin in my jacket. “It didn’t work.”
“What?” Lisette said, the smile freezing on her face.
“The alemtuzumab. It didn’t work,” I said. “The cancer’s getting worse.”
“Oh, Cora,” Lisette said, her face crumpling. “What’s she going to try now?”
I shook my head.
“Cora?”
Dammit. I blinked hard. I hadn’t cried the whole trip from Baltimore to College Park. I wasn’t about to start now. “She told me to call hospice.”
“Hospice?” Lisette’s voice rose. “But that’s for people who are—”
“Right,” I said, cutting her off, not wanting to hear the word. “But she gave me another number. To a...” I hesitated, not sure how to describe it. “A clinic.” That wasn’t too much of a lie, was it? I wasn’t quite able to explain the truth—I wasn’t even sure what the truth was. “They are working on a—a trial of sorts, I suppose. The doctor drew some blood. They’re going to run some tests, see if I’m a good candidate.”
I realized I didn’t have the name of the drug or the procedure. So much for Google.
“Gosh, I hope that you are!” Lisette said. She never swore.
“So do I.” It was my only chance.
Lisette glanced at the door, then back at me. “You up for Hannah’s place?”
“What’s the plan for tonight?” I asked.
“They snagged Mike’s Playstation again and have Netflix hooked up to the flat screen. Movie marathon. 1980s high school classics. Everybody’s supposed to wear leg warmers and frizzy hair, but I think most of us are just going to show up in pajamas.”
Hannah and Sarah lived in an apartment just down the hall. They threw a movie marathon at least once a month, and it always lasted well into the next day.
“What’s showing?” I asked.
“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business.”
I grinned. “Yeah, I think I’m up for that.”
“Honestly?” Lisette lowered her voice in mock confidentiality. “I’ve only ever seen The Breakfast Club.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“Finish your dinner, and then we can go and party like it’s 1985,” Lisette said.
I groaned and pulled the foam container over to myself, popping the lid.
“Philly cheesesteak. You like it,” Lisette said encouragingly.
“I do, I do, and I swear I will eat every bite.” I gave a half-shrug. “Well, now that I’m off the alemtuzumab, at least I’ll be able to enjoy my food again.”
“Maybe put some meat back on your bones.” Lisette’s voice was light, but she couldn’t hide her worry.
“Sure thing,” I said around the first bite of the only slightly soggy sandwich. “No problem.”
***
An hour later, I sat in Hannah and Sarah’s darkened living room, nibbling on a piece of pizza they’d bullied me into taking and leaning against a beanbag chair with Emily, wrapped in a hideous but surprisingly soft afghan that Sarah’s grandmother had sent her. After a motion from Lisette—one I probably wasn’t supposed to see—no one had asked me any questions about my doctor’s appointment, and after a few minutes of artificial good spirits, everyone relaxed back into being themselves.
And I felt normal again, if only for a little while.
Sarah was curled up in Mike’s lap on one of the bland institutional chairs, not-quite-making-out and playing with the ring on her finger. The rest of the girls and a couple of guys—boyfriends and wannabes—were sprawled around the room in various boneless poses.
I was suddenly, intensely glad that I was there and that I had them to be around me. If I’d stayed home that n
ight, I would have probably cried and maybe puked and probably cried some more. And at some point, Chelsea and Christina would have stumbled back in, probably drunk and almost certainly with at least one guy between them, and then I would have had to listen to them all night through the thin apartment walls.
It wasn’t that I’d forgotten my grief. I was still dying, and I knew it. It was that, right now, I wasn’t alone.
I dropped the greasy slice of pizza on the paper plate and let my eyes sag shut. For the moment, I was watching corny movies with my friends, and that was enough.
It was all I had.
C hapter Five
“So, remember—Spence says that school’s primary value isn’t to make you smart or even well-trained but to signal that you already have the qualities of intelligence that an employer is looking for,” the professor said, summing up. “See you next week.”
“So, basically, she’s saying that what she teaches us doesn’t really matter,” quipped a guy two rows below me. His friend guffawed.
I gathered my coat and bag. It was Thursday, six days since I had left Mr. Thorne’s office bewildered and confused. Six days since the doctor told me that I had five months—maybe five months left to live.
I had tried very hard to keep all thoughts of that day out of my mind, and now that I didn’t have to go in for an intravenous injection three times a week, I found that it was just possible to pretend to myself, most of the time, that nothing was wrong.
Most of the time. As the one-week mark approached, though, I waited for news of the test with mounting anxiety. My last chance. As strange as the meeting with Mr. Thorne had been, I believed it.
“Spence’s job market signaling is only the first type that we will cover as applied to economics,” the professor continued said, raising her voice as we all clattered to our feet. “Next week, expect to cover the other applications discussed in Osborne, and don’t forget to check the course site for the links to relevant online content. You will be responsible for all the material. Thank you!”
I slung my backpack over my shoulder just as my phone chimed, signaling that I’d missed a call during my preset no-ring for class. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and unlocked it, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the number.
