“I thought…I thought you wanted to wait.”
“I did,” I say, clumsily. “I do.” My cheeks are hot, my body in panic mode, not because we were kissing, but because I grabbed him and pushed him into his bedroom and kissed him on his bed—and almost did everything I said I wasn’t going to do.
Still, his skin shivers and his heart pounds, same as mine. “This isn’t going to fix anything, Bee.” He presses another kiss to my throat, holding on to the moment, as if he’s not ready to stop yet. As if he wants to keep going.
I want to keep going. Of course I do.
I wiggle, and he rolls his weight to the side, propping his head up on one hand. He kisses my sleeveless shoulder. “You know, we could have everything we wanted right now, but afterward our problems would still be there. I don’t want to do that because I know we’ll regret it. I don’t want us to be that couple.”
“Neither do I,” I whisper thinly. I’m feeling two things exactly, and both are sharp. The first is guilt, because I was the weaker one. (Sure, he went along with it, but he also stopped it. He reminded me of everything I’ve been so careful about, everything I’ve stood for.) The second is loneliness. I know he loves me, I know he wants me—I felt that in every kiss, in his hands as they explored my skin—but it’s over, abruptly, and everything is unfinished, and the hole inside me is wider.
I made it wider.
I roll away and sit up, hands shaking. I grip the edge of the bed to steady myself. “I’m so sorry, Levi.”
He sits beside me and reaches out to touch my cheek, moving my hair behind my ear, kissing just next to my eye. “Why are you sorry?”
“This isn’t what I wanted.”
“But…we…we didn’t…”
It doesn’t matter, I want to say, but I don’t know how to explain it to him because it’s not even clear to me. I shake my head, standing. “I need to go home now.”
His expression tells me he wants to say something else, but he is also intuitive. He knows I’ll break if he breathes another word about it, so he stands with me instead. “I understand,” he breathes, his eyes closing briefly with—I can’t place it. Is it sorrow? Regret? I try not to think about it; my heart hurts too much already.
Levi walks me to the door, where I squeeze his hand once and start to turn around. When he grabs me and kisses me again, I think I might cry. But instead I let him hold me. I let him take what he can. After a few minutes, when I can’t breathe or think clearly, when I’m tempted to go right back to what we just stopped, I disentangle myself.
“Call me soon?” he asks.
“Yeah, of course.” I don’t give him a final happy birthday, because it feels useless to say anything now. Here his birthday ends on a sad note, on a confused and exhausted note, and I don’t want to remind him that I put him there. I drop my hands to my sides and head to my car. This is the third day in a row where we’ve parted empty-handed, mixed up, broken; where we’ve come no closer to a conclusion or a solution. This can’t keep happening. I’ve got to do something, or else stop trying altogether.
Chapter 42
“Astrid. Astrid. Pass me the soy sauce, or so help me—” Tom groans, reaching across our makeshift table (okay, it’s a blanket) on Papa’s hospital room floor.
He’s been trying to get the soy sauce from Astrid for at least two minutes.
“Millie,” he says, “help me.”
Millie raises an eyebrow. “No way, she’s scary. Do it yourself.”
Astrid grins a terrible grin.
I reach over and smack the back of her head and grab the packet from her hands. “You’re not even using it.”
“I was going to!” she protests.
“Well, not fast enough. You already had one packet, and Tom had none.” I hand the packet to Tom, take a bite of noodles, and look up at the sound of the door opening. My parents went for a walk just before we arrived with Chinese takeout. Or rather, Mom walked, and Dad got pushed around in the wheelchair.
Millie is up in two second flat, running at them in a flurry of flailing hands and arms. “Hi! We got you Chinese food, Mama. And Papa, you can have some of mine if you want.” She kisses his cheek and takes the wheelchair from my mom.
“Thanks, M&M, but I already ate before you got here.” Papa winks at me. “How’s my Baby Bee? And Tom, here with your sisters for a change.”
“And me,” Astrid mutters.
“And you, Superstar.” Papa has Millie roll him up to the bed, and Mama helps him get in, pulling the covers up to his chest. “Guess what? We have some news for you kids.”
That’s all it takes to get us up, away from our food and crowding around him. My dad takes my mom’s hand and looks at us. His blue eyes are round and happier than I’ve seen for a while. “They’re able to get me into surgery this weekend,” he says.
Instantly, we all freeze. It’s like we don’t know what emotion to feel, or how to respond.
Mom squeezes Dad’s fingers and smiles sadly. “The surgeon said that while he still can’t operate on my brain, he can do his best to remove as much of the other tumors as he can. Of course, that still leaves one or two problems, but we can’t be picky-choosey.”
I study my father, with his shaved head and thinning face and his breathing that takes more effort. (It’s like his lungs are weighted.) He smiles like there’s nothing wrong, like he can’t wait to get in and out of this surgery—like he has hope. But I don’t see it. I don’t feel it. The chances he will live are slim, and a surgery that doesn’t remove his biggest problem—the cancer on his brain—won’t help him. The doctors claim that surgery, the one he needs most, will likely end him quicker.
“That’s great, Dad,” Tom says finally, nodding solemnly, and the girls chime in with hugs and kisses. I only manage to squeeze his fingers, hoping he doesn’t notice that I’m hurting. It’s not about me right now—it’s about him and his future. I won’t be selfish, not now.
I sit back down at our makeshift table and set my bowl in my lap. In the last five minutes since I left my phone on the ground, I’ve missed a call from Levi. I take a few more bites of noodles before calling him back.
“Hi, Bee,” he answers, quietly.
I swallow hard. It’s been three days since we last saw each other, and a week since his birthday. We haven’t discussed the important things yet, but he calls me every day and asks me how I’m doing, and how is my dad, and how are my siblings and mom, and can he come over soon? The only problem with this is that I can never be too thankful—and I have nothing to give in return. I have no questions, no encouraging words for him. He says I support him, but I haven’t been to TCP in over a week. Three days ago when he kissed me goodbye, leaning against the side of my car, he looked more exhausted than I’ve ever seen him. And yet, there we were, saying goodbye, with me realizing it had taken several hours for me to notice him.
I never asked him how he was, how I could help.
It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t seem to mind. I mind.