Chapter Seventy-Four

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Each of my toes feels like a large bag of cement, weighty and swollen, as if they're on the verge of bursting inside my shoes. My steps are strained as I struggle to place one foot in front of the other, forcing my reluctant body to keep up with the other pair of moving legs in front of me.

The soft, barely audible sound of the nurse's shoes pressing into the built-in carpeting registers in my ears, and I realize the only reason I can hear her footsteps is because I'm trying my damnedest to focus on her feet instead of mine.

She forgoes the elevator in favor of the open stairwell. She's probably as healthy as a newborn if this is her routine every day.

At least that makes one of us.

I walk up the flight of stairs, following closely behind the evenly paced steps of the conservative nurse. I'd snuck a peek at her tag earlier. Not even sure why I did. It says H. Levins. I randomly wonder what the H stands for. Helen. Harriet. Hannah. Hell, maybe even Hippolyta from the Roman myths. I wouldn't be surprised if she also has super-conservative parents who decided to give her an equally super-conservative name that fit the rest of her perfectly.

My mind keeps on guessing, making ridiculous projections about a woman I don't know and occupying itself with the idle task of trying to guess a stranger's name in a blatant attempt to steer itself away from dealing with the impending and quickly-approaching fact that: one, I have to face Frost again after what had happened the last time we were together, and two: any awkwardness or anxiety I'm certain to feel around him may very well be the least of my worries after the kind of news I'm almost positive and deathly afraid he's going to give me.

Happy.

I decide then and there that nurse H's name is Happy. Happy Levins. At least in my mind, it is. I need it to be. Especially right now when I have no sort of happiness of my own. I can at least pretend to be near happiness, to have some inkling of hope that even the tiniest bit of it will rub off on me if I walk next to it long enough, whatever form it appears in. It's crazy and irrational and pretty damn stupid, but then again, the mind conjures up crazy and irrational things when it comes down to the nitty gritty of self-preservation and survival. I should know.

We get to the top of the floor but nurse "Happy" goes off in a different direction, bending into an intersecting corridor and leaving me less than ten feet away from Frost's door all by myself.

His door is half-way open, but I still decide to knock. I lift my hand to the door tentatively, my fingers trembling so badly they can barely curl up into my palm to make a fist, let alone carry out the simple action of knocking. But somehow I manage. Three quiet, timid taps eventually break the eerie silence as my knuckles meet the wood, almost as if the door is a living, breathing entity and I'm scared I'll hurt it if I hit too hard.

Frost looks up from his desk immediately, registering the barely-audible sounds.

"Come in," he says, his eyes on me, unblinking as I force myself to walk inside.

I hesitate for a moment, my feet reluctant to step over the threshold, but I force my body to move forward even as my heart pulses like a rabid dog in my chest, thrashing around in my body like it has zero self-control.

My steps are wary and slower than normal, my breathing much faster than normal, but then again, this isn't exactly a normal situation.

I take a seat opposite him, intentionally avoiding the chair I'd been seated in when I signed away all my dignity and decent moral standing to his perverted, trifling ass.

"You look pale," he says matter-of-factly as he pulls out my medical folder. It's a statement, not an inquiry.

Suddenly, I have the cynical urge to laugh and scream, "No shit, Sherlock!" at the fact that he chooses to remark on something so obvious as his opening statement. But of course, I don't. When I say nothing in return, he pauses and looks at me with his assessing gaze, gauging and calculating. After a few moments of extremely awkward silence, he finally speaks again. "How are you feeling?" he says.

The question takes me by surprise, catching me off guard for a second, not because of the question itself, but because of the way he asks it. He almost sounds...genuinely concerned.

Like complete and total crap. "Fine," I answer with a shrug. I try to sound nonchalant, but I fail terribly. I don't sound even a little bit convincing, not even to my own ears.

He shakes his head in that arrogant-slash-subtly condescending way some older folks do right before they go on one of their senior citizen mega-rants about "kids nowadays". It irritates me to no end. Frost doesn't seem to care, though. He simply continues speaking as if he doesn't see the scowl that has now plastered itself on my face.

"Number one, Miss Gallo: that's a very vague answer and doesn't really help me out a whole lot as a physician, and number two: you certainly don't look fine, and after what I told you when we last spoke, I don't expect you to be," he says firmly, his eyes latched onto mine with their usual intensity. "So let's try that again, shall we?" His gaze intensifies as his eyes turn to slits, zoning in on me as if they want to see into my very soul. "How are you feeling today, Ramona?" he repeats, the edge in his voice creeping in as he punctuates each word with an emphasis for me to answer honestly. And the fact that he switched from addressing me formally to using my first name sends a blast of goosebumps scattering across my entire body.

I quickly look down at my lap, avoiding his gaze as my shaky fingers interchangeably fumble with each other and the hem of my sweater. I really wish he would look somewhere else.

What does he even really want me to say, though? That I cried myself to sleep balled up on my living room floor? That my eyes are puffy and bloodshot and I'm sore and achy all over because of it? That I might have to accept the reality that I very well may not have a future? That I'm scared out of my fucking mind and I don't know what the hell to do? Take your fucking pick!

"Like I said, I'm fine," I say, gritting my teeth in annoyance. "But I will be a lot better once you give me my biopsy results," I add snarkily. I don't even mean to sound so cynical, but goddamn if that's not exactly how I feel right now.

He stares at me blatantly, his own irritation clear and sharp as the crystal blue hue of his eyes. He looks like he's two seconds away from yelling at me, but he doesn't say anything for several moments. He remains dead silent but never takes his eyes off me. Not even for a second. The whole thing is so strange and beyond unnerving, but then again, what else is fucking new when it comes to this guy?

He breathes out audibly, almost as if in reluctant resignation, bringing both his hands to rest on top of his desk.

My gaze unintentionally lands on his wedding band and I have to struggle to swallow as I quickly look away.

Thankfully, he breaks his silence and brings a much needed distraction from the all-too-obvious awkwardness between us. "Like I mentioned the last time we spoke," he begins, "your biopsy had to be delayed and you couldn't get your biopsy results right after your endoscopy because the head pathologist at the time was being transferred to another hospital so we had to have someone new replace her over here."

I have nothing to say to that, so I don't bother saying anything. I don't even offer a nod to acknowledge that I heard or understood what he just said. I just want him to hurry the hell up and get this over with.

As if he read my mind, he continues. "Anyway, getting to the point, I have both good news and bad news," he says, intertwining his long fingers in front of him, never breaking his gaze. "Which would you like to hear first?"

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