K. Bromberg - Slow Burn

There will be many more indulgences today but of the noncaffeine variety.

I turn the corner into the kitchen and déjà vu of our first time here hits me. So many things have changed over the past year, but at the same time, so much has stayed the same.

She still steals my breath with her courage, her fiery spirit, her unyielding love, her beauty inside and out.

Haddie stands at the window, her athletic body, thinner now as she tries to gain back the muscle she’s lost with treatment, haloed by the morning sunlight. Her hair is short, the regrowth finally long enough to be cut and styled for the first time last week. She was so excited by the fact, but I watch as her fingers play absently with it at the nape of her neck and know she’s still unsure, regardless of how sexy she is, rocking the pixie cut.

I remember her laughter as I told her that, lucky me, I get to take a new woman to bed with me every couple months as the hairstyles change. I’ll say anything to ease the lines of worry from her face.

The thought makes me smile as I watch her. We’ve been to hell and back in this past year—gone through more things than any new relationship should ever be tested with—but look at us…. We’re stronger than ever.

She finally stopped pushing.

And started accepting I was in it for the long haul.

“Good morning,” I murmur, my voice catching in my throat as the dream comes flooding back to me. She turns slowly to face me, tears streaming down her face in silence, cell phone clutched in her hand.

My heart drops through my stomach as my eyes flicker back and forth, hoping against hope what I fear isn’t true. I brought her out here so that she’d be occupied instead of sitting at home and fretting endlessly about the results of the latest scans and tests. The typical four-to five-day wait being the hardest thing to endure in this whole process.

For her and me.

It’s brutal, watching the one you love hope and try to remain positive after enduring rounds of chemo and now radiation to get their hopes dashed and spirit crushed when they’re told the cancer is still there, still eating away at them bit by bit, day by day. It may have shrunk or not advanced, but it’s still there.

It’s hard to fight the uphill battle with renewed vigor each time you have to start it over.

I move to her, tears burning the back of my throat and my chest physically hurting as I watch her sob, so overwhelmed by emotion that she can’t speak. I pull her smaller frame into my arms, careful not to squeeze her too hard against my chest since she’s still sore from the first procedure she had last week to prepare her for possible reconstructive surgery.

“Becks.” She says my name, but I just keep shushing her, trying to soothe her and accept the resignation that we’re going to have to start the cycle all over again. Lose the hair she’s just grown back.

“Becks!” The way she says my name this time pulls me from my thoughts and I look down as she leans back.

I take in the tears streaming down her face, but then I notice the smile spreading over those lips of hers. I force a swallow down my throat, afraid to hope that smile means what I think it means. My heart pounds and my head shakes back and forth as she nods her head up and down, answering the question in my eyes.

“Are you serious?”

Her smile is so wide now, the laughter bubbles up and the sound consumes me, overrides all of the fear and worry—her shadow I’ve carried on my shoulders over the past year—and tells them they have no place here anymore.

“It’s gone,” she says, her body vibrating with excitement, with life, with a future. “The scans are clear.”

I hear a whoop and don’t even realize it’s my own voice as I lift her up gently and whirl her around in excitement. Then I try to process everything as I press my lips to hers over and over and find that I can’t.

I can only focus on one thing right now, and that is how much I love and admire this woman in front of me. How I can’t live without her.

We just went a full twelve rounds and finally got the knockout.

She starts giggling as I proceed to kiss her over and over, the only way I can speak right now after the heart attack I almost had, thinking the results were the opposite.

She pushes me away, trying to speak. “I just got the call before you came out…. I was processing it all. I couldn’t speak. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

“Oh, baby,” I tell her, framing her face and lacing it with kisses, the taste of salt on my tongue from our tears of joy a welcome change.

And then my mind clicks.

“Hold on. I’ll be right back!” I tell her as I bolt from the kitchen.

HADDIE

Disbelief owns my battered body right now, but it’s the most welcome feeling in the world. I’m grateful for Becks giving me a moment so that I can try to process the unbelievable. So I can grasp that I beat this.

Holy fucking shit!

The adrenaline hits, and even though Rex is still barking outside to come in, I’m trembling so much, I lean against the wall and slide down to the floor.

I close my eyes momentarily, seeing Lexi’s face when I do, and I silently thank her for helping me. My dandelion sister, who used to blow wishes into the wind and hope one day one would come back for her.

Mine just came back. I got the more time I asked for.

My mind switches gears to try to remember more details of the doctor’s call but don’t remember much after all clear and no evidence of disease remains . I pinch the skin on my thighs, hoping it’s not a dream because if it is, I don’t want to wake up from it.

I need to call my parents and Rylee and Danny, but my hands are having trouble hitting the screen from their trembling. I’m trying again—my mind going five thousand miles an hour—when Becks returns.

I let my phone drop in my lap as I try to brush the tears from my face, knowing it’s going to do no good. I earned these tears . When I glance up to him standing in front of me, he has this look on his face, eyes intense and full of love, that makes my breath falter.

“What?” I ask him, suddenly self-conscious under his scrutiny of my short hair and bandaged chest so that I start to cross my arms over it.

“Uh-uh,” he says as he lowers himself to the ground beside me and takes my hands in his so that I can’t cover myself up. “Don’t you dare cover up that beautiful body of yours.”

I roll my eyes and get that lift of his eyebrows in reprimand, which causes me to smirk. He leans forward and brushes a soft kiss to my lips before settling on the floor next to me. He blows out a breath before nodding his head in complete acceptance—of what, I have no idea.

“Today I had planned for your family and Ry and Colton to head on out here and have a barbecue. I had grand plans of entertainment and fun to keep your mind occupied and free of the shadow .” I smile at him and his thoughtfulness. He’s so damn good to me. “I had plans for a bonfire down by the pond. Friends, family … surround you with love so that I could do something…. I had it all planned perfectly.” He looks down at our joined hands and laughs softly. “But as we’ve both learned over the past year, sometimes fate has different plans for us.”

I snort at the truth in that statement. At how cancer tested me. At how HaLex should have failed with my preoccupation with my treatment, but how instead Danny stepped forward and offered to help, and now it’s thriving and in demand. At how I broke my own rules and tied those strings I didn’t want into double knots around the heart of the man in front of me.

“That’s so sweet of you. We can still have them over, have a celebration instead,” I tell him, mistaking his fixation on our joined hands as one of disappointment.