Chapter 26
Anna
“Okay, it’s official. Owen Hunt sucks.”
I almost cough on a popcorn kernel laughing so hard.
“I thought you liked him,” I say to Travis, who’s sitting next to me on my couch. “You thought he was a badass.”
“Nah, he’s a jerk for cheating on Cristina. She’s the badass.”
I bump his shoulder with mine, smiling so hard my cheeks ache. He’s come over to my apartment almost every day for the last two weeks to watch my favorite episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and distract me from stressing about my MCAT test scores by burying his face between my thighs.
He grabs a Sour Patch Kid from the snack bowl in my lap and pops it into his mouth. I stare at him.
“What?” he asks.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you eat candy.”
His mouth tilts up in a wickedly handsome half-smile. “It’s growing on me.”
He tucks my hair behind my ear and presses his fingers gently against the hinge of my jaw. “Need me to distract you some more?” he asks, his voice all low and rough.
My inner thigh muscles quiver. “I’m still recovering from the three orgasms you gave me while riding your face earlier.”
Raw want flickers in his gaze. “You know I’m always eager to give you more.”
I bite back a giddy smile. “I’m good for now. Thanks, though.”
My tummy does a somersault at just how insanely good this summer break has been so far with Travis. It’s the perfect setup—we hang out, talk and laugh and joke around, and always end up fooling around on my couch.
It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with a guy.
“The hospital on this show is the nicest hospital I’ve ever seen, by the way,” Travis says. “It looks like a spa.”
I laugh. “Yeah, it kind of does.”
“Is that the kind of hospital you dream of working at when you’re a doctor? Looks like a spa and is staffed by ridiculously good-looking physicians?” he teases
“Of course not,” I laugh.
He slides his arm around me, pulling me closer to him on the couch. I cuddle into him, resting my head on his shoulder, feeling more relaxed and content than I have in a long time.
He kisses the top of my head. “So what’s your dream?”
A warm feeling courses through me that he’d think to ask me that—that he wants to know.
“To get into Stanford Medical School,” I say. “That’s why I’m stressing about my MCAT score so much. I need to get a really high score to even be considered. They only accept around two percent of all applicants to their medical school every year.”
“Holy shit, really?”
“Yeah. It’s wildly competitive. But it’s my dream school. They have an incredible oncology program. And their cancer research center is one of the best in the whole country.”
I feel him stiffen against me. He’s quiet for a moment.
“You want to help cancer patients?” he asks.
I nod. “Ever since high school, I’ve been interested in oncology.”
“I don’t remember you ever mentioning that.”
I chuckle. “Well, I mean, we weren’t friends, so I wouldn’t have told you that about me.”
He kisses my temple. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Can I ask what made you interested in it?”
I still, feeling sad at the memory. “My favorite teacher in high school was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ms Faraday. She taught anatomy.” I’m quiet as my throat starts to ache with the urge to cry.
“ She went through so many treatments. It took such a toll on her. She had to take a leave of absence from school, so I would visit her in the hospital sometimes, along with a bunch of other students from her class. I was already interested in medicine then, but that’s when I decided that I wanted to work in oncology.
I wanted to help people like her get better. ”
Travis hugs me tighter as I go quiet. My eyes burn with tears.
“She passed away less than a year after being diagnosed,” I say quietly.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I think I remember the school making an announcement about it. I didn’t take many science classes though, so I didn’t know her.”
“She was pretty private about it. She didn’t want everyone prying into her business.”
“I can understand that,” he says.
We’re both quiet for a long moment while he hugs me.
“My mom had breast cancer.”
I sit up and turn to look at him. “She did?”
He nods, a stricken look on his face. “She was diagnosed at the beginning of senior year of high school.”
“Oh my god. Travis, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“She was really, really private about it, just like your teacher. She didn’t tell anyone other than me and her close friends, and some family. No one else knew.”
“Wait, did Nick know?”
He nods. “He was the only one of my friends I told. I asked him not to tell anyone though, because my mom was so private about it.”
I think about how Nick never said a word about it. Not to me, not to our parents. What a good friend he was—he is.
I stare at Travis, stunned. I grab his hand in mine. “How is your mom now?”
“She’s in remission. She’s doing really well.”
I let out a breath. “Oh, I’m so glad.”
“It was rough. She noticed changes in the skin on her breast and pain and swelling for a while, but her doctor brushed it off because she didn’t have any detectable masses on her mammogram.
She made multiple appointments with him, but he never took her complaints seriously,” he says.
“She finally got fed up and saw a different doctor, who listened to her concerns. She got diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer.”
My stomach drops. “Oh my god.”
“It was bad. She had to have surgery. And pretty aggressive chemotherapy and radiation.” He stops to swallow. “It was so hard seeing her go through that. How sick she was…how much pain she was in…”
His eyes shine, but he blinks quickly, like he’s trying not to cry.
I wrap my arms around him, hugging him tight. I don’t say anything. Because there’s nothing to say. Seeing your loved one go through the hell of battling cancer is agony.
“That wasn’t even the worst part,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“My dad left her when she got sick.”
That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach multiplies. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.
I lean back and cup his face in my hands. “He left your mom when she was sick with cancer?”
Travis nods, his jaw tight, like he’s angry and wrecked all at once.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice strained. He presses his eyes shut, like he can’t bear to even think about it.
I think back to senior year of high school, when his mom would have been going through all this. I remember Nick mentioning to my parents that Travis’s mom and dad were splitting up, but I didn’t know that was why.
