CHAPTER TWENTY
"Mr. Whitman, I'm just going to take some blood to run some preliminary tests so we can move forward," Calvin said.
I watched as the blood filled the little vial, so red.
"Move forward?" Aaron asked Calvin, but his gaze was on me. It was always on me. That twitchy, intelligent gaze somewhere between black and gray. Things had been different this last week, since our bloody kiss, since I found out about her. It seemed as though that kiss should have erased what I knew about her – that she existed. She shouldn't have mattered. She wasn't here. I was here.
But she did matter.
Now every time I visited Aaron, she was all I could see.
Ridiculous, right?
I didn't know who she was, what she looked like. She was faceless, an empty frame on a wall of colorful photos. She blanketed everything, until she was all I could think about while I was with Aaron, and while I was at home. I couldn't watch him anymore in the evenings. I tried after our bloody kiss, but something was lost. Something that had burned so brightly before had become charred ash.
"With the procedure," Calvin supplied while he filled a second tube.
"I'm having a procedure?"
I nodded, not speaking. It had been decided since the moment I understood what the machine did. I had to know about them, about their lives, about her. She was everything, and I needed to know what that meant.
"What procedure, Violet?" There was anger in Aaron's gaze, volatile. His fingers tapped.
"Just a standard procedure, nothing to worry about." Calvin chimed in, capping off the last vial of blood. "I'll go run these tests to make sure everything comes back okay. Shouldn't take long."
Calvin left, leaving me alone with Aaron. "What is the procedure, Violet?"
A pale, flesh-colored bandage covered the little wound on Aaron's arm. It wasn't quite as pale as his skin. It covered up dark words etched into the white.
"Violet!"
I flinched, meeting his gaze again.
"Tell me what's going on," he demanded. A muscle ticked in his cheek.
I frowned. "What happened to your hand?" His right hand was swollen, the knuckles scabbed over.
"Don't try to change the subject, Violet. Tell me what's going!" His hair stood in its normal fashion as if he had been running his fingers through it over and over. Had she run her fingers through it? Had she caressed the strands with her hands? Over and over and over and over and over?
"No!" I turned away from him. I couldn't stand it. These fucking images that ripped at me inside. "Fuck. Just fuck!"
"What's wrong with you, Violet? You haven't been watching me at night." His voice was quieter, his fingers tapping.
"How do you know?" I turned back to him.
A sad smile covered his face, stretching his tattoos. "I just know."
"Pity for you, then, isn't it?"
His brow creased into a frown, but his lips continued to smile. It was unnerving. A smiling, frowning face. The image of confusion itself. "Of course it is, Violet. You're the air I breathe, and when you take away my air, I suffocate." He licked his lips. "It just makes me all the more desperate to get it back."
"Desperate for me?"
"Have you been spending time with him, with Richard?"
Richard, standing with me out in the cold this morning flashed into my head. The swirling, dancing images on the page. I pushed the images away. My lips opened to say what I said earlier in the week, that Richard was co-worker and nothing more. But instead something else came out. "Maybe." It wasn't a lie, even though Richard and I were completely platonic, I didn't include that information.
Aaron's chest rose and fell rapidly with jerky breaths. "Maybe, Violet? Maybe? Maybe you've been spending time with your co-worker instead of spending time with me? Is that what's happening, Violet?"
He's jealous.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I stopped worrying about you, when I knew you were thinking about her." I'd tried to find out who she was. There was nothing in his file about a woman in his life outside of his mother and even that information was sparse.
"Her?" he repeated.
"The one you love, Aaron."
He started to chuckle, the sound grated from inside his chest, his twitchy gaze on me. His mouth was half open revealing his shiny teeth. The sound grew louder, his eyes squinted in the corners. "That's what this is all about?" He spoke the words in between rumbles of laughter. "You wanting to know about my past."
"Not about your past, Aaron. I want to know about the woman you're in love with. You brought it up the other day." It was something I'd noticed later. He was the one who brought up love and past relationships. He was the one that led us to the conversation, to her. "You wanted me to ask about her." My words were accusatory. I pointed my finger at him from across the table. I wasn't sitting. I couldn't sit. I couldn't bear it, not right now.
"Don't you think there's a difference?" His laughter had quieted.
"A difference about what, Aaron? You can't just change the subject."
"A difference between loving and being loved."
"Are you kidding me?" I raised my voice.
"Is all love equal?"
"What kind of question is that? Of course, there's a damn difference. The words themselves are different. It doesn't even merit question, Aaron. You're just trying to waste time, to distract me with your riddles of love and its equality so you don't have to talk about what's really important." I slammed my fist down on the table.
