Captivated (13 page)

“That’s kind of a long story.”

“You have a lot of long stories. You ran away from Kentucky and moved to Paris to get away from your parents. You have an assistant who isn’t your assistant but who lives with you. And you’ve had more than a dry spell? What’s going on? Tell me.”

“‘Dry spell’ is an understatement,” he said.

“Oh shit.” Remi covered her mouth with her hand.

“Don’t ask,” he said, a look of quiet desperation in his eyes. “Please.”

“Oh my God.”

“I have a good excuse, I swear.”

“You’re a virgin?” she asked, utterly astounded.

“I asked you not to ask.” Julien crossed his arms over his chest and laughed nervously.

“I’m sorry.”

“Does it really bother you?”

“I’m just shocked,” Remi said, looking at Julien in a new light.

“Shocked?”

“You’re beautiful, Julien. I thought that the second I saw you four years ago. I thought that the second I saw you again tonight. And now you’re blushing and you’re even sexier than you were four seconds ago.”

“Let’s go talk in my room. There’s something I need to tell you. And show you.”

“Your naked body?”

“If you still want to see it after I tell you everything, then you can see it.”

“The ‘if’ was not necessary, I promise,” she said.

Julien took her hand and led her through the now empty living room.

“Wonder where Merrick and Salena went?” Julien whispered.

“It’s Merrick. Five bucks says they’re in her bedroom.”

“Salena’s really picky about the guys she dates.”

“It’s Merrick. Trust me, this isn’t about dating.”

Julien took her hand and they crept past a closed door. They heard a voice from within.

“So how old are you?” they heard Merrick asking Salena.

“Thirty-three. You?” Salena asked.

“Thirty-six. You put us together and you get sixty-nine.”

“You’re very good at math.”

“Who was doing math?” Merrick asked.

“Mystery solved,” Julien whispered and rolled his eyes. He looked so cute with his amused disgust that Remi had to stop herself from grabbing his face and kissing him again. “Let’s go.”

They quickly reached his room at the end of the hall. He pushed the door open and ripped a small folded piece of paper off the door. He glanced at the note, smiled and shoved it into his pocket. As soon as they were in the room with the door locked behind them, Julien pulled her to him. Remi raised her hand and covered his mouth.

“No kissing. You talk to me first,” she said.

“My man’t malk wiff your mand on my mouff.”

“What?” she asked, pulling her hand back.

“I can’t talk with your hand on my mouth,” Julien said.

“Okay, you talk. I’ll be sitting at a safe distance and listening.” Remi picked up a chair and set it five feet from the bed, where Julien now sat. She was impressed by his bedroom. The walls were an elegant jade green and the bed frame an antique brass. The walls were lined with beautiful if bizarre art, and every surface was spotless.

“Your room is really clean,” she said. “That’s not natural.”

“Salena hired a housekeeper. Was not my idea. I’m not that spoiled.”

“I want to know about Salena. She’s way too beautiful, she lives with you, but she’s not your assistant and yet she hired a housekeeper.”

“And she’s seen me naked. A lot. Just making sure you know everything.”

“I hope there’s a good explanation for that.” Remi wasn’t the jealous type, but she was quickly getting used to the idea of being the only woman who got to see Julien naked.

“There is. And it has everything to do with why, I’m, you know...”

“Undefiled?”

“That’s a diplomatic word for a guy who’s never gotten laid.”

“I’m trying to be diplomatic. It’s better than ripping your clothes off,” Remi said, and sat on her hands to remind herself to let him talk before the clothes-ripping began.

“I’d rather you just rip my clothes off.”

“Talk,” she ordered.

“Okay, I’m talking. It’s just... It sort of changes everything when I bring it up.”

“Bring what up? What is it?”

“The reason I’m a virgin and the reason Salena lives with me and the reason I have a housekeeper who keeps everything spotless and disinfected and the reason I lived with my parents until last year when I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and the reason I didn’t send you all the letters I wrote you...”

“What’s the reason?”

Julien took a deep breath. He seemed to be steeling himself. “Salena’s not my assistant, but she does work for us.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s my doctor. Dr. Salena Kar—oncologist.”

