AJ shivered, recalling that blue room at Simmons. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She thought back. “I guess it’s good they eventually figured out what it was.”
Noah blinked uneasily. “They figured it out that summer. I knew that night I came into work. When we played premise lawyers.”
The night he’d cried in her arms. AJ hadn’t been expecting this—she’d thought he would say he’d learned the day of the convention. That he’d been so overwhelmed he’d had to get away.
No one should know how they’re going to die.
Cold dread snaked through AJ’s intestines. “Wait, so you knew that whole last month?”
Noah nodded. They were very near it now, the thing he didn’t want her to see.
“I don’t understand,” said AJ. “Why not tell me?”
Noah was silent. AJ watched the tendons on the backs of his hands flex and then smooth into fists. “Because I didn’t want you to know,” he said at last. “HD is hereditary. Children have a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the gene.”
A genetic coin toss. AJ felt as though the oxygen had been sucked from the room.
“My mom didn’t know her birth parents, so she never knew there was a family history.” He pushed on. “When we found out about her, I was given the option to test.”
If you’re going to die, it’s better to know.
That night hadn’t been about his mother’s diagnosis at all.
It had been abouthis.
“So you—do you—”
Noah nodded, eyes fixed on his hands.
AJ’s adrenal glands surged. Her mind snapped back to that blue room, the skeletal creature inside, the one with Noah’s coloring, his cheekbones. That would be Noah. When? His mom hadn’t been that old. No. This wasn’t possible. He was here, and he was beautiful, and—
Oh God.
“It takes about a month to get the results. I found out the day of the convention,” he said. “I don’t even remember driving there. Honestly, I only went to see you. I had to see you.”
Now AJ couldn’t breathe.
Noah was still looking at his fists. “That was such a dark time in my life, then you came out of nowhere like this playful ray of sunshine, and you were just so fucking beautiful. The first time we touched, I was just…gone. I was so unbelievably gone for you, and you had no idea.”
He smiled sadly and met her eyes.
“That summer, I thought my biggest problem was going to be keeping my hands off you. We’re only four years apart, but at that age…it was just wrong. And that wasn’t what I wanted for us.”
He had never looked at her this way before, even in a scene—with such steady, unmasked longing. AJ felt her throat constrict.
“That’s why I left,” he said roughly. “I’d been so careful for so long.But I was twenty-one, and I’d just been handed a death sentence. The first chance I had, I was kissing you, which was all I’d wanted to do for months. After, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I had to clear my head. I told Eudora about my diagnosis the next morning and left.”
The two of them sat in silence, remembering. Suddenly it all made sense. The volatility of his feelings that night. The way she’d been convinced she could hear him silently screaming.
He must have been so scared. “Where did you go?”
“My dad’s,” said Noah. He turned to her. “You have no idea how bad I wanted to get back to Gladstone. I didn’t want to waste another second of my life. I was going to tell you everything, how I felt, what was happening. And then get my shit together, go back to West Point.”
He paused, biting the inside of his cheek. His eyes were glistening. “I actually called them up to make sure my spot was still good,” he said, his tone stilted. “That’s when I found out that with HD, I’m no longer considered medically fit to serve.”
AJ’s heart broke for him. “Shit.”
Noah nodded. “Yeah. After that, I sort of fell off the wagon for a while.”
