The sun illuminates his shuttered face, a gentle breeze tugs at his hair. I squeeze his arm; he doesn’t react. ‘At first I thought going through chemotherapy—with the pain, the nausea, the weakness, the hair loss—would be the worst part,’ I say carefully, and finally he turns his head.
Our eyes meet. In the green of his eyes, a surge of constriction flares up. I feel it, and I feel him, with everything that makes him who he is.
‘But that’s not true.’ I draw in a sharp breath and look at him intently. ‘The worst part is the fear.’
His breathing speeds up.
‘No one who has never been through something like this can imagine how intense it is.’ It’s hard for me to go on speaking, but I do it anyway. ‘How it sinks its claws into you, steals everything from you that is good and beautiful and precious. How it turns you into a person you don’t want to be.’
He nods almost imperceptibly.
I place my hands on his cheeks. ‘It took everything from me, and even when my doctor declared me healthy again, it didn’t stop.’
Maybe he, too, is thinking right now of the Nyla he met a good two weeks ago: the health fanatic whose thoughts revolved solely around risks and dangers.
‘The opposite was the case. After I was cancer-free, it actually got worse. I was healthy… but I still wasn’t living.’ And that’s exactly what will happen to him if he runs away now.
No matter how much he pretends he’s fine, the uncertainty will crush him. It will force him into the moment, make him blind to everything else.
What if it’s not a life anymore?
He asked me that not all that long ago, so he knows. Deep down he has always known that his constant being-on-the-run isn’t a life.
Gently I stroke my thumbs over his five o’clock shadow. ‘It wasn’t the doctors and the treatments that ultimately gave me a new life. It was you.’
For a while he is silent, then he exhales slowly. ‘The moment the therapy started, my life would be over, and we both know that.’
So he is allowing for the thought that he might actually be ill. That’s progress.
‘Lilly’s story isn’t automatically yours as well.’ My voice is quiet and full of caution.
Absentmindedly, he lets his gaze wander.
‘We’ll do the biopsy and the CT scan, then we’ll see whether you even…’
‘Knowing wouldn’t make any difference, you understand?’ He lays his hand on my cheek, strokes my skin with his thumb and looks at me in a way that makes it hard for me to breathe.
‘How do you mean that?’
‘What if we just enjoy what we have?’ His tone is so desperate, so full of longing for deliverance. ‘Day by day. Moment by moment. No more, but no less either. Remember?’ He moves closer to me. ‘Just us.’ His lips find mine, tender, questioning, hopeful. ‘Just now.’
Just here.
Just us.
Just now.
I see the desperation with which he yearns for it, and I too want to be with him in that way. Weightless, so lost in the moment that nothing else matters. Without fear, without worries, without a future, without questions.
There is nothing I want more. Still, it’s wrong, and we both know it.
‘It would just be an escape.’ I wind my arms around him. ‘But we can’t run away from this. It will catch up with us.’ And when that day comes, it will drag us down into the abyss with it.
He kisses me as if he were a drowning man clutching at the only thing that can save him. Then he pulls back just far enough to look at me. The tips of our noses touch; in his eyes I see how fiercely he is fighting with himself.
‘Don’t you want to see the garden come into bloom? Don’t you want to experience how the plants grow and the trees bear fruit?’ I ask.
‘And what about you?’ He lays his index finger on my lips. ‘Do you really want to sit at my sickbed instead of dancing with me? Do you want to watch the strength drain from my body instead of visiting the Grand Canyon with me?’