Chapter Nine

Nate

The one thing that a terminal patient never expects to forget is the fact that they are a terminal patient. Once you found out that you were going to die sooner than you had expected to, and there was nothing that you could ever do about it, the reminders were everywhere that you looked, whether it is in the things that you have already tried or those that you have not. If those mental cues were not enough to keep the mind focused on it, there were all the doctor’s appointments or the treatments or the medication. I have no doubt that there are other things that hold significance to other patients but those were my primary predicaments.

I had made a mistake without ever knowing it and it had become far too late.

The irony is that it was my first missed appointment since I had met Carlos. I had not intended to miss it. I had somehow managed to sleep through the alarms that I had set – all three of them. Even so, what happened made absolutely no sense to me. I chalked it up to Murphy’s Law. Murphy enjoyed torturing me from time to time.

Carlos was nowhere to be found when I woke up that morning. I had fallen asleep with my cheek against his chest and his arm wrapped around me. I often woke to find that he was absent, either due to having to get to the hospital early the following morning or because he had been called in at some ungodly hour in the morning while I slept. I was used to it.

As per usual, there was a glass of juice sitting on my bedside table waiting for me. Carlos had a tendency to leave one there. He had stopped leaving notes a while back. You could only say the same thing a certain number of times before it started to become old and repetitive. It was okay. I knew where he was and a glass of juice was more effort than I had had anyone outside of my family put into me before – it said “have a good day” as well as a few words on a note did.

I proceeded to go about my day, starting with a sip of the juice. It was mango and it was refreshing. I made my bed because if I showered first, I knew that it would not get done that day. Carlos and I had a bad habit of never making the bed over the weekend when he stayed over at my place because we got so caught up in each other and everything else. After I had tidied the room and finished my juice, I hopped into the shower.

My agenda for the day was practically empty. I had managed to land a client in a European country who wanted a few websites designed for him. The best part of it was that it might mean that those travel plans could be closer than they ever had been. That was about all that I was required to start with though.

After my shower, I decided to make omelets. Eggs had been one of the key foods that I had never been able to keep down back when things were still bad. Therefore, Carlos and I had been eating a lot of eggs. He liked them, so that was okay by him.

I had never visited Carlos when he was at work before. I wanted to do something nice for him for a change. It was a very quick walk and I knew that he was at the hospital that day instead of the practice. I packed the omelets into containers, got some napkins and a bottle of juice with two cups.

I walked into the hospital and made my way up to the front desk. There was a woman typing away on the computer in front of her but she was also on the phone so I did not want to interrupt her. I was watching the comings and goings in the meantime. The hospital was quiet that day. There were only two people in the waiting room. There were nurses, male and female, in cyan scrubs walking up and down the halls all morning, though. They were never still for more than a moment as they spoke to each other or wrote things down on clipboards or picked up seemingly random items.

“Hi there,” a voice to my right said. “Is there something that I can help you with?” The voice came from a short woman with a pixie cut. She was really pretty. She was wearing the nursing scrubs and had a friendly smile on her face.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m actually here to see Doctor Carlos Ramirez? If I recall correctly, he should be on break in about five.”

“Oh! Yeah, he is indeed. I’ll go and let him know that you are here.” She began walking away from me, turning back at the last moment, “What was your name again?”

“You can tell him Nate is here.” I said. “Thank you.”

She gave another smile and then disappeared from my sight, opening one of the side doors. The woman at the front desk had said goodbye to whoever was on the line but the sound of her fingers typing away on the keyboard did not stop. She looked up at me questioningly. “May I help you?”

“No, that is okay. I’m waiting for someone.”

The smile the woman gave was tight and I realized that I should probably be sitting in one of the chairs of the waiting room in that case. I was on my way over to them when I was stopped by the sound of his voice.

“This is a surprise?” I turned to face him. I had not seen him at work before. He had a coat over the same scrubs that everyone else wore. He came over to me and pulled me in for a hug. He smelled really good, as always.

“That was the idea.” I wiggled the back pack that I had brought along. “I thought we could maybe have lunch.”

The smile that Carlos gave me told me that I had done the right thing. It was worth it. “We could maybe have lunch. Follow me.”

I did. Carlos led me down the same hallway that the nurse had gone to retrieve him. We opened the same side door that she had gone through and we were faced with a lounge of sorts. There was a miniature kitchen station with coffee machines and a fridge on the one side. On the other side, there were couches and armchairs around a coffee table. We walked through the middle of the room, passing them, and headed to a glass door that I had not noticed in the back.

Carlos opened the door and we stepped out onto a patio. To the right of the door, there were tables and chairs. The patio overlooked the hospital grounds. There were gardens that I had never known existed. It was quite a pretty sight. With a flourish of his hands, Carlos gestured to one of the tables and I made my way over to them.

I unpacked our lunch onto the table, carefully opening the containers. A perk of walking was that the omelets could not be thrown about and ruined in a car. The presentation was next to perfect. I pulled the cutlery out of the bag, laid our cups down and poured us each some fruit juice.

“You never cease to amaze me, Nate.” Carlos said. He walked up to me and wrapped his arms around me from behind, hugging me. He pressed a soft kiss to the nape of my neck. “Thank you for this, mi corazon.”

“It is a pleasure. Enjoy it while it is still warm.”

We sat down and ate our lunch together, overlooking the grounds. Carlos had the habit of moaning around his food when he ate. At the beginning, I had been unable to stop myself from laughing at his reactions to good food. I asked him why once and he told me that when you grow up in Spain, you are taught to appreciate good food in a different way. He literally felt pleasure when he ate good food, he told me. I felt complimented each and every time thereafter. I wondered sometimes if my food had not been good if he was able to eat it without making a sound.

