The check-in process ran together in her mind. Time was becoming wet, slippery, running faster and faster downhill as she tumbled closer to her appointment. And before she knew what was happening, she was in a room waiting for Dr. Caldwell. Dr. Caldwell was beautiful, middle-aged, and also very much of a bitch. Autumn loved her. But it wasn’t enough. Hank’s only hand was, though. He came. He showed up for her.
As they waited, things unsaid rose up between them, things both of them had been running from for months, and in turn, their entire lives. But they didn’t have to say anything now. She felt that he was glad to be there, and it made her fall in love with him all over again. Or maybe the love had never left. Right there in that hospital room, Autumn knew that there would be no more running from this, not from her side of things, at least. She took in his scent as they sat there, soap and citrus and Tide laundry detergent and something else, something new and old – the glory of the summer. And besides, Autumn felt fairly good about this appointment, discounting her random bursts of anxiety over the past few months. She had been dealt enough bad hands in the card game of life – there was no way fate could fuck her over again. She felt normal enough, she had no new lumps, even the nurses didn’t seem too particularly worried. All seemed well.
So when Caldwell put up the scans, Autumn slid down the back of her seat. Her initial instincts had been correct, as they usually were. The tumors were everywhere. They had bloomed inside her like a bed of violet flowers on a sand dune in the spring. They were beautiful, wicked, malicious, eating away at her slowly and surely, a glossy-haired murderess in the night, and there was a solid chance she would not survive the wounds. The look in Dr. Caldwell’s eyes told them both.
There was so much to do. In the medical world, bad news only led to more news – there were family members to call and specialists to start researching and insurance people that needed notifying. Sometimes Autumn felt like her life was a series of phone calls, each one more difficult than the next. And the prospect of doing all this alone made her want to slide into a storm drain and disappear. But she knew she was going to have to. She and Hank were done, and there was no way in hell he was going to come back after that bombshell. She wouldn’t have, either. She understood. This was her battle to wage.
Nani left them alone in a hallway off the lobby with a somber nod. Hank turned to Autumn, and the past five months just bubbled up out of his eyes. His love had propelled her to triumphant heights and pushed her to horizons she had never imagined, but now she was on her knees, humiliated and sick and alone. He was the bedrock she needed, a cane placed before her without even asking, and she was grateful for even this, his last moment of assistance. What a gift it suddenly was, just to smell him, just to be looking at him. He was so precious, even in these last moments. After all, it is not until the sunset that we even bother looking at the sky. But she was looking now. What an important thing, just to have someone show up for you.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, somewhat formally, eyes on the tile floor now. “I’m so sorry for calling you here. I can’t believe I thought…”
“Get in my car,” he said, taking out his phone.
Autumn went numb. “What?”
He waved her off like he was a cashier and she had pulled up to McDonald’s three minutes past closing time. “I said get in my car. My friend is driving your car home, and I’m taking you now. You’re coming with me.”
“…What?” she said again. He looked down at her.
“Do you really need me to explain? I’m taking you, I’m handling all this, and you are about to pass the fuck out on my bed at my parents’ house with some wine, some Netflix, and some Pringles. My girl is not dealing with anything after getting news like that.”
“Your girl?”
Autumn let the words hover in her throat, and he nodded. She wanted this to last forever, but this was not in the cards for her. Her cards were built to fall apart, and she knew how hard it would be for him to love her again. “But…but you have a girlfriend, and…”
“Girlfriend?” Hank asked, his face a sour lemon. “You mean Caitlin, from the pier? Get outta here. She’s my best female friend, and I got lonely and started hanging out with her again after you and I broke up, or whatever we did. I only called her there that day to tell her how fucking miserable I was without you. Then you barged up and ruined everything, and now she thinks you’re a total psycho. So, firstly: good job on alienating my best female friend, since you know that’s a huge hurdle in any relationship, charming BFFs. And secondly: guess what? She’s absolutely right about you being psychotic, and I fucking love you for it.”
He looked down at her then with the crinkled eyes and the glassy pupils and the flicker of intensity from some light deep within, that look you can only ever get when you are filled all the way up with love for someone. And if Autumn’s feelings for him were a puddle, she would have drowned in them in that moment. Her worst fears and wildest dreams had come true: he loved her. It was all so clear to her now. As a bolt of lightning cracked its way through the atmosphere to reach the ground, their love was a similar force of nature, propelling them towards each other, all the other frequent and varied horrors of the world powerless in their attempts to stop this dual and singular trajectory.
