Kip doesn’t respond, his nose flaring as he presses his lips together in a hard line. I watch as the muscles over his abdomen flex with every breath. “I can’t.”
My heart slows, the beats coming at a reduced pace but with more force than I’ve ever felt. Every thump knocks me forward a little, jerking my body with it. “What?”
He swallows. “I am registered for the tournament.”
“But you’re not going, right? Not anymore. Not after you promised me you wouldn’t hurt me. Not after you told me you loved me. Not after we became us. Right?” I ask the questions without breathing. Breath doesn’t exist in my body at this point. “Right?”
Kip doesn’t move. He doesn’t swallow or blink or flinch, but one single tear rolls down the left side of his face and under his cheek.
And I know that one tear is saying more than any words can.
“I’m sorry, Skyler.”
He doesn’t look away from me or hang his head. He just kills me with his baby blues, keeping me locked in their glare as he waits for my next move. And I don’t know what to do. I want to throw something at him, I want to kill him, I want to cry and scream and rip his apartment to shreds.
But more than that, I want to run to him. I want him to hold me and make the pain tearing my chest apart disappear. I want him to fix it. To fix me.
But he won’t.
Because he can’t.
Because he never loved me enough to care in the first place.
The reality of everything crashes down on me in one large, soul-crushing wave. I start breathing faster, panic washing through me as the wave takes me under the current, pulling me down, down, down.
I look at him one last time, memorizing the words I read in the file and relating them to his face. His beautiful smile ties into his lies, his lips into his broken promises, his eyes into the pain I feel right now in this moment. Without another word, I turn and run out of his apartment, flying across the parking lot and onto campus. He doesn’t come after me and I don’t wait to see if he will. I just run. I know I’ll have to send someone back to get my stuff tomorrow, but I couldn’t stay in that room one second longer.
When I reach the house, my legs are burning and my feet are raw from running on the concrete. I put my hand on the doorknob but don’t turn it. Everything hits me and I fall to my knees, leaning my forehead against the door as I give in to the flood of tears escaping my eyes. I squeeze them tight, trying to will the tears to stay away, but they seep through the cracks and pull me down further into the dark hole Kip shoved me in.
Everything was a lie.
Helping me with poker, asking about my past, about my dreams. Kissing me, touching me, making me want him and making me think he wanted me, too. The words, the promises, every single feeling.
This is the game changer. This is the part where everything I thought I knew about the game gets shattered into tiny pieces and I’m left reeling trying to pick them up and glue them back together, to force them to make sense to me again. I thought I had it in the bag, I thought I was sitting on Lucky Street with nothing but good days and smooth sailing ahead.
But I’m in stormy water.
Deep, treacherous, Kip-infested water.
And I don’t think anyone is strong enough to survive this storm.
Running has only ever been cardio for me. But right now, it’s so much more. It’s the distraction from life, the pain I need to feel to keep my mind off the torture that is reality. I’ve been running for at least two hours now and I know I’ll wake up in the morning and barely be able to feel my legs, but right now they’re burning and aching right along with my ribs and arms and that’s just enough to draw a little bit of the pain from my heart.
But it won’t last for long. I know that because I ran one night when I was back home. I flew home to see my dad immediately after I got off the phone with my mom when I got back from the cruise. After the first night of being in the house with Dad, listening to him tell me things no son should have to hear his dad say, I went for a long run just like this. But it was only a temporary numbness. My mom said it so simply, she said that my father was sick, like he had a cold or the flu or a fucking headache. But the truth is so much worse – it demands so much more than that measly four letter word.
My father has cancer.
Stage four lung cancer, to be exact.
And even though cancer only has two more letters and one more syllable in it than sick does, it’s so incredibly fucking different. It’s permanent, it’s crushing, it’s cold and cruel and hard. And it’s moved into my life like a bug infestation – slowly, silently, and then completely overruling all at once.
I never knew what that meant, to have stage four lung cancer. I’ve heard of it before. I’ve watched shows about it on TV. But, I never really knew what it meant. For the past two weeks, all I’ve done is research online. I know everything about it now.
I know that cancer at this stage is usually widespread when it’s diagnosed, which was the case for my father. Because he’s stubborn, he waited until he was coughing up blood before he finally let my mom drag him to the hospital. They found that not only did it live in his lungs, but the cancer had also spread to other areas of his body. And, as if that’s not fucking enough, he has fluid around his lungs.
I know that they can give him chemotherapy and radiation treatment to help with the pain and possibly keep him alive longer, but my father refused both.
And I know that whether he went through that stuff or not, stage four lung cancer is not something you survive.
And that fact absolutely demolishes me.
I run faster, digging my heels into the concrete each time they hit and pushing off with as much force as I can muster. Every muscle in my body cries out in protest but I grit my teeth and keep moving. Even with my music blasting and my entire being aching, I can’t stop thinking about the way he looked, the way he sounded – the way the room felt, like it knew he was dying even if we all tried to deny it.
Even though it’d only been a few months since the last time I saw him, he looked like he’d aged at least ten years. My once strong, resilient dad was lying in bed with tubes and machines hooked up everywhere, his eyes hollow, his skin graying along with his hair. Because he refused chemo, he still had his hair. And he made sure to point that out to me. I think it was important to him, which makes sense. My dad has always been about appearance, about not letting anyone know if he was hurting.
It doesn’t make sense for him to have lung cancer. He hasn’t smoked since he entered the service at eighteen, but being deployed several times over the years, the doctors assume it was due to exposure to something on a tour. They also said it could be something they’re not thinking of, something random. So basically, the doctors don’t know shit except that he’s dying.
My dad is dying.
My dad is fucking dy-ing.
Push harder. Run faster. Kick. Hit. Push. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Fight.
The reality of that statement crashes into me now just as hard as it did when I went home to see him. I tried to help my mom around the house and told her I didn’t need to go back to school. Fuck school. But my dad insisted I come back. He wants me to live my life and get my education. And even though he told me it was okay if I didn’t want to do the tournament in May, I know he just said it because he thought it was what he needed to say. But the truth is, he wants me to do this more than anything. This was his dream, and then when he couldn’t make it happen, when he gave everything up for our family – he made it mine, whether I wanted it or not. Now it’s not just a dream, but his dying wish, and I want more than anything to win this tournament in his name – for him to see it happen before he passes.