‘Jesus, baby. You have me fucking terrified. What are you—are you gonna be okay?’
She laughs weakly and sinks her head further back into her pillows. Lets her eyelids droop closed. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ve just been overdoing it.’
I scan the picture in front of me. ‘This isn’t overdoing it. You look like you’re dying.’
‘This is why I didn’t want you to see me like this.’ There’s a note of despair in her voice that I don’t get.
‘Who cares? What’s wrong with you—have they given you a diagnosis?’ Do you need me to speak to somebody?’
’No, Josh. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’ve had a diagnosis for years. This is not uncommon. Well—it’s uncommon for it to get this bad, but I’ve lived with this for over a decade.’
She opens her eyes, and my confusion must show, because I still have no fucking clue what’s going on.
I remember something. ‘Alyssa said you had a flare-up? But once she figured I didn’t know what she was talking about, she wouldn’t tell me any more.’ I rub her hand slowly between my fingers, urging it to warm up.
She sighs. ‘I have Crohn’s disease. Do you know what that is?’
‘Uh, no.’ But it sounds nasty. It sounds terrifying. Myheart rate ratchets up at the idea that my poor, beautiful girl has some kind of scary-sounding disease.
‘It’s not very glamorous.’ She attempts a little laugh.
Is she kidding me right now? ‘Fuck glamorous. I don’t give a shit if it’s glamorous or not. I’mworriedabout you. I need information.’
‘I don’t have the energy to explain it all now. But it’s an auto-immune condition that causes inflammation in my intestines. For me, it’s mainly in my colon.’
‘And what does that mean—what does the inflammation do?’
‘It’s different for everyone. It makes my colon scab up and start bleeding. It’s incredibly painful, and, well, embarrassing.’
‘There is nothing you could say that would embarrass me or make me embarrassed for you. Shoot.’
She looks away from me, down at the cannula in her other hand. ‘I lose control of my bowels. I… get diarrhoea, basically. But much worse. And I haemorrhage. Out of my bum.’ She braves a quick glance at me before turning away. And oh my God. My heart is breaking for her.
‘It’s okay.’ I squeeze her hand. ‘And that’s what happened last night?’
‘Yeah. Both of those. Being run down brings it on. So last night, when I got back fromGordon Kay, things got pretty bad. I couldn’t stop the bleeding and so Nora—she’s my flatmate—called an ambulance sometime in the middle of the night. I’d lost a fair amount of blood, and the diarrhoea made me severely dehydrated too. Hence the drip.’
‘Holy fucking shit.’ I stare at her. ‘And you had this when we were together? When we dated?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I was dating the most gorgeous movie star in the entire world, and I was crazy aboutyou, and I had a hunch that if I told you I regularly lost control of my bowels and shat myself, you might not fancy me quite so much?’
I flinch, both at her brutal honesty and at how wrong she has it.
‘Nothing you could tell me would ever change my mind about you, about how beautiful and sexy you are.’ I stare at her, willing her to believe me.
‘Well, we’ll never know, will we? I didn’t tell you, and I still wasn’t enough for you.’
No.
No.
No.
I wasn’t enough foryou.