Remi’s mouth fell open. She quickly closed it. Her desire for Julien turned instantly to pity, compassion and fear.

“You have a live-in oncologist?” she whispered.

“I do.”

“What do you have?”

Julien sighed again. “It’s not what I have. It’s what I had.”

“Which was?”

“Leukemia, Remi. Two weeks after you and I almost had sex, I was diagnosed with leukemia.”

Chapter Four

No Last Names

“Leukemia,” Remi repeated. Her mouth formed the word but her tongue wanted to spit it back out, reject the word, the truth, the suffering, Julien had experienced.

“Acute myeloid leukemia, if you want to be specific.”

“That sounds...bad.”

Julien laughed a little. “There’s no good leukemia.”

“No,” Remi breathed, her hands shaking from shock. “I wouldn’t think so. What happened?”

Julien shrugged and sighed. She knew he didn’t want to tell the story but she had to hear it. Every word.

“The night of the Christmas party, you thought I was older than I was. Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You were almost six feet tall and had a glass of wine in your hand.”

“I thought it was probably the wine that made you think I was older.”

“That and how intelligent and funny you were. I’m surprised your parents let you drink wine.”

“They usually didn’t. But I had a headache that day. It got worse at the party. Dad said I could have one glass of wine and if that didn’t help I should just go lie down in one of the guest bedrooms. They’d find me when it was time to go. That’s why Mom was looking for me.”

“You didn’t tell me you had a headache that night.”

“I’d had a headache off and on for a week. When I saw you and we started talking, it disappeared. But it came back the next day. A week after Christmas, I started getting bruises that wouldn’t heal. I finally told Mom I thought something was wrong with me, and I showed her the bruises on my stomach. Next day I’m in the doctor’s office getting blood drawn and my mom’s crying and the doctor’s looking at my blood in the tube and scowling.”

“Scowling is not good,” Remi said, her hands shaking as if it had been her in that room next to Julien watching a doctor stick a needle in his arm.

“The doctor said he was going to run some tests, and I should pray I got an A on the tests.”

“An A?”

“A for is for Anemia, which is easy to treat and would have explained the bruises and the headaches. I got a C on my test instead. Cancer. They admitted me into the hospital immediately. Then home for a few days. Then I was back in the hospital again. After the bone marrow transplant, I pretty much lived in the hospital.”

“How bad was it?”

“Bad,” he said simply. “But it’s always bad. With cancer it’s either bad or worse. Mine was bad, so it could have been worse. That’s what you tell yourself to make it through the night. Mine was treatable, even curable. Not all of the big Cs are.”

Her heart ground against the gears of her chest. Julien spoke of his years at death’s doorway so casually, too casually.

“So you’re better? Completely?”

“See that?” Julien pointed to a chart on the wall. “That’s a five-year calendar. Declared in total remission one year and eleven months ago. That’s when the countdown starts. At five years if I’m still clear, then I’m cured. But the likelihood of relapse is extremely low at this point.”

“Good,” she said and exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

“But you should know, there are some lingering issues. I’d get Salena in here to tell you all the dirty details, but I think she’s a little busy right now.”

Remi stood up and walked over to his bed. She touched the side of his face. “I want
you
to tell me, no one else.”

He shrugged and rolled onto his back. Not able to stay away from him any longer, she stretched out on her side next to him. Julien stared up at the ceiling. She stared at Julien.

“Okay, dirty details. Leukemia sucks. I lived in the hospital for months at a time. Radiation makes you skeletal. No teenage guy wants to weigh ninety pounds. Then you get chemo and steroids and you blow up like a balloon. Skeletal. Fat. Skeletal. Fat. I banned cameras. There are literally zero pictures of me from age seventeen to nineteen in existence.”

“I was wondering why I never found any pictures of you. Your family’s in the news all the time.”

“Even when I was having good days, feeling okay, Mom wouldn’t let me out of the house. All the treatments kill the immune system.”

“House arrest?”

“Basically,” Julien said. “Not her fault. Mom and Dad never talked about me being sick to anyone because I asked them not to, and they respected that.”

