Opposite of Always(55)

I shrug. “Oh. Probably just a conversation I had with myself then.”

“Probably,” she concedes.

I take a few steps closer. “I’m sorry about not listening to you, Kate. About whatever it is you wanted to tell me.”

“You don’t have to pretend like you don’t know, Jack.” Her eyes are dark and intense, like they could absorb an entire constellation.

“Oh,” I say softly, spreading some loose gravel around with my shoe. “Right. So should we talk about it now?”

“No,” she says flatly. “You killed the I’m going to die from my genetically inherited illness vibe back in there.”

“I hate when I do that,” I say.

She cracks a grin, just barely. “I have sickle cell.”

“Oh,” I say because I’m an idiot. And because, while I’ve heard of it, I don’t really know what sickle cell is. “I’m sorry,” I say. Because what else can you give?

“Listen, I don’t want you to act different with me now, okay?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because everyone who knows does.”

“I’m not everyone. I’m just one someone,” I tell her. “Besides, I only know one way to act with you, Kate.”

She raises her eyebrows in that sexy, inquisitive way she does. “And how’s that?”

“Like I never want to be apart from you.”

And she hits me with a you’re impossibly corny groan, then walks back to my car, climbing into the driver’s seat.

“Well, are you coming?” she asks.

I hop in before she can change her mind. “Where are we going?”

“Where the night takes us,” she says, backing the car out of the driveway, narrowly dodging a pair of trash cans and a scraggly cat. “Or to Moe’s for a big, fat, juicy burger and fries. Whatever happens first.”

“Hey,” I say. “Just one thing.”

“What?” she says, tapping the brake just in time to avoid a slew of mailboxes.

“This,” I say, leaning over and taking her face in my hands. Our lips pressed together, well, it’s explosive. Like if you could somehow kiss a burning asteroid right before it smacked into Earth. You know, without being vaporized.

Except when I kiss Kate, I also hear trumpets.

And we’re swallowed in blinking white light.

As if the love gods are saying, Hey, you two, it’s about damn time.

Or maybe it’s because the light we’re sitting at has turned green and the cars behind us are flashing their headlights and honking their horns to get us to move.

Nope. It was the kiss.

When we finally release each other from lip-lock captivity, Kate drives us to the gorges. Tonight the sky’s so low, and we sit there, a canopy of stars exhaling above us, and Kate tells me what it’s like knowing you’re going to die.

“I’m dying, Jack. And not in the we’re all going to die eventually way. It’s not a question of when, just how soon.” She shrugs. “Years, days, I don’t know.”

My brain feels like it’s been tossed off a steep cliff.

“So, what is sickle cell, exactly?”

“My red blood cells don’t stay neat red circles. Instead, they sickle, which means they’re not as flexible as normal cells. And sometimes if too many of them clump together, they can block oxygen from making it to the rest of my body. And, well, you go long enough without oxygen and . . .”

A beat where neither of us says a word, where I am hyperaware of every sound coming from Kate’s body—the flit of her eyelashes, her breathing, her heartbeat, her teeth grazing her bottom lip.

“There’s no cure?” I ask, my voice cracking.

“They’re starting to do these stem cell transplants, but you need a donor match. Thing is, less than ten percent of us have a match, so—”

She looks away. “So, for now, there’s no surefire cure. For now, you manage. Try to avoid the crises, try to control the onset. But there’s no secret formula, no magic potion. You eat painkillers like they’re trail mix, which make your head feel like a helium balloon floating away from your body, and you wear oxygen twenty-four hours a day, and your best friends are your nurses because, if you’re like me, with recurring episodes, you spend more time in a hospital bed than your actual bed. And you sit there, waiting, watching enough reruns to write a Fresh Prince dissertation, and you wait and wait to feel better, and sometimes you do in a few days, and sometimes it’s weeks. Because you hurt all over.” Her face turns back to me. “Your body’s at war against itself so, no matter what, you always lose.”

“Someone has to be working on something else, somewhere.”

“They are, but . . .” Her voice trails off.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“There is this one doctor,” she begins. “But—”

“But what?”

“He costs more than what my parents make in a year combined.”

And I haven’t the slightest idea what to say. But I wonder if I could (peacefully) rob a bank or somehow rig the lottery. Or— “You know, the crazy thing is, at the hospital, they’re always asking you to rate your pain, one to ten. Except no one’s asking about the pain in here.” Kate points to her head. “Or here.” She moves her finger to her chest, left of center. “Because there’s no rating for that. Numbers don’t go high enough.”