I turned back to Adam’s cousin. “William? I’m curious, is there someone you’ve been thinking about asking out?”
William looked down, a small smile on his mouth before he blushed and then straightened in his seat. “Yes.”
Then he stood up and grabbed his keys. “It has only been forty minutes, but I can spend the last five minutes walking to the car.”
I went to stand up but Adam stopped me.
“William, can you spend fifteen seconds of that giving me a hug?” I said. And he stiffly bent and allowed me to give him a hug. “Thank you for the figurines. I love them.”
And he was gone. Adam locked the door behind him and sat down beside me again with a smile on his lips, shaking his head. “Poor guy has no clue that I’m the last person he should be asking for advice about women.”
“Hmm,” I said, leaning over to rest my head on his shoulder, relishing the feel of his arm coming around me. “I think you do quite well with the ladies…too well, as a matter of fact.”
He laughed and tucked me into bed not long after that. But I noticed, when he thought my eyes were closed, that he picked up the pill container and checked the level on it.
***
One week later and with the help of a blood test, I was declared officially no longer pregnant and ready to start rounds of chemo. It was honestly as matter-of-fact as that, like being told my red blood cell count was low, or something.
I tried my best to show a brave face to everyone around me. To make sure those feelings of hollow worthlessness at what I’d done didn’t show on the surface. Heath checked on me regularly. My mom came over every day to spend hours with me. We’d talk about other things, never about what was happening to my body…that I had allowed my fight against cancer to kill the little life inside me one rapidly dividing cell at a time.
And Adam. He spent lots of time over at my place. Things were tense between him and Heath for the first few days, but after that, they seemed to begin to go back to normal.
Adam and I got along great on a surface level. But beneath that, it was weird—as if there was some kind of unseen barrier between us. Ironic, since we had both shed all our secrets. It seemed like we were finally open to each other, yet neither of us could really turn and look at the other and see them for who they were.
Would it get better? Or was the demise of our relationship only a matter of time? We had way more baggage than any two people our age should have. And we were currently wading through the worst of it now. I worried about what our future would be—even more so, I think, than my own future. I took for granted that I’d still be around to worry about all of this stuff.
Sometimes I caught him looking at me, his dark eyes nearly unreadable, but I could detect a sharp sort of worry. That look made my heart hurt. I didn’t doubt he still loved me. But there was some essential ingredient to that love that seemed missing now. We’d hurt each other and he hadn’t quite been able to see past it yet, despite all his earnest attempts to focus on the bigger problems in our life at the moment.
“So…” Adam began when we were sitting side by side on my bed, each with a laptop resting on our legs. I was still a little weak from the pain but aware enough to pick up the subtleties in his behavior. “With all this going on, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that the hidden quest has been unlocked.”
I hesitated and studied his face. He was looking at his screen and typing at his crazy-fast pace.
“I, uh, I know,” I said.
He stopped typing and looked at me with a faint smile. “I know you know.”
I blinked. “How did you know it was me?”
“You left your rig on the log-in screen the other day. I knew the name of the character that unlocked it.”
I raised a brow. “So what does this mean? Are you going to disable my account?”
He frowned. “Why would I do that?”
“So I won’t blog about it.”
He shrugged. “You can blog about it if you want. And you can blog about it how you want.”
I looked askance at him. “You mean…you’re okay if I spill all the secrets?”
He looked at me again. “I have no control over how you dish your scoop.”
I frowned…there must be things he wasn’t telling me. Or maybe it was my own discomfort at the thought of spilling the secrets to his beloved project that he’d spent so long developing. “But it’s your big secret quest. You love that quest.”
“It was meant to be enjoyed by players. It’s time. I’ll think up something new and even more frustrating for them to look for next.”