Life's Too Short (The Friend Zone #3)(78)

“You can’t fix this,” I whispered. “I know it’s hard for you not to be able to control this. But Adrian, please. I need your support.”

His anguished eyes searched mine. Then he dropped his palms from my arms. He turned away and dragged a hand through his hair.

“No. I won’t support it.” He shook his head and looked back at me. “I won’t let you abandon hope. What if there’s a breakthrough? What if you could live another twenty years?”

“And what if I can’t?” I snapped. “What if I only have one more year before I can’t swallow or breathe without equipment? One more year before I’m dead. I want to keep living my life, Adrian. I’m not wasting precious time hooked up to IVs, trapped in hospitals chasing rainbows.”

We stood there staring at each other, breathing hard.

“I’m doing this with or without you,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “Please don’t make me do it without.”

We stood there in a standoff of silence. I saw his heart breaking. It cracked and tore across his face. A strong deep-rooted tree, struck by lightning, split right down the middle. He looked instantly worn. I’d never seen him look this tired. Like some sort of vitality had left his body since I saw him last.

“I just want none of this to be happening,” he whispered.

I swiped a tear off my cheek. “Okay. Then let’s forget it’s happening. Let’s go do something fun. Let’s rent snowmobiles or go tubing. Let’s stay up late trying some acrobatic sex move in the bathroom. Get an injury we don’t want to explain to the paramedics.”

This garnered me a tiny smile—but it didn’t last. “I need to have a say in this, Vanessa.”

I blinked at him. “A say in my life?”

“It isn’t just your life. This doesn’t just affect you.”

I set my jaw.

His eyes begged me. “Please. People fight this. They try everything possible—”

I nodded. “Yes. Many choose to try everything. That’s their choice. That was Melanie’s choice. This is mine. And the only person who should be making it is me.”

He stared at me bleakly from across the room. Then he sat on the damask chair and put his face into his hands, squeezing his fingers into his scalp.

“I won’t be a captive to this illness, Adrian. I won’t spend my life catering to its what-ifs. It’s already taken enough from me.”

He didn’t look up.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might be crying.

I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay, like he’d told me once. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to give him false hope.

Then I realized that day in his office when he said that to me, he hadn’t meant it. How could he? He didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

It wasn’t until just now that he realized how hopeless it all really was.





CHAPTER 27





THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD EVERYTHING, THEN

DISASTER STRUCK!




ADRIAN

We went around in circles about it all night. Me begging her, her digging in. We somehow faked our way through dinner and then went back to our room and picked up where we left off. Finally, we fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

I’d been in the same tornado she was this whole time. I’d been in the eye, in the calm, while it built up all around me without me knowing, and now I was sucked into the vortex, spinning in the howling black, grasping for something to hold on to, and there was nothing. She wouldn’t give me anything to cling to. Nothing to give me hope.

Yesterday I’d driven us home. We barely talked the whole six hours.

We weren’t fighting. We weren’t mad at each other. We were just at odds, and there was nothing to say.

As we’d passed a billboard for Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, she waved a white flag and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t up for any adventures or side trips. I wanted to be back in our space, where I didn’t have to pretend to be okay because we were in public—because I was not okay. At all.

I didn’t begin to know how to accept the situation.

I understood Vanessa’s reasoning, but I still couldn’t support it.

She didn’t know whether she’d have the same reaction to the drugs that Melanie did. What if she tolerated them without side effects? She wouldn’t know unless she tried them. Three months wasn’t much—but it was something. It was better than nothing. How could she throw away three months of life without even trying?

What if the next clinical trial brought the cure? Or halted the disease in its tracks? Or reversed it altogether? What if that trial was happening now, and she wasn’t there to participate in it?

It was unacceptable to me. Unfathomable.

How could she just give up?

Waves of anxiety and panic had been rolling over me for two days. I’d never been this tired. It was an emotional weariness that settled in my bones. I felt hopeless. Powerless. I wanted to save her, do something, but my hands were tied because she wouldn’t even give me one thing. Not one thing.

If she’d agreed to see someone about her hand, at least I could busy myself with looking for specialists, making appointments for her. There’d be an actionable plan, there’d be something happening. But there was nothing to do. She wanted me to just forget about it. To sit here and go to candy stores with her and pretend like my entire universe hadn’t just imploded.