“Yes. Pity. I can’t drive myself. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I need someone to check on me — or else I might have a seizure, hit my head, and never wake up,” he explained. “It’s pretty pathetic.”
“I’ve never thought that,” she said, a little flint coming out in her eyes, in her voice. “I would have never pitied someone like you. You’re amazing.”
“Someone like me?” he asked, trying to ignore the way her words brushed over him like a pair of hands.
“Successful. Self-made. Intelligent. Talented,” she listed. “You’re intimidating. Not pitiful.”
He huffed. “I’m not intimidating.” Gray shook the notion from his shoulders. No way she found him intimidating.
Her dainty left brow arched severely. “You’re a bestselling author, and you’re not even thirty. You’ve been to Paris three times. You eat things I can’t even pronounce, and you own a breed of wolf dogs from Czechoslovakia,” she listed in a rush. “You havetwofireplaces.You’re the most intimidating person I’ve ever met. Add all that to the fact that you look like something out of Greek mythology, and it’s a wonder someone like me can even form sentences around you.”
Her words were meant to distance them, so Gray wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against him. “Something out of Greek mythology? Like the Cyclops?” he teased.
She glared up at him. “You’re not funny.”
“The Minotaur?” He gave her a concerned frown, and her mouth twitched. Just a little. And then her eyes grew sad.
“No. The Trojan Horse. Because you hide a devastating truth.”
Gray shut his eyes to absorb the blow.
“Ouch… You’re right,” he whispered, opening them again. Meredith looked pained, and his guilt doubled. “I’m sorry.”
“So tell me the truth now.” Her voice was just a husk, empty of its usual strength.
“I could die any minute.”
Meredith shut her eyes, and her body recoiled as if he’d shoved her. He remembered collapsing on top of her with the seizure and how her small frame put up no resistance. It was just like that.
This is what I am.A lumbering oaf who takes out innocent bystanders as I go down.
But he didn’t let her go down this time. He held onto her. He held onto what he had left.
“Is it cancer?” she said, blinking her eyes open. Her color was gone again, but her voice sounded steadier.
Gray shook his head. “No, it’s not. But that doesn’t matter. It’s pressing against the left carotid artery in my brain. That’s what’s causing the seizures,” he explained. “And it’s growing. If it blocks the artery completely, I’ll stroke out… My doctor says it would be fast.”
As he spoke, her eyes grew wider until she gaped at him in horror. “How can you say it like that? So calmly? Like…like…”
“Like I’m not afraid?” he asked. “I am afraid. But not of dropping dead.”
She shook her head, growing more panicked. “Why the hell not? I am. Your family sure seems to be. What did Bax mean? About odds?”
Gray silently cursed his brother. Bax didn’t understand. Neither did his parents. It would be such a relief if Meredith could.
“I don’t want options. I want time,” he said. His left arm was wrapped around her, and he still held her right hand. He squeezed it, hoping she’d listen. “Surgery is an option, but—”
“Then do it,” she said flatly.
He took a deep breath. “Meredith, I will, but I need time. I’m still me. A lot of things have happened to me since this tumor showed up, but I’m still Gray Blakewood,” he tried to explain. “Most days, I can still write — if I skip that stupid seizure medicine.”
He watched her wince, but he kept going.
“Yeah, I’m forgetting things. Like did I feed the dogs? Did I unload the dishwasher? And my head hurts all the time, but I’m still who I am. My behavior hasn’t changed, and I can still do the things that are most important to me.”
“But for how long?” she breathed, the sentence making her lower lip tremble. She pulled it between her teeth, and Gray fought the urge to run his thumb across her lips.
“I don’t know,” he told her honestly. “But the surgery is tricky. Assuming I survive it, I could lose some memories. And some — maybe all — of my ability to speak. Words might not make sense, and I wouldn’t be able to write. It will be a long, slow recovery, and even then I may not recover everything.”
