Page 37 of His Heart

“No,” I said. “I need to, but you know how they are. Especially my mom. She’ll freak out about me being so far away from home.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “So, driving or flying?”

“Driving,” I said.

“Cool. When do we leave?”

“We?” I asked.

“Road trip, bro,” he said. “It’s summer. I’m off until I coach at camp next month.”

Charlie was a teacher and an assistant wrestling coach at his old high school. He loved his job and he was amazing at it. He’d thought about pursuing a coaching job at the college level, but he liked working with the high school kids.

“You really want to come?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “If you’d rather go alone, it’s cool. I mean, you’d be an asshole, but whatever.”

“No, it’d be great to have company,” I said. “And someone else to drive. But we’re taking my car.”

“Dude, you have no love for the Beast.”

I shook my head. Charlie drove the same old pickup truck—the one he’d inherited from his dad when he was sixteen. It ate through gas like a motherfucker and drove like a tank. But he loved that piece of shit.

“You want to take the Beast, you pay for all the gas,” I said.

“Touché,” he said. “We take your car.”

“We leave tomorrow.”

After our workout, Charlie headed home and I went for a run. Because I could. Four years later, and I still hadn’t gotten over the way it felt to make my body move and feel it respond. Feel the air going in and out of my lungs. The muscles in my legs working. No dizziness or chest pain. Nothing but the lactic acid building up as I ran, the rush of air in and out of my chest. Deep breaths, filled with oxygen. My new heart thumping a steady rhythm.

It felt really fucking good to be strong again.

Recovery from the transplant surgery had been brutal. But considering they’d cut open my chest, taken out a vital organ, and replaced it with a new one, it wasn’t surprising. It blew my mind that it was even possible.

It had taken a year before I’d felt like the surgery no longer impacted my daily life. But I’d been on the brink of death before that, so every day post-surgery had been an improvement. Even those first pain-soaked weeks when I’d felt like I lived with a stack of bricks on my chest had been better than the months leading up to the transplant. At least the new heart gave me some hope.

I’d indulged in that hope with a high degree of caution, especially at first. There were numerous things that could go wrong after a transplant. I’d needed regular tests, including multiple—painful—biopsies to determine how the heart was functioning. Every time, I’d braced myself for bad news. For the doctors to tell me something was wrong. That this heart was failing too, or my body was rejecting it.

It hadn’t.

With the help of a cocktail of drugs, my body had accepted the new organ. I hadn’t had a single fibrillation episode in four years. I’d been spared any other complications. My new heart worked just as it should.

Now, it was all on me. I had to take care of the heart Liam Harper had given me, and I took that responsibility very seriously. I didn’t fuck around with shitty food—at least not very often. Didn’t drink or let anyone smoke around me. As soon as I’d been cleared to work out again, I’d hit the gym with a vengeance. I’d been as weak as a kitten when Charlie and I had first started, but as time had passed, my strength had grown.

I fully intended to do everything in my power to keep my body—and my new heart—as healthy as possible. I didn’t ever want to be sick like that again.

When I was about half a mile from home, I slowed to a walk to cool down, and pulled out my phone. I’d thought about waiting until I was on the road to tell my parents I’d gone out of town. Or maybe call them from Phoenix. But that could upset my mom even more. I took a deep breath, and called her number.

She picked up on the first ring. “Hi, honey.”

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

I tried to ignore the hint of urgency in her voice. It was like she was still expecting me to drop dead. “I’m great, Mom. Just went for a run.”

“Honey, you need to be careful,” she said. “You don’t want to overdo it. And it’s so early. Did you get enough sleep?”

---