Page 54 of Where We Belong

“All good.” He smiles, then drops his sunglasses from his head to his eyes. They hang from his nose, but he still gives me a goofy grin and says, “Pretty happy to be enjoying that sunshine anyway.”

I laugh. “That why you came?”

“Sole reason.” Finn bends to engulf two pieces of bacon at once—the man acts as if he hasn’t eaten in four days—and as he does, I spot on his scalp a patch where the hair’s almost gone.

“Why are you staring? Want some?” he asks as he extends a piece of bacon my way.

I accept it and after taking a delicious bite, I ask, “What’s that on your head?”

“What?” His hand jumps to his shortly-cropped hair as if he thought there was a spider on there, then says, “Oh. That.” He wipes his hands with a napkin, then crumbles it. “It’s just a patch of alopecia.”

“Alo-what?”

“Alopecia areata. It’s an autoimmune thing. I lose my hair sometimes.”

“Like all of it?”

“Usually not, but I get these patches often. That’s why I keep my hair short.”

It doesn’t matter that he says it in this careless way. Something in my stomach twists at the thought that his buzz cut is there to hide a medical condition. And that thought brings me to an even worse one, which is that at some point, he was much sicker.

“Lilianne told me something when we hung out last time. She said something about dialysis?”

He snickers and shakes his head. “She really spilled all the beans in one short ice cream run, did she?”

“Were you really sick?”

His interest snags on his piece of toast, which he eventually drops in the puddle of yolk. “For a while when I was in high school, yeah. Autoimmune stuff often comes as a group, and I was blessed with both this,” he says as he points at his head, “andthe kidney thing. I was lucky enough that it went away with medication and I only spent a few months on dialysis.”

“I’m really glad you’re okay now.”

“Me too. Dialysis sucks.”

“I bet,” I say. My hand drifts to my fork, but I find my appetite gone. Even if Finn’s healthy now, the thought of him being ill and bound to a bed with no energy is impossible. It’s like thinking of an ocean with no water. It makes no sense.

“So if the alo…something happens often, why haven’t I seen it before?”

“It doesn’t happen that often, that’s the thing. I have some loss here and there, but my last true flare up was more than a year ago.”

“So what caused it?”

“There’re a few possible triggers. Usually it’s mostly stress.”

“What are you stressed about?” I ask.

He leans back in his chair, elongating his already-tall body. “A lot.” After a pause, his eyes drift to the other side of the restaurant and he adds in a low voice, “And I guess this past week had me a little worried too.”

It takes me a moment to figure out what he’s talking about, and when I do, I feel my entire body become aflame.

It’s terrible that I’m even thinking this, but I can’t help myself: someone stressing this much over me must be one of the nicest things I’ve ever felt.

Chapter 19

Finn

“Ican’tcookthis.”

Lexie gives me a look as if I’m the dumbest person she’s ever met before saying, “Yes, you can.”

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