Laugh (10 page)

Tay was
hers
, just as Russ had been, their families had been, the orchards had been, their baby had been.

Who did she need to remind of what had been taken and what she had paid?

Nina felt the burn where her nails had dug into her palms.

She turned and banged out the double doors.

She would, at least, silence those knives.

* * *

Sam looked up to find a very angry Nina staring at him.

When he’d met her at the hospital with her friend—who seemed to be a bit of a hippie if hippies had muscles like bantamweight boxers—he’d worked hard to stay friendly and professional, to answer Tay’s questions. He’d had a hard time keeping his eyes off Nina—if she’d been beautiful in utility shorts and mud, he’d nearly died to see her in a tight black T-shirt and a skirt that somehow moved all around her thighs when she walked, with her hair loose from its braids and in blue-black waves almost to her waist.

But then he also saw how scared she was.

He felt like his entire life was about getting that look off people’s faces.

His mom’s face, when it was for him.

His dad’s, when his mom was sick, even as he failed and had to watch the sadness live in his dad’s face, instead, until he died.

His brother’s and sisters’ when his dad was sick, when Sarah had been hurt and had setbacks in her recovery.

His patients. Their families.

The only thing he had been able to do today, because he wasn’t Tay’s doctor, was to convince Dave Messick to sedate Tay. Because he hadn’t been able to be God, or even a full doctor, now, he had wanted to give both Tay and Nina ease, but when he’d reached out a hand to Nina she had hunched away.

So he answered Lacey’s voicemail and then answered to her and her irritation with his missing the first meeting with the rest of their hires at the clinic.

He was needed here, with people who were hurting, not in the half-finished rooms of the clinic, endlessly talking about nothing.

Now Nina’s worry seemed gone. She looked angry.

“You were yelling out here.” Every word was thrown at him. He had to dig in, hard, not to throw words right back, like a reflex.

“There was stuff at work.”

“Tay doesn’t need to be around your stress. I called you here to help.”

Sam felt almost panicked, looking at Nina. “I did help. Tay’s not stressed because she’s
sedated
, she’ll be able to relax the rest of the day.” He shoved his phone in his pocket. “Look, I can go. I probably should go. I
missed this thing at the clinic, Lacey’s pissed. I’ll make sure Donna’s the nurse that takes care of Tay for recovery, she’s good.”

Nina pushed her lips together, tight. There was puffiness around her eyes, like she had been crying or had slept poorly. Her expression ringed her mouth with fine wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, ones he’d not noticed on her face before, all those times she was showing him things. Laughing.

But her age didn’t show in her laugh lines. It showed in her anger, in her fear.

“Can we go someplace?”

“What do you mean? Now?”

“Like, someplace private? Do you know a private place we can go in the hospital?”

Her arms went up under her breasts, like they had the first time they’d sparred in her garden, by the library, and her breasts lifted up in the same pretty way. But then, her whole body had been easy, loose. Sexy.

Now she looked brittle. Beautiful, but like she could shatter.

“I have this temporary office by urgent care. For when I’m down there working shifts.”

“Let’s go.”

He couldn’t figure this out. She was already bending over, grabbing the purse she had put under his chair before she’d gone in with Tay. “What about your friend?”

“Like you said, I’ll meet her back up here, in recovery.”

“What do you need, do you need to call someone? Can I—”

She wouldn’t look at him and was standing by the exit in the tiny MRI waiting room. “I need privacy.”

“Okay.”

He walked just in front of her through the warren of the hospital, down to the urgent care. Waved his badge in front of the ScanLock, pushed into his bare office. It clicked behind them after a slow hiss from the pneumonic hinge.

Nina backed him against the door, and Sam thought,
Her thighs are against mine
, because that was all there was to think. First they were walking silently through the hospital, then her thighs were pressing his, her stomach, her breasts, the heels of her hands pushing his shoulders.