“You were sick. That’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“I know that now. Harder to accept when you’re seventeen and bald and there are days you can’t even go to the bathroom without help. I didn’t want visitors. I didn’t want people all over me. I just wanted to get through it and get on with my life.”

“I can see that, but still...God, if I’d known you were sick, I would never have let my family say a word about your family even around our kitchen table. This stupid feud would have been over even if I had to tie up, gag and chain every last relative and throw them in the basement.”

“Kinky,” Julien said. Remi flicked him in the arm. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Remi said. “Just keep talking. I want to know everything.”

“This next part is embarrassing.”

“Tell me, Julien. Please tell me everything.”

“I’m sterile,” Julien said. He glanced her way before staring assiduously at the ceiling again.

“You mean,
sterile
sterile? Permanently?”

“Chemotherapy plus bone marrow transplant means goodbye to your fertility forever. It’s possible I could have kids someday. They froze some of my sperm.”

“That was smart.” She was saying things she knew she should say, keeping calm, being rational even as her stomach roiled with unspoken emotion—grief, sadness, relief...so much relief that he had lived to tell his tale.

“Smart and horrible. Talk about humiliating, sitting in front of your doctor with your mom next to you and discussing your sperm.”

“Oh God, you poor thing.” Remi could have cried at the thought of what Julien had endured. She felt an ache, almost physical, to go back in time and somehow be there for him and with him while he’d gone through it all.

“Yeah, that was a bad day.” He laughed softly and rubbed his forehead. “I don’t think Mom’s ever recovered from the ‘Save Julien’s sperm’ conversation, either. Anyway, thought you should know that part up front.”

“My horses are my babies. I don’t need much else,” she said before realizing they were already talking about the future. Where had this come from? She didn’t know. Right now she didn’t care. “That doesn’t bother me.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Anything else I need to know?” she asked.

“Nothing much more to tell. Oh, except this. Two years after diagnosis I’m finally in remission. After about six months after that I started to feel pretty normal. I looked normal, too. My hair was back. It was short but at least I had some. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I was starting college and was so ready to have a girlfriend.”

“And have sex?” she teased.

“All the sex,” he said.

“So what happened?”

“My immune system still wasn’t one hundred percent. I caught a cold. The cold turned into pneumonia. I had to take a medical leave from school two months in. I’ve never been back to school. College dropout. Thank God for trust funds, right?”

“Why didn’t you go back to school when you were better?”

“Mom took the pneumonia as a sign I should be in lockdown. Do you know how hard it is to meet women when your mother won’t let you out of your own house? And it’s really hard to kiss someone when you’re under orders to wear a surgical mask.”

“You had to wear surgical masks?”

“Everyone in the house wore them around me,” Julien said. “And that’s where Salena comes in. My parents hired Salena to be my live-in doctor. Salena had burnout and student loans from med school. My parents paid off her loans, and now she has only the one patient. Well, two patients counting Mom. First thing Salena did was diagnose my mother with ‘vulnerable child syndrome.’ Real syndrome. It’s basically pathological overprotectiveness. And then she wrote Mom a prescription. Four words—‘Let Julien move out.’”

Remi would have applauded if her hand had been free.

“Thank God for Salena. That’s really smart, writing it on a prescription pad.”

“Doctor’s orders,” Julien said. “Salena writes me prescriptions all the time. ‘Go running’ or ‘Go hiking’ or ‘Ask her out on a date.’”

“She writes you prescriptions for dates?”

“She’s awesome, right? I had to have a ton of tests and stuff to get cleared to have sex. You know, they had to make sure my immune system could take it. Salena did all the tests and then after I got cleared, she sat me in her office and gave me a three-hour lecture on sex, women and the female anatomy. She had charts and diagrams. The films were my favorite part. It was amazing. I’ve never had sex, but I know where the clitoris and the G-spot are, and I know what to do when I find them.”

“Can I go kiss Salena now? On the mouth?”

“Can I watch?” Julien asked.

“Of course.”

“I love Salena,” Julien said with a wide-eyed exhalation. “She’s my hero and my best friend. She rescued me from my own house, makes me go out, have a life, try new things.”

“Like moving to Paris?”

