Chapter 9

Devolin

Here I was, laying in my hospital bed, recollecting how my day had turned out.

I figured that once Dalton was granted a visit, that he would have been all about business.

He hadn’t been.

Instead, we’d made light chitchat. I never figured the man to be much of a talker, simply because of what Skylar had told me about him, but it was evident that my best friend didn’t see her brother in the same light I had.

All the fuss I’d made over my pending visitor had been for naught. Within minutes, Dalton had me so at ease, I felt it necessary to tell him all about myself.

I began my story when I’d loss consciousness at summer camp, right before my ninth birthday. I’d been unusually tired and nauseous. My skin was pale, I had ached all over, and bruises started popping up with the slightest bumps into things. I wasn’t hungry, and despite this, my belly had grown hard as a rock to the point it bulged out, resembling that of a malnourished child in some Third World country. Everyone thought that I was coming down with a cold or some sort of flu bug.

But it wasn’t that…

I lived in Canada, one of Toronto’s suburbs, at the time, so my mother had picked me up and brought me to the Toronto General Hospital.

When I talked about the multiple sessions of poking and prodding, the incessant questions about my symptoms, Dalton’s nose had scrunched up to the point I had laughed.

“It sounds worse than what it was.” I patted his hand in reassurance. “Trust me, there were worse things that came after that.”

“It’s so much for a young kid to deal with,” he voiced.

Admittedly, the whole experience had freaked me out. This was also when I told Dalton that perhaps having had my nose in my father’s old biology and pathophysiology textbooks may have not been that bright of an idea. I was smart. Freakishly smart, that is. With that kind of gift, the thirst for knowledge had beckoned me, and my parents indulged my harmless endeavor.

“From the General…” I licked my lips. That’s when Dalton had also poured me a glass of water, handing it over to take a sip. “They sent me to Toronto Hospital for Sick Children. I felt like I was stuck in an episode of Star Trek or something.”

There’d been MRIs, CT scans, more X-rays since my lungs had been rattling badly. Hell, they’d even done an ultrasound, but my least favorite of all diagnostic tests had been the lumbar puncture.

“I can’t imagine how hard it must have been on your parents,” Dalton said.

Snorting at that, I turned to set my glass of water on the bedside table.

My mother had dealt with it well enough, by giving into her OCD impulses and keeping everything in sight clean and sterile. My father, on the other hand, his reaction I didn’t get. I’d simply chalked it up to when life throws you a curveball, some rolled with the punches, and others…well, to put it simply, they just ran.

“At this point, I’d been hospitalized for three days. My mother never left my side. Dad, being the man I adored—who inspired me to be the best at everything I did—had a job to do. He couldn’t stay and I got it. He was a doctor. He helped kids like me get better every day. Since he worked in the same hospital I was in, I knew I had it good because Daddy would stop in whenever he had time between patients.”

Dalton took this in, and seemed to know without my saying it that this was a major turning point in my life’s story. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

My head fell to my chest and I whispered, “They diagnosed me with leukemia.”

Dalton’s hand covered my twisted fingers, his other coming up to tilt my chin until our gazes met. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered.

All I could do at his heartfelt words was shrug in a what-can-you-do manner. What was done was done, so I continued with my tale.

“Dad’s visits grew more and more infrequent, until they stopped altogether.”

“Fucking coward,” Dalton growled.

I agreed with him wholeheartedly.

It had broken me. It had broken my mother. It had also filled me with the resolve I needed to beat that cancer bitch with everything I had. It took five years, multiple relapses, not to mention loads of pills, chemotherapy, and radiation, but the day came where I was told I had won the battle.

Except that wasn’t all…

“After that, Mom took us and moved us to Jacksonville before the ink was dried on my parents’ divorce papers.” I giggled quietly at how we ended up here in the first place.

Dalton smiled, and then asked, “What is it?”

Shaking my head, I explained, “When I asked her why she chose North Carolina, she told me she’d fallen in love with the idea of it because of one of her favorite authors.”

Dalton’s eyebrows rose as he laughed. “You’re shitting me, right?”

I shook my head and met his disbelieving gaze. “Mom’s, Mom. She’s flaky at times, but if you’re one of hers, she’ll lay her life down for you without hesitation. So my life was uprooted, thanks to Nicholas Sparks, when I was fourteen. Even though we have no family around here, I loved it immediately. I still do.”

It had been heaven for Mom and me.

For a short two years at least.

It turns out that numerous sessions of chemo and radiation caught up with me.

Times two.

“They always say bad things come in threes—and I was destined to live it, I guess.” I shrugged. “I was out with a bunch of friends, enjoying the last of the summer vacation before school started up again. We were at the beach. Ian, my boyfriend at the time, and I had snuck off from the rest of the gang that surrounded the bonfire we’d built for some one-on-one time.

“The headache hit me like a ton of bricks. Then the nausea and the dizziness followed.”

Dalton’s eyes widened in realization. “You thought the leukemia was back, didn’t you?”

This had been rhetorical, but I nodded just the same. “The moment my mother saw me, she rushed me here to Onslow Memorial Hospital.” Since they knew of my history with leukemia, they ran the necessary tests and came back with nothing until they ran additional ones. “I got stuck with lupus and a rare type of anemia,” I grumbled.

The man groaned. “Seriously?”

“They put me on iron therapy to correct the anemia they found, but when that didn’t work, they tested my marrow and found that I had very few stem cells,” I explained. “As if lupus wasn’t enough, I also was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. My doctors had informed me that both the lupus and anemia were most likely caused by the various treatments I’d received while I was sick with leukemia.”

Dalton’s head fell forward to his chest on a heavy sigh. His hands flew into his hair, pushing it out of his face. “Fuck, Dev,” came out, sounding pained before his tortured gaze met mine again.

“So that’s me,” I ended on a whisper.

“Fuck!” Then his hands reached for mine. He got to his feet, his ass found the side of my bed, and he pulled me into his arms for a hug.

I sighed at the memory of Dalton’s hug. Unused to physical attention, especially from a male, I never expected for my body to melt at this intimate contact as quickly as it did.

His heat.

His kindness.

His safety.

As exhaustion set in, I held on to the feel of him wrapped around me, falling asleep with a smile on my face for more than just the simple reason that I’d be able to leave the hospital really soon.