Page 6 of Screwed (Dad Bod Contracting 4)
“So you dumped him?”
“I threw his ring in his face, went back to my office and told my boss I quit, there and then, on the spot. I called a moving company and had them pack my apartment and put all my shit into storage. I packed my clothes and I just…left. Washington, my job, my friends, my apartment, everything. I ended up in Chicago, and at first I got a job at a law firm, clerking. Familiar work, but I hated it.” I push the swing back into motion.
“Then I met Craig at a coffee shop. He was the barista. We flirted while he made my coffee. This went on for months. Just flirting. Talking. He asked me out, and I accepted. He was…different. From a shitty background, lots of abuse and stuff, and ran away to the city, and was sort of just surviving on his own. Younger than me, but so, so, so amazing. Just absolutely the kindest, sweetest, funniest guy I’d ever met. Genuine to the extreme. He made you feel like you were the only person on earth. We dated for four months and then I moved in with him.”
“Oh shit,” Laurel says. “I don’t like where this is going. There’s no way you got bamboozled by him, too. Your taste in men can’t be that bad.”
I hesitate again. “Honestly, I wish that was it.” I stand up, pace across the barn to one of the horses and pet its nose. “Craig and I had it good—really good. We were together for five years altogether. During that time I started the party planning business. A friend of ours wanted to throw a party for her graduation but just couldn’t make anything work, so I offered to help. I guess I did such a good job, she talked me up to our friends and someone else asked for my help. That snowballed into an event planning business. I loved it. Craig and I were barely making ends meet, but we were happy. He was a barista and a janitor, I was an event planner, and we just sort of scraped by, but we had each other and it was enough.”
I have to stop again, gathering myself.
“I’ve never talked about this before.” I scratch the horse on its nose, and it nudges me whenever I stop. “So, um. Craig started acting weird. Not eating much, getting cranky, taking naps—all of that was wildly out of character for him. He shaved his head randomly, and he’d always been sort of vain about his hair. He got cagey, like he was hiding something.”
“He was cheating on you?”
“That’s what I assumed.” I twist my hair up and then let it fall loose again, going back to the swing. “I followed him around one day, thinking I’d get to the bottom of it. Instead of going to work, he went across town, and I thought, aha, got you now, asshole. But instead of a hotel or some chick’s apartment, he went to an outpatient medical facility. A…um, cancer center.”
Laurel’s face falls. “Ohhh. Oh no.”
“Yeah. I went in. Found him in a chair, getting chemo.” I swallow hard. “He had cancer, and he’d never told me. He was hiding it. Hoping he could beat it. Or maybe hoping it would kill him before he had to tell me he was dying. I don’t know. We never discussed why he didn’t tell me. I just…” I blink hard. “I stared at him for a minute, and he stared back, and then sat down with him, held his hand, and…that was it. I stayed with him. Went to every round of chemo with him. Went to radiation with him. Sat next to him for every oncologist appointment, sat at his bedside while he died.”
“Holy hell, Nova.”
“I found out in May, and he was gone by September.”
“Jesus.”
I wipe at my face. “Yeah.” The memories are sad and bitter. “Two weeks after his death, after I’d cleaned out our apartment and donated his stuff and everything, I got a letter. From Craig. He wrote it before he died. It had a ring inside. He had planned on proposing, had the ring, but then he got sick, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask me to marry him when he knew he was going to die.” I lift my wrist and tap the hospital bracelet. “This is his. From his last hospital stay. He gave up treatment at the end, knew it wasn’t going to save him and he didn’t want to fight it, so he just came home, and I took care of him. That was…hell. There are no words for it. None.”
“Nova, god. I’m so, so sorry.”
I nod. “I really truly loved him. Like, so fucking much. I’d been waiting for him to propose. I had our wedding planned, in my head at least. I knew exactly what it would look like, everything.”
