A Summer to Remember (31 page)

Hearing her name, Mouse left the pillow and trotted to the back door. He slipped her leash on, stepped outside, and followed her to the grass.

A lot of the information he'd learned danced around in his brain. Some had been too technical to understand, and some had been overwhelming, and some had actually been hopeful. Words like
not fatal
,
treatable
,
manageable
,
normal activity
were singing in his head like the
“Hallelujah Chorus.”

He was pretty sure the accompaniment in Fia's head was more along the lines of a funeral dirge. Her old life was gone, and it wasn't coming back. She needed time to grieve, accept it, and move on.

And she probably expected him to move on, too.

Damn, he hated to disappoint her. Not.

By the time Mouse headed back up the steps, Fia was waiting. She'd filled the pup's food dish and put fresh water in her bowl, and she'd gotten a jacket from the closet, a faded orange jean jacket that matched the flowers on her dress.

He remembered passing the IHOP his first night in town. It was just a few minutes' drive, only a block or so from the gym Fia pointed out where she worked. Despite the time—half past eight—the parking lot was full, the gym was well lit, and people scurried from machine to treadmill to weight room.

“I haven't been in a gym in too long. Should I try yours?”

“Oh, sure. The fittest, buffest, toughest women in town either work or work out there. They'll treat you like a king.”

“Huh. I've never been treated like a king before.” He laughed at the sharp jab she gave him. He liked it when the right woman displayed a bit of jealousy.

He found a parking space near the restaurant door, and they walked in together, hands clasped. Her palm seemed damp, or was that his? Were those his fingers shaking or hers?

With the dinner rush over, they got a small table in a far corner with no other diners to disturb them. The waiter brought a pot of coffee and a bowl of flavored creamers, took their orders, and left them alone facing each other.

She rested her palms on the table, probably because they'd tremble if she put them in her lap, like his were. “Did you read enough to form an opinion?”

He chuckled. “I read enough to diagnose the next patient Dr. Haruno sees.”

“It's awful.”

“It's manageable.”

She scoffed. “Fifteen years after diagnosis, twenty percent of patients are bedridden, and twenty percent more require a wheelchair, a cane, or crutches to walk.”

The scorn in her voice couldn't hide the fear. If she found losing the ability to drive tough, losing the ability to walk would kill her, so he kept his voice level when he responded, “What happens to the other sixty percent?”

She opened her mouth, stopped, and closed it again. She was by nature, he knew, an optimist; it had gotten her through the crappy years with her family, had kept her safe and whole until she met Scott, had kept her here when Scott died because she was needed here. Now thin lines formed between her eyes as she scowled at him. “They're waiting for the ax to fall on them.”

He poured two cups of coffee, dumped a tub of creamer into his, and stirred it with a spoon. “The other sixty percent are taking their medicine, doing their yoga, watching their diet, and soldiering along. There are even some who have very little deficit at all in their whole lives.”

She reached for her own coffee and breathed deeply of the steam. “I have deficits, Elliot.”

“Because you're not on the treatment plan yet. The medications are very good and getting better.”

She shuddered. “I take enough medicines now, and just how much do they help? I don't want to be a walking pharmacy.”

“The pills you take now are just treating symptoms. We're talking medications that alter or slow the course of the disease. And stop whining about how many pills you take now. I can shove a hundred down your throat every day and smile while doing it if it keeps you healthy.”

She stopped in the middle of sweetening her coffee, everything about her going still. “Did you just tell me to stop whining?”

Her eyes were narrowed to laser-like beams, and he wasn't sure if the steam was coming up from her coffee or blowing down from her nose. He'd been in situations like this before, occasionally with a girlfriend but usually with Em. He used what had worked best for him in the past: the sweetest, most charming smile he could pull off and equally sweet words. “I love you.”

The impact of the words didn't escape him. Sure, he'd said them hundreds of times before, but never to this woman. Never to the one who'd been nurturing a piece of his heart forever. And he didn't care if she said them back because he knew. He
knew
.

