Chapter 33
“WELL, I JUST FISHED GRASS out of my bra,” I say, stepping out of my bathroom. “That was a first.” I look at Ian, perched on the corner of my desk. He’s frowning at his phone.
Unease creeps over me. He’d been quiet on the drive.
I wanted to believe it was how he was coping with Diego’s running monologue, but there was a tension to his silence.
It was still thick while we got Diego situated in his room, and I hoped it would run its course while I took my time cleaning up.
But he turns his frown on me. My stomach drops.
“Why was your doctor talking about a neurologist?” His voice is too calm.
My stomach bypasses the basement and plummets to the subcellar. “How—”
“I looked up the hospital’s directory. Only one Hartman.” He holds up his phone. On the screen is a photo of the good doctor, as well as information about his hours and the number for his office. He has a five-star rating from patients. Good for him.
I cross my arms and lean against the doorframe of the bathroom. “A little invasive, don’t you think?”
“Forgive me for having some sensitivity around the woman in my life receiving specialized medical care.” It comes out of him sharp, but then he sighs and closes his eyes for a beat. When his gray gaze returns to me, it’s softened. “I’m sorry,” he says gently.
My heart joins my stomach somewhere subterranean. The hope that had felt so promising back at Firehouse seems like such a fragile thing. That whole scenario it generated was hung on never having to tell him at all; I don’t know that it can support the truth.
I start small. “When we met, I couldn’t see out of my right eye. Optic neuritis. Inflammation on the optic nerve keeping what my eye was seeing from getting to my brain.”
“That’s… that’s why you’d cock your head.”
“You noticed that?”
He frowns. “It’s you, Ellie. Your body. Of course I noticed.” Before I can unpack that, he continues. “You haven’t done that for a while… the vision came back?” He sounds hopeful.
I grab on to the hope and white-knuckle it.
“Yeah! It still gets foggy when I overheat. That puts pressure on the nerve. So, a good workout, or particularly athletic sex. We’ve left me half blind more than once,” I say, relieved to be able to contribute some levity.
It rouses a smirk from him, but the upturn vanishes a beat later.
I rest my head against the doorframe. “Other than that, I don’t see color as brightly on that side now. And I get a phantom flash in the corner of my vision when I look really far to the right. Which is weird. That’s the only area I could see during the nerve attack.”
“Nerve attack?”
“That’s what it was. It took three doctors to get the diagnosis, but Dr. Hartman”—I nod to the phone still in his hand—“he figured it out.”
He nods, and I hope against hope that this will be the end of the subject. My eye was weird, now it’s not; end of story. But when he meets my eyes again, he wears an expression of such obvious hurt, it’s like I’ve kicked him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice is quiet. “I asked you, when we talked about your goals at the gym, I asked you directly if you had any medical conditions. You said no.”
“You asked me if I had any injuries or anything that would restrict my movement.”
“You were blind in one eye, Ellie.”
“I knew how to accommodate it.”
“But I didn’t! The guys and the others working out around you didn’t! Any one of us could have been in your blind spot and interfered with a movement, and you or someone else could have been hurt.”
“But that never happened,” I insist.
“It could have been a liability for the gym. Had you considered that? If something had happened, it could have been on the facility. It would have been on me.”
The oversight dulls some of my defensiveness, and I sag a little, the ridge in the doorframe digging into my shoulder.
“You’re right. I’m sorry about that.” I really am.
And I also really want to defuse this situation.
“I was already the newbie, coming in, knowing nothing. My fucked-up insides have made me the damaged one for years. I didn’t want to be that here, too. And it’s fine now—”
“What if your eye goes out again? Could that happen with this nerve thing? Would you tell me?”
I scoff. “If it happens again, I’ll have different priorities, I assure you.”
I should not have said that.
“What does that mean?” Ian’s question comes out flat.
I don’t answer. “If it happens again, will it… will it be permanent? Ellie, oh shit.” He’s at my side before I can react, hands rising to cup my cheeks as he looks down at me.
It’s more than worry on his face. “Oh Jesus, babe, I’m so sorry.
” He pulls me into a hug. “I hadn’t thought about that. ”
“It’s okay,” I say. Tears have sprung to my eyes. Joy and panic war in my chest. He cares. So much. Too much. And I want it too much.
He holds me more tightly, and I realize that I’m shaking. One of his hands smooths over my back, and the rush and relief I get from it is cruel.
I’ve let this go on too long. I’ve forgotten who I really am, and what it is to be the real me, always on time but never a good time. I don’t get to have this life. I don’t get to have him. I don’t get to hope.
I straighten enough that he has to loosen his hold. “The vision loss could be permanent. But symptoms could take any number of forms. In any case, a second flare-up would mean that I have multiple sclerosis.”
Ian’s arms stiffen. He steps away, his hands falling from me like I’ve shrugged out of a jacket. “What?”
“Half of the time, the eye thing is the first sign. The MRI I had two months ago showed no damage that would correspond with MS, which was great,” I say, lightly, “and when the six months is up, I’ll have a second MRI and they’ll look again.
