He remembered passing the IHOP his first night in town. It was just a few minutes’ drive, only a block or so from the gym Fia pointed out where she worked. Despite the time—half past eight—the parking lot was full, the gym was well lit, and people scurried from machine to treadmill to weight room.
“I haven’t been in a gym in too long. Should I try yours?”
“Oh, sure. The fittest, buffest, toughest women in town either work or work out there. They’ll treat you like a king.”
“Huh. I’ve never been treated like a king before.” He laughed at the sharp jab she gave him. He liked it when the right woman displayed a bit of jealousy.
He found a parking space near the restaurant door, and they walked in together, hands clasped. Her palm seemed damp, or was that his? Were those his fingers shaking or hers?
With the dinner rush over, they got a small table in a far corner with no other diners to disturb them. The waiter brought a pot of coffee and a bowl of flavored creamers, took their orders, and left them alone facing each other.
She rested her palms on the table, probably because they’d tremble if she put them in her lap, like his were. “Did you read enough to form an opinion?”
He chuckled. “I read enough to diagnose the next patient Dr. Haruno sees.”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s manageable.”
She scoffed. “Fifteen years after diagnosis, twenty percent of patients are bedridden, and twenty percent more require a wheelchair, a cane, or crutches to walk.”
The scorn in her voice couldn’t hide the fear. If she found losing the ability to drive tough, losing the ability to walk would kill her, so he kept his voice level when he responded, “What happens to the other sixty percent?”
She opened her mouth, stopped, and closed it again. She was by nature, he knew, an optimist; it had gotten her through the crappy years with her family, had kept her safe and whole until she met Scott, had kept her here when Scott died because she was needed here. Now thin lines formed between her eyes as she scowled at him. “They’re waiting for the ax to fall on them.”
He poured two cups of coffee, dumped a tub of creamer into his, and stirred it with a spoon. “The other sixty percent are taking their medicine, doing their yoga, watching their diet, and soldiering along. There are even some who have very little deficit at all in their whole lives.”
She reached for her own coffee and breathed deeply of the steam. “I have deficits, Elliot.”
“Because you’re not on the treatment plan yet. The medications are very good and getting better.”
She shuddered. “I take enough medicines now, and just how much do they help? I don’t want to be a walking pharmacy.”
“The pills you take now are just treating symptoms. We’re talking medications that alter or slow the course of the disease. And stop whining about how many pills you take now. I can shove a hundred down your throat every day and smile while doing it if it keeps you healthy.”
She stopped in the middle of sweetening her coffee, everything about her going still. “Did you just tell me to stop whining?”
Her eyes were narrowed to laser-like beams, and he wasn’t sure if the steam was coming up from her coffee or blowing down from her nose. He’d been in situations like this before, occasionally with a girlfriend but usually with Em. He used what had worked best for him in the past: the sweetest, most charming smile he could pull off and equally sweet words. “I love you.”
The impact of the words didn’t escape him. Sure, he’d said them hundreds of times before, but never to this woman. Never to the one who’d been nurturing a piece of his heart forever. And he didn’t care if she said them back because he knew. He knew.
Her expression was comical, torn between outrage and laughter. This time the laughter won out. “I don’t whine. If I do, you’ve got my permission to smack me upside the head.”
“Aw, I’d never smack you. But I might tickle you until you lose control.”
With that poorly chosen image, the cheer fled her face. “Bladder dysfunction occurs in eighty percent of all patients. So does bowel dysfunction. And sexual dysfunction. Elliot, you can’t possibly…”
He got all solemn, too. “What, Fia? Be with a woman like that? Be with you no matter what happens?”
She leaned forward, the color drained from her face, and whispered, “I could lose sensation in important places. Sex could be off the table. Damn it, you could end up changing my diapers!”
He leaned forward, too, their noses nearly touching over the coffee cups. “Yeah, my dick could shrivel up and fall off tonight from too damn much anticipation. A meteor could crash through that window—or a ninety-year-old woman who can’t tell the gas pedal from the brake. Anything can happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to, and if it does, well, we deal with it.”
Heat radiated from her, fading as she slowly sat back. “I deal with it. You…you’re free to walk away anytime.”
His jaw clenched on all the words he wanted to say, letters clawing with their fancy curled tips to get out of his mouth and into the air, but his muscles clamped tighter. The waiter provided a respite, bringing their meals, offering condiments not on the table. If he noticed the frost between them, he didn’t let it show other than with his quick retreat.
After a couple moments, followed by maybe ten or twenty more, Elliot forced his mouth open, forced a smile and a pleasant tone. “You tried dumping me yesterday, and yet here I am. Why do you think I’ll be any more amenable tonight?”
Fia folded her arms across her middle and ignored the ham, egg, and white cheddar crepes in front of her. “You can’t refuse to be dumped. Guys don’t do that. They yell at you, call you names, then go get drunk and screw around with other women.”
“I don’t do that.” He arranged his eggs over easy on the toast, then speared the yolks and let them run. With sausage, hash browns, a biscuit, and gravy, it was a totally heart-unhealthy feast that he rarely indulged in. Tonight just seemed that kind of night.
