by V M Black
“I can’t—” I stopped. “You can’t—”
I stared at my finger. The blister was every bit as real as the flame had been.
“It’s not possible. I wouldn’t do that,” I said, even as I remembered the ecstasy of pain. “I never would.”
“But you did,” he said.
I did. I did. I remembered it, I felt it, I had wanted it.... The pain and the pleasure all tangling into a mass of sensation so intense that it was like drinking pure life. If he told me to do it again, I would.
Maybe I was going mad. Maybe he was driving me mad.
“What are you?” I demanded.
“Something more dangerous than you can imagine,” he said, and I believed him. Oh, how I believed him.
“What you are promising me—the cure. Is it real?” Or do I also believe that because you want me to?
His voice was fervent, his brows lowering. “Oh, it is very, very real, Cora Shaw. I have no need to lie to you to take what you would freely give.”
He was right. I knew he was. I closed my eyes, but I could still see him in my mind, looking at me, looking through me. He could hurt me. The throbbing of my finger had reached my wrist now, a very real pain. He had hurt me. But still I wanted to give him everything.
“That is why you must decide for yourself,” he said gently. “Far away from here. Far away from my influence, and far away from me.”
Though only anticipated, I already felt the separation like a jolt. “No,” I breathed, my eyelids flying open.
The sorrow on his face wrung my heart even though I didn’t understand it. “You may be the one, after all, Ms. Shaw. But I will have your permission, of your own free will. Not now.”
“In two weeks,” I said then, defeated.
“In two weeks,” he agreed. “Not a day before. You have the number.”
I nodded dumbly.
“Then call. And if you still wish to gamble the last months of your life on an outside chance, I will be happy to assist you.” He treated me to a lopsided smile that made my lungs hurt. “For now, you have a dinner to enjoy in the finest restaurant that a glittering capital can boast. Enjoy.”
The rest of the evening was a long blur, my unrelenting awareness of him pushing all my senses to a fever pitch. Even the food became a kind of torture, the delight of my taste buds only throwing my frustration into contrast. After the entrée, which was a balance of perfected simplicity and intricate garnishes, came a series of tiny desserts, each more decadent than the last, spaced to titillate and to indulge. Every taste was enmeshed with the overwhelming force of Mr. Thorne’s presence, every bite taken with keen knowledge of his closeness and of his gaze upon me.
At the end of the meal, I fled to the ladies’ room with equal parts relief and longing. As I washed my hands, I stared at my own reflection, trying to find the Cora I knew within it. Strands of my hair were escaping to curl around the sides of my face, and my cheeks had the first real flush that I’d seen in months. The shining dark eyes I barely recognized. They couldn’t be my own, because I saw depths in them that I didn’t understand.
I squared my shoulders, scooped up my purse, and pushed back into the dining room. Mr. Thorne stood as I approached. Despite my attempts at control, I could hear my heart in my ears as he stepped forward to meet me.
“I’ve settled the bill,” he said. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
He motioned for me to walk in front of him, and obligingly, I led the way to the front of the restaurant. Our coats were brought promptly, and I stepped outside with mine folded over my arm. From the doorway, I could see the Bentley waiting to whisk me back to the University of Maryland.
I didn’t want to go.
Mr. Thorne’s hand rested lightly on the small of my back as he guided me down the iron stairs. Even through the thickness of the satin blouse, his cool fingers burned against my flesh. As I reached the sidewalk, I couldn’t stop myself. I turned into his arm, so that I was facing him, my body a hand’s breadth from his.
From there, I could smell his personal scent, under the sandalwood and musk. I was excruciatingly aware of him, aware of the weight deep in my belly and the wetness between my legs. I ached for him. I couldn’t move.
“Please,” I said, the word escaping. I was trapped in his spell, and only he could release me.
“You do not know what you are asking for,” he said, his voice rough. The hand that still rested on my back became rigid.
“I wouldn’t care if I did, and you know it,” I whispered, looking up into that beautiful, impossible face.
