Chapter Eight
Mack and Rob were leaving the following morning, so Zaan and Lexi spent the next day at the condo helping them pack up the last of their things. They were taking summer clothes and a few necessities, but everything else would remain since they were coming back in September. Lexi was packing up some of her things to take over to Cody and Suze’s house, since she’d be staying there while Zaan moved out and into the condo. A lot of things were still up in the air, though, since Mack hadn’t yet heard back from the specialist in New York about the reconstructive surgery for Lexi’s breasts. Lexi hadn’t heard anything from Julliard, either.
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight,” Mack was saying after Rob and Zaan put the last of their suitcases in the back of Rob’s truck.
“Where should we go?” Rob asked, smiling at his wife as he pressed his lips against hers.
“Wherever the kids want to go,” Mack responded, kissing him back and surreptitiously running her hand over his ass, squeezing lightly.
“I don’t care,” Lexi laughed, turning away. She’d never seen her father as happy as he’d been since he’d met Mack and she loved Mack too. She didn’t want to watch them make out, though.
“I need steak,” Zaan mumbled. “I’ve been forced to eat all kinds of healthy shit this week, by someone who shall remain nameless.”
“Oh, hush!” Lexi nudged him. “Salad and vegetables are good for you. Besides, we had pizza with Tore and Mimi last night and ice cream twice this week!”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re what? A hundred pounds soaking wet? You could eat ice cream every night!”
She shook her head. “Cancer feeds on sugar—at least that’s one of the things the oncologist talked about—and it’s not worth the risk to me.”
For a moment everyone was silent and Mack turned to Lexi slowly. “We talked about this, honey. There’s a connection, but you don’t have cancer anymore and we don’t know enough about the correlation to worry about every bite you put in your mouth. You’re still underweight for your height and the truth is that sugar, which comes from glucose, feeds all the cells in your body, both cancerous and healthy. Even if you ate completely carb- and sugar-free, your body needs it and would draw it from protein or fat if it had to. Although I think eating healthy is a wonderful idea for everyone, until you’re back to your regular weight, you need to eat more and a good variety too.”
“I’m doing everything I can to keep it from coming back,” Lexi replied, biting her lip.
“One of those things should be eating enough to reach a healthy weight,” Mack reminded her.
“I can’t gain weight if I want to be on stage or TV anyway,” she said. “But I eat plenty, I promise. I just don’t eat junk, which Mr. Professional Athlete seems to want all the time.”
“I do not!” he protested, making a face at her. “But I still want steak tonight.”
“Okay, we can have—” Lexi paused as her phone rang. She frowned down at the number. “Is the 2-1-2 area code New York?” she asked, lifting it to her ear. “Hello? Yes, this is she… oh, yes, hello.” Her eyes widened and she looked at Zaan. “It’s Julliard!” she mouthed, jumping to her feet and beginning to pace as she listened to the woman on the other end. “Day after tomorrow?” Her eyes flew to her father, who immediately nodded. “Yes, I think so… there are plenty of flights between Las Vegas and New York… yes, okay… of course. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much!” Lexi disconnected and stared at them. “They said they have a time for me to audition the day after tomorrow… oh my God!”
“I’ll get online to book us flights,” Mack said, reaching for her laptop.
“Us?” Lexi couldn’t seem to move.
“Well, if you’re going to New York, I’m going to see if Dr. Wells can see you while you’re there.”
“Okay, yes.” She turned to Zaan, as if he hadn’t been standing there the whole time. “They called. Julliard! Julliard is going to let me audition.”
“I know, baby.” He pulled her close, looking down into her face. “I told you they would. I’m so excited for you. What do we have to do?”
“Crap, there’s a million things to do,” she breathed, spinning around and hurrying to her room.
Zaan watched her go with a mixture of pride and disappointment; she was leaving and his gut told him she would never truly come back. Maybe for a visit or the holidays, but not for good, and certainly not to him. With her talent, she was destined for even greater things than he was and though it broke his heart to see her go, he would be her biggest fan.
