Chapter 35
They woke in the gray early-morning light to say goodbye. As Angus loaded up the car, Natalie gripped Gabby’s trembling arms. She imagined that, with every press of her fingers, she was sending bits of her own strength and health into her friend, then wanted to cry because she knew it didn’t work that way. “You’re going to be okay,” she said, wishing she could make herself believe it.
Gabby tried to say something, then pressed her lips together as if to stop herself from weeping. Instead, she just nodded, rested her head on Nat’s shoulder for a moment, and walked out the door.
After their car disappeared down the street, Natalie realized that she’d buttoned her shirt all wrong, one button off.
A layer of dread clung to the surfaces around them like dust, stirred up into the air whenever they moved. Natalie’s anxiety was a hand clamped around her throat. She managed to put it somewhat to the side when Christina was awake, since Christina ran around with her usual energy and there was no choice but to follow her lead. Rob and Natalie played with her, their ears alert to any dings from their phones that might change the course of their futures.
Natalie almost wanted to laugh, remembering her twentysomething self relentlessly checking her email in hopes of a book deal. She’d thought waiting for that news was the most agonizing form of torture. What a lucky, naive girl she’d been.
Each time a text came in, Nat and Rob pulled their phones out with fumbling fingers. But it never told them what they wanted to know. It was always only Angus with the update that they were waiting to go into surgery, Angus checking in to say that the doctors had wheeled Gabby in and put her under, Angus letting them know that he didn’t know anything at all.
When bedtime came, Natalie and Rob both tucked Christina in, and Rob sat by her side, reading Christina multiple stories with all the patience in the world. He tried to do character voices, though he wasn’t very good at it, which was charming in its own way—a bunny speaking in a dry tone, a dump truck speaking in the same dry tone, just louder. Thank God he was here, a sturdy, steady anchor despite the anxiety that must be thrumming in him too.
“Another story,” Christina said, then frowned at Natalie. “Just Rob stays.”
Natalie raised her eyebrows at Rob, and he shrugged. “I see who wins the popularity contest here,” she said.
“Can’t help it that I’m immensely and universally likable,” he replied, and she actually managed the ghost of a laugh.
“I’ll leave you to it.” She slipped downstairs and stood in the kitchen, useless, unmoored.
Maybe she could tidy something to keep her hands busy. She turned around all the spices in the spice cabinet so that they were facing the exact same way, then went into the front hallway. The day’s mail had spilled onto the carpet from where the mailman had pushed it through the slot, and Natalie bent down to pick it up, sorting it into a neat pile to place on a nearby table. Mostly catalogs and junk.
But her hands stilled as she registered a small envelope, one that looked like it had been through the wringer, marked Return to Sender. An envelope with her name on it, in Gabby’s neat handwriting, along with an outdated LA address, the place she’d been living the last time she and Gabby had been on speaking terms.
Shaking, she slid the seal open, pulled out a letter, and began to read.
Dear Natalie,
I have cancer. I’m going to work up the courage to tell you before this letter makes its way to you, so I don’t need to go into details here. But I scheduled my surgery and mangled an entire box of tissues, and now I’m sitting in my bedroom writing letters to the people who are most important to me. Despite everything that’s happened between us recently, that list could never be complete without you.
I keep thinking about something you said during our fight—that you never mattered to me as much as I mattered to you. I hate that I made you feel that way. Please don’t think that you were someone with whom I was just killing time while I waited for “my person” to come along. You are my person too.
Sometimes I think about the alternate universe in which I met Angus later, and you and I had more time to live together in that crappy apartment. (I can say that now that we’ve both moved out of it, right? That place was a hellhole. And yet I remember it with immense love because you were there.) I’m very happy with my life. Well, except for the cancer of it all. But there would have been so much joy in that alternate universe too. So many more long talks about everything and nothing that went deep into the night, without either one of us having to worry about catching the subway home. So much more laughing until our stomachs hurt and exploring the city and trying new things, figuring out who we were together. I wish that, somehow, I could have had that and everything I have now (again, except for the cancer) or that ours was a world where it was normal to live in a commune with all the people you wanted to see every day.
I know that commune living probably isn’t for us. But if I make it through this, I hope that we can be in each other’s lives again in a more honest way than we’ve been in the past few years. I don’t want to keep shying away from difficult topics because they make us uncomfortable or because talking about them might be unpleasant. Our relationship is about so much more than pleasantness. Things will never be the same as they were when we were twenty-three. But maybe, in some ways, they can be better.
And if I don’t make it through, I hope that Christina can know you. I don’t want to put pressure on anyone or anything. But it would mean a lot to me if she could have a role model like you in her life—a woman who loves deeply and fights for herself, who puts herself out there and holds out for what she deserves. You have more courage in your pinky than most people have in their whole lives.
I love you,
Gabby
When Natalie reached the end of the letter, she went back and read it again, then a third time, tears streaming down her face. At some point, without realizing it, she’d sat down on the couch, her legs giving way beneath her. As she memorized Gabby’s words, wanting to tattoo them onto her soul, she startled at a hand on her shoulder.
Rob, looking down at her in concern. “What happened?”
