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He was letting her down. Like everyone in her life who’d failed to protect her, and themselves.
He didn’t know how long she sat there staring at him, her face frozen, breathless, pulseless, like him. Then she spoke, thick and slurred. “Cancer is treatable now.”
He got off his knees, slumped against the tent wall. He was still naked, and he suddenly couldn’t bear her eyes on him. Now she knew. He dragged the sheet over his lap. “I’ve had treatments. Six years ago, when I first discovered it.”
Her sudden movement startled him. She surged from her kneeling position, erupted to her feet, came looming over him. “Will you tell me everything, or do I have to keep dragging it out of you?”
A goddess. This was what one had to look like. Standing there in only her unbuttoned khaki shirt, her beloved, lush body bathed in peach and agitation. He wanted to drag her on top of him, remove the sheet and bury himself in her. This was where he wanted it all to end. But he wouldn’t do that to her.
“Sit down. It’s a long story.” He waited until she knelt in
front of him again and looked her straight in the eye. “I once had it all—what society advertises as ‘all’ anyway. A rocketing career, a lot of money, accumulating offers, endless opportunities. And I had youth—and health, too. A surplus of it. I was thirty-five and was still competing in short-distance swimming championships—and winning.” He saw realization in her eyes as they roved the expanse of his swimmer’s shoulders and torso. He hadn’t known what they’d been for until she’d rested her head there, pressed herself to his heart.
He ran agitated hands over them now, trying to put out the fire trails her gaze left behind. “I had patients flying me from all over the globe to perform the reconstructive surgery only I can perform. I had houses and estates in every country that took my fancy. I had an obscenely well-paid staff of twelve to organize my days for me. I had a glamorous wife who ornamented my bed, my many houses and public appearances. I had a mother who doted on me and four half-brothers and half-sisters who adored me. Then I felt a lump in my testis.”
Gulnar’s face settled into the neutral mask she’d presented him with during her daily visits in hospital. Was she withdrawing? No, no—but, yes, for her sake, let her drift away, let the illusion of loving him fade. He didn’t matter.
“My wife was scared witless, said she’d never noticed anything. Probably because we haven’t been making love for over a month at a time, and when we did, she didn’t do much…exploration.”
That got a response from Gulnar. She bit down on her lower lip—hard. Did she hate the idea of another woman’s hands on him, even in the past, even when he was telling her how disappointing it had been? Only fair. He felt like killing anyone who’d ever touched her, without—or with—her consent. He exhaled the wave of blinding aggression, continued. “I went in for tests and, yes, I had a tumor, and it had already metastasized, everywhere.”
An intake of trembling air was her only response. He went on. “Lungs, liver, bones. Before debating treatment options I had to have the radical inguinal orchidectomy to remove the testis and the abdominal lymph nodes and find out what kind of cancer I had.” He could read what leapt into her mind. She’d had her hands all over him there, fondling, her lips suckling, and now her eyes followed, remembering…How ridiculous was it to get aroused while talking about the most emasculating experience a man could have?
He shook his head. “Phil, my friend and urosurgeon, unasked, decided to substitute what he removed with an artificial implant. Didn’t want me to suffer body image problems. Didn’t want my young, passionate wife to miss out on the feel of an even pair. Not that he thought such trivial things would rock our stable marriage.” He huffed in sarcasm. “He also advised me for the sake of our future family to consider sperm cryopreservation, since permanent sterility was one of the possible outcomes of treatment.”
Her lids lowered, then squeezed. Now she knew he hadn’t been a careless, selfish bastard, making love to her without protection. “The tumor was a nonseminoma, the worst prognosis type at stage three. Everyone advised me to go all out with high-dose systemic chemotherapy, radiation and autologous bone-marrow transplantation. They removed bone marrow before chemotherapy, treated it with chemotherapeutic agents then froze it. After the chemotherapy infusions destroyed what remained of my bone marrow, they re-injected it into me.
