Chapter 13 ADAM
Chapter thirteen
ADAM
She’s still wrapped around me, breath shaky against my neck.
At some point we migrated from the floor to the bed, moving the dogs to the office area and closing the door.
The mattress dips as she shifts closer, and I pull the comforter higher around us, creating a cocoon against the December chill seeping through the B&B’s historic windows.
Our damp skin, the messy sheets around us, the air that smells like her, like me, like us.
And I don’t say anything yet. Just let the moment exist. Let us both absorb it.
Because this isn’t just sex, and we both fucking know it.
The B&B’s ancient pipes groan overhead. Sally’s famous Christmas plumbing with its mysterious matchmaking properties.
Usually I’d roll my eyes at the town superstition, but with Eve Foster’s leg hooked over mine, her fingers drawing patterns on my chest?
Maybe there’s something to it after all.
Her lips brush my collarbone. “So many things I didn’t tell you.”
My fingers still on her back. “I know.” I’m not going to push her. Not going to press. She shifts slightly, her fingers grazing absently over a scar, down my abs, back up and each touch registers deep under my skin.
She swallows and then, almost to herself, she says, “The first time we chatted on that Reddit thread…”
I smile. “For hours about the need for more shows like iZombie. Before arguing about the best character…”
“And then about that iZombie convention we wanted to go to.”
She huffs out a small laugh. “Yeah. We could have met in person if I had gone.” That would have been four years before Pittsburgh.
She said her parents weren’t comfortable with her traveling that far alone at nineteen.
Especially with a twenty-two-year-old. And I got it. We were friends then. Nothing more.
“Yeah?”
“That’s when I was diagnosed.”
My chest tightens with that same hollow feeling I get when I see fear in an animal’s eyes and know they don’t understand what’s happening to them. Twenty-two-year-old me had no idea she was fighting for her life while I rambled about shelter puppies and exam stress.
She continues, “I had been dizzy. Coughing. Tired. Itchy. And I dropped everything. I was studying GenEd at community college. I thought I wanted to be a vet.”
“I remember.” Of course, I remember.
She loved animals, even telling me once she became a vet, I’d be the first person she called when she inevitably adopted too many dogs.
She swallows again. “I stopped going on forums. Didn’t even join any for Hodgkin’s at first. I thought, okay, a few months of chemo, a scan, and back to life.” She shakes her head. “It wasn’t like that.”
My grip tightens at her waist. “You came back almost five months later.”
“Yeah. That first scan was rough. And the oncologist overseeing my oncologist-in-training was... a dick. And not an emotional pickle dick that pays attention.” Her next inhale is shakier.
“Got a second opinion from an oncologist who actually listened to me. A kind specialist who didn’t push transplant on me even though he was a transplant specialist. He saw me.
He gave me hope, and we started a different chemo treatment.
Started therapy, too. I felt… seen, and… I started talking to you again.”
That part, I remember, too. She had turned twenty. I was twenty-three. And our messages? They went from casual to constant. From casual friendship to more.
She told me she changed her mind and wanted to become a Registered Nurse. That she wanted to work in ER. She sent me memes about vets and nurses, terrible anatomy diagrams and funny dog ones, let me rant about my vet courses.
And I threw myself into everything. Vet school. Volunteering. Studying at all hours. Picking up extra shifts at the animal shelter. I was already stretched thin, already filling every gap of time, because if I was needed, I felt like I had a purpose.
Saturday nights were the one thing I never skipped. Because Saturday nights belonged to us.
We’d eat something sweet (comparing cronuts). We’d laugh. We’d talk about whatever, our weeks, our classes, the meaning of life or the weather, and read books.
She read romance. I read nonfiction.
We argued about it like it was a sport. I’d quote history about the roman empire. She’d quote the books that made her laugh and hold her chest.
Until one day, she sent me a link with exactly zero context. The Hating Game, a romance novel. “Read it please,” she’d written. “It’s funny. And it has sex. And someone who sees past what everyone else sees. And someone who does way too much for others. You’ll like it.”
And fuck, I did.
After that, I read to her sometimes, did stupid voices for the characters to make her laugh.
Got personally offended when she rated one of my favorites three stars.
“I’m sorry but that … genitalia are too big,” she wheezed.
“Too. Big.” And then she killed me when she added, “Not that I have firsthand experience, but…”
She converted me, book by book. Until it became our thing.
Throughout everything. Through two years of stories she didn’t tell me.
