“I don’t understand, Em. Are you throwing up? Do you have a fever? We can take you to an emergency clinic if you need to see someone.”
She shook her head. “No. I need to see my personal physician before I do anything. I’m gonna need a referral.”
“Okay, but what’s wrong?”
Sitting back, she took his hand and played with his fingers, drawing comfort from his nearness. Rarity was right, she had to tell him no matter how difficult it was. Taking a deep breath, she whispered, “I found a lump in my breast.”
He stilled. “A lump? I’ve never felt it.”
“I found it the other morning. It’s like it showed up overnight.”
“Are you sure it’s that sort of lump? Maybe it’s something else, an ingrown hair or a pimple or some sort of...of...fuck, Emma, are you positive?” His eyes, moved with utter panic, searched hers and she wished she could tell him it was a mistake.
She sniffled and nodded. “It could be anything. I tried looking online, but it freaked me out really bad. I’m seeing the doctor on January second and if it’s still there they’ll run some tests and I’ll know more.”
“January second? That’s like two weeks from now. Can’t they get you in sooner?”
“No. I explained everything to the receptionist, but that’s the usual wait period. She said two weeks is actually a pretty short wait.”
His eyes were creased with worry, his breathing erratic. His distress proved a distraction from her own.
She gently rubbed his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
He laughed without humor. “No. Are you?”
“No.” Mouth tight, her vision blurred. “I’m sorry to put you through this, Riley.”
His attention jerked to her. “Jesus, Emma, don’t apologize. It’s not like you chose this. I’m sorry you have to go through this, but I’m sure it’s nothing. Either way, I’m here. I’m with you. Whatever it is...” He pulled her close and kissed her jaw, her lips, her eyes, her nose as he hugged her extremely tight, yet somehow held her gently. “We got this.”
He held her, rocking, never letting her go. It wasn’t the same as when she told Rarity. With Rarity there had been a sense of shared fear, a sort of solidarity that didn’t come with telling Riley. Seeing his worry only scared her that much more, because it proved how much he truly loved her and that was something she’d never had before him—the one thing she feared losing should this end badly.
After a long while, he asked, “Can I see it?”
She nodded and eased back. Her fingers trembled as she unbuttoned her shirt. “It’s this one.”
“Starsky?” He sat up, gently cupped her breast, and stilled. “Fuck. I feel it.” Breath expelled in a shocked wheeze. “Jesus. That wasn’t there before.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” It seemed instinctual to lie in order to curb his distress. If he lost it, she’d be a disaster. She couldn’t carry his worry on top of her own. She simply didn’t possess the strength.
His breathing turned uneven. She was teetering on a slightly stable, albeit false, sense of security for the first time in days and needed him to hold it together for the sake of her sanity. She was probably too exhausted to cry anymore, but seeing him worry really pushed her boundaries.
Bending low, he gently kissed her breast. It wasn’t sexual. It was the way a mother kissed a boo-boo and magically made it all better. She wished in that moment that Riley’s kisses were magic, but she doubted such things existed.
Sitting up, he touched her chin. “Emma, nothing can happen to you. You’re... You’re my best friend. Of all the people in this world, you’re my favorite. Whatever needs to happen, whatever has to be done, we’re doing it. You and me. Team Starsky.”
A slip of laughter escaped in a snuffle. “Team Starsky,” she agreed.
“Let’s go to bed,” he whispered, picking up what he called the ‘boo-boo blanket’. She followed him to his room, not wanting to be in her bed at the moment.
They curled close under the covers and stared into each other’s eyes. He kissed her nose. “This.”
“This?” she asked.
He nodded. “This. This moment, you lying here, facing me, filling my arms. This is everything to me, Emma. This. Us.”
She smiled. This was her everything too. “This.”
It was everything she existed for, everything she was afraid of losing.
This.
Chapter Twelve
Outside of Riley’s door the strings and celestial cymbals of The Cure could be heard. It was Christmas Eve and he was barely speaking. Emma took a deep breath and knocked.
Lyrics about the sky falling in on lovers kissing in the rain and the courage to let go swathed the dim room in poetic melancholy. Pictures of You was one of her favorite songs by The Cure.
She stepped inside, fearful of pushing him too hard. “Riley?”
Sitting on the floor with his back to the wall and his knees up, lucky sock monkey hat pulled low on his head, he grimaced as he stared at his phone, his thumb swiping over images every few seconds.
“What are you doing?” Deliberately stepping over a pile of books on the floor she tried to find a place to fit. His palm slid the hat lower on his brow, hiding his eyes. Was he crying?
Dressed for dinner at his parents’, she gathered her emerald skirt, crossed her ankles, and sank to the carpet beside him. “This song reminds me of the day we sat on the roof,” she whispered, trying to find a smile.
He sniffed and nodded. He wasn’t dressed for dinner. It was nerve wracking reintroducing herself to his parents as more than Rarity’s friend. But Riley, not being his usual upbeat self, was more concerning.
The Lockhart’s had always made her nervous, the sort of people that naturally induced pressure on others. Today, she was oddly indifferent about such things, but she still hoped to make a good impression for Riley’s benefit—if he cared. Maybe he didn’t.