“I had an almost fatal infection and after they resuscitated and stabilized me, they kept trying to vary the agents, the combinations, the dosages. Nothing seemed to be hitting me any less and the metastases were resistant. I went from two hundred and twenty pounds to one hundred and fifty in three months. I looked like a corpse and had the energy of one. I had originally decided to have my chemotherapy on an outpatient basis, but I was soon hospitalized. For six months. Until no metastases could be detected. During that time, I didn’t want anyone to see me. I told my wife and family to just phone me.”
The memory of those days made him restless. Not memories of the degradation of disease and incapacity, not the dread of a long, agonizing decline before the end, but of discovering the truth about his so-called loved ones, the people in whom he’d invested such presumptuous faith, so much life. He got up, yanked on his jeans. Gulnar’s emerald eyes followed him, reddened, puffed, hanging on his every word.
“Roxanne…” He wouldn’t keep calling her his wife. She’d never been his wife. Gulnar was. The one he’d pledged himself to. His only love. The one who’d inherit from him. He’d made all the plans. “Roxanne was horrified to see me the day I went home. She’d thought I’d be back to normal. She’d seen me once after I deteriorated and lost my hair and she’d thrown up then.” He skimmed his hand over his smooth head. “If you’re wondering. I couldn’t bear my hair when it grew back, so I kept shaving it. She thought I was crazy to prefer being an ‘egghead’ to my previous glossy black haircut.”
Gulnar’s teeth made a curious sound. His lips quirked. “She couldn’t bring herself to come near me. When I assured her I wasn’t contagious she was enraged. I wasn’t painting her as a superficial flake. No woman in the world could bear seeing her husband looking like that. I excused her—really.”
Gulnar’s eyes spewed forth wrath. She didn’t, huh? His lips twisted again. “Gulnar, in war zones, you see people mutilated, handicapped, emaciated, but a person ravaged by chemotherapy—it’s all in the transformation—it was horrifying. You see me now, when I’m 80 per cent of my old self. She saw a zombie.”
Why was he defending Roxanne? He knew why with her next words. “Are you trying to tell me I’d feel the same in her position? That this is the kind of horror you’re trying to save me? Dante—besides loving you, I do love your body, I am addicted to its pleasures, and it would pulp me to see its beauty destroyed, its power extinguished. But my torment wouldn’t be for me.”
And there was all the difference. Roxanne had thought only of herself. Gulnar thought only of him.
He couldn’t let her do that. He wouldn’t.
He heaved in a shuddering breath. “Anyway, I told her my prognosis was fifty-fifty. I hadn’t even told her that my sterility, if permanent, wouldn’t mean we couldn’t have children when she said she couldn’t bear waiting for me to relapse. She decided it was time to also reveal that even when I was healthy I was a disappointing lover, and from then on my sex drive would diminish, even disappear. She’d been reading up on the subject.” He huffed a chuckle now. What a load of bull. It was all about who. At his fittest, Roxanne had put out his fire. Now Gulnar had him constantly burning. She’d been his first real sex, too. “In short, she wanted out.”
Gulnar’s lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything. Her eyes said it all. He quirked her an indulgent smile. His virago. She’d defend him against everything. Even past injustices and injuries. And he believed she’d wipe them out, too. She already had.
“I gave her an instant divorce and half of my possessions in settlement. I went back to work and for a year and a half I went for follow-ups. The only finding was that the sterility was confirmed. Along the way I realized I was living someone else’s life, doing it right only because I give everything my best. So I cut every professional tie and donated everything to charity. And it was then that I found out the rest of the truth.
“My mother, brothers and sisters turned on me like rabid animals, filed a dozen lawsuits against me to declare me incompetent, to take control of my fortune, when they got it back from the charities I’d donated it to. I left them to it, walked out. I stopped my follow-ups and pledged whatever time I had left to live to worthier pursuits, to taking chances, as extreme as need be, to achieve all the things others’ expectations had stopped me from pursuing, to reach all the people who could have never afforded me in my previous fake life. And here I am.”
Gulnar rose, came towards him, her eyes scorching him. “Yes, here you are. Four years later. Strong and healthy and beating the odds—conquering death even. If you’re not back to normal, it’s because you neglect yourself!”
“Gulnar, it’s a matter of
time before I relapse…”
“You don’t know that!”
