Fortune (23 page)

Again the sickening slide of helplessness.
But I’m trying. I’m trying my very best. Why won’t this work?
Dmitri began to seize on the table. The machines shrieked and beeped their inhuman warnings, as if Ryan wouldn’t know there was trouble without their prompting. He knew he was losing him. He knew.

The trauma team jumped in and Ryan was pushed to the side, to the outskirts of the drama. His role was done now. If it had been a normal surgery he would have left the room, gone back to his office and made notes.
Unsuccessful.
He would have enumerated the steps he took to excise the tumor, the advent of the seizures, the quadrant and locus of the fatal bleed. The wheres and whys. But not this time, not yet. This time he stayed and watched as if in a dream as they worked on his lover’s father. He watched Dmitri code, come back and code again. He watched until the team desisted, removed their gloves and called it. And still he stayed and watched as they sewed him back up. He wanted to apologize. He wished he had said goodbye to Dmitri before they put him under. He wished he had told him how much he respected him, that he was a good man with a treasure of a family. He wondered how he could go back in the waiting room and face them all.

He had to change into clean scrubs before he went to give them the news.

* * * * *

Kat sat hunched among her sisters and her mother. The husbands minded the children, shuttling them back and forth to the bathrooms and vending machines as needed. None of them spoke. The time for prayers and panic was over. For now, it was out of their hands. Based on the location of the tumors and the insidious nature of the particular type of cells, Ryan had put the likelihood of success—survival—at fifty-fifty. Kat knew with some sixth sense that he was inflating the actual chances. But she tried not to think of that. She tried to think of a thousand cranes, good fortune, a wish.

I wish, I wish. I wish for my father to smile at me again, to call me princess just one more time.

As soon as the door opened, as soon as she saw Ryan’s drawn, blank affect, her wishes disintegrated into dust. Elena’s soft, choked sob was somehow worse than her sisters’ howls of mourning.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, spreading his hands. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t… We lost him. The tumor was too…”

His voice was tight. He shuddered a little, so slightly, but Kat saw it.

“He’s gone. I’m sorry. There was always a risk. The tumor was—” His hands fell at his sides, helpless. “I’m so sorry.”

Her sisters fell on Elena and wept. The husbands cried silently in that stolid manner men have, still tending the children with the robotic efficiency of necessity. A searing pain crippled Kat so that she couldn’t move.
Gone.
How could he be gone just like that?

Ryan still stood across the room, the deliverer of doom. The interloper. She knew she should go to him and tell him it was okay, that it wasn’t his fault. That he shouldn’t be sorry for trying to help them. Some impulsive realization reached her through all the pain and shock. Just as he turned to go, she flew across the room and caught his arm.

He looked down at her. There was a tension in the arm she held, a fathomless cast to his dark gaze. He cupped her face. “I’m sorry, doll. I tried.” His hand dropped away and he moved again to the door. “I can’t stay. I have to finish his chart.”

After he left, after they completed the excruciating exercise of saying goodbye to Dmitri’s body, Kat went home with her family. The house had a feeling of quiet unreality. As she walked through the rooms it felt as if she were trespassing in another family’s home. And Dmitri’s small TV room, with his worn recliner… No one could bear to go near it. His absence haunted them like a ghost.

Ryan’s absence haunted her too. He didn’t come, not even when it neared midnight. At last, Kat left to go find him. She found him sitting up on the side of his bed in darkness, in silence. She went to him, uncertain of his mood, but he turned and pulled her into a gentle, enveloping embrace.

He’d been drinking. She could smell it on him. “Are you mad at me?” she whispered.

“No. Of course not. Why would I be mad at you?” His words slurred a little. He frightened her this way because it was so unlike him to drink. She shrank away but he held her.

Kat’s head hurt and her eyes ached from crying. His somber misery dragged her down even deeper into sadness, like a weight on her heart. Bleak grief was choking her, drowning her, and Ryan, her buoy, was dark in the night. “I’m sorry I asked you to…” She couldn’t say it. “I—I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have asked you to—”

“You were right, Kat. It’s all bullshit.” His gruff, toneless voice startled her.

“What…what’s bullshit?”

“All of it. Love. Hope. Wishes.” He made a sibilant sound of frustration and then he laughed. “You know what it comes down to, Kat? Blood and physiology. Cells. Reality.” He groped her between the legs, an awkward aggressive pressure. She pushed away from him and he stood, dumping her from his lap. His arms rose at his sides and he stood over her like a furious dark angel. “This is it, Kat. This is what we have. And this stupid shit—”

He lurched for the cranes in the corner, the mass of strings alive with wings and delicate beaks. “Cranes. Luck. Good fortune. Bullshit!” His hands tore at the paper chains, stripping the glossy creations from their anchor, pulling them down, shredding them, crushing them. He spun on her. “You believed! When it suited you, you believed. What do you think now?”

Kat shook her head, speechless. She watched his fists close on the broken cranes in his hand and something inside her felt crushed and broken too. She backed away from the man she didn’t know, this man she didn’t recognize, and she ran.

* * * * *

Kat fled down the streets of Cambridge until she ran out of breath, until her lungs ached and then she walked, blowing convulsive breaths of condensation into the cold night air. She didn’t have her coat but she barely felt the weather. She welcomed the numbness. Her walk slowed to an amble. She stopped, finding herself in a familiar place.

She gazed up at the marquee of Masquerade. An effusive group of college-aged partygoers nudged past her and pushed her forward toward the ropes. One of the bouncers smiled at her. “Hey. Long time no see. You coming in?”

Kat looked down at herself, her jeans and tee, her hospital waiting room clothes. She didn’t even have her purse with her. “I don’t have ID,” she said, holding up her hands. Her voice sounded strange and robotic.