“Gabby wrote me a letter after all,” she managed to squeak out. Rob sat down next to her and pulled her into him, and she cried into his chest until she managed to get a hold of herself.
When she finally pulled back, she wiped her eyes and said, “It’s been so long since she went in. Shouldn’t we have heard something by now? Is the radio silence a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” Rob said.
“I can’t help worrying—” Natalie began, then cut herself off.
“What?” he asked, a wrinkle in his forehead.
Looking at Rob, talking to Rob, felt like standing on the only stable ground in a disintegrating world. “I worry that Gabby and Angus moved so fast, did things so much quicker than the rest of us, because somehow Gabby knew, subconsciously, that she wouldn’t get as much time as everyone else.”
“I know what you mean,” Rob said. He cleared his throat. “Or perhaps they moved fast because Gabby is a goal-oriented person. And if her goal is to beat this cancer, then she’s going to send it packing.”
“Yeah,” Nat said, another tear springing up in the corner of her eye. She knew it didn’t work that way, that cancer didn’t take only those who weren’t willing to fight it. It was an indiscriminate monster. Rob knew that too, but sometimes you had to say things you didn’t fully believe. He moved forward and gently brushed her tear away with his thumb.
And then, on the arm of the couch, Natalie’s phone began to ring. Angus’s picture flashed on her screen. Her stomach dropped. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to move. Because on the other end of that phone call lay a different world, one that potentially included a future without Gabby. And if that was the future Angus was calling to share, she wanted no part of it. She’d rather stay in this moment of agonizing ignorance forever than face a life without her best friend.
Rob squeezed her hand. “Do you want me to answer it?”
“No,” Natalie said. “I will.” She swiped the phone open and put it on speaker. “Hi, we’re here.” Her voice sounded faint, but maybe that was because of the roaring in her ears drowning everything else out.
No, not everything else. She could hear Angus on the other end of the line. He was crying. “Oh, guys,” he said. “She’s…she’s…” Natalie and Rob locked eyes, their expressions hollowing into sorrow. A sob caught in Natalie’s throat, her heart beginning to plummet through her chest down into the basement, burrowing into the center of the earth. Rob’s hand shot out and found hers, holding on tight.
But Angus was forcing out more words. “She’s going…they think she’s going to be okay.”
Natalie blinked, unsure if she was hallucinating. “What?”
“It hadn’t spread too much,” Angus went on, “so they managed to get it all out. She’s resting now.”
“I thought…” Natalie said, unable to fully believe it. “You were crying so much…”
“I’m having a lot of feelings right now,” Angus blubbered.
“So, wait,” Rob said, his voice so calm it seemed he might be in shock, “everything’s okay?”
“Not everything. We’ll have to monitor and possibly discuss treatment, and it could always come back, and they had to take out her uterus. But the doctors told me this was the best case they were hoping for.”
“Oh my God,” Natalie said, jumping to her feet and pacing, the energy bursting out of her. “Oh my God!” She stared at Rob as tears of relief began to spill from his eyes, the two of them beginning to beam matching unrestrained grins.
“I love you, buddies,” Angus said. “I gotta go kiss my wife.”
“Go,” Rob said.
“We love you too, Angus,” Natalie said. “We love you guys so much.”
Natalie hung up the phone and dropped it onto the couch, her whole body humming. It was going to be okay, or at least as okay as it could be. Gabby would get better and come home to them all and swing Christina up in her arms and kiss Angus good morning and gossip on the phone with Natalie and so much more. The road ahead wouldn’t be easy. But it existed.
Without thinking, she screamed, a guttural sound of relief she didn’t even know she was capable of making. On instinct, Rob stepped forward and covered her mouth. “You’re going to wake Christina,” he said, laughing and crying all at once.
The awareness hit her: without seeming to realize it, Rob had looped his other arm around her back. The two of them were standing an inch away from each other. Their eyes locked as Natalie took a shaky breath in, Rob’s warm, strong palm on her lips.
With what seemed like great effort, he started to take his hand away from her mouth. She reached her own hand up and placed it over his, then moved his palm to her cheek. Still, they could not look away from each other.
Over the past few days, her fear had hung over the rest of her emotions like a heavy curtain. But now, relief swept that curtain away, revealing all the longing that had built up behind it. The intensity of it made her knees go weak. Here he was, this infuriating, wonderful man who had been by her side through these terrible days. His eyes were glued to hers, his dark lashes casting shadows on his face. All she had to do was step forward and press her mouth against his.
So she did.
At the touch of her lips, his whole body seemed to loosen. Then he drew her closer to him and kissed her back, hard. She lost herself in the feel of his mouth, of his hands running up and down her back. He let out a groan as she pushed herself into him, and she wished she could play that sound on loop for the rest of her life. (Though it wouldn’t be practical for her to go through the rest of her life being as turned on as that groan made her. She’d never get anything useful done again.) He ran a hand under her shirt to cup her breast, and one imperative ran through her mind: she had to touch every part of him. But as she reached to unbutton his shirt, another thought intruded.
“Wait,” she said, scrambling backward. “We’re not just doing this because we’re so relieved about Gabby, right?”