“My mom’s medical team said it’s a pretty common thing, for wives to be abandoned by their husbands when they get seriously ill,” he says. “I was so mad at him. I still am. I haven’t spoken to him since he left.”
“You have every right to be mad, Travis. He abandoned your mom when she needed him the most.”
His eyes shine with unshed tears, and my chest feels like it’s about to crack in half. He’s hurting so much.
“He just left, like it was nothing. Like she was nothing,” Travis says. “I’ll never forgive him for that.”
I wrap my arms around him again, resting my head on his shoulder as I hold him tight.
“So it was just you taking care of your mom all alone?” I say, my voice on the verge of breaking.
“Pretty much. My aunt stayed with us for a while to help. My mom’s best friend helped a lot, too.
And my grandparents. But they still had to work and had their own lives and families to take care of.
So sometimes it was just me.” He pauses.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t think I did a very good job. ”
My heart shatters. I lean back and look at him. “What do you mean? Travis, you were a kid.”
His lips wobble for a second before they go back to the stoic straight line they always are. “Yeah, but I wasn’t there as much as I should have been. I had school and hockey. I was trying to balance it all, but…”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“Sometimes I couldn’t go with her to all her treatments because I had practice or a game.
I’d sit with her in the middle of the night sometimes when she’d vomit because the chemo made her sick.
She always told me that she was okay, that she didn’t want me to miss out on my life for her, but I felt like shit,” he says.
“I just wanted to be with her. But it was so hard. I even missed a week of hockey practice and games to help her, but my coach got so mad. He yelled at me in front of the whole team for not being committed enough. Your brother stuck up for me though.”
I think about seventeen-year-old Travis quietly struggling to attend class and play hockey, all the while helping his mom. He was probably exhausted and drained from being pulled in every direction.
He probably felt so alone and isolated too.
I cup his face in my hand. “First of all, your coach is an asshole for that. I’m so glad Nick stood up for you. And second, you did the best you could in a truly awful situation. Don’t feel guilty. Please don’t feel guilty.”
Travis closes his eyes. “My mom said that too,” he says quietly.
“How do you think she would feel if she knew you were still beating yourself up over this? Especially now that she’s healthy?”
His expression eases. “She’d be mad.”
I press a soft kiss to his mouth.
“It’s just hard not to worry about her all the time,” he says. “Even now, there are times when I get so stressed out thinking about her cancer coming back that I can’t focus.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“Like playoffs during freshman year. I got pulled from the game in the first period because I let too many goals in. We ended up losing that game and the playoffs because of me. The day before that game, my mom had an abnormal mammogram. She’d been cancer-free for six months up to that point, and she couldn’t get in to see a specialist for another week.
I was going crazy with worry. All I could think about was what if the cancer is back… ”
His eyes shine with tears. I grab his hand.
“It ended up being fine,” he says. “It was just an area of dense tissue. Nothing to worry about at all. But up until the point we got the good news, I just couldn’t stop thinking about her being sick again…about losing her…”
He clears his throat. I wrap my arms around him, my heart breaking in half when I think about how long Travis has quietly struggled on his own. How he’s kept his pain and worry and feelings to himself. How he took on the stress of his mom’s health and the stress of his team’s loss.
I swallow back the lump in my throat. “It’s not your fault that your team lost, Travis.”
“It felt like it,” he says, his voice sad and low.
I lean back and hold his face in my hands. “Listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. I was at that game. I saw how you and the rest of the team played. The defense sucked.”
The edge of his lips twists up. I didn’t mean for that to be funny, but if it makes him smile—if it takes away some of the pain he’s feeling in this moment, then I’m happy.
“You play hockey, Travis. It’s a team sport. Whether you win or lose, it’s never, ever because of just one player. It’s because of all of you.”
He blinks, and the pain in his gaze starts to fade. That ache in my chest eases.
“Please don’t feel like any of this is your fault. It’s not. Your team didn’t lose because of you. And your mom didn’t suffer because of you. You helped heal her. You were her biggest support,” I say.
Emotion flashes in his piercing blue eyes as he gazes at me. “I really needed to hear that.”
I don’t say anything else. I just hold him, hoping my embrace is comfort enough. We lie down on the couch together, him spooning me from behind, his arm wrapped around my waist, holding me tight.
Later on, when we’re halfway through another episode, I turn around to look at him.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He nods, his expression warm as he looks at me.
I run my fingers through his hair, my heart aching in my chest while I think about all that he’s been through.
Travis wasn’t just a grumpy jerk for no reason in high school. He was watching his mom battle cancer. He was dealing with his dad abandoning his family. He was holding it all in, struggling with it quietly on his own.
“Thank you for telling me all that,” I say. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
“Thank you for listening. And thank you for what you said.”
“What’s your dream?” I ask in a soft voice after a quiet moment.
He doesn’t answer right away.
“You asked me what my dream was. Now I want to know what yours is.”
He traces his fingertip along the hinge of my jaw. “To play hockey. For my mom to be okay.”
He’s quiet for a second while his eyes scan my face.
“To spend as much time as possible with you.”
I smile. “Funny.”
He kisses the side of my neck. “I’m not joking, sweet thing,” he growls against my skin.
A giddy feeling bubbles up inside of me. I wonder what he means by that. Does that mean he sees me as part of his future?
A hopeful feeling flutters through me, but then I halt it. No. He can’t mean it in that way. He’s just being playful. We agreed that this wasn’t serious. That we’re just having fun together.
But I can’t help but think about what he’s said for the rest of the night, wondering if he just might be telling the truth.