His head came forward then, his lips parting, and for one interminable moment, I thought he was going to kiss me. But abruptly, he shifted his hold on me and held me at arm’s length as he turned his face away.
“And that,” he said, “is exactly why I won’t.”
With that, he bundled me into the car, shutting the door with devastating finality. He stood on the sidewalk, his brow furrowed and his hands thrust into his pockets, as the Bentley rolled away. And I watched him until the car turned a corner and he disappeared from my sight.
Chapter Eight
“Cora!” Lisette’s exclamation stopped me in the doorway. “Thank God. I was about to call the police!”
I looked around our living room. Lisette had roused half the apartment complex. Sarah, Hannah, Emily, and Sabrina were waiting with various expressions of relief and outrage on their faces. Even Christina and Chelsea were there, lounging in the corner in skin-tight shirts and their clubbing makeup.
Sarah was talking on the phone. “Yeah, you can come back up. She’s here. She’s okay.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“What is wrong with you?” Lisette demanded. “Why didn’t you answer your phone? You left four hours ago. We thought something horrible had happened to you.”
“Oh, crap,” I said, seized by guilt. I fumbled in my clutch and pulled out my phone. I’d missed eight calls, mostly Lisette’s. “Twenty-four texts, guys? Really?”
“No one knew where you were,” Sarah said, hanging up. “Geoff saw you get into some rich dude’s car. Lisette thought you’d be back in a couple of hours. When nine o’clock rolled around and you still weren’t answering your phone....”
“Lisette said your new doctor is really sketch,” Hannah said. “You didn’t tell her where you were going. He could have been some kind of serial killer rapist or something.”
“Seriously, though, he could have been really dangerous,” Lisette said.
I sank onto a corner of the couch, edging Sabrina to the side. I felt emptied, hollowed out, and my finger was throbbing.
They were right. So very right. Mr. Thorne was the most dangerous man I’d ever met. And his interest in me, for whatever reason, was far more intense than scientific attentiveness could possibly account for.
“I’m so sorry, guys. The meeting ran long, and I had my ringer off, and I was so tired afterward that I forgot to check my calls.”
Lisette’s face softened instantly. She always forgave easily. “It’s just that it’s not like you to disappear for so long. If it had been Chelsea or Christina—”
“You know we’re sitting right here,” Chelsea said, lobbing a pillow at Lisette’s head.
The girls all laughed, and I joined in, terror and regret and relief somehow all spilling out at once. The tension dissipated.
Slumping back against the couch cushions, I thought about it for a minute. I said, “Wait. You all thought some guy had me locked up in his torture dungeon or something, and you thought the smart thing to do then was to huddle in our apartment? And, what, send Mike to walk around campus looking for me?”
“Shut up, Cora,” Emily said, running her hand through her cropped hair. “You’d be a lot more embarrassed if you’d come back to find that we’d called the campus cops.”
“I’m glad you’ve got my back,” I said, completely deadpan. “Otherwise, I could be
in some serious trouble.”
This time, the pillow was thrown at me.
After another round of hugs and threats, Emily, Hannah, Sarah, and Sabrina headed back to their rooms, and Christina and Chelsea grabbed their purses and headed out to for the frat party that they’d heard about—all the hardcore partiers started Thursday night, since that homework wasn’t due until the next Tuesday.
Then Lisette and I were alone in the apartment. She looked suddenly tired, and with a jolt of guilt, I knew it was my fault. She’d borne too much of the weight of my illness. She made sure that I ate when I was too wrung out to care, coaxed me to my classes on my bad days, and even threw half a load of my laundry in with hers when my pile got too high.
If anyone deserved to know everything, it was Lisette. But I didn’t know how much I could tell her. So much had happened that I didn’t understand myself, and most of what I could tell her would only worry her more because none of it fit into Lisette’s black-and-white world.
“What did the doctor say?” Lisette asked.
