I give him a dark look. “You know they’re hiding it from the public. They don’t want mass panic to break out. The best way to stay updated is with Cal Decker.”
“That guy’s a hack.”
I gasp. “He’s an independent investigator and he’s the only onetalkingabout the Chicago Maneater!”
“…who is a made up serial killer based on a series of unrelated deaths.”
“Cal has almost been abducted twice in downtown Chicago!”
Eitan rolls his eyes. “You don’t think he’s dramatizing those stories the slightest bit for his audience? His following has increased tenfold since he started talking about the Chicago Maneater.”
“Well no matter what you think, I’ll kindly ask you to not walk around late at night, especially near any bodies of water. Thank you.”
Eitan kisses my forehead and stands up. “I promise, Ruby.”
I lay back, pleased.
Eitan fills up two glasses of water and leaves one on my nightstand. The other he carries with him as he walks around my apartment, examining my things.
“Looking for something?” I call from across the studio.
“Just trying to figure you out, Ruby Hirsch.” He squints at my bookshelf. He spots something on the bottom shelf and I crane my neck. It’s one of my journals.
“Ah ah.” I sit up. “That’s a journal?—”
He raises an eyebrow. “I bet your journals are pretty entertaining, being a writer.” But he respectfully returns the journal to the bottom shelf. “Wait, are these all journals?”
I nod softly. “I like to keep track of what’s happening in life.”
“Can I read something you’ve written?” he asks, and my heart leaps. He crouches and pulls at the journal spines, counting them without opening anything. The idea that he wants to readsomething that I’ve written is so exhilarating, I forget about the sensitive matter tucked in between the covers of those journals.
The soft swish of paper slipping out is my first clue.
Eitan grinning and asking, “What have you got here?” is my second.
Shit. My head quickly exits the clouds. In Eitan’s hands sit my secret stash of pre-surgery photos. I race out of bed.
Eitan’s eyes spark with surprise and curiosity as he takes them in.
“They’re nothing—just my before photos?—”
“Before your surgery?”
I reach him and he’s flipping through the photos I took with Grant the night before the surgery.
“Yes,” I say, shifting between my two feet. I’d wanted to document my body one last time, and we had agreed that we would print the photos and delete the digital files. Frankly, I would have been okay with publishing them in the New York Times. I figured that if I had to lose them, the world might as well see them. They were quite glorious. The crème de la crème of tits. Architecturally magnificent. Could have been the eighth wonder of the world. Strange to think that the last people to see them were the staff in my O.R. I hope at least one person appreciated them in that cold, sterile room. Had a momentary thought that hey, this is a nice rack.
I brace myself. “They were pretty great,” I say, leaving the opening for him to agree. Already my eyes pinch, the faint sting that preludes the Dark Place.
“They were great.” Eitan seems to sense something shifting in my atmosphere, and he tucks the photos away, back on the lowest rung of my bookshelf. “But these are better.” He wraps his arms around me from behind, kissing my neck.
I roll my eyes. “You’re obligated to say that.”
“I mean it,” he whispers, and something in me flutters, some long-buried hope. I survived cancer. I should be grateful for whatever shape my body had to contort into to accomplish that. But there is always the nagging fear that this part of my body will be permanently worse. I don’t have a lot of empirical evidence, but before the surgery, Grant was happy dating me, and after, he wasn’t. Not an overwhelmingly positive response.
“These are boobs of life,” Eitan says sagely, his thumbs running along my lowest scars.
I pause for a minute, then laugh. Really laugh. “Boobs of life?”