"What's really important? It's funny that you would deem my past romantic life as something that would merit importance, here and now."
"Past?" I clung to the word. "She was your past romantic life?"
His gaze darkened, the tapping stopped as he dug his nails into the table. "Some things are forced to dwell there, in the past. There is no other refuge for them."
"What is that even supposed to mean? Quit talking around everything, quit making me guess!" I yanked on the ends of my hair until my scalp burned like it did that night a few weeks ago when my hair had been wrapped around his fist. The pain felt good, it made me feel present, alive and in control.
"You are in love with me, Violet. Look at yourself. Yanking on the ends of your hair. Angry. Upset that I have a past outside these white walls. But not the fact that my past is smeared with the blood of innocents, as some would call them." He chuckled. "I wouldn't call them that though, no one is innocent. However," his fingers tapped quickly, "You're upset because my past includes the love of another woman. Someone who is not you."
"Me, love you?" I scoffed, but I could feel it. The lie. The most blatant lie I could remember ever telling.
"You don't want to think about the fact that I've been inside another woman's body, that I loved every minute of it, and that I loved her with every breath inside my chest, with every beat of my heart. It makes you sick, doesn't it?"
"Stop it." The words ripped from my chest like a pathetic cry. "I can't take it."
"Because you love me. You need me." His words were soft, matter of fact. "You're in love with me, my one letter away." He smiled and there was something genuine about it, something that made me want to reach out and touch his face and feel all the crinkles in his skin, to memorize them with my hands so I could never forget.
"You don't know anything," I whispered.
"I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do." Over and over he said the words. "Because I'm in love with you, too." The words seemed to seep into the white walls that surrounded us, into everything, into me. "Richard can't have you, because you're mine." He slammed his fist down on the table, it made a rattling sound. "No one gets to have what is mine!" He shouted the words, but somehow they were quieter than those before them.
"I only want you." The words were in the air between us before I realized I'd said them.
"Good," he said. "Come here."
I was halfway to him when the door to Aaron's room opened. "Dr. Violet, the tests came back good. I've prepared the MEI machine, is everything ready on your end?"
The procedure. I'd almost forgotten about it. Aaron told me loved me. The procedure didn't matter anymore. Did it?
But it did.
I glanced back at Aaron and realized that it was all I had. Aaron might have claimed that he loved me, but he loved her first. He still didn't tell me about her, instead he professed his love for me. He distracted me, again. I'd tried to keep us on the path to her, but he had swerved without me knowing.
He doesn't love you, Adeline. He loves her.
Who is she?
My mind spun, a haze seemed to settle back over me, the same haze I'd been wandering around in for a week.
"Yes, I'm ready." I had spoken the words, but they didn't feel like they came from me. None of it seemed real, not as the orderlies came in with Christopher, not as they pressed the taser button on my remote to subdue Aaron. I watched as the electricity shook his body, rendering him limp, as they drug him to the little room off the OR.
His body seemed so small with all the men around him, shuffling him into that little room, but once they were all gone, once it was just Calvin, Aaron and I in there, he seemed to take up the space, engulfing everything, even while he laid strapped to a table. I stood next to him, with Calvin at the computer. The lights were still on, bright, seeming to illuminate all the ink in his skin. I noticed now the words that crept out of his shirt, up his neck. I frowned down at them. How had I not noticed these words before? Madness thrives in the light while beauty shrivels.
But what did it mean? Was beauty more important hiding away in the dark, or madness in the light? I reached out to touch the words, to feel their texture.
"Dr. Violet?" I glanced up at Calvin. He stood, peering at me from over the computer screen. "Is there a certain category of memory you'd like me to choose?"
"Love."
He coughed into his hand. "Okay. Any subcategories?"
I considered this. "What are my choices?"
"You could do anything, really. Love coupled with anger, or happiness, even sadness."
I wanted to see it all. "Just love."
"All right." He fidgeted with his glasses. "Are you ready to begin?"
I swallowed. Was I? I could cancel all of this, say we should not put our patients through something painful in order to gain access to the darkest places in their minds. I had that power. I could end it. Now.
But I didn't. I wouldn't.
Something inside me wanted to hurt Aaron Whitman. I wanted to hurt him because he was right, that I did indeed love him.
I wanted to hurt him because he'd loved someone else before me, because his question about the difference between loving and being loved said all I needed to hear. Love wasn't equal. Even though Aaron said he loved me, he left it there on the table raw and open with the precursor that all love was not equal.
His love for me will never be the love he had for her.
"Yes. I'm ready."