The other bouncer shrugged. “We know who you are. Come in out of the cold.”

They led Kat under the rope, comped her in. Their kindness resonated in the emptiness of her mood, made her want to cry some more. The darkness, the smoke and music crawled over her, coating her in a familiar film. How long had it been since she’d been here? Several months by now. It seemed like a lifetime. She felt out of place as she crossed to the stairs and climbed up to the balcony. She remembered the first time they’d talked there.

You’re monitoring my vices?

Should I be?

She remembered falling down the stairs and looking up to find him leaning over her. That was the first time she’d noticed that intensity in his eyes, the intensity he’d just turned on her in his bedroom, ripping down cranes and raging over… What? The helplessness of life. So many wishes unanswered. Even if you knew the future, like her mother, it didn’t make it any easier to cope with when it arrived.

The view from the balcony was different, so different now. Kat went to the restroom just before one but Marla wasn’t there. It was some other woman Kat didn’t know. Kat slunk out the door, having no money to leave a tip anyway, thinking of what may have befallen Marla. Car accident? Aneurysm? A particularly aggressive brain tumor like her father? The dance floor was crowded now, the music almost painfully loud. Kat pushed her way through the undulating throng, then looked up into the eyes of a guy she remembered, although she couldn’t recall his name. She ducked her head, changing direction, avoiding his grasping fingers, only to see another guy she’d been with once upon a time. She forced her way to the stairs, climbed to the balcony and huddled in the back corner, shaking with something like fear.

Those boys. She had been so empty back then, back when she’d played around with those boys. So miserable. Not the misery of sadness she felt now, but an encompassing, smothering misery that had nearly consumed her life. She didn’t want that again. She wanted Ryan. She wanted fun and trust and that closeness he forced on her that scared her and made her feel alive. She thought of crushed cranes and his empty eyes and she knew she’d ruined everything. She’d lost everything. She turned her face to the wall and let the stinging tears come.

She’d lost all the things she never even realized she had.

* * * * *

When she’d left, he’d had the urge to drink more, to really finish the self-destruction he’d started. But then his gaze had fallen on the mass of cranes. He hated those cranes for betraying him, for betraying Kat. For not living up to the magic he believed in. Even half-drunk, he realized his mistake. He realized there was only one way to save the relationship—and it wasn’t folded paper.

He gathered up every crane, one thousand in all, and stuffed them into a trash bag. It felt slightly depraved, slightly murderous, but he did it anyway. He took the bag down to the dumpster and flung it in, bringing the lid down with a bang and then set out to the club district, newly sober.

He knew she had walked and he had a pretty good idea where she would end up. The bouncers greeted him with broad smiles and when he inquired after her, gestured him inside toward the balcony. He navigated the press of bodies with a sense of dread. What would he do if he found the old Kat on the dance floor, gazing up at some asshole with a come-hither glint in her eye?

But no, that wasn’t what he found. Her gaze was destitute, bleak. He hung back a moment, feeling ashamed. He was the one who was supposed to comfort her in her loss and instead he’d completely lost control.

“Poor Kat,” he said softly. He had no words to express how he felt, the depth of his longing for her. The intensity of his desire to save their relationship. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I should have been there for you tonight. I know how much you loved him.”

“Yes, I did love him.” Her voice faltered as she reached out for him. “But I love you too.”

He clasped her close, drank in the feel and smell of her.

“I love you, Ryan. I don’t want to lose you too.”

“You won’t lose me. I’m not giving you up. No matter what. That’s what I came here to tell you.”

They walked out of the smoky, noisy club together, drawing in fresh deep breaths of clear air. He wrapped his coat around her and they made their way back home hand in hand, talking about deep and soulful things like love and loss, luck and misfortune, minds and hearts and connection. All the things they’d been too afraid to talk about before. When they got home it was after two in the morning and still they talked as they took each other’s clothes off, as he led her to bedroom.

She didn’t mention the missing cranes when her glance flitted to the empty corner and he didn’t explain what he’d done with them. He made love to her without any rope, without any collar. He held her down with his hands and his body alone and slid into her, taking on all her shuddering ecstasy and grief. He soothed her and comforted her, reveling in the perfect completion of being inside her. He felt her skin against his like a promise, soft velvet proof that he held her, he had her. She was his.

“I’m yours, I’m yours,” she sighed as he loved her.

“Yes, you are,” he whispered back.
At last.

Chapter Twelve

Six Months Later

“Oh my—oh my
god
—” Kat threw her head back in the dim light of the lazy August morning. She pulled at the knotted rope that bound her hands together and tethered them to the headboard of Ryan’s bed. She spooned back against him, grinding her hips as he reached around to twist her nipples vigorously. “Oh— Oh—
Please
!”

“Shh.” Ryan chuckled against her ear and placed a hand over her mouth. “The windows are open.”

“Mmph…don’t…care…” she mumbled against his palm. “Don’t care…don’t care…”

“If you don’t quiet down,” he said in a lower voice, “I might have to punish you for it later.” Her pussy clenched on his cock, his softly spoken words settling in her pelvis with a low hum. “And I don’t think you’ll like it.”

Kat wasn’t sure about that, but she was beyond caring anyway. “Oh my god,” she squealed behind his hand as he used the other to reach between her legs and tease her clit in long torturous strokes. Each time he entered her from behind, he hit her spot and made her shudder and tense up at the sheer, singing pleasure. “Oh please, please, please never stop doing that.”

As soon as she said it, he stopped. She let out a strangled moan. “Please, Sir. I said please!”

“If you want it, control yourself. Be quieter. I’ve told you what I want.”

She swallowed another wail, let his words sink into her brain when most of her thought was centered between her thighs.

“Quiet…quiet…” he whispered. “And I’ll make you come. Eventually,” he added. “But you have to be a good little girl.”