“Let’s go eat and come back to bed. Make me forget, Ash. I don’t want to think about tomorrow and what’s waiting for me.”
Ash held Drew close. The plan was to make love to him until they were both too tired to move.
Reality could wait one more day.
Chapter Four
“Iwant totell the guys.” Drew pushed Ash’s cup of coffee across the table.
“You’ll tell the guys but not Esther? And Rachel? How’re you going to tell Mike and not have him tell his wife?”
The disbelief in Ash’s silvery eyes would be funny if the situation wasn’t so serious.
“I haven’t figured that out yet, exactly,” Drew admitted. “But I can’t work and go to treatments if that’s what the diagnosis is and not tell them.”
A fucking mess. That’s what this all was. And deep down, Drew knew the diagnosis was correct. He’d done a self-exam this morning and it was only a matter of time for the test results to come back. Now the only question was what stage.
“I agree. I think you need to tell everyone. Esther will be devastated if you keep it from her. Families stick together.”
“But it’s the holidays. And her birthday. I can’t ruin it for everyone.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Ash never snapped at him, and the fact that he did showed the strain.
“I don’t know. Stop pushing me right now. I don’t even have test results. Let’s wait and see what that is.”
“That’s fine. But Esther—”
“You know,” Drew said, smiling, despite the seriousness of the situation. “You act more like a blood grandchild than I do. Maybe that’s why she always makes youyourfavorites whenever we come for dinner, not mine.”
Ash’s gaze dropped to his hands holding his mug of coffee. “I never had a mother or a grandmother. And Tina never treated me like her son, not as much as Brandon or even Luke. Maybe because I came when I was older. But from the first, I felt a connection with Esther. She never judged me for who I was.”
“Like I did.” Drew’s biggest regret was how harshly he’d spoken to Ash when they first met. “I wasn’t the nicest person to you when we first met.”
“Neither was I. We didn’t trust each other or our feelings. I had no idea why I was attracted to a man so good-natured and sweet. Everything I wasn’t. But I couldn’t stay away from you.”
“I remember.” So well, that the intensity of their first encounter, when Ash backed him up against the wall and kissed him, hit Drew hard, and from the darkening of Ash’s eyes, Drew knew Ash remembered too.
“What Esther went through in the camps…the inhumanity,” Ash closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “She understood hopelessness and related to me. Next to you, she’s the most important person in the world to me. I couldn’t imagine keeping this from her, especially now.”
When he fell in love with Ash, Drew hadn’t understood the deep complexities of the man. He’d been drawn to the internal goodness he’d shown the lost and broken children they helped at the clinic, and knew beneath the sexual promiscuity lay a man so deeply wounded by life that he didn’t know how to care for anyone or recognize when he was loved. Ash was right—from the first time Esther met him, she sensed a kinship and fiercely defended Ash against anyone who criticized him.
“Especially now? Because of the holidays?”
“Yeah.”
Drew cocked his head, certain that wasn’t what Ash meant but when he didn’t explain further, Drew dropped it. “Let me get through today, and we’ll see. Okay?”
“Not like you’re going to listen to me anyway.”
And despite himself, Drew grinned at Ash’s grumbling. “You know me so well.”
Ash’s hand shot out and grabbed his. “I do, but there’s still more to learn, and I intend to have many years to explore you.”
“You will.” Drew lifted their entwined hands and kissed Ash’s fingers. “I promise.”
Drew got stuckin traffic on his way to the clinic and by the time he arrived, Jordan and Mike were already with patients, and the rest of the day was filled with a flood of people. At two o’clock his phone rang, and his heart pounded when he saw Eric Goldfarb’s office number on the caller ID.