Her expression was comical, torn between outrage and laughter. This time the laughter won out. “I don't whine. If I do, you've got my permission to smack me upside the head.”

“Aw, I'd never smack you. But I might tickle you until you lose control.”

With that poorly chosen image, the cheer fled her face. “Bladder dysfunction occurs in eighty percent of all patients. So does bowel dysfunction. And sexual dysfunction. Elliot, you can't possibly…”

He got all solemn, too. “What, Fia? Be with a woman like that? Be with you no matter what happens?”

She leaned forward, the color drained from her face, and whispered, “I could lose sensation in important places. Sex could be off the table. Damn it, you could end up changing my diapers!”

He leaned forward, too, their noses nearly touching over the coffee cups. “Yeah, my dick could shrivel up and fall off tonight from too damn much anticipation. A meteor could crash through that window—or a ninety-year-old woman who can't tell the gas pedal from the brake.
Any
thing
can
happen, but that doesn't mean it's going to, and if it does, well, we deal with it.”

Heat radiated from her, fading as she slowly sat back. “
I
deal with it. You…you're free to walk away anytime.”

His jaw clenched on all the words he wanted to say, letters clawing with their fancy curled tips to get out of his mouth and into the air, but his muscles clamped tighter. The waiter provided a respite, bringing their meals, offering condiments not on the table. If he noticed the frost between them, he didn't let it show other than with his quick retreat.

After a couple moments, followed by maybe ten or twenty more, Elliot forced his mouth open, forced a smile and a pleasant tone. “You tried dumping me yesterday, and yet here I am. Why do you think I'll be any more amenable tonight?”

Fia folded her arms across her middle and ignored the ham, egg, and white cheddar crepes in front of her. “You can't refuse to be dumped. Guys don't do that. They yell at you, call you names, then go get drunk and screw around with other women.”

“I don't do that.” He arranged his eggs over easy on the toast, then speared the yolks and let them run. With sausage, hash browns, a biscuit, and gravy, it was a totally heart-unhealthy feast that he rarely indulged in. Tonight just seemed that kind of night.

“Then they follow you places, get in your face, make threats, and get their asses kicked by a white knight passing by.”

“I don't do that, either. How are your crepes?”

She looked down at them, and he swore he saw her nose twitch as the flavor drifted up to meet it. “I've lost my appetite.”

“Really? The way your stomach growled all the way over here? Huh. Imagine that.” He cut a slice of sausage, dipped it in gravy, and made a show of
yum
ming it.

Grudgingly Fia picked up her fork and poked the crepes as if she wasn't sure they wouldn't poke back. She cut a tiny slice, slid it into her mouth, put the fork down, and crossed her arms again. A silent declaration:
I'm done.

“Elliot,” she began after a while. “I know I never should have gotten involved with you without telling you about my mystery condition. And I know you have this huge sense of duty to other people, and you want to make them happy, and you want to fix them, and it's hard for you to not do that. Like the girl at Bubba's the other night…you'd never seen her before in your life, but you felt obligated to help her out, even though her boyfriend was twice your size.”

“I'm the one who walked away while he sprawled in the dirt,” he reminded her, then relented. “As far as feeling obligated, hell, yeah. I wasn't raised to just walk past someone who was being mistreated by someone else. Emily's the same way, though she wouldn't have bothered throwing any punches. She would have kicked his family jewels so far up inside him they'd need a spotlight to find them.” He raised one brow and pointed his fork at Fia. “That's what you would have done, too.”

She wanted to deny it just to be contrary—he could read her so well. Instead, she whacked off another bite of food as if it had offended her and stuffed it in her mouth.

Elliot ate a few more bites, enough to satisfy his hunger for the moment, and set his fork and knife down. “Okay. I know what you want, Fia, what you need, and what you fear. Now I'm going to tell you what I want and need and fear.”