When he looked into her face, she was turned away and all he could see was the fall of her hair, the shape of her nose and forehead. He moved to bring his hand up, and he didn’t even know what he was going to
do
with that hand, but before his hand could decide for him, she did look at him, her brown eyes huge, and she slid one of her hands from his shoulder to grab his at the wrist. Brought it down, and held it.

Then her thighs were on either side of one of his.

She used her other hand, the one not pinning his wrist to the door, to yank up her skirt.

Then he felt her grind over the muscle he was clenching in his thigh. Slow, hard. Hard enough he felt
her panties shift through his jeans.

She kept her gaze locked with his, and she held his wrist against the door, and her hips came up, came down.

When he breathed, there was no air, but his inhale seemed to animate her breaths, which became short, which softened her mouth, finally, but her eyes were steady, even as they filled with tears.

Her hips circling.

He was hard now, but he almost didn’t feel connected to it, his desire was more a buzz than an ache, and diffuse, not sharp, not something he could work out how to act on.

“Nina?” he whispered, and that brought something like clarity to her eyes, and, also, spilled the tears.

She leaned against him, completely formless and heavy, where she had been all tight, hard, and graceful movement before he said her name.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He had no idea. He had no idea and yet, somehow, he completely understood. “It’s okay,” he said, and he brought his arms up to hold her against him. Held as much of her as he could against as much of himself as possible.

For once, his first gut impulse was actually the right one. She put her arms around him and started to cry. She cried for a long time, and it made him almost sick, listening to her. Her sobs came from someplace that made them choke in her throat, wet and thick.

“Here’s the thing”—he stared straight ahead—“about cancer.”

She stiffened in his arms, and he ran a hand over the top of her head, all through her thick hair to its curling ends.

“Keep in mind,” he continued, “I’m not an oncologist. Though I’ve had many more patients than I’d like who have survived cancer, or are living with it, or lost their lives to it. My dad did, you know. I know I told you. What I’ve learned is that right now, right where your friend is at, is the part where they’re gathering data. Lots and lots of data. It’s like … they’re spying on her cancer. Learning as much as they can about it. Where it came from. Where it’s going. What it wants. What its weaknesses are. How strong it is. Every single test, even the ones that really suck, they learn something more.”

“Then what?” He felt her lips move across his chest, where his T-shirt had gotten wet with her tears.

“Then they make a battle plan. All the spies come back, tell them everything they know. Then they plan the battle, one part at a time. All the battles make a war, of course, but really, it’s one battle at a time, and even the battles you lose, you learn something. More information. You win something from that battle—information, or a smaller war.”

“That sounds awful.”

“War is awful.”

“Tell me something good.”

Sam thought. His patients liked him for the same reason his family didn’t, which was that he didn’t lie, and he respected the truth. “We try to fight the wars now with smarts and really specialized weapons instead of bombing the whole field and hoping we blast away the cancer without blasting away too much of the patient.”

She stiffened again, and he held on to her nape.

“Look,” he said, “Tay seems really freakishly strong.”

“Yes, she is.”

“She’s otherwise healthy, obviously, she eats vegetables.”

Nina made a noise that was kind of a laugh. “She’s a vegetarian.”

“Doesn’t smoke, probably.”

“No, despite what she looks like, she doesn’t even smoke the other stuff.”

“She has people who love her.”

“Yeah. Lots.”

“She has health insurance?”

“I have a small business plan for the whole group. It’s good. Expensive for me. I … wish it was better though. But if I have to, for Tay, I have assets to sell.”

Sam almost told her no, she shouldn’t do that. But fuck that. She could do that if she wanted to. He was glad she felt like she could. Glad that he was holding a woman who would.

“So it’s just one thing at a time. One information-seeking mission at a time. One battle at a time. She has cancer. But she’s living with cancer. Like you’re living with terminal gorgeousness. Or how I live with ADHD.”

She leaned back and her face was puffier, and she needed to blow her nose, but still, yeah, terminally gorgeous. “It still bugs you, though. Even though you’ve accomplished so much?”

