Page 103 of Perfect Distraction
Chapter Nineteen
Lauren dropped her eyes from the road to see who was calling.
Andrew. His name on the screen simultaneously caused her heart to soar and her stomach to drop.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded tentative even to her own ears.
“Hey,” came his deep voice. “Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I like to take a drive when I need to think. I’m somewhere north of town. I don’t even know.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Us.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “I’m at your house.”
“You are?” She looked at the passing street sign. “I’m sorry. I think I’m like thirty minutes away.”
“It’s okay. It might be easier to talk about this over the phone anyway.”
“Talk about what?”
“Us.” His voice cracked.
She didn’t say anything for several seconds, and neither did he. Neither of them wanted to be the one to say it. To be the one to break both their hearts.
“You don’t want to be together anymore?” she finally asked.
She imagined him alone at her house. Was he pacing on the porch? Sitting in his car? She considered telling him to wait there until she could meet him, thinking it might be easier to talk in person. She quickly erased the thought.
Nothing would make this easy.
“That couldn’t be further from the truth, but all I’ve thought about up to this point is what I want. That’s the problem. When I think about what’s best for you, and what you want out of life, I can’t possibly allow this to continue. It’s not fair to you. I’ve asked you to risk your career and your happiness to be with me, and I can’t do that anymore. I won’t.”
“Andrew.” Tears burned behind her eyelids. “I may have risked my job to be with you, but never my happiness. I’ve never felt so much joy, or”—she paused, searching for the right word—“fulfillment as I have since I met you. Never in my life have I felt cherished and valued. Until you. So don’t say I risked that to be with you. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded far away.
“You got under my skin in the most wonderful way, and I fell in love with you. I know I got upset about the Gavin thing the other day, but then you got sick…and I realized I want you more than my job. But I feel at least partly responsible for what happened. You were having symptoms, and I didn’t see them because I was blurring the lines of your cancer care and our relationship. If I’d put it all together and said something to you, maybe you would have realized something was off. If I’d been paying attention to what was going on with your health instead of being so wrapped up in my feelings for you, I could have prevented it. I’ll never forgive myself for it, and I can’t let it happen again. I care more about you being alive than I do about being with you.”
“What happened on Friday is not your fault. How can you even think that?”
“Don’t try to convince me otherwise, it will only piss me off. You didn’t know, so you get a free pass. But I knew. I know, Andrew. I know what bleomycin can do, and what the symptoms are. When I think back on it, I noticed several things that should have set off alarm bells in my head, and I missed them all. Every single fucking one.”
There was a beat of silence. “Did you just say fuck?”
A small part of her wanted to smile, but she couldn’t. “Focus, Andrew.”
“Fine. I’ll never blame you for that, as long as I live.”
“That will make one of us.”
“So that’s it? We’re breaking up because you’re blaming yourself because I experienced a well-known side effect from chemo that probably would have happened anyway? That’s bullshit.”