“Thank you,” Rob said under his breath, touching his shoulder.
Zaan nodded. “Yeah, of course. I told you—I’d never keep her from her dreams.”
“If it’s meant to be,” Mack looked up from the computer, “you’ll find your way back to each other again.”
“Hey, it was just a week,” he said lightly. “She’s going to forget me the minute she gets to New York.”
“I doubt that,” Mack said.
“Zaan!” Lexi called to him from the bedroom. “Can you help me get this suitcase down?”
“Sure, babe.” He turned and went into her bedroom, pulling down the big suitcase from a high closet shelf.
“I’ll be back,” she whispered once he put the suitcase on her bed. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed a kiss against his Adam’s apple.
“I know.” He kissed the top of her head. “So what else can I help with?”
“Keep me sane while I pack?”
“Count on it.”
“Lexi?” Mack stuck her head in the door.
“Yeah?”
“We’re booked on a 6:00 a.m. into JFK. Will that work?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“See if you can get packed and then we can go to dinner because I’m starving.”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
“Sure.” Mack backed out of the room, leaving Zaan and Lexi alone.
“I guess I’ll cancel the appointment at the tattoo place,” he said after a moment.
“Oh!” Her eyes rounded with disappointment. “Maybe we can just postpone… I probably won’t be there more than a few days.”
“Don’t worry about anything like that, just focus on your audition. I’ll take care of cancelling the reservation.”
The next few weeks were a whirlwind of auditions, cross-country flights, doctor’s appointments and general insanity. In the middle of July, a week after receiving her formal acceptance letter into Julliard, she had surgery to reconstruct her breasts. Rob and Mack were at her side for the first week and then Zaan flew in so Rob and Mack could head back to Chicago to finish closing Mack’s office. Lexi was planning to go back to Las Vegas for the month of August to continue her recovery before school started in September, but she couldn’t fly yet so Zaan had come to her instead.
Something had changed in the month she’d been gone, though, and she watched his face intently one night after he’d been in Manhattan for a few days. He was quiet, as gentle and loving towards her as ever, but something was definitely different. She’d tried to draw it out of him several times but hadn’t had the energy to fight with him. She wasn’t willing to let it go now that he’d settled in, so she turned off the TV and crawled into his lap, refusing to let him distract her. “What is it?” she asked softly. “There’s something bothering you and I want you to tell me.”
He smiled, kissing the tip of her nose. “I’m not a very good actor, am I?”
She cocked her head. “Why would you need to put on an act? This is us, remember?”
“I know. I just… In my head I know exactly how far apart Las Vegas and New York are, but it wasn’t until you were having surgery 3000 miles away that I realized how far it is emotionally.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hated not being there for you, not being able to get to you if you needed anything. I know your dad and Mack were here, but it wasn’t about your safety, it was about our connection. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to hang out with my friends… all I could think about was you… and it’s not healthy. For either of us. If it had been hockey season, I would’ve been distracted and off my game.”
“It’ll be hard for a while, but we can make it work.”
Zaan hesitated, taking her hand in both of his and gently stroking the skin. “We can try to make it work, but we both know it’s not going to be what we want it to be. What if I was injured? Wouldn’t you want to be with me? Take care of me?”
She nodded. “Of course!”
“But you wouldn’t be able to. Not really. I mean, you could hop on a flight to be there to make sure I’m okay initially, but you’re going to be having the time of your life in one of the greatest cities in the world, working towards a dream most people can’t even imagine. You can’t drop everything to take care of me for eight weeks because of a concussion or something, so how will you function with classes and rehearsals and everything that goes into what you’re doing if you’re pining away for some jock on the other end of the country?”