“Then they follow you places, get in your face, make threats, and get their asses kicked by a white knight passing by.”
“I don’t do that, either. How are your crepes?”
She looked down at them, and he swore he saw her nose twitch as the flavor drifted up to meet it. “I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Really? The way your stomach growled all the way over here? Huh. Imagine that.” He cut a slice of sausage, dipped it in gravy, and made a show of yumming it.
Grudgingly Fia picked up her fork and poked the crepes as if she wasn’t sure they wouldn’t poke back. She cut a tiny slice, slid it into her mouth, put the fork down, and crossed her arms again. A silent declaration: I’m done.
“Elliot,” she began after a while. “I know I never should have gotten involved with you without telling you about my mystery condition. And I know you have this huge sense of duty to other people, and you want to make them happy, and you want to fix them, and it’s hard for you to not do that. Like the girl at Bubba’s the other night…you’d never seen her before in your life, but you felt obligated to help her out, even though her boyfriend was twice your size.”
“I’m the one who walked away while he sprawled in the dirt,” he reminded her, then relented. “As far as feeling obligated, hell, yeah. I wasn’t raised to just walk past someone who was being mistreated by someone else. Emily’s the same way, though she wouldn’t have bothered throwing any punches. She would have kicked his family jewels so far up inside him they’d need a spotlight to find them.” He raised one brow and pointed his fork at Fia. “That’s what you would have done, too.”
She wanted to deny it just to be contrary—he could read her so well. Instead, she whacked off another bite of food as if it had offended her and stuffed it in her mouth.
Elliot ate a few more bites, enough to satisfy his hunger for the moment, and set his fork and knife down. “Okay. I know what you want, Fia, what you need, and what you fear. Now I�
��m going to tell you what I want and need and fear.”
* * *
When Fia’s fingertips went numb around her fork, her first distressed thought was the spasms were starting again. After an instant, she realized she was gripping her fork so tightly that she’d cut off circulation. Gingerly, she peeled them loose and waited for Elliot to speak.
He was going to make an argument that staying with her knowing what he now knew should be entirely his decision. That it had nothing to do with duty or feeling somehow responsible. That he knew what he was giving up—a normal life with a normal woman and a normal household. That he loved her too much to make any other choice.
He would tell her all those things, and like any other woman in the world, she would want desperately to believe them. She wanted it so bad that she ached with it. Accepting a commitment like that would make life so much easier. She’d learned that from Scott. But what right did she have to accept a commitment like that in her condition? How could that possibly be fair to Elliot?
“This huge sense of duty…that’s just who I am, Fia, whether I’m with my family or you or my Army buddies or anyone else. It’s the way I was taught: to care about others, to protect them when they need it, to help them when they want it. I couldn’t change that if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. I think being a good person is a better goal in life than being one who just doesn’t care. And I know you understand that because you taught yourself to be a good person. To get involved. To make a difference in people’s lives.”
Slowly she took another forkful of dinner, actually tasting it for the first time. The crepe was delicate, the flavors of the eggs and ham and cheddar melding together beautifully. She let the surface of her mind focus on each taste, each bite, while deeper in her brain she concentrated on Elliot.
“As far as acting responsibly, wanting people to be happy, and making commitments, yeah, I plead guilty to that, too. I prefer to live in a better world than a worse one. It would be disrespectful to my parents and uncles and grandparents to act any other way. Now, you have damn good reasons to not respect your parents after the way they treated you, but me…” He shook his head. “They made me who I am, and they did it with love and responsibility and commitment, and that stuff is so deeply ingrained in me I can’t ignore it.”
She swallowed hard—ugh, another problem she might face as the disease progressed—and for a flash, envied him. Her parents had contributed to who she was, too, though not in a good way. The good stuff had come from her own stubborn determination, from Scott and the friends she’d been blessed with.
Elliot was a blessing, too, wasn’t he? She’d known that from the instant she’d realized she was falling for him—no, even before that. The night they met, the tender care he’d taken with a scrawny, vulnerable puppy, umbrella and all…That was when she’d realized he was a very special man. A man who brought happiness to everyone in his path. A man her friends adored and respected from the start.
A man who could spend hours studying the effects of a disease, then look at the woman who had it and say, I love you.
He sipped his coffee, his strong fingers gripping the mug with just the right pressure, the way he touched her. She had vague memories of Saturday night, but there were flashes of recall, of him unfolding her fingers so gently, rubbing away the pain, never pushing harder than she could take.
When he could have taken off instead, came Scott’s drawl. He’s a stand-up guy, Fia, and I know you have trouble believing this, but you’re damn well worth standing up for.
“I know the word you hate most in the world,” Elliot went on. “Your worthless parents made you feel like a burden. Even though you’ve overcome pretty much everything else, you’ve never overcome that fear of being someone else’s burden. Do you think Carly feels burdened by Dane, or Bennie by Calvin, because they’ve got health issues?”
She thought of her friends, both pregnant and happy and deeply in love with their husbands, and envy turned her voice into a breathy squeak. “No.”
