“I’ll keep you company,” she offers with a grin. “I’m very good at holding down the couch.”
“Okay,” I give in. I’ve tried the conventional approach for almost a year, and I still have a fucking tremor. It hasn’t gotten worse, but it hasn’t gone away either.
“Great,” she grins. “Let’s start now. We have the whole afternoon.”
“You want to spend the entire afternoon on the couch?”
“Yup.”
“Can I take a shower first?” I’m still wearing my sweaty tennis clothes.
“Showering is allowed, yes. I think I’ll shower too.”
We shower in our respective bathrooms, and I try not to think about the fact that she’s just down the hall. Naked and wet and soapy.
Fifteen minutes later, we reconvene in the living room. I sit on the couch, and Ally sits cross-legged in the wing chair beside me. She’s wearing faded jeans and a Maple Leafs t-shirt, and her wet hair is piled in a knot on top of her head. She smells faintly like peach shampoo.
“Drew?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you should see a doctor about your tremor.”
No. The thought of going back to see Dr. Barrett, telling him about this tremor; I just can’t. “You said you thought it was a stress response.”
She sighs. “I do, but I’m not a doctor. And on the one in a million chance it’s something else, I don’t want to be the person who told you you’d cure it with sleep and TV.”
And sex.Ally specifically recommended sugar, sleep, trashy TV, and sex. I have a very clear memory of this.
“Ally, I don’t think?—”
“Drew,” she interrupts. “If you don’t get it checked out, you’ll worry you’ve got some sort of awful condition, and the fear will keep you up at night. And if you’re not sleeping, it’ll make the whole problem worse. You’ll be in your head about it.”
“Ally—”
“I get why you might not want to see someone in Somerset,” she says. “It’s not that big, and if word gets out things could be awkward. But couldn’t you go somewhere else? You must still know people in Toronto, right? There must be someone you’d trust to keep it quiet.”
She’s right. I do know people in Toronto, people whose judgment I trust. And people who I could trust not to blab about the fact that Drew Malone has a tremor.
But if the tremor is caused by something other than insomnia and stress—something on the list of very depressing neurological conditions—it can’t be kept quiet, regardless of whom I see. Because if it’s something else, it will almost certainly get worse, and it’ll mean I’ll have to stop operating.
And call me a coward, but I’m not sure I want to find out. At least not yet.
“I’ll think about it, Ally.”
I can tell she’s not happy with that answer, but she doesn’t push. “What do you want to watch first?” she asks.
“You can pick.”
She smiles as she grabs the remote and starts to scroll through streaming options.
“Really?” I ask, after she hits play onLegally Blonde.
“Already seen it?” she asks.
“No, but?—”
“You said I could pick,” she reminds me. “You can choose next.”
