“Jesus, Hunter.” I breathed into my elbow.
“We need hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dishwashing soap,” she said, shaking her head at him.
“How do you know?” I gagged.
“We get skunked patients in the ER.”
“You wash skunked patients?”
She shook her head. “No, my nurses do it.” She pulled back his eyelids. “It can cause ocular swelling if they get it in the face. He seems okay. I can wash him. I’ve already got it on my hands.”
I had to smile a little. A few months ago, this woman hadn’t known how to sweep. She didn’t scrub toilets or clean the kitchen. Now she was washing skunk off my dog? It made me feel oddly proud of her for some reason.
“I’ll help,” I said.
She grabbed him by the collar. “Are you sure? No point in both of us getting gross.”
“I’m sure.”
I didn’t want to lose time with her. Not even to this.
The sand in the hourglass was running out.
They were voting on her new job tomorrow. If she got it, which she seemed to think she would, that was it.
She’d given me three more months. I was grateful for it. But at the same time, I knew it might have been better to let her leave that day after the spaghetti dinner and never see her again. Because while it would have hurt me, it didn’t have the power yet to kill me.
Now it did.
I was in love with her.
I couldn’t even breathe thinking about this being over. It woke me up at night, made me feel for her next to me to be sure she was still there. I wanted her to stay so badly, I didn’t know what to do. I felt desperate. I wished I had a genie in a bottle or a fairy godmother, someone to grant just one wish. Just one.
But as it stood, there was nothing to be done.
A lot had changed in the last three months. Amber hadn’t called to ask me for money or to let me know the deal was off. I called her last week just to check in, and she sounded good. My guess was she’d come out of whatever self-destructive slide she was on the last time I talked to her and she was doing okay—for now.
I’d cleared out most of the backlog in the garage and sold it at the swap meet. Made eight thousand dollars, so not bad. I’d been focusing more on my freelance pieces than anything. Alexis liked them.
She’d started an Instagram and an Etsy store for me, and I’d been using it. I shipped a headboard to an interior designer in Maine last week, made two thousand dollars on that one item. It was looking like I could raise the money in time. I was almost halfway there, and I had half a dozen projects in the works and the house was rented out straight through October—but what happened with Alexis would determine everything in the end.
I’d decided. I’d give up my life here to be where she was if she’d have me. I’d give up my house and this town and all the people in it. If she was at the hospital eighty hours a week, I could be there when she left and be there when she came home. Make her breakfast, take her lunch, take her dinner. I could pick up the slack. She wouldn’t have to do anything, it could be all me this time—I’d go to her. It didn’t have to end.
We’d gotten so close after the last three months. We were comfortable with each other now. She’d walk around my room naked, looking at the little wood carvings I had on my windowsill or flipping through one of my books. Pee with the door open. We didn’t use condoms anymore. She had an IUD, but knowing that barrier had come down between us, that we had that extra layer of trust…
All these little things were everything. At least they were to me.
But she still talked like the end was still going to be the end. She was always trying to remind me it was coming, like she wanted to manage my expectations. She wouldn’t leave anything here. Not even a toothbrush. She wouldn’t take the drawer I offered her or the key I’d tried to give her. Every time she left, all of her did. And it always made me feel like this time could be the last time, because there was nothing here for her to come back for.
There were times when we were together and I knew I made her happy, and I told myself that meant I might have a chance. And then something would happen to remind me how extraordinary she was and how she had a different life she needed to go live, and I’d feel hopeless.
I’d hear her talking to some other doctor on the phone, saying things that I couldn’t even begin to understand. She was so damn smart. She learned things like it was nothing. I could show her a recipe and she could make it again from memory, remember all the measurements and ingredients, just from seeing it once. There was the time a day laborer from a nearby farm came to see her with an infected cuticle, and Alexis started speaking Spanish. Just rolled right into another language I didn’t even know she spoke. When I asked her about it, she said she was fluent in sign language too. I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at her.