43
XAVIER
I HAD OFFICIALLY pushed my body past its limits.
I’d used what little I had to get to California and then I somehow managed to turn around and get back. By the time I was walking up to my apartment, I felt like my legs were going to give out. Then she opened the door, dragged me inside, and threw her arms around me and I could have done this whole nightmare of a round trip a hundred times over if this was waiting for me at the end.
I was so happy to see her, tears squeezed from my eyes.
“You’re so pale,” she whispered.
“I’m a Minnesotan.”
She did a little laugh-cry and pulled away to look at me. I could tell by the splotches around her eyes that she’d been crying before I got here.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting a palm to her cheek. “I should have told you I was coming. I wanted to surprise you.”
“Why were you even out? You’re sick, you look half dead.”
“I’m not contagious.”
“That’s not the point, Xavier. You need to rest.”
“I can’t rest unless I’m with you.”
I swayed a little. I wasn’t feeling well. My body ached, and my ears still hadn’t popped from the flights. I didn’t feel like myself. I felt drunk, even though I wasn’t. I chose to chalk it up to exhaustion and cold medicine.
She was studying me with beautiful worried brown eyes.
I wondered if I was hallucinating that she was here. I’d been wanting to be alone in a room with her for so long that maybe my brain had finally cracked and I created her myself out of pure imagination.
She put a hand to my forehead. The touch felt real enough.
“You’re hot.” She frowned.
“Am I?”
“I think you have a fever. Get in bed. Let’s go.”
I looked around while she led me to my room. She’d cleaned.
“I’m sorry I left it a mess,” I said.
“Stop.”
She sat me on the end of the mattress and started taking off my boots. I grabbed her and pulled her down on top of me.
“Just for a minute,” I whispered, holding her. “Let me hug you. Please.”
She let out a breath and I wrapped around her. I needed to feel her like a weighted blanket. I wanted the pressure like proof she was with me and not just some figment of my fevered imagination. I tried to breathe in her hair but I couldn’t smell her, I was too stuffed up.
She’s right, I shouldn’t have been on a plane, but I couldn’t justify taking four days off work that weren’t days with her. I would go out of my mind alone here without her. I went out of my mind anywhere without her but at least at work I was distracted.
The last three months had felt like a punishment. Like I was bailing water out of a sinking ship with a spoon. No matter how much I worked, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get back to her. And then I finally went and she’s not even there. Both of us desperate to be together and none of it was working.
She pulled away to look down at me, her hair around us like a curtain. Her eyes were bloodshot. Mine probably were too.
I was so tired.
“Xavier, you’re really hot,” she said.
“Just lay down with me…”
“No. I think you need medicine.”
I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep. I felt like I didn’t even have the energy to get all the way onto the bed. My chest was tight. I was wheezing a little.
“Can you get me the pulse oximeter,” I managed. “Small black box. To check oxygen levels. In the medicine cabinet.”
“Okay.” She got up and brought it to me with the thermometer, looking worried. I slipped the pulse ox on my finger while she took my temperature. My oxygen was at 85 and I had a fever of 103.
“I need to go the hospital,” I said, trying to get up.
“Oh my God, what ?”
I coughed and my ribs yelped. “My oxygen is low. It’s fine, it’s probably pneumonia—”
“Xavier!” She was running around the room, grabbing me a hoodie, pulling a charger out of the wall. She helped me up, slinging her purse over her shoulder.
“They’re just going to give me some oxygen,” I said, holding on to her arm. “Maybe an IV. I’ll be fine.”
She wrangled me to the door. I tried to take the keys. “I’ll drive.”
“You are not driving, Xavier!”
“I know where the hospital is—”
“So does Google!”
I swayed into the wall.
She looked at me, panicked. “Should I call an ambulance?”
“No, no. I can make it.” I didn’t actually know if that was true.
My body was giving out. I could feel it. Not in a dying way, in a it had had enough of the abuse and neglect I’d subjected it to kind of way and it was going to make me take the break I needed whether I wanted it or not.
And all I could think was that now we had to go to the ER instead of cuddling in bed or eating something together or doing literally anything else.
I felt defeated. Like my own body had betrayed me. It was probably the other way around.
An hour later they admitted me. Double pneumonia.
I had my own room. They’d started me on an antibiotic drip, steroids, and they’d given me a breathing treatment. I was going to be here at least until tomorrow.