When we were done with our meal, we sat in silence together. There was no one I had ever been more comfortable with in silence than Carlos. I knew that we had known each other for a very short time but that was of no concern to me. I was already beginning to fall in love with him. I think, in fact, that I had already fallen in love with him at that point. Of course, I had yet to tell him that. I was afraid that he would not feel the same. Even worse, I had the fear that he might think that I was crazy or that things were moving too fast and never call me again after I told him how I felt.

So far, I had mostly let Carlos lead our relationship. Everywhere that we had gone thus far, I had enjoyed. If I did not like the path that we were taking, I would have voiced as much. That was not the reason I allowed him to take the reins. No, the reason that I wanted Carlos to lead was because I had never done anything like this before. I had never been with someone like I was with Carlos. I had never felt the feelings that I felt for him.

He had way more experience than I did in this situation.

After some time had passed, Carlos stood up from the table. He walked around to hug me as I stood too. “This has been lovely, Nate, but my break is over. I have to get back to work. I’ll see you tomorrow, yes?”

I smiled. “Yeah, definitely. I can hardly wait.”

“You and me both, cariño.”

I had thought that he would head back inside but he surprised me by pressing his lips to mine. It was not a quick peck. His hand ended up in my hair, which I had started to grow out, and his tongue traced the curve of my lower lip. I sighed against his mouth, my hands holding onto the coat that he was wearing and my eyes shut. I did not think I could ever get used to kissing that man. It felt like a dream each and every time.

All too soon, he pulled away. He tucked his hair behind his ear shyly, smiling down at me. He began to get all the containers and the leftover juice and the cutlery together on the table, packing it all back into the bag. I held my hand out for it but he shook his head. I rolled my eyes. He was always insistent on carrying things for me if he could.

He led me back through the glass door and we walked past the doctor’s lounge and back out into the hospital. The nurse who had gone to fetch him for me was standing near reception and she gave me a smile as Carlos and I paused near the door. He hugged me and finally passed the bag to me.

“Have a good day,” I said.

“You have already made it so much better, Nate.”

***

The attack came out of nowhere but then, they always had.

The best place for me to almost die was in my house. The reason for that was because the entire place was filled with tiny little buttons whose locations only the company who had installed them and I knew.

I had been in the kitchen when it had started. I had been cooking myself some dinner. Carlos had been telling me about the paella that he used to eat when he still lived in Spain. It had been his favorite meal. I had not told him as much but I was starting to learn how to cook it. I wanted to test the recipes on myself first. A big cookbook full of Spanish food was open on the counter before me and I had yet to take the ingredients out of their respective homes. I read through the recipe several times over. The main problem was that I had never had paella before so I had no idea how to taste if it was good or right or not. The secondary problem was that I did not believe that anyone could beat a mother’s cooking and this was a meal that Carlos’ mother had prepared for him.

Carlos had spoken about taking me to Spain more than once. His parents were still alive and he wanted me to meet them. It made me warm from head to toe to know that he wanted me to meet his family. I was pretty sure that that was a new thing for him – which made a change since I felt as though he had way more experience in the entire relationship department than I did. It wasn’t fair, really.

It had been such a long time that, just for a second, I was uncertain as to what was happening. I had forgotten the feelings of my body that I had been most accustomed to – that being, the ones that were broken. I felt a tingling sensation in my legs at first. I had thought nothing of it and started to walk around the island dining table, trying to bring the feelings back. It worked, sort of. Only, the feelings that had awoken in my system were not normal. They were not the feelings that I had wanted to return.

There was a scream from somewhere in my house, somewhere far away. I could not make my way to it because of the pain that shot up my leg. It started at the heels of my feet and made its way up the back of my calves, stopping at my thigh. It was excruciating. I tried to move toward the screaming but my legs were not working. One step in front of the other is all it takes, I told myself. You have to help whoever it is that is screaming.

Finally, my foot moved. It did not land on the ground though. It floated somehow and I fell forward because I lifted my other foot at the same time and I could not fly. My knees hit the kitchen floor with a crunch and that was the last thing I heard as everything became white noise. It was like static in my ears, the entire world muted. I was no longer in control of my own body. I lay on my stomach on the floor and all I felt was pain. It was everywhere, coursing through my veins like literal electricity. I was being electrocuted by my own brain. I wanted to close my eyes to escape from it, to fall asleep and escape the pain. I could get away from it forever.

I realized as I lay there that I had not heard someone else screaming in my house. It had been me. I had heard my own screams from far away. Tears streamed down my face, hot and wet, as I shook. My final thought was an obvious one.

I could not lie back and let this happen. I had wanted to help the other person screaming in my house; I had wanted to fight through the terror and the pain; I had wanted to get to them no matter how much it hurt. Why could I do that for someone who was probably a stranger but not for my own body?

It was impossible…

I tried to move, tried to drag my body along the floor, but I had no luck. I knew where the button was. It was within my sight. I could see it. It was a red, shaking blur on the underside of my kitchen table. In fact, not only was it in plain sight, it was within arm’s reach. All I needed to do was stretch my arm out and touch it and help would arrive and everything would be okay.

My face contorted in a scream as the electricity turned to fire. Everything inside me was burning. I could not hear myself but I could feel the burn on the back of my throat, the scratching of my own cries of pain. My vision went black shortly after the fire had started. I could no longer feel anything. I could not remember if I had managed to move. I did not know if I had pressed the button or not.