“I actually spoke to the CEO,” I said. “He said I was a good candidate. He went through the procedure and outlined the risks.”
“And?” Lisette prompted.
“And you were right. The risks are really high. But I’m going to tell him yes.” I shrugged. “Even a slim chance is better than none at all. And I’m not ready to call hospice.”
Her expression was fierce. “You shouldn’t be. Well, good for you. When will the drug trial start?”
“It’s more of a single-dose thing,” I said. “In two weeks, I can call and make an appointment. If it works, the results should be pretty immediate.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Lisette asked.
I shrugged. “I’m dying, anyway. There’s not much worse than that.”
Lisette made a face. She hated when I talked about death. “That won’t happen,” she said confidently.
And however foolishly, I felt sure that she was right.
“So,” I said, changing the subject, “you worried about me being gone for four hours, but you let C-and-C walk out of here dressed like that, knowing just what kind of trouble they’re headed into, without a word of protest?”
“Eh,” Lisette said with a dismissive shake of her head. “They went nuts the day they turned twenty-one. Worrying about them is kind of pointless now. Besides, they’ve got each other. More or less.” She raised her eyebrows. “And if I lost you, I’d have to find another study partner.”
Lisette didn’t like doing homework alone—that’s how we’d first become friends—but I knew she was perfectly capable of keeping her 4.0 without my help. She was just making sure that, however tired I was, I got the work done, too.
I sank deeper into the sofa and kicked off my shoes with a groan. I couldn’t even think about getting up. I couldn’t physically do it.
“Fine, I’ll take the hint, but I’m not moving from this couch,” I said, playing along. “If you want to go over the homework, you’ll have to bring my work to me.”
“Deal,” Lisette said, disappearing into my bedroom.
Left alone, I looked at my aching, blistered finger and thought about what I had said about being locked up in a torture chamber. I had been joking at the time, but I realized that it was very possible with this man. But with him, I would tie myself up and apply the instruments of torture to my own flesh...and be glad.
I hugged myself, sick with horror at how very plausible that thought was, and even more sick at the thought that part of me, even now, would welcome such a fate.
Chapter Nine
It was Tuesday of the next week when a call across McKeldin Mall stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey, Shaw!”
I turned around to see Geoff grinning at me in the slightly worried way I’d come to dread.
Oh, damn. Someone had told him that I was sick. Now I was going to find out just how much he knew.
“Hi, Geoff,” I said, pausing so that he could catch up more quickly. I mostly took the bus to travel between my south campus apartment and my classes now, but I wasn’t heading home quite yet.
“Headed to lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got some extra Terp Bucks to burn before finals are over, so I was going to The Dairy.” The Dairy had a decent selection of sandwiches, pizza, and, of course, ice cream made on site, and with my dining money expiring at the end of the term, it was time to use it or lose it.
“Me, too,” he said. “Join you?”
“Sure,” I said.
We walked along in an awkward silence for a couple of minutes. I watched Geoff out of the corner of my eye. He was visibly struggling, trying to come up with a polite way to ask me about being sick.
I sighed and stopped, turning toward him. He took one more step forward before he realized that I was not beside him anymore.
“So, what have you heard?” I asked. “And who did you hear it from, because I want to know who I should kill?”
Geoff looked uncomfortable. “Cancer?” he said. “For real?”
I let out a puff of air and started walking again. I was too tired for this. “Yeah. For real,” I said.
“I thought you’d gotten some kind of eating disorder or something,” he said. “I mean, your hair—”
“Yeah, thanks, you and half the world,” I said. “It’s the wrong kind of cancer to be treated with chemo that causes all your hair to fall out.”
“So, you mean like....” He made a vague cupping motion at chest level.
I punched him in the arm. “Seriously, what is wrong with guys? You find out I have cancer, and the first thing you think about is my tits? Really?”
“Well, what other kind of cancer do girls get?” he said, but he was grinning now.
