But I at least got clues from Wade’s end of things.
“MY DEAREST UNCLE,” A SMARMY Danny cooed into my ear.
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
“Geez. Calm down. You know, I don’t understand why you’re in such a bad mood every time I call you,” he said through a chuckle.
Fucking ninja ringtone switcher.
“You know exactly why I’m annoyed. I’m tempted to warn Haley that you get way too much pleasure from pushing my buttons. It points to sociopathic tendencies that I’m sure she wouldn’t be comfortable with.”
Raw laughter vibrated through the earpiece again. “Are you kidding? Do you actually know who I’m dating? Sociopathic, at the very least, rhymes with her middle name.”
At the same time I heard Allison mumble from her spot in the passenger seat. “Hah. I’m sure she’s plenty fine with it.”
“Anyway,” Danny segued, “I thought I would have heard from you by now.”
The peripheral vision of Allison moving her long hair from in front of her shoulder to behind distracted me momentarily from Danny and the road.
“Um. What?” I sought clarification, the skin of her slender neck making me forget the question.
“I said, I thought I would have heard from you by now.”
Okay, so it wasn’t even a question.
Wow.
Get it together.
Shit.
Look at the road!
Jerking my eyes back to monitor our safety and tightening my grip on the wheel, I questioned, “Why?”
For some reason, Danny’s voice sounded funny. Like disbelieving laughter. “Because you came to visit me. I figured you were gonna want to do something today.”
“Alli and I are headed to the grocery store,” I explained, avoiding any deeper conclusions or explanations.
“Alli, huh?” There was definitely a smile in his voice now.
Glancing back at Allison, but curbing the urge to do it for any real length of time, I muttered, “Yep,” wondering if she could hear Danny’s part of the conversation.
I hoped she couldn’t. I was doing a good enough job embarrassing myself all on my own. I really didn’t need his help.
“Right. So I guess I’ll hear from you later today. After you’re done at the grocery store. With Alli.”
The arms of my situation—namely Allison next to me listening intently—tightened, putting me in a headlock and really limiting my ability to verbally punch back.
“We’ll talk later.”
“Riiiight,” he said again, his fucking chuckle mocking me with every gravelly beat.
“Dan—”
“Get enough food for us. We’ll be over for dinner.”
The click of the phone didn’t leave much doubt as to what he’d left me with.
Dead air.
Pulling the phone away from my ear, I scowled. “What an ungrateful little—”
“Angel?” Allison interjected.
My eyes bounced from the road to her and back again all within a second.
“Yeah.” I chuckled, uneasily coming down from the worked-up hilltop Danny made me climb. “Yeah, ‘angel’ is exactly what I was thinking.”
“I figured. That’s the look I always get when I want to call my kids angels.” She smirked, wrapping her arms around the frame of her body and rubbing.
Reaching forward with my right hand, I hurriedly turned up the heat and pushed the button for her heated seat.
The minute curve of her smirked lips grew in gratitude.
I smiled despite myself, clearing my throat and tightening my grip on the wheel ever so slightly.
“So where are we headed?”
“Oh,” she mumbled, giving me enough time to catch her looking down at her lap and shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “Why don’t we just head to the grocery store?” Her voice was hopeful. “Then we can take the groceries home, and I’ll just run out quick to do a couple of other things and you don’t have to spend your time running around.”
My eyes narrowed. Genuine was a distant memory, and in its place was her fidgety and fibbing twin.
“We’re already out,” I argued amiably. “And I’ve got not one thing to do today, so it’s no trouble at all. Use me.”
I should have let her off the hook. I knew I should have, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t.
Maybe it was the fact that I lacked people skills. All this time spent mostly alone had completely deprogrammed me from all acts of common courtesy. In fact, as a matter of course with my job, I’d spent most of my time decidedly in people’s business. Whether they really wanted me there or not.
Or maybe it was something more than that. A feeling lingered, twisting and scrawling and fighting for space in the back of my brain, insisting that when she pushed, I needed to pull. Some tiny inkling that the more she tried to avoid me, the more she needed me to disallow it.
It was twisted, and unexplained, and even more uncalled for from me. I had no proprietary claim on this woman, and even if I did, when she said to mind my own fucking business, I should mind it.
Color me unsure as to why I had no desire to do that. Why I found myself having absolutely nothing other than a yearn for spending the day with her.
I blamed the eyes. Or the breasts. It was really one or the other.
I spied a hint of her cream sweater as I glanced in her direction.
And again, don’t look at her breasts.
Once my focus redirected out the windshield I realized something was off.
Jesus, was that the same building I passed five minutes ago?
Was I driving in circles?
Shit.
“So where am I headed?” I asked again, ignoring the fact that she’d been painfully silent the entire time I’d been busy giving myself a nonverbal talking to.
MY MIND RACED TO FIGURE a way out of this—calling the doctor and rescheduling to later in the day or, the much more appealing, just not showing up—but in the end it was futile.