“Once I was cleared for ‘adult activities,’ as Salena calls them, she staged an intervention with my parents and told them they were making things worse by keeping me cooped up and treating me like I was on death’s doorstep. My parents worship doctors, so they took her seriously and let me go. I just had to take Salena with me so she could monitor my medical condition.”

“So you ran off to Paris?”

“I said Paris. They assumed Paris, Kentucky. I didn’t exactly correct them.”

“Did they freak out?” Remi asked.

“They did at first. But Salena talked sense into them. France has the best health-care system in the world. Much better than the U.S. And I’m healthy as a horse now. Salena makes sure of that.”

“I’m happy to hear that.” Remi realized she might have made the understatement of the century. “Ecstatic” would have been more accurate.

“My parents are calmer now about the Paris thing. Salena loves it here. I love it here. Been learning the language, trying to meet people.”

“Meet women?”

Julien shrugged. “Been on a few dates.”

“Only a few?”

Julien gave her a crooked smile and a halfhearted chuckle. “Did you know
cancer
is the same word in English and in French? No matter what language, the word sends girls running. It’s not that it’s in the past. That’s not what scares people. It’s that it can come back. It might come back. Anytime I get a headache, a cold, anything, my family freaks out. Anybody who is in my life will share in that fear. Hard to ask that much courage from someone you just met, right? No wonder the girls go running when I tell them the truth.”

Remi rose up and looked down at Julien, still lying on his back on the bed.

“I’m not running,” she said.

“Why not?” Julien asked.

“I am the least romantic person I’ve ever known,” she confessed. “But for some reason...”

She said no more because she knew she didn’t have to.

“I know,” Julien said in a low voice, almost scared.

“I’ve never forgotten you. I should have. You were seventeen. I’d just graduated college that December. I should have gotten over you a long time ago. I never did. And now that I’m here with you, I feel like this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

“Although it ended badly, I was so grateful we had that moment at the Christmas party. Those nights I was alone in the hospital with nothing but my fears and my exhaustion, and I thought maybe I would just stop fighting, go to sleep and never wake up again, I would remember that night with you. I remembered kissing you, touching you, being touched by you...and it helped me keep my eyes on the future. A future where I was healthy again and wasn’t alone. You were with me the whole time, Remi.”

Remi blinked back tears. Neither of them spoke. A heavy, meaningful silence descended. She didn’t want to rush things, didn’t want to push him. But for all her noble intentions, she also wanted to kiss him again, touch every inch of him, and spend all night with him in this bed helping him make up for lost time and show him exactly what he’d been fighting for.

“This is going to sound like a line,” Julien finally said, “but I swear it isn’t. The thing is...when you spend age seventeen to nineteen thinking you might die, it changes the way you look at your life. I decided I wanted to move to Paris on a Thursday. Salena and I were on a plane Monday. When you want to do something, you do it. You don’t wait a week, a year. Because you know you might not be around next year, next week.”

“Carpe diem?”
Remi asked.

“That means ‘seize the day,’” Julien said. “It’s night.”

“
Carpe
... Hold on a second. Merrick?” she called out loudly, loud enough she knew her voice carried throughout the entire apartment.

“Little busy, Boss!” he yelled back, his voice easily penetrating the wall of Julien’s bedroom.

“What’s Latin for ‘night’?”

“Depends on the part of speech!”

“Direct object!”

“Noctem!”
he yelled.

“Thank you!” Remi shouted. Then she turned to Julien and whispered, “
Carpe noctem.
‘Seize the night.’”

“We could have just looked that up online,” Julien said.

“I know. But I wanted a little payback for all the times Merrick starts conversations with me when I’m in the bathroom. Plus, what’s the point in having a genius assistant who knows Latin without asking him to help you with it?”

“Good point.”

“So...” Remi said as that tense, taut silence descended on the room again. She slid her hand up and down the center of Julien’s chest. With each pass down his stomach she moved lower. Under her hand she felt his stomach fluttering. Julien was nervous. She liked that.

“So...” Julien said. “What do you want to do?”

“It’s your decision,” she said. “You have more to lose than I do.”

“Literally,” he said.

“How about this? How about I kiss you right now and you kiss me back and we’ll keep kissing until something more happens or we fall asleep?”