“That had better be a joke,” I said. I knew it was. And if Geoff could crack a joke, I might survive this conversation. “And no, my boobs are fine. It’s leukemia. And the first treatment didn’t work, so my doctor’s going to have me on something new soon.”
“But you’re going to be okay, right?” Geoff’s face went serious. “We were getting along so well at the end of last year, and then when this semester started, I thought we’d be able to pick up where we’d left off....”
I felt a pang of guilt. I’d gone on my first date with Geoff four days before I got my diagnosis. “Yeah. Sorry about that. I guess I kinda shut down for a while.”
“I thought our date went well, myself,” Geoff said.
“Oh, it did,” I assured him. “I’m still a terrible bowler. But it was fun. It’s just...with everything I had to deal with....”
We had reached The Dairy. Geoff grabbed the door and held it open for me as I went inside.
“Look, it wasn’t you. It was just crappy timing. We weren’t really dating yet, and I couldn’t dump all this in your lap, and I felt like, if we kept going out, I’d be lying to you if I hid it.” We joined the back of the line.
“So you thought it’d be better to ignore me,” he said. “Instead of letting me decide what I could handle. It wasn’t like we’d just met. I’d known you for three years. I considered you a friend. I still consider you a friend.”
He had a point. “I consider you a friend, too. I didn’t want you to think that I was trying to make you be something more, throwing it all on you after one date.”
“It still wasn’t your decision,” he said. “At least, it wasn’t only your decision.”
By then, we’d made it to the register. I made my order, and so did Geoff. He added my food to his tray and led the way to a table in the corner of the dining area, and I took the chair across from him, dropping my bag under my chair. I tried not to show how grateful I was to give my tired legs a break. He set my sandwich and drink in front of me.
“Thanks,” I said.
Geoff leaned forward. “You know, I was beginning to wonder if I really was that bad of a kisser.”
I felt the heat rise in my face, and I fiddled with my sa
ndwich to cover it. “Not at all,” I said. It was my turn to feel awkward. “It was nice.”
At the end of our date, he had dropped me off at my apartment door. The hall lights had been turned to their nighttime setting, only half the fluorescent tubes on so as not to glare into the apartments when someone opened a door. I was leaning against the door. The corridor emptied for a moment as we talked, and he stepped up, so quickly that it caught my breath, and cupped the back of my head in his hand.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” he had said, and then his mouth came down over mine, and I had tipped my face up to meet him. His mouth was hot, hard and soft at once, and a warm deliciousness unspiraled inside me. Clutching his shirt, I opened my lips under his.
When the kiss finally ended and he stepped back, I looked away, breathless and blushing furiously.
“Um,” I said. “Whoa. Sorry. I didn’t mean to eat your face off. I hope I didn’t scare you.”
He chuckled, and I shivered slightly. My heart was still beating too hard. “Trust me, Cora. I’m not scared.” He took a lock of my hair and pushed it back over my shoulder. “See you?” he asked, and I knew he didn’t mean in class.
“Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”
Then he had left me to fumble into my apartment and collapse on the couch, hoping we hadn’t just ruined a friendship trying for something more.
“Nice?” Geoff said now, settling back with an exaggerated air of disgust. “That’s all I get? Nice?”
“Okay, better than nice,” I admitted. “I was looking forward to going out again.” I took a bite.
“Well, good. Because so was I,” he said, shifting with his usual swiftness back to seriousness again.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “It just wasn’t a good time for me to get into anything new.”
“And now?” he asked. He raised his eyebrows over his slice of pizza.
It was striking how different he was from Mr. Thorne, I thought inanely. Geoff was boyish and golden, with light honey-brown hair and a perpetual tan that he got from hours on the lacrosse field. He was sporty without being a jock, with a self-effacing humor that never failed to make me smile. I was still a bit dazzled that he was interested in me. It wasn’t that I was unpretty or anything. I just didn’t have the sparkling kind of personality or background that usually attracted guys like him. I was the wingman to Lisette’s charm.