When Fia's fingertips went numb around her fork, her first distressed thought was the spasms were starting again. After an instant, she realized she was gripping her fork so tightly that she'd cut off circulation. Gingerly, she peeled them loose and waited for Elliot to speak.

He was going to make an argument that staying with her knowing what he now knew should be entirely his decision. That it had nothing to do with duty or feeling somehow responsible. That he knew what he was giving up—a normal life with a normal woman and a normal household. That he loved her too much to make any other choice.

He would tell her all those things, and like any other woman in the world, she would want desperately to believe them. She wanted it so bad that she ached with it. Accepting a commitment like that would make life so much easier. She'd learned that from Scott. But what right did she have to accept a commitment like that in her condition? How could that possibly be fair to Elliot?

“This huge sense of duty…that's just who I am, Fia, whether I'm with my family or you or my Army buddies or anyone else. It's the way I was taught: to care about others, to protect them when they need it, to help them when they want it. I couldn't change that if I wanted to, and I don't want to. I think being a good person is a better goal in life than being one who just doesn't care. And I know you understand that because you taught yourself to be a good person. To get involved. To make a difference in people's lives.”

Slowly she took another forkful of dinner, actually tasting it for the first time. The crepe was delicate, the flavors of the eggs and ham and cheddar melding together beautifully. She let the surface of her mind focus on each taste, each bite, while deeper in her brain she concentrated on Elliot.

“As far as acting responsibly, wanting people to be happy, and making commitments, yeah, I plead guilty to that, too. I prefer to live in a better world than a worse one. It would be disrespectful to my parents and uncles and grandparents to act any other way. Now, you have damn good reasons to not respect your parents after the way they treated you, but me…” He shook his head. “They made me who I am, and they did it with love and responsibility and commitment, and that stuff is so deeply ingrained in me I can't ignore it.”

She swallowed hard—ugh, another problem she might face as the disease progressed—and for a flash, envied him. Her parents had contributed to who she was, too, though not in a good way. The good stuff had come from her own stubborn determination, from Scott and the friends she'd been blessed with.

Elliot was a blessing, too, wasn't he? She'd known that from the instant she'd realized she was falling for him—no, even before that. The night they met, the tender care he'd taken with a scrawny, vulnerable puppy, umbrella and all…That was when she'd realized he was a very special man. A man who brought happiness to everyone in his path. A man her friends adored and respected from the start.

A man who could spend hours studying the effects of a disease, then look at the woman who had it and say,
I love you.

He sipped his coffee, his strong fingers gripping the mug with just the right pressure, the way he touched her. She had vague memories of Saturday night, but there were flashes of recall, of him unfolding her fingers so gently, rubbing away the pain, never pushing harder than she could take.

When he could have taken off instead,
came Scott's drawl.
He's a stand-up guy, Fia, and I know you have trouble believing this, but you're damn well worth standing up for.

“I know the word you hate most in the world,” Elliot went on. “Your worthless parents made you feel like a burden. Even though you've overcome pretty much everything else, you've never overcome that fear of being someone else's burden. Do you think Carly feels burdened by Dane, or Bennie by Calvin, because they've got health issues?”

She thought of her friends, both pregnant and happy and deeply in love with their husbands, and envy turned her voice into a breathy squeak. “No.”

“Did Carly know from the beginning that Dane had lost his leg? Did Calvin tell Bennie right from the start that he had PTSD?”

“No.”

“You guys take privacy to extremes around here, don't you?” Elliot shook his head, his expression bemused. “For what it's worth, I had the measles when I was a kid, but the vaccinations took care of everything else. I've been stepped on by a few horses, had a few black eyes, mostly from Em, and had stitches a few times, along with a couple bruised ribs after encounters in drinking establishments that didn't turn out as well as the one at Bubba's. I also discovered once that I could be too drunk to get an erection, much to the disappointment of myself and a pretty little Carolina girl, and I have never been that drunk since.”