But if I have another nerve attack in that window, I’m diagnosed.
That’s why I lost it the day I got dizzy. I—”
“You thought it was the second nerve attack,” he finishes for me. His face is so hard. “And when I asked you directly then,” he bites the words out, “you said that you were scared.”
“I was,” I say, defensively.
“But that wasn’t all.”
“What does it matter? It didn’t end up being anything.”
“It was a lie of omission.”
Why is he being so hostile about this? And why am I arguing with him? “How, Ian? How would knowing this have been useful?”
“You’ve had this hanging over you this whole time, and you never said anything to me!”
That his instinct is to point out that this has been a burden I’ve been shouldering alone does not elude me. He was annoyed by the eye thing, but this is different. He’s mad because I left him out of something massive in my life. Because I wouldn’t let him help.
I get back on the defensive. “What could you have done?”
“Been aware! Known to look out for signs—”
“What signs, Ian?” I ask, weeks of sidelined fears creeping in, the past decade of crushed hopes overwhelming his credentials.
I think I’m going to throw up. “I don’t even know what signs to look for.
I just get to obsess over every minor glitch in my already fucked-up body and hope it goes away.
There was no reason to burden you with this, too. ”
He’s shaking his head. “I’ve heard that line of logic before, Ellie.
It was bullshit when my parents used it, and it’s bullshit from you.
When my mom relapsed, she and my dad decided that Grant and I didn’t need to know the severity of it.
So when she went from ‘a little sick’ to terminal, it was a pretty huge shock. ”
“This isn’t like that. This isn’t a terminal diagnosis. There isn’t even a diagnosis! It’s just a maybe. It’s a maybe for the next few months, less of a maybe for the next five years—”
“Five years?” He stares at me. “How long does it take to get a fucking diagnosis?”
“If something doesn’t happen in the next few months, there’s still a 20 percent chance of it developing in the next five years.”
His eyes bug. “And you’re just going to live with that?”
“I don’t see any alternative.”
He runs his fingers through his hair, tugging it. “I can’t believe this.”
“This isn’t even for you to take on, Ian. All this was only temporary, anyway. This whole thing, renting the room here, working at the gym.” I point back and forth between us. “Whatever this is—”
“Us.”
“Everything! All of this was a break from my life while I waited out the window. It’s a fantasy. It’s not who I am. I make to-do lists and go to bed by ten. I don’t skate on the living room floor and have a fling with my hunky boss!”
But…I do. Or, at least, I do now.
The color drains from his face, his expression going slack. I don’t think he could look more stunned if I’d slapped him.
His eyelids flutter, and his head shakes slightly, eyes going hard. “So you’ve just been passing the time, then? All of this. Like you said. Everything. Us. None of it has mattered.”
I know that this is my chance to nip this in the bud. I can just agree and it will cut him so deeply, he’ll be severed from me completely. But some sentimental, stupid part of me says, “I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.”
“But it’s not real. Not for you.”
The you is an accusation. And a contrast. It’s not real for me, but it’s real for him.
But we can’t be real because the me in it doesn’t exist. With him, I’m Break Ellie. Not Real Life Ellie. So it doesn’t taste like a lie when I say, “No. Not for me.”
His face is bloodless. I feel the color drain from myself as well, but I call on the scaffolding I’ve spent the past decade-plus erecting.
I hadn’t known it, but it had all gone up for this.
Because no matter how many times I try to tell myself differently, he is the one who will stay.
It won’t matter how hard things could get, how far I might deteriorate, what shell he might be left caring for. He’d stay through it.
And I won’t do that to him.
We stay in our stunned silence: Ian, white faced at my cruelty; me, erect in defiance of the seismic shift that’s taken place inside of me.
For so long, I’ve been afraid that I’d be alone.
That my ruined insides or broken personality would keep getting me left behind. That was the pattern until now.
Now I have the man I know won’t walk away. But I can’t bear the thought of him staying. Not for what this could look like. I won’t ask that of him. I want more for him.
“Then you’re fired,” he croaks. His voice is so broken, it takes me a second to process that he’s even used words.
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“We’re done,” he says, his voice tight, but his own again. “Completely. If none of this has any significance to you, then I don’t want you on the team.”
“The team? That’s your concern? That I’m going to be a drag on morale? Fuck that. You can’t fire me! I quit.”
“Fine!”
“Leave!”
“I am!” He sputters, and starts for the door to the side yard, me on his heels. He turns so suddenly, I almost run into him. And it’s a mercy I don’t, because if we’d collided, I’d be collapsing into him and I don’t think I’d be getting up again.
He points at me, his face fierce. “And don’t even think about coming back to the gym.”
“I’ll just work out here, then!”
“Fine!” He flings open the door and storms out. I stare into the darkness, listening to his angry footsteps on the gravel path.
I want him to come back. I want to go after him. But I told him to go.
And now he’s gone. Because that’s what happens.
I end up collapsing anyway.