“Did Carly know from the beginning that Dane had lost his leg? Did Calvin tell Bennie right from the start that he had PTSD?”
“No.”
“You guys take privacy to extremes around here, don’t you?” Elliot shook his head, his expression bemused. “For what it’s worth, I had the measles when I was a kid, but the vaccinations took care of everything else. I’ve been stepped on by a few horses, had a few black eyes, mostly from Em, and had stitches a few times, along with a couple bruised ribs after encounters in drinking establishments that didn’t turn out as well as the one at Bubba’s. I also discovered once that I could be too drunk to get an erection, much to the disappointment of myself and a pretty little Carolina girl, and I have never been that drunk since.”
Fia didn’t want to soften or be amused, but she couldn’t stop herself from adding to his record. “And you’ve still got scars on your ankle from a miniature poodle with pink bows on her ears.”
“That was one ferocious dog,” he defended himself. “Of course, if I had to go around with bows on my ears, I’d be pretty pissed off at the world, too.”
After his grin faded, he took her hand. “Fia, the point is, loving somebody and making a commitment to them doesn’t have anything to do with health or wealth or social status or career or any of that stuff. It has to do with who you are and who I am and the fact that we’re better people together than we are apart. You having some disease…yeah, it’s awful, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it doesn’t change who you are, and it doesn’t change who I am. Who you are is a strong, intelligent, hardheaded woman who’s been on her own so long that you’re afraid to let someone else in for the long haul.”
At least he got the hardheaded part right. Strong? She used to be. Intelligent? Her head had been so muddled with frustration and helplessness that she wasn’t sure how much intelligence remained. After all, she was trying her best to break up with the best guy she’d ever met since Scott. Nothing smart about that, was there?
“And who are you?” Her voice was tight, broken between words by the lump rising in her throat.
He gazed at her with the intensity that had made her shivery from the start. “I’m the guy who’s in it for the long haul, no matter how hard you push me away. You may not have learned this yet, darlin’, but I’m a little on the hardheaded side, too. I know, I know, I come off as all soft and easygoing and biddable—”
She snickered. “What twenty-eight-year-old man says biddable? Wait, I bet your grandma used to say it.”
“Nope. I picked that one up totally on my own.” He flashed a grin, but the fierce look in his eyes didn’t lessen. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, biddable. But deep down, I’m like a dog with a bone. When I want something, I don’t give up.”
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “Until you get it,” she prompted. “You don’t give up until you get it.”
“No. I don’t give up. I never give up.”
He would never give up on her. So how in the world could she give up on them so easily?
We’re better people together than we are apart. He really believed that. Did she?
All it took to answer that was a scan of the past few weeks. All the tenderness, all the feelings that she was once again part of a whole, all her smiles and happiness and hopefulness—all of it had come from or been in response to Elliot. He had that missing part of her heart. She could live without it, but why in the world would she want to?
Slowly she lifted her gaze to Elliot. A smile was tugging at her mouth, pulling wider until it spread across her face, sending warmth and pleasure through her. She hadn’t really smiled since Saturday night, and damn, how she’d missed it.
She slid to her feet, picked up the ticket, grabbed his hand, and pulled him up. “You’ve been taking care of Mouse the past few days. Now it’s time for me to live up to my end of the bargain and take care of you. After all…” She gave him a wicked look over her shoulder. “We don’t want any bo
dy parts falling off, do we?”
Epilogue
It was Saturday night, the evening was still, the heat was hanging around, and sheet lightning was putting on a show off in the northwest sky. Exhausted in a totally comfortable happy way, Elliot lay on a chaise longue on the patio, Mouse curled by his feet, with a beer resting on an upside-down bucket serving as a table. Beside him, Fia lay on a matching chaise. She wore shorts that left her long legs bare, a thin top that left glimpses of her belly bare, and his straw Stetson, tipped forward to cover most of her face. Her water bottle sat on the bucket, too.
It had become their habit to come out on warm still nights and laze—or as Elliot liked to think of it, be one with the universe. They watched the sun set, looked for comets and shooting stars, and mostly found airplanes. It was a peaceful, restful end to their days—peaceful and restful being something Dr. Haruno highly recommended.
This second Saturday in June, while a hell of a lot of fun, had been far from either one.
“Are you awake under there?”
“Yup.” She removed his hat and looked at him. “The margarita girls throw one hell of a party, don’t they?”
“Yes, ma’am, they do.” It had started as a simple little barbecue to celebrate that school was out, for the students—the kids, Dane, Bennie, and Noah—and the teachers, Carly and Therese. Then since it was June, they’d added Carly and Dane’s anniversary, and they couldn’t overlook little John’s big oh-one birthday. Patricia’s son and daughter-in-law, Ben and Avi, were heading back to Georgia from leave, the Smith family was meeting Dillon’s daughter, Lilah, for the first time, and Elliot’s own family was coming to town to meet Fia for the first time. The simple little school’s-out party had become a huge celebration of everything.
It had been the best first meeting in the history of family first meetings. “You know my family adored you,” he mentioned, just in case she’d let uncertainty blind her to the obvious.
A Summer to Remember Page 29