“Shouldn’t you be getting dressed? We’re supposed to be there in an hour.”
He shrugged and crossed his arms over his knees, pulling them close and lowering his face into the hollowed space by his elbows. She smiled at the back of the ridiculous hat and gave the monkey tail a slow tug.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas,” she whispered, wishing some magical spell of merriment would fall upon them and they’d slide back into normal. They needed a reprieve from all the heaviness. “Santa’s coming...”
He said nothing.
She reached for his hand and tilted his phone. “What are you looking at?”
Her lips parted as she saw the image. It was her, sleeping. “When did you take this?”
“In August.”
That was when they’d first started dating. Had it only been four months? In comparison to every other relationship she’d had, theirs felt lifetimes long.
Did he look at this picture a lot? Maybe he did in the beginning, when they were hiding their relationship and they couldn’t openly be together, sleeping under the same roof but walls apart. Bitter that she didn’t have such a picture of him sleeping, she felt a pinch cheated. In the beginning there were plenty of nights she wanted to watch him sleep and couldn’t.
She still liked staring at him, but now she could do so whenever the mood struck. How did people carry on when the one person they longed to look at wasn’t there? She shoved the morbid question into a dark corner with the rest of her morose thoughts. But she was glad he had that picture.
Was it normal to be so obsessed with another person? To want to spend every waking second and every sleeping breath within his reach? Becket had never been that invested in her. Even in the end, when they were ‘engaged’, they worked on a ‘by appointment only’ arrangement. She laughed inwardly, understanding why that suited him.
There was nothing planned about her and Riley. Not in the beginning and not now. That wasn’t how they operated. They flowed naturally, on a current of laughter and desire that formed a rhythm, like stars drawn across the universe i
nto the other’s orbit, drifting close until they collided. Never the same again.
The music ended, the room silent as the tape stopped with a sharp snap. “You and your cassettes.”
He laughed, but the sound was clipped and hollow.
“Riley, you can’t let this consume you. We don’t even know anything yet. It could just be a cyst.”
She’d been trapped where he was. The worry was enough to swallow a person whole. She wasn’t strong enough to bear it, so she took it in doses. Right now she was coping by pretending the worry wasn’t there, somehow convinced life was normal. But it wasn’t.
“I looked on the internet,” he quietly admitted.
Her eyes closed, as sympathy tightened her heart. She’d made the same mistake when she’d been curious and overwhelmed herself in a matter of minutes. She understood the temptation, but should have warned him there was no comfort to be found in such searches. Rarity made her promise to stay away from medical websites and patient forums. She should’ve made Riley promise the same.
“Did you find anything good?” None of it was good. People visited those sites begging for peace of mind, but signed off with nothing more than terrifying paranoia.
“There’re so many cases. Thousands.”
She nodded. Daunting. “I know. It’s a little shocking that I’m the first person we know to go through something like this.”
“You’re so young, Emma. We’re so young.”
Her breathing turned jagged as she faced the wall, watching the items on his desk blur under a fresh gloss of tears. It was impossible to hide from the worry when he wanted to discuss it, but they needed to talk about this, she supposed.
She needed him to be able to handle this, because she couldn’t handle it alone. Her biggest fear, maybe more than the C-word, was coping with something so life altering without Riley there to make her smile. If this turned into too much for him to handle... She couldn’t even imagine what she’d do.
Her head rested on his shoulder. “I know I’m young, but that’s a good thing, right? It’s really rare at this age, so maybe it is nothing. Maybe, in a few weeks, we’ll all be laughing about how dramatic we got and how we let one little pea sized cyst ruin Christmas.” Wouldn’t that be nice?
Resting his chin on his arms, he mumbled, “I read the survival rate’s good with treatment for women your age.”
Survival rate.
That wasn’t really a phrase she needed to incorporate in her life, was it? Those sorts of words came after a diagnosis. Right now she just had a foreign hard spot in her body. That could be anything. But his words lingered in her mind.
Good news was a jagged pill to swallow when it came with words like survival rate. Things got very real very fast. Her chest tightened and whatever comfortable cloud of distraction she’d been hiding behind dissolved.
Her breathing turned heavy, but she tried to hide her stress from him. Staring at the floor, she blinked and casually wiped away the start of tears. “It could be nothing,” she rasped. Broken record. Broken woman.
Her wrist throbbed as she became hyper-focused on her health, the blood flowing through her veins, the cells mutating, and a world of science she didn’t understand. As her fingers went numb, a tingling sensation traveled up her arms and over her shoulders. Pressure built in her chest and a small voice inside her head, very far away, started to scream.
Is this what a panic attack feels like? Amazingly, she remained perfectly still.
“I think you should have it removed, even if it’s just a cyst,” Riley said.
Her entire chest vibrated so acutely, yet her trembling was imperceptible. Her mind wove together images of her body, red with blood and floating cells as her imagination drifted from her brain stem, down her spine, through her chest, and into her breast, following those little ducts like roots of a tree. And there, at the end of it all, was a small little pea.
