Page 104 of The Hookup
What he wanted was for her to come over and have dinner with him, for a change, and then stay the night. Stay in the guest room if it made her feel better. That was what he wanted, but he never asked her, because their relationship was different now. He liked this new easiness they had going on between them especially now that sex was off the agenda. He still missed the sex, but that was a conversation for another day. He had a lot of groveling to do before then.
At least things weren’t worse, though it felt as if there was a storm coming. After her outburst at the hospital that day, he sensed that Kay wasn’t yet done, that she still had things to say, and he was just going to have to wait for her to say them. Each time he’d tried to have a conversation about that night, and the night before that, when he’d said some despicable things to her, she refused to discuss them, saying these things would have to wait. The tables had turned because there had been a time not so long ago when she had wanted to talk, and connect, but he had denied her that, and now she was having her revenge by treating him in the same way.
He couldn’t fault her at all. Kay had been amazingly good to him. The two weeks after the surgery had stretched on like a goddamn month, and had it not been for Marie and Kay coming in to see him daily, he’d have been out of his mind with boredom.
He had still managed to keep an eye on the business, managed to keep on top of his emails and other pressing matters, and he’d kept in daily phone contact with the workmen at the Canal Street site.
Marie took care of all other business matters, and Kay—she was the best part of his day. It was her visits most evenings that he looked forward to the most.
Things became easier between them. She came, she talked, and then she left. And this was how he got to find out more about her. Thinking back on it now, he could see exactly how empty and how meaningless what they had had before had been. Back when it had been just pure physical sex without the emotional connection.
Now, he was slowly making that emotional connection, strengthening it with every new morsel of information he discovered about her. He had come to know more about her than he had ever before, about her growing up, and her getting her scholarship and then her high pressured job. He learned about her boss Remington, and the new client deal she was leading at work, and he marveled that she found the time to fit him in despite all of that.
He was humbled, and embarrassed, and determined to make it up to her. His voice was getting back to normal, but he wasn’t given the all clear yet. There was one final part of his treatment left, and which his doctor recommended.
“It will kill off any more living cancer cells that the surgery didn’t catch, Luke,” his consultant had told him. “I would advise you to have it.”
Itwas a radioactive iodine treatment. It wasn’t a surgical procedure, but required him to ingest the radioactive iodine which would make his body slightly radioactive. For the first few days, he’d be in a single room without visitors. Once the radiation levels in his body came down, and he wasn’t considered a risk to anyone, he would then be allowed to go home.
The fuckers who told him that this was the good cancer, didn’t tell him that taking away part of his thyroid gland meant it would no longer produce the hormones he needed. That the absence of a fully functioning thyroid would make him feel off balance and less than functional, that even if he looked normal on the outside, he would never be 100% the same. That, unless he took his medicine every single day, he would suffer from poor muscle tone, depression, weight gain, and brain fog; there was a whole list of things he would have, things he had taken for granted, things which were working just fucking fine before he’d had part of his thyroid gland removed.
But life had also given him Kay, and she seemed to have stuck by him in spite of everything. He could never make up to this woman for the way he had treated her. And that, he had decided, during many of the free hours he’d had to sit back and reflect on his life, was what he was going to fix as soon as he could .
“Are you ready for it?” she asked a few days before the treatment. They were sitting across the kitchen island from one another. It was their safe place, away from the couch and the bedroom.
He was. “I sure am. I want it over and done with.” He did. He wanted this part of his life behind him. He wanted to forget he ever had it, but the chances of that, the doctor had told him, were zero. He would have to take replacement hormone tablets for the rest of his life, in order to prevent symptoms of an underactive thyroid.
She reached across the island, and took his hand. The sudden, unexpected gesture stealing a beat of his heart. “You’re going to be fine,” she told him, as she had the night before his surgery.
He smiled, basking in the warmth of her reassurance.
“We’ll get it over and done with,” she said, making his heart burst. She’d said, ‘We’.
Once this was all done with, he’d explain, he’d make her see and she would understand.
“Thanks,” he said, rubbing his thumb slowly over the back of her hand. He waited for her to move her hand away, but she didn’t. “You don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.”
Things were going to get better.
Chapter 36
Isolation stank.
He'd taken his pill almost a week ago and had stayed in an isolation room at the hospital for the first three days because he was a risk to others. His body was literally giving off radiation as if he was a nuclear missile.
After those days, he’d driven himself back home and spent another four days in solitary confinement.
‘Five to ten days, to be safe,’ the doctor had told him. He’d told Marie and Kay not to come over.
He was expecting to stay in isolation for another week, but when one evening, on day eight, the door opened and Kay walked in, it physically knocked him back. He’d given her a set of keys to his place a few weeks ago, but seeing her walking through his door as if she lived here was like a burst of sunshine in a cloud of grey.
He liked the idea of her coming home tohim, of this beingtheirplace, but he wasn’t sure it was such a good idea, him being a walking, talking bundle of radiation and her being this close to him.
“Hey,” he said, taking a few steps back. “You shouldn’t be here. I’m still radioactive.” He took a few more steps back so that he was in the corner of his living room as she watched him, still hovering near the door.
It didn’t matter how low the doctor said the levels would be by now, radiation was still radiation. This woman had some guts. “Kay, I’m a danger to the public. You shouldn’t come any closer.”
“I like dangerous men,” she replied, giving him the kind of smile she used to give him when he would initiate sex. “You should have come with a warning,” she replied, nodding, “But I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