“I don’t think you’re just some—”
“Shh.” He put a finger on her lips, his face close to hers, his eyes so intensely blue she was momentarily mesmerized. “It’s the same for me, you know? How can I concentrate on hockey when my girl is thousands of miles away, practically hypnotizing men all over Manhattan with the voice of an angel? We have to keep it casual, babe. I have to do hockey and you have to do Julliard…”
“But, but…” Her eyes filled with tears as she stared at him. “I thought you—”
“I do.” He kissed her so tenderly her tears started to fall faster. He drew back slowly, the thumb of his right hand brushing them off the side of her face. “You’re my perfect match, my perfect fit, my perfect everything… just not now. Someday, somehow, we’ll find our way back to each other, but not now. You have a gift to share with the world, and I can’t afford a distraction. The Sophomore Slump is a real thing, it happens all the time in your second year in the pros and sometimes it makes or breaks a career. Just like you can’t put off Julliard, I can’t risk my whole career.”
She couldn’t think of a response so she sobbed against his chest as he held her, his arms loosely circling her still-sore body. The surgery had been just as complicated as they’d anticipated, and recovery was slow, but she wouldn’t let go of him no matter how much her torso hurt. For the last few weeks it had felt like she could have it all—her health, new breasts, Julliard and Zaan. Without him, the other things weren’t nearly as exciting and that alone told her he was right. She was already reluctant to do anything other than think about him, be with him, make plans for them to be together. But that would get old once he was on the road for weeks at a time and she sitting home by herself. She needed to be at Julliard. In New York. Three thousand miles away.
“I won’t ever be more than a phone call away,” he whispered against her hair. “One call and I’ll be on the next plane, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, if you need me.”
“I need you now,” she sniffed, lifting red-rimmed eyes to his.
“I’m not going anywhere. I wasn’t going to have this conversation until I was ready to head back to Vegas but you know me too well; like you said, I can’t hide anything from you.”
She pulled out of his arms and slowly got to her feet, walking into the bathroom so she could wash her face and stare into the mirror wearily. She hadn’t worn her wig in weeks and the soft blond pieces were hanging limply around her face. Her skin was paler than ever after being in the hospital for a week and in this hotel room recuperating for another. She’d lost weight again because the pain medication killed her appetite, so even her smallest shorts hung limply on her slight frame. She had breasts now, though. Everything was still bandaged but she could see the small, round mounds beneath them. They would only be a B cup, Dr. Wells had told her, but she didn’t care as long she had something.
It occurred to her Zaan would probably leave before he saw them and fresh tears slid down her cheeks. She hiccoughed trying to control them, but then Zaan was there, his arms around her from behind, holding her close and whispering all the things she’d hoped she would hear him say.
“Please don’t cry.” He grazed the side of her face with his lips, his breath warm against her skin. “I’m not walking away from this—us—I’m just saying we need to temper what we feel with what we do… I don’t think we should put pressure on ourselves to be serious at a time when we can’t put 100% into a relationship. Let’s take it one day at a time, see what happens.”
Her eyes met his. “I’m so afraid I’m going to lose you, that I’m choosing Julliard and a future with no guarantees, over you.”
He sighed. “Don’t do that to yourself, baby. We have the rest of our lives to be together—we only have right now to follow our dreams. Remember the day we met?”
“How could I forget?”
“What did I tell you to do?”
She frowned for a moment but a slow smile spread across her face as she recollected those early conversations. “You told me to work on me, to find the things that make me happy and do them.”
“Singing makes you happy… and it’s going to make a lot of other people happy too. I’m so excited for you, knowing that singing for you is what hockey is for me—not a lot of people get the chance to do something they love that much professionally. Don’t think of it as a choice; think of it as part of our destiny.”
“How come you’re being all rational and mature even when you’re poetic and romantic?”
He chuckled. “Because if I wasn’t, we’d both be crying.”
They were quiet for a long time, his chin resting lightly on her shoulder, the sides of their faces pressed together. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say; they were doing the right thing, the only thing they could do without sacrificing one part of their souls for another.
Finally, she turned to face him, reaching out with one hand to stroke his handsome face. “I love you,” she whispered. “I want you to know it, remember it, feel it.”
“I don’t know what the future holds,” he whispered back, “but I don’t believe I’ll ever love anyone else the way I love you. You’re the siren of my soul and you’ll always be part of me.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”