Samantha was holding my hand.
“I am literally so pissed at you right now,” she said, shaking her head at me from the chair next to my hospital bed. “I cannot believe you got on two planes like this.”
“You can’t be mad at a guy with a cannula,” I said tiredly.
She snorted.
“You should have let me drive,” I said.
She rubbed her forehead. “Xavier…”
“I don’t get to do things for you,” I said. “I want to do things for you when you’re here.”
“You think you should be driving yourself to the ER? That’s what you want to do for me?” She gave me a look. “You can do one thing for me,” she said.
“Anything.”
“You can break up with me.”
I scoffed. “No.”
She sat back in her chair. “I thought you’d say that.”
“Why are you thinking about that?” I asked.
“Because this sucks for you and I don’t know why you’d want it?”
“I love you. That’s why I want it.”
She let out a puff of air.
“I love you too,” she said. “But this is ridiculous.”
“I don’t care.”
“You can’t keep living like this, Xavier. I don’t want you working like you have been anymore, okay? Please promise me.”
“Then I won’t be able to come see you as much—”
“Then don’t come see me as much. I’d rather know you’re here and healthy than working yourself sick. And I don’t like that you had to give up the rescue stuff. I don’t like any of it. If you’re not going to have a life with me in California I want you to have a life here . I want you to have time to see your friends and go to the gym and sleep. Things that keep you sane and healthy. Maybe we’ll just have to be okay with quality instead of quantity. Maybe we see each other less, but then when we do, we’re not in the ER.”
“I’m fine—”
“No, you’re not . And neither am I.”
She peered at me, her red eyes sad. “I promised you on our first date that I’d always tell you if things aren’t okay,” she said. “They’re not.”
I swallowed. “Are you unhappy?”
She threw up her hands. “Of course I’m unhappy. I’m watching my mom vanish before my eyes, my family is falling apart, I don’t get a break, I don’t have a job, I don’t have my person. Those small moments when I have time for me or time for something, anything, that isn’t Mom, you’re not there. I can’t call you when I’m having a particularly shitty day and say hey, take me for margaritas. Or hey, it’s Wednesday, let’s get wings. We already don’t get to make memories and when we do, they’re like this .”
“It won’t always be this way,” I said.
“Yes, it will,” she said. “Because nothing about our situation is going to change.”
I wished the tightness in my chest was just the fluid in my lungs, but it wasn’t.
“I can’t have you killing yourself for this relationship,” she said quietly. “I already feel guilty that I’m not strong enough to leave you for your own good.”
My heart rate on the monitor was jumping.
“I don’t want to break up,” I said. “Don’t even talk about that.”
“I don’t want to break up either, but—”
“But nothing. That’s not the solution. I will never be happier without you.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “Neither will I.”
We looked at each other. Another silent standoff. And I didn’t even know for what because we both wanted the same thing.
She climbed into my bed. The mattress was small, but I wrapped an arm around her and she nuzzled up to me and I felt more healed from this contact than anything they were putting into my IV.
“I will never leave you,” she whispered. “I just wish this wasn’t so hard.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. She put a hand on my chest and I covered it with my palm.
“I love our fantasy life,” she said softly. “The one where we have goats and a garden and we can wake up together and be a witness to each other’s lives. And maybe we have kids and they’re playing in the yard and we get unlimited memories. We just get to open our eyes and make them, every day.”
I couldn’t respond to this. If I did, I was going to cry. She lay there with her ear pressed to my breaking heart for a long time before she spoke again.
“You know how when you see a movie or read a book you really like, and you haven’t seen it in a few years and you start to lose the details?” she said quietly. “You forget some of the great lines or the subplots, the names of side characters? After a while all you remember are the main characters, the broad strokes, the big things. And you can’t even remember how those happened, just that they did. When someone asks you to tell them about it, all you can recall is it’s a Western or a drama or an action flick.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’d like to look back on my life and remember every single thing. But if I don’t, I hope I remember that it was a love story. And that the love story was about you.”
I couldn’t muscle down the lump in my throat this time. I was too tired and too sick and I missed her too much even though she was still here. Tears slid silently down the sides of my face.
I had never done anything harder than this in my life. I doubted I ever would.
Sometimes the challenges we face either break us or they make us stronger.
And sometimes they do both.