Condition. I wanted to laugh.
When did I become a condition and not a person?
“Are you okay?” Noah asked from the doorway, his eyes searing into the side of my face. I stopped telling him to leave me alone on the third day when he held me down and pressed his lips against mine, effectively shutting me up.
I wished I could tell him to fuck off, to leave me alone, to go and live his life and forget about me, but I couldn’t. I clung to him like a newborn baby to its mother, and I didn’t want to let go.
He never asked questions I didn’t want to answer, but I could see them dancing behind his eyes. I could see the exhaustion marring his face, but pushing him away wasn’t an answer anymore.
“Just peachy.” I smiled, lifting my head to look at him. “What are you doing here?”
Sundays were usually reserved for his games or practices. I picked up my phone and looked at the time.
“Shouldn’t you be at the rink or something?”
“Well.” He came inside the bathroom and closed the door behind him. “Coach gave us all a day off, and I was thinking.” He stepped closer to me, his eyes hooded, his voice deeper. “Maybe we could do something together.”
Just like me, Noah loved pretending that the cancer ticking inside my head didn’t even exist. And I was grateful for it. I knew it ate him alive, but it was his choice to stick around.
“Like what?” I asked, suddenly breathless. His palms landed on the sides of my head, holding me in place. He stroked my cheek with his thumb and started lowering his head toward mine. My eyes landed on his lips, and I wanted, no, I needed him to fucking kiss me.
He touched me, stroked my skin, played with my body, but he didn’t kiss me again. He didn’t try to have sex, he didn’t do anything I wanted him to do, and if these were the last months for me, I wanted them to be filled with good things.
I wanted him to have good memories that would one day overcome the bad ones.
“You remember how you said that you won’t get to do all these things you wanted to do?”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
“I have an idea.” He grinned. “I’m not sure if you’re gonna like it or not, but still.”
“What kind of idea?” I didn’t like where this was going.
“Come.” He grasped my hand in his much bigger one and turned around, opening the door of the bathroom. As soon as we stepped inside the room, I could see the rays of sun coming through the window, loving the much nicer April weather.
I looked toward my bed, seeing a notebook that definitely didn’t belong to me.
“What’s this?” I looked at him.
“It’s for you.”
“Me?”
“No, dummy, for Casper the Friendly Ghost.” He snickered. “Yeah, you.”
“But what is it for?”
He let go of my hand and walked toward the bed. He sat down and lifted the notebook, turning it toward me. “It’s for your bucket list.”
“My bucket list?”
“Are you just going to repeat everything I say today? Yeah, your bucket list. The things you wanna do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Soph.” He stood up and dropped the notebook on top of the bed and walked toward me. “I know that you won’t have enough time. Trust me, I fucking know. But I also don’t want you to just sit inside this house as time passes. I want you to do all these things, you know? Maybe they won’t be the same, but we can try. We can make new memories together.”
And if I wasn’t in love with him already, I would definitely be falling now.