I was too tired, and Wade was apparently too stubborn. Psychic flashes of him riding me piggy back as I tried to sneak out of the house this afternoon flashed through my mind, and I knew the best thing to do was just get it over with.
Not to mention, we were circling the high school for the third time in ten minutes. The man needed direction, and he needed it fast.
“Turn right at the light,” I instructed, the sound of defeat ringing soundly in my own ears.
He could wait in the car. I deserved that much at least.
Some boundaries were made to be challenged, but the privacy a woman requires while she’s got her feet up in stirrups wasn’t one of them.
As the lean of the turning car swayed my body toward his, I marveled at the simple luxury of having a companion for menial tasks like going to the grocery story.
Sure, I wasn’t actually thrilled to have him with me today, the mothership of bad and extremely personal days, but I was excited by the general prospect of not spending most of my moments alone.
The idea that someone was making an effort to cook me dinner or watch me while I did it. Simple stuff, really.
“You’re gonna go straight for about a mile and turn left at the fourth light.”
“Whatever you say,” he agreed easily, his eyes all but glued to the road. I wondered at the intensity.
While thinking of topics for small talk and categorizing all of the things I knew about him, I realized something.
“Wait. Didn’t you live in Knoxville at one time?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you have no idea where you’re going?”
“Well, it was over twenty years ago, and I lived in East Knoxville. Totally different.”
That was true enough. People in Knoxville tended to keep to their sections and West Knoxville hadn’t really bloomed until recently.
“Not to mention, I don’t actually know where we’re going. Knowing your destination is kind of a key fac
tor in knowing how to get there.”
He eased his words with a wink, averting his gaze from the road for the first time in a while to do it, but as the smart ass tone registered, I couldn’t stop my eyes from narrowing.
“We’re going to the gynecologist,” I snapped, the jerk of my figurative knee all but slamming my stupid foot in my mouth.
I expected him to at least stumble at the mention of the “women’s doctor,” but he didn’t. Apparently, the thought of periods and babies and pap smears didn’t make his balls tighten up quite as much as it did other men.
“Okay. You have an appointment?” he asked, the casualness in his voice ringing slightly more false than true.
“Not really,” I evaded. “I work there.”
“So you’re going to work?”
Ugh. Nosy asshole. “Not exactly.”
“Ah,” he sighed knowingly. “‘Not exactly’: code for shut the fuck up, Wade. Got it.”
“Well, you mottled the translation a little, but I’d say that’s the gist.”
“Do women ever say what they mean?” he asked with a genuine malice-less smile.
“Occasionally. Usually it’s when we’re too mad to filter. Or for my daughter, always.”
His shoulders bounced slightly as he chuckled.
“She’s never cared what people think, huh?”
“Only the people she loves. And we’re all too smitten to care.” I laughed. “Thank God. I’d be devastated if I were the one to smother that light.”
His face lit up, enlarging his smile. It took some effort to pull my eyes away, but when I did, I saw we were almost there.
Wade pulled into the left hand turn lane, following directions much better than any man I’d ever dealt with and gave me the silence I apparently needed.
Nerves swirled in my gut, uncomfortable and unprepared to handle their own rapid growth.
The weight of my body pressed gently into my seat as Wade moved when prompted by the green glow in front of us, and the worn brick of the all too familiar building came into view.
“It’s just up here on the right. You can drop me off right at the door. Building eight.” My words ran together, and I wondered if their wobble was as obvious to his ears as it was to mine.
Foregoing a verbal answer, he followed my simple directions again, pulling to a stop at the door in what seemed like mere seconds.
The enormity of the situation seemed to weigh me down and make it nearly impossible to move from my spot on the black leather. None of it seemed real, my mind searching for the wormhole to the completely different reality of a couple of days ago.
The combination of Wade’s warm hand landing softly on mine and his equally gentle voice brought me back to reality. “Alli? You okay?”
“Yes! Yeah, yeah. I’m great!” I overcompensated, prompting the downturning of his lush lips.
Denying him the time he would have needed to question it, I popped the door open and jumped down, calling, “I’ll be out shortly!” over my shoulder as I went.
Focusing on my boots hitting the ground in front of me, I didn’t look back. But I wasn’t quite ready to look forward yet either.
Half of me was grateful that these doctors and nurses were men and women I knew. People I spent almost all of my days with. The extra support would surely be a boon, and the fact that they would have even more vested interest in my welfare was worth mentioning.
But I also knew the meaning behind their looks, the expressions that strangers wouldn’t catch. They’d all expect to know what was going on and how I was doing, and any kind of privacy I could have gotten somewhere else would be nonexistent.
Overall, it didn’t bear thinking about. The facts were facts.
I was sick.
I had Cancer.
And I hadn’t gone to another office, so all the insignificant things I was worried about were already set in motion.
There was no going back.
Cold shot up my arm as I gripped the metal handle on the office door and twisted. An accompanying chill raced down the length of my spine and settled into my gut.
The front desk loomed in front of me, the sound of my entrance prompting an encouraging smile from my coworker, Robin.
She didn’t look worried or fake or anything I’d feared, and the very fringes of my nerves started to abate as a result.