What color was it? It pissed her off that she couldn’t decide on a color when imagining the lump, pissed her off she knew absolutely nothing about breast cancer and she was a woman. Her imagination took her on a tour of her anatomy with the precision one would garner from a cartoonist illustrating a skit about the human body on Sesame Street.
She could sense it, beneath her skin and tissue. A phantom presence that was actually quite solid. An abnormality she wanted gone. How could something so small be so powerful, so lethal? What if she had it removed and it came back? Did that happen? She didn’t know how cancer worked, didn’t know how a woman went from losing a pea-sized lump to losing both her breasts.
Something like one in every eight women faced the risk of breast cancer, so why wasn’t she more educated on the subject? And of those diagnosed, only two of every three survived.
Suddenly furious and unspeakably petrified, she stood. “You should get dressed. We have to leave soon.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
She paused. They needed to go, because if she stayed in the loft another minute she’d freak out. As unpleasant as his parents could be, she needed the distraction—desperately.
“Riley, it’s Christmas Eve. They’re expecting us. We have to go.”
“Why? It won’t be the first time my parents expected something from me and were disappointed.”
Taking a slow breath, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “I want to go.”
He frowned at her from the floor. “Why? They’re assholes, Emma. We should stay here.”
“And do what, sit on the floor and listen to The Cure?”
He looked away. “I don’t wanna go.”
“Riley,” she pleaded. “I’m dressed. I did my hair and put on makeup and squeezed into these tights. We don’t have to stay long—”
“You look pretty.”
“Th—thank you.” She sighed. “Rarity’s going. We made her do Thanksgiving on her own. We can’t abandon her for Christmas too.”
“She can stay with us.”
She was silent for a few minutes, running out of methods of persuasion. “Just an hour. You can do sixty minutes with them. I know you can.”
Glancing up at her, his eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to go so badly?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re your parents.”
She couldn’t let him know how scared she was. He was dealing with his own trepidation, and fear was contagious. Their anxiety would feed off each other so for the moment she kept her worry to herself.
Shaking his head, he rolled his eyes. “They’re gonna judge you.”
“So? Let them.”
“You say that now.”
Sighing, she lowered herself to the floor again, this time kneeling before him so they were looking into each other’s eyes. “Riley, I know you hate being around them and I know you’re only trying to protect me, but I’ve known them since I was a child. I get that they don’t really like me, but they don’t like anyone, so I’m not taking it too personally. What they think can’t hurt me.”
He prepared to argue, but there was a fast rap on the door and Rarity came in. “Are you guys ready? We have to get a move on.” She frowned. “Please tell me you’re wearing that hat. It’ll keep mom bitching all night and then I don’t have to hear about how I’m wasting away my ovaries watching life go by through a camera lens.”
“He’s not going,” Emma said, knowing Rarity wouldn’t stand for that.
“The hell you aren’t. I did Thanksgiving by myself. There’s no way I’m doing Christmas. Get your ass off the floor and get dressed. I’m walking Marla and then we’re leaving. Emma, get his suit out of the closet.”
She stood and did as Rarity instructed, once again grateful for her best friend.
****
Riley drove while Emma fidgeted beside him. Rarity texted Lexi from the backseat. Lexi would stay at the loft tonight so they could all be together for Christmas morning. There had been so much going on that week, so many surprises, all of their plans sort of fell apart, but being together, doing nothin
g, sounded just fine to Emma.
Originally, she intended to have a traditional brunch, but she’d forgotten her shopping list and been so distracted at the grocery store, she wasn’t sure what they had in the pantry. Tomorrow’s menu would be another surprise.
She smiled at Riley who scowled as he maneuvered through traffic toward Park Ave. The last time she’d been to the Lockhart’s condo she was ten. Rarity and Riley spent most of their childhood living on the family estate, outside of the city. Her only memory of the condo was not being able to touch anything. There was a lot of white and almost everything was glass.
As they took the elevator, the three of them shifted with resigned apprehension. Rarity reached in her shirt and hoisted up her breasts while loosening a button. She also rolled her sleeves so the tattoos running up her forearms were on full display.
Emma drew pleasure from watching her friend flaunt her diversity. From her short hair, buzzed close on the sides, to her oxblood boots, Rarity was everything her name claimed.
Deposited into a private foyer with vaulted ceilings and a sparkling chandelier, the scent of wealth and conceit churned up prickly memories.
The door opened and an older gentleman dressed in gray greeted them. “Mr. Lockhart. Ms. Lockhart.”
“Harold, you remember Emma,” Rarity said.
“Of course.” Tipping his head, he greeted. “Miss.”
Right.
Although every exterior wall was made of glass, displaying the gaping panorama of New York and a gazillion dollar view of Central Park, the condo was taciturn and unwelcoming. Monochromatic, eccentric, and ugly were the words that came to mind.
Marble walls complemented the pale zebra wood flooring and cold metal furniture. Art deco lines created an abundance of space, so much so it became a piece of art in itself, the pricey square footage so blatantly displayed it surpassed braggadocios.
Harold took their coats and they shuffled into what the Lockharts called the fore room where white leather chairs sat beside an étagère wall displaying glass pieces of objects d’art. She hated it.