“It still interferes with my life more than I like it to.”

“But you live with it.”

“It’s a battle.”

She put her hands on either side of his face. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you get more information, right?”

He closed his eyes because her hands, strong and rough with their long fingers, felt really good against his face. He’d dated a lot in his twenties, his early thirties, and mostly, it always seemed to start and be sustained physically because he didn’t know how to tell those women how he felt, except with his body.

Which worked out how he guessed it worked out for most people. Sometimes great, sometimes so great
that you thought,
This one. Me and this person are going to make a real go of it.
Sometimes really awful, and awful in that way you never really got over.

Then a few years ago, about the time his dad got sick, he’d had enough. He’d started to talk to his dad, almost the way, at least sometimes, he and his mom had talked. At first it was about Mom, because they had that love in common, but then, just talking.

His mom had told him things about falling in love, lots of things, when he came to her with his first high school heartbreaks. Then he heard his dad’s story.

He hadn’t thought about how it had been for his dad. Loving his mom, but living with her, too. Just day-to-day, when she was like Sam as well as a mom with four kids. He’d never noticed the mess, really. He never thought about whether it was weird that he often had to hold up the class for a field trip so the school secretary could call his mother when Sam didn’t show up with the permission slip.

His mom was just his mom, dark-haired and funny and understanding.

But listening to his dad, he had started to understand that love wasn’t this thing that consumed you. It was finding someone who, no matter how many times she forgot to sign her kids’ permission slips, was always
enough.

Sam’s mom always used to tell him,
I love you because you’re you.
And talking to his dad at the end of his life, he had realized that his mom probably said that because his dad said it to her.

I love you because you’re you.

He realized that his dad had always loved him, loved him because he was just Sam, because his dad had all the practice he needed loving difficult people, because he loved his mom.

He started wanting something more from life than the hope that it wouldn’t be awful; he started wanting a partner. Maybe he’d never have something as good as his parents did; he didn’t know if he was good enough himself. But something nice. Something he could make a family from. Like Mike had. Like other guys he’d grown up with in the neighborhood.

Who could he take home? Who would look around a dump apartment like his and see any good?

Who’d see him, after all that, and see any good?

Nina’s hands felt so good on his face, was what he was thinking. Felt so good after this long stretch of losing out and being lonely and not quite making it.

She started to pull her hands away, and he reached up and pressed them against his skin, closer, looked at her.

“What am I going to do with you, Sam Burnside?”

“I liked what you were doing before,” he tried, though he was smart enough to know when grief could take over your gonads.

He just wanted her to laugh, maybe.

She did laugh, at herself, it seemed like, and she got red over her neck, splotchy with a blush that looked hot on her jawline. “I know that was confusing. I’m sorry.”

He let go of her hands and touched her face, too. Traced the boundaries of her blush, the swelling around her eyes from her tears.

“No, I get it.”

She looked solemn. “Do you?”

He kissed her, but let go of her face and paid attention to her hands on his in case she wanted him to back away from it.

But she pulled him in closer, slid her fingers into the hair at his nape and that felt so good, just so good, that he softened and deepened the kiss hoping she’d—

He didn’t know. Just
hoping.

Her fingers massaged and pressed; her mouth was hot, her tongue, sliding, was bringing the blood out to the surface of his skin, and that combination of shivers and heat was getting him so hard, making him want, and so he followed her hair down to where it touched her waist, then eased his hand under her T-shirt, got her hips closer to his.

Felt good. His dick in the soft hollow of her hip, her circling herself on his thigh again. But it was all looser, warmer than before, when she was freaking out. He kissed and kissed her, breathed her in, breathed in the way she smelled like she had just come in from the sun, even in this over-air-conditioned room.

He left her waist to trace the division between her quadriceps and her gracilis muscles along the lateral side of her thigh. She hitched her leg up, and he grabbed it, using it to drive her hips in up-and-down hitches. She hummed, just a little, from her chest, and they kissed between catching their breath.