For a time, as I lay in this bed with Andrew, it feels like it did when we were on the road. We don’t think about sickness or death, and we don’t cry. We just talk and laugh and every now and then he tries to touch me in all the right places. I giggle and push his hands away because I feel like I’m doing something wrong. That he should be resting.
Eventually, I give in and let him. Because he’s persistent. And, of course, he’s irresistible. I let him finger me underneath the blanket and then I do the same for him with my hand.
After another hour, I get up from the bed.
“Babe, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” I say smiling warmly and then I take off my pants and my shirt.
He’s grinning from ear to ear. I knew that the perverted gears in his head would start churning before anything else.
“As much as I would love to have sex with you in a hospital room,” I say as I crawl back into the bed with him, “It’s not gonna happen; you need all your strength for your surgery.” I would totally have sex with him in this bed, but right now, it’s not about sex.
He looks at me curiously as I lie back down next to him wearing only my panties and bra and I curl my body against his like before. All he’s wearing underneath the knit blanket are a pair of thin blue hospital pants. I press my chest firmly against his and tangle my legs around his. Our bodies are perfectly aligned, our ribs touching.
“What are you doing?” he asks, growing more curious and impatient, but loving every second of it.
I move my free arm down and trace his tattoo of Eurydice with my fingers. He watches carefully. And when my index finger finds Eurydice’s elbow where the ink stops, I move it along my skin to pick up where his left off.
“I want to be your Eurydice, if you’ll let me.”
His face lights up and his dimples deepen.
“I want to get the other half,” I go on, touching his lips with my fingers now. “I want to get Orpheus on my ribs and reunite them.”
He’s overwhelmed. I can see it in his glistening eyes.
“Oh, baby, you don’t have to do that; it hurts like hell on the ribs.”
“But I want it and I don’t care how much it hurts.”
His eyes begin to water as he looks at me and then his mouth covers mine and our tongues dance with one another for a long, loving moment.
“I would love that,” he whispers onto my lips.
I kiss him softly and whisper back, “After your surgery, when you’re well enough then we’ll go.”
He nods. “Yeah, Gus will definitely need me there to make sure the placement of your tattoo lines up with mine—he laughed at me when I went in to get this on my ribs.”
I smile. “He did, huh?”
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “He accused me of being a hopeless romantic and threatened to tell my friends. I told him he sounded like my father and to shut the f**k up. Gus is a good guy and one helluva tattoo artist.”
“I can see that.”
Andrew spears his fingers through my hair, constantly brushing it back over the top of my head. And as he watches me, scanning my face, I wonder what’s going through his mind. His beautiful smile has vanished and he looks more intent and careful.
“Camryn, I want you to be prepared.”
“Don’t start that—”
“No, baby, you have to do this for me,” he says with worry in his gaze. “You can’t let yourself believe one hundred percent that I’m going to live through this. You can’t do that.”
“Andrew please. Just stop.”
He puts four fingers on my lips, hushing me. I’m already crying again. He’s trying to be as gentle with the truth as he possibly can be, holding back his own tears and his own emotions even better than I can my own. He’s the one who might die and I’m the one with no strength. It pisses me off, but I can’t do anything but cry and be pissed at myself.
“Just promise me that you’ll continue to tell yourself that I might die.”
“I can’t make myself say something like that!”
He squeezes me tighter.
“Promise me.”
I grit my teeth, feeling my jaw grind harshly behind my cheeks. My nose and my eyes sting and burn.
Finally I say, “…I promise,” and it wrenches my heart.
“But you have to promise me that you’ll pull through this,” I say, pressing my head underneath his chin again. “I can’t be without you, Andrew. You have to know that I can’t.”
“I know, baby…I know.”
Silence.
“Will you sing to me?” he asks.
“What do you want me to sing?”
“Dust in the Wind,” he answers.
“No. I won’t sing that song. Don’t ever ask me that again. Ever.”
His arms tighten around me.
“Then sing anything,” he whispers, “I just want to hear your voice.”
And so I start to sing Poison & Wine, the same song that we sang together back in New Orleans when we lay in each other’s arms that night. He sings along with me a few verses, but I can tell just how weak he really is inside because he can barely hold a note.
We fall asleep in each other’s arms.
~~~
“I just can’t believe you’re going through this after what you went through with Ian. It’s like some cruel f**king joke that fate is playing on you.”
It does feel like that in a way, but with Andrew, it feels much worse than some cruel joke.
“Girl,” she says, laying her hand on my leg, “think about it: what are the chances that everything that happened the way it did, were just coincidence?” She shakes her head at me. “I’m sorry, Cam, but that’s just too much coincidence—you two were meant to be together. It’s like some wicked f**king fairytale love story that you just can’t make up, y’know?”
I don’t say anything; I just contemplate it. Normally, I would comment on her dramatic usage of words, but this time I can’t. I just don’t have it in me.
She forces my gaze. “Seriously, do you think you would be put through all this only to watch him die?”