His breathing was ragged. When he spoke, his voice had gone hoarse. “I am very relieved. But I don’t know about you…I’ve wanted to do this since the night I met you.”
“I have too,” she said.
“Good.” In a quick motion, he stepped forward and picked her up, as if to carry her over a threshold. She stifled a yelp.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking you upstairs.”
Those lean, sneaky muscles of his, stronger than they looked, made her feel weightless as he walked them over to the stairs. Or maybe the reason he could pick her up like she was nothing was that he was running on adrenaline. Nothing got one’s strength going like the prospect of finally getting to take someone’s clothes off after nearly a decade of waiting. She couldn’t stop laughing a giddy laugh, shaking in his arms, and he glanced at her as he took the first step up. “You moving around like that makes this seem dangerous and inefficient.”
“I’m sorry. Put me down, and we’ll get to a bed much faster.”
He smiled at her and placed her on the second step. She started kissing him again right there, then forced herself to pull back, and they raced up the remainder of the staircase. Natalie’s room was closer, so they ran in there, breathless. She shut the door, then turned to find him right behind her. He backed her up against the wood, his hands in her hair, and kissed her again, then lifted her shirt over her head, staring at her breasts in the light filtering in from the streetlamp outside with an expression of awe on his face.
“No fair,” she said, and he blinked as if coming back from some faraway place.
“What?”
“That you get to see me when I don’t get to see you.” She unbuttoned his shirt with shaking fingers, easing it off his shoulders, revealing his bare chest. The sight of it made her head spin with desire, but it wasn’t enough. She needed more, so she reached out again for his belt buckle, tugging his jeans and boxers down.
“Who’s being unfair now?” he asked with an almost competitive glint in his eyes, and reached for the button on her pants. In contrast to her impatience, he moved slowly—How did he have such restraint in a time like this?—his hands skimming her hips, her thighs, as he stripped off all her remaining clothes too.
When they were both completely naked, they stood in silence, trying to catch their breath.
There he was, all of him, the parts she had already known and the parts that people didn’t get to see, looking right back at the tender, precious parts of her. She traced the ridges of muscle in his arms, the soft trail of hair on his stomach, everything new and unfamiliar yet also making complete and total sense.
He made a sound as she touched him, a low rumble in the back of his throat. Her blood whooshed in her veins, a whole symphony happening inside her. How was it that she walked through the world every day barely aware of what her body was doing when it was capable of all this feeling?
She was supposed to have a way with words. If he didn’t make her feel so giddy and off-balance, she could pen odes to Rob’s body, to the electric current running between them. But in this moment, all she could manage to whisper was “Holy shit.”
“I know,” Rob said, a shaky smile breaking over his face. “How are you even better than I imagined?”
“Oh, you’ve imagined this?” she asked, raising her eyebrows innocently.
“You know I have,” he replied. He backed her against the wall again and kissed the tender skin of her neck. “And I know you have too.” Moving to her earlobe, he bit down gently and said, in a low voice that wasn’t gentle at all, “So go lie down.”
Unsteady with anticipation, she walked to the futon and did as he’d told her. Rob began kissing his way down her stomach. The press of his mouth on her bare skin made her shiver. He studied her as if she was the most fascinating rare text he’d ever seen, then bent his head to the tops of her thighs. “Is this okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“And this?” he asked again, making his way up, his mouth more insistent.
“More than okay. It’s perfect.”
And then he stopped asking her. But that was fine, because she stopped being able to articulate words anyway.
It took her a while to catch her breath after falling apart. “Robert Kapinsky,” she said when she finally managed to speak again, her voice full of wonder, her limbs full of warmth. “How are you so good at that?”
He lifted his head from between her legs, a sheepish grin on his face. “I am in my thirties, so I’d better be by now,” he said. “Also, the sounds you were making were not subtle, and I’m a quick study.”
She grinned back at him. “Academia, I guess.”
He propped himself up on his elbow. “Oh, I didn’t tell you. I quit the university.”
“You did?” she asked, sitting bolt upright. “I’m so excited for you! How has it been? What are you doing now?”
“I want to tell you the details,” he said, his face turning serious. “But first I’d really like to have sex with you.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, pulling him into her. “Yes, we’ll come back to all that.”
Afterward, Natalie rested her head on Rob’s chest, his heart thumping under her ear. She ran her hand up and down his stomach, tangled her fingers lazily in his chest hair, both of them spent, content. Credit where credit was due, Angus’s futon had proved remarkably sturdy. Whenever it had gotten a little awkward, as first times always did, Rob had simply laughed. She’d never seen him laugh so readily, so happily.
And she saw everything, because unlike with other people, she didn’t want to look away from him. She refused to close her eyes for one moment despite the rush of feeling overtaking her. His discipline, his rigor, his control, they’d all added up to something richer than she’d had with anyone else. But when she’d made him lose that discipline and control entirely? That had been the best part. What they’d just done together had felt sweet and passionate and more intimate than she’d realized was possible. But that wasn’t all, she thought as he kissed her forehead.
It had also felt like a beginning.