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‘t felt natural to help Kayce at the barn. Coyo didn’t even have to ask; Cal offered. When he neared the burnt out building though, he felt it for the first time. What doctors and nurses and all the pamphlets were telling him to look forward to.
Nausea.
The smell was intense. Engulfing. Scratched the back of his throat and reached down inside his esophagus all the way to the stomach. Squeezed. Twisted. Cal paused in his steps, not fully considering retreat, but with a sting of hesitation.
Coyo came out of the ruins at that exact moment, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with sooty rubble.
“Hey, man!” he called. “Good timing, we’ve just started.”
Cal had promised. There was no turning back now.
They worked through the afternoon, and Cal managed to not throw up. He managed to keep his face neutral when Kayce looked, or turn away, when he needed more than a moment to get a grip on himself. It wasn’t easy, but...
Easy day, as they said, was yesterday.
Andrea wanted the two of them to come over to the Bullet, to pour one for Double G. It felt right. A sixer of PBR after a day’s work on East Camp, listening to some country. Reminiscing.
Cal was tired after two bears, but he mustered through the third. For Double G. In the end, though, he had to leave Kayce and Andrea to their bickering.
Another radiotherapy session awaited him bright’n‘early.
Miles’ friend, Sabrina, had died. Drug overdose. Drugs were a plague haunting the Reservation. One of the two, the other one being... cancer. Caused by all the pollution.
Cancer. Not something Cal wanted to think about, but it kept reminding about itself, over and over again.
Nausea was constant today. Started when he was walking out of the hospital, after the treatment, and stayed, heavy in his stomach. Cal didn’t even notice any particular smell this time, that would trigger this. It just washed over him, clung to his skin, to his insides, mocked with every breath, every swallow of the saliva.
More than two weeks—almost three—he had thought he’d be immune to the side effects of the treatment.
No such luck.
At least, he wasn’t vomiting yet.
The job was a distraction. Until it wasn’t.
He calculated the dose of his pain meds wrong, and they started wearing off as they were getting the barrels with drugs from the hidey-hole to the truck. Cal had the vial on him, of course, but he didn’t want to take any while in a clear view of his team.
They probably knew, anyways, or at least suspected something. Coyo had said as much when they’d been huddled in that cabin on the mountain. ‘The guy secretly popping pills,’ he’d called him.
Fuck.
And Belle had asked him if he was fine, several times.
What was he going to tell them? He had no way to explain what was going on with him.
The pain in his neck got more annoying on the way back to the HQ. It spread to the shoulder blade and down his arm. Made him aware of the tendons in his elbow, forearm, wrist—with shooting, burning sensation. Movement didn’t affect it, for worse, or for the better, no change in position helped, no massage, no stretching, nothing. It burned, relentless, sharp, up and down his nerves, up and down, up and down. Only sometimes, suddenly, it switched from fire to ice.
“Cal, are you alright?” Andrea asked from the back seat. Damn, he forgot about being careful, about masking the pain. It got too strong to mask it. “You keep holding that arm—” she added, uncertain.
Kayce cast him a glance, from the side.
Cal let go of his hand. “I’m fine,” he choked out. His voice didn’t sound convincing even to his own ears.
“You don’t look fine,” said Andrea.
“An injury?” asked Coyo.
“No, it’s not,” Cal denied, before he thought better of it. If he said it was, maybe they would stop asking. This way, ‘what is it, then?’ was inevitable.
“I had a sergeant at my first job,“ Andrea said. “He was complaining of a shoulder pain, like this. Thought he must have pulled it or something. Turned out he was having a heart attack. Didn’t make it.”
Cal glanced back at her, incredulous. Heart attack?
“Would have to be sudden,” Kayce commented. ”This has been going on for weeks.” He turned to look Cal in the eyes, dead on. ”Hasn’t it?”
Cal gritted his teeth.
“I’m dealing with It," he sneered.
“If you say so.”
In the end, it was Belle who got through to him.
He let his guard down for a minute, the thing with Miles making him spin out.
“It’s gonna be a final nail to the coffin of my relationship with Maddie,” came out of his mouth before he could think better of it.
“You came through for her,” Belle countered. ”She’s gonna see that in time.”
“Time. Right.”
‘t was all she needed.
“Why are you acting like you think you don’t have time?” She insisted on him answering, no matter his attempt at diverting her attention back to her own problems.
He shouldn’t have said anything. He should have listened to her, made her talk. He knew she had some trouble and he needed her to tell him what it was. She needed that.
But he missed the opportunity, and now she was waiting for his answer.
“It’s a tumor,” he told her. ”No, it’s not benign. I don’t want to talk about the treatment plan, please, Belle. Right now—right now I just want to feel like I’m not staring this down alone. Okay?”
She paused. Nodded. Took his hand in hers.
“You’re not,” she said and leaned back on the couch, next to him.
It was awkward and, at the same time, strangely natural, to sit like this with her. Being scared. Terrified maybe. And comforted. Like. If this moment could last forever, then Cal was safe. Safe and content.
Belle was... Belle was the woman of his dreams, quite literally. Impossibly capable, strong and gentle, smart, beautiful, sexy.
Married.
Devoted to her family.
Unattainable.
Was that the appeal? That she could never be his?
No, it wasn’t like that. True, he fell in love with her almost right off the bat, right after they met, but he started fantasizing about kissing her, about seeing her naked, about touching... He started dreaming about her after he’d learned that her marriage to Jared was a front, a mask. A mirage put up for the world, so their son could have ’stability’. A lie. She was lying to the world, to her son, and to herself. Cal wanted her to stop playing pretend with the man who had no qualms showing off his other conquests—when he had the most perfect woman alive in his home, no less. He wanted her to put an end to that, so she could be with him.
For about a week.
Because. What did he really have to offer, now? Cancer?
He knew one thing: he was glad he told her. He wouldn’t want to lie to her. Even if all they had, and were ever going to have, was friendship. It was quite enough for him.
Belle was amazing. And sitting with her, like this, in comfortable silence, was not only natural. It was—like her—acutely, painfully, perfect.