“Are you telling me you didn’t feel it in that room?” he asked, and she knew exactly what he meant. She’d felt it, too: forever, settling in. She just didn’t want to admit it, to jinx it.
“Why did you run, then?” she asked, and he breathed through his teeth and looked down the hall.
“Same reason you did, I suppose. Guess I was scared. I was afraid. I was so used to being alone, living inside of myself, that finding someone who felt like a part of me was…well, it was terrifying. But fuck all that.” He turned back to her. “When I walked away on the pier that day, I was going to say that I wanted you, but that I wanted to not want you anymore, and that in the end I knew I would never be able to. It’s hopeless.”
She looked at him with all the power and all the glory of a woman with a broken and bleeding heart. “Never?”
He stepped forward, his jowls shaking. What he was trying to say looked damn near impossible to get out, like forcing a boulder through a keyhole, but he powered through. Because that’s what love does – gives you wings, makes you soar, makes you crash, makes you fly again.
He stared at Autumn, who looked a special kind of beautiful in the sunlight from the windows. “You are the one for me, Autumn. I force my way through life, you float through it. I do believe that you are the great love of my life, and even though it’s impossible between us, I don’t want to wake up one day and look back and know that I didn’t try hard enough, that I could’ve done more, that I could’ve kept you, that I let you slip through my fingers. To speak in the language of those awful romantic comedies you love, I don’t care how long this lasts – you are my Goddamned destiny, and you can’t argue with the stars.”
Tears burned at Autumn’s eyes. She was standing in a hospital ward facing the reality she had run from all her life: that someone could love her. And she fell forward and kissed him then, hard enough to make up for all the lonely nights, all the times she’d wrenched herself away from him, all the times she’d picked up her phone to call him and put it back down. For all the love she’d never given him.
“But come on,” she said, pulling away and wiping her nose, staging one last protest. “This isn’t some stupid movie. We fight like crazy and we have nothing in common and I have cancer and-”
“There’s the thing – we don’t know. We can never know. But we don’t know anything in this life, do we?” He took a breath. “There’s something I never told you. Remember when I said I held a dying little girl, back in Iraq, in her last seconds? I never told you what she told me. I was kind of holding her against my knee, trying not to get covered in her blood, and she reached up, brushed my hair off my forehead, and told me she loved me. She said she loved me – the guy who was basically responsible for her death.” He closed his eyes, fighting off a past he wasn’t going to let encroach into his future anymore. “Love doesn’t need a reason, Autumn. It’s just love.”
She didn’t know what to say. He looked at her, and she wondered if he knew how close to the sun she was flying.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not offering you forever. Shit, I’m not even offering you tomorrow. Lord knows we’ll probably get into a fight as soon as we walk through those doors and go back out into the real world. I am offering you happiness, right now, right where we stand. No matter what happens, I’m here, and I’m not leaving. You of all people should know how irrelevant the future is. Not when we’re so alive right now.”
“Okay,” she said after a few endless moments. She was crying and she couldn’t stop. She already knew that cancer was part of her story, but maybe, just maybe, it didn’t actually have to be the end of it. Maybe the ending could be written in love, or their strange little cynical version of it, at least.
Hank’s shoulders lifted. “Okay? Really?”
“Really,” Autumn said. She didn’t know what would happen next, but suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. They had found their way back to each other. Autumn had come home.
“But one thing,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She shook herself off, wiped her eyes, and stood taller. “You broke my heart, you ran out of my house in the middle of the night, and you left me smack in the middle of the shittiest time of my life. All that I could look past, given time.” She threw a disgusted glance down at his feet. “But Hank…Birkenstocks? Really? Have you learned nothing from me?”
He laughed and pulled her in, sinking into the floral scent of her signature shampoo. “Okay. You’ll teach me how to not dress like a lesbian art teacher from the Pacific Northwest, and I’ll teach you how to love. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He kissed her forehead, a giddy little smile on his face. “Please don’t change. Ever.”
“Wasn’t planning on it. Oh, and Hank?”
“Yes?”
She frowned. “My face is covered in mascara, I feel massively overweight, and I’m wearing my nasty old yoga pants I wouldn’t even go get groceries in. If any pictures of this day make it onto social media, I will cut off your balls with a scalpel and keep them in a jar on my bookshelf. That is a vow, not a threat.”
“Gotcha, baby.”
Autumn smiled. Held out her hand. And together, they stepped into the sun.