There were a couple of times we didn’t talk for several weeks, usually because she was busy with school, or her family and friends, a trip… or so I thought.
Even when she started going to school again part-time, instead of full-time, I didn’t question her. Even when she didn’t put on the light (to not wake up her roommate, she’d say) or when her video stopped working for at least three weeks. I should have asked more questions.
She had biopsies, more treatments, radiations, immunotherapy... she was rebuilding her body, having scans, and more scans.
About three weeks before Pittsburgh, I told her things I had kept from her.
Because if she was going to truly see me, she needed the full picture.
I told her about the test I failed. The second one ever.
How I’d studied so hard my brain went numb, how I sat in my car for an hour afterward, telling myself it didn’t mean anything.
But it did. It was the third time I thought, “I’m not good enough for this.”
Told her about Cassandra. My high school sweetheart. Cassandra, who never did anything outright wrong, except treat me like a goddamn transaction. Like I was there to be reliable, to help, to fix things.
That relationship fucked me up. Because being helpful is what I do, but with Cassandra that’s all I did.
Never told her when I was struggling. Never asked for anything back.
She used what I offered, and I never offered anything else.
Can’t fix a broken pattern when you don’t even know you’re in one.
Being on that iZombie forum was me needing an outlet after a shitty date and a shitty day.
And when Eve didn’t show in Pittsburgh, when I stood in that hotel lobby for three hours, checking my phone, sending messages that went unanswered, that felt personal. Like I’d finally let someone see every part of me—every crack, every doubt—and she’d turned away.
Cassandra and I never argued when we dated.
Eve and I did. When we were tired. When we were hungry. When we disagreed.
I thought what we had was real.
But I didn’t know.
Later, she sent that email explaining some of what she’d been through. Vague medical terms that I didn’t fully grasp at the time. By the time I replied, she didn’t answer. And when I wrote to her to congratulate her on her BSN, I thought whatever we had had fizzled out (on her part).
She hesitates. “The year before Pittsburg, when I told you my parents and I were going on a cruise after my finals, for Christmas, that’s when I did my autologous stem cell transplant.
A few days after, I had full-blown sepsis.
My heart…” she exhales sharply, like she’s still hearing the beeping, still feeling the burn in her veins.
“SVT. A spectacular one, apparently. They had to stop it with adenosine. The one night one of my parents didn’t stay overnight because my grandma had fallen and needed help and my dad had to work. ”
The word hits like a fucking punch. Adenosine.
I understand what that means. What it does.
The sensation of your heart stopping before it starts again.
My throat closes up. While I was probably pulling all-nighters over anatomy textbooks, Eve’s heart was being chemically reset like some malfunctioning equipment.
And I wasn’t there. Couldn’t be there. Didn’t even know to check in on her that night when her parents couldn’t stay.
The thought of her lying there alone with monitors beeping and nurses rushing in makes something primal twist inside me, a helplessness I can’t stand.
She was alone.
And I thought that time I got kicked by Mrs. Clark’s rescue horse was a bad day.
“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. It’s not a competition,” she murmurs.
My fingers trace a circle on her hip, and she doesn’t look away. All those times she wore my UPenn shirt, she was fighting for her life, and I had no idea.
“I didn’t tell you because I wanted normal. Because I didn’t want to talk about fevers and heart rates… I wanted…” She trails off. “I wanted to be me.”
I get that.
Inhaling deeply, I stay still for a moment.
Processing. Outside, winter batters the windows of Sally’s overheated B&B.
The mechanical Santa display across the street keeps flashing its damn nose through our window, painting Eve’s bare shoulder red every few seconds.
Normally I’d get up and close the curtains tight, but right now?
I’d let a whole army of light-up reindeer watch to keep her talking, to keep her here.
I was what she needed during another Christmas season. I just didn’t know what she was surviving.
I drag a hand over my face. “Fuck, Eve. I should have—”
“No.” She shakes her head. “You were there in the way I let you be there. And I know you. You would have made it your personal mission to save me. You would have looked at me differently.” She swallows again.
“And then… when I was finally able to sit up again without help?” She stops.
“I put my pink wig on.” Her voice is lighter, but it’s not a joke.
“It was itchier than before. Turned the light off so I wouldn’t see too much.
” She inhales sharply. “Crossed my fingers I still had eyebrows.”
I swallow hard. Because fuck.
And then she whispers, “That’s when I called you.”