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“Girl, I wish. Maybe I’d be a kajillionaire too. Keeping my own personal hoard of sugar babies on my fancy yacht as they filled endless champagne coupes full of the finest bubbly.”
“You get seasick,” I reminded him. “And carbonation makes you burpy,” I added.
“Don’t ruin my fantasy.”
“And you love your boyfriend,” I reminded him.
“I do,” he said, his face softening at the mention of the man I kept him away from far too often. “Anyway, I was able to move around your appointments for the morning, so you could squeeze in that check-up you have been putting off forsevenmonths now,” he said, giving me a disapproving raised-brow look.
“I hate the doctor,” I grumbled, sounding petulant but unable to help it.
“Believe me, I know. I’ve rescheduled this four times already. I’ve never met someone who will happily go to their dental appointments without so much as a whine, but put off their annual check-up like this.”
“Cam, I love you. But there is one way in which you have a privilege that I don’t,” I told him, shrugging.
To that, his brows lowered as he looked at me. “I’ve never known you to be anything but absolutely fucking in love with yourself. Including your body,” he said, shaking his head.
He wasn’t wrong.
It had taken me a long time—my whole damn life, really—to accept that I was never going to be one of the skinny girls, that I wasn’t built that way, that no matter how disordered my eating was, my body chose to hold onto some extra padding.
But I did accept that.
And I did love my body.
That being said, not everyone did.
“I do. But I can’t even begin to explain how quickly a doctor telling me about my BMI being unhealthy undoes years of self-love.”
“BMI is complete and utter bullshit. It was created by a mathematician, not a physician,” he ranted, clearly agitated. “And it was only ever used for male bodies. It doesn’t take into account the tits and ass and hips women have.”
“You know that, and I know that, but the entire medical field seems to be completely oblivious to that. And I just don’t want to hear that shit again, so I’d rather just skip the visit.”
To that, Cam let out a deep sigh.
“Okay. Listen. I will cancel it one last time. And I will do some heavy research to find you a doctor who isn’t going to say stupid crap like that. Then will you go?”
“I guess if you can find that unicorn doctor, yes.”
“Okay. Good. Then I am keeping you from your bathtub and Chinese for no good reason.”
“And I’m keeping you from that yummy boyfriend of yours. Get home. I’ll see you in the morning,” I told him, not knowing then that I wouldn’t, that by morning I would be in a hospital room, hooked up to machines, being given harsh looks from everyone who passed me by, with absolutely no idea what the hell had happened to me.
All I remembered was getting in my town car, then going to my apartment.
I had vague flashes of running my bathtub, of letting a bottle of red breathe on the kitchen counter, then of hearing the doorbell.
Chinese, probably.
I was a creature of habit that way.
Mondays through Wednesdays, it was always something healthy. Sushi, salads, the trendy new vegan place a few blocks away.
Then on Thursdays, it was Chinese, my guilty pleasure. Because nothing could help me push through one more day of the workweek like a massive serving of lo mein, a hot bath, and a glass or two of good red wine.
In my mind, I could see myself walking to the door.
After that, though, it was all just… gone.