I didn’t waste time signing in my name, and she effortlessly put me at ease just as quickly.
Her seat-wrinkled navy scrubs straightened as she jumped up to standing.
“I bet you’re loving putting me to work, huh? Watching me do all the dirty paperwork while you sit back in one of the plush lobby chairs and relax?”
“It’s not bad,” I responded on a nod, a smile tugging at one thin corner of my previously worried lips.
Thinking myself dismissed by my new view of the top of her head, I retreated.
I didn’t make it two steps away from the counter before she was calling me back.
“Don’t sit out there, come on back.”
My eyelashes nearly brushed my eyebrows as my eyes widened. “You’re going to have an angry mob of pregnant women chasing after me,” I whispered as I glanced around the crowded waiting room.
“I’ll find a way to fend them off,” she promised cheekily, picking up a Hershey’s candy bar and waving it enticingly back and forth.
“You’re evil,” I said through a laugh.
Her answering smile was shameless. “I already reserved my ticket on the plane to hell.” Her eyebrows waggled. “First class.”
We each moved to the door on our respective sides, and she shoved it open for me as soon as I got to it. Slipping through to the other side, I looked around at the familiar walls and told my anxious stomach to relax before all that acid slid up into my chest and ate away at important stuff.
Like my heart.
Turning right to head into the area behind the front desk—expecting to hang out and gab with Robin while I waited—I was caught off guard when a hand settled on my elbow from behind.
Just barely stopping myself from jumping all the way out of my semi-wrinkled skin, I turned to find my doctor, Sarah Addleton, giving me an expectant smile. Her white coat almost looked blue in the harsh office light.
“Hey, Allison. Come on back.”
“Oh,” I stalled, hooking a thumb over my shoulder to indicate the front desk behind me. “I thought I’d have to wait a little bit.”
“Nope,” she disagreed, waving me forward to join her. “Just finished up with another patient, and I’m all ready for you.”
Excellent. I was really hoping you would say that.
Not.
Gripping the strap of my purse until the fresh leather let out a creak, I steadied my nerves, turned on the ball of my foot, and followed her down the hall. She turned right at the end of the hall, stepping into a minimally decorated room I knew to be her office and disappearing from sight momentarily.
One deep breath later, I stepped inside, and she shut the door behind me. Absolutely bloated with tension, I sank slowly into one of the damask print chairs on the patient side of her desk like a slowly leaking balloon.
“I know they called you yesterday with the results of our test, so you’re well informed that we’re dealing with Cervical Cancer,” she dove in immediately, circling the black surface of her desk to settled on the other side.
I sucked my bottom lip into the grip of my teeth and bit down. All of the pressure of the situation snuck into those two linear inches, breaking the skin and producing a few tangy drops of blood.
“Allison,” she called, pulling my eyes up from my lap before I even realized they’d gone there and coaxing my ravaged lip free.
“This isn’t that bad. We’re light years away from the worst case scenario here.” I made myself not only listen to her words, but truly hear them. “I know the words themselves are scary, but I promise, this is something we can deal with.”
She looked me in the eye so fier
cely that I believed her. Each word she spoke took her professional confidence from within her, converted it to personal in the open space between us, and then transferred it directly into me.
I sat up straighter, looked her square in the eye, and prepared myself to really understand the plan rather than freaking out. “Okay.”
“Luckily, you’re in a place in your life where I have no problem recommending we go forward with a total hysterectomy. We’ll go in vaginally, so there’ll be no incision scar or complications, take the cervix, uterus, and tubes, and as long as we can reach, we’ll grab the ovaries too. Quick and easy.”
I worked hard to absorb her words rather than let them bounce right off, but her choice of words still had me reeling. I didn’t think they were inappropriate or anything, I’d just never felt like something was so spot on and off at the same time.
Diagnoses and solutions felt like they were coming too quick to handle, but all of it felt anything but easy. The loss of all of those things, realistically, was inconsequential. But the idea of parting with them still felt undeniably difficult.
Somehow, I found my voice. “So how do we need to do this? What about my hormones? Won’t the hysterectomy affect all that?”
“It might. Depending on our decision on the ovaries, you might go right into menopause. We can take all of that one day at a time, but I assure you that we’ve got answers for any problem you might have. We’ll just have to test it out to make sure you feel exactly like you should.”
“When are we talking here?” I queried, touching the edge of her desk with my fingertips.
Her answer was immediate and confusingly succinct. “As soon as possible. We’re ready as soon as you’re ready, and the sooner that is, the better.”
“I need at least two weeks,” I found myself saying, not even knowing where it came from. But I knew I needed it. I needed the time to digest the news myself, and then I needed to come clean with my family. The time to wrap my head around everything was paramount though. I just knew if I went ahead with it faster than that, I wouldn’t be ready to say goodbye.
It’s a funny thing, finding out that you’re attached to something as weird as your uterus. For most of your life, it’s nothing but a nuisance, shedding its lining through painful cramps and instigating mood swings.
Accidental Alpha Page 4
