To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Fifteen Days

Radiation took fifteen minutes a day, and most of them were spent lying still.

They fitted me with a mesh mask in the first week, warmed it, and pressed it over my chest and neck until it set.

Then they drew four small blue dots on my skin and told me not to wash them off.

The machine hummed, and I stared at a ceiling, and counted my own breaths.

That was all.

It did not hurt.

By the sixth session, the skin over my breastbone was red.

By the ninth, I couldn't climb the stairs without sitting down on the landing.

Dad drove me on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, and Fraser on the others, and neither of them ever let me carry my own bag.

On the tenth night, I woke at eleven and the spare room was empty again.

This time I knew where to look.

I walked there in my father's coat, with Dad's keys in my pocket, and the street was quiet.

The shop light was on.

He stood at the workbench with a plane in his hands, shaving a long curl off a chair rail.

The curl fell into a drift of others around his boots.

"Hey," I said.

He looked up and smiled, and it was a real one.

"I'm fine," he said. "I couldn't sleep. I just wanted to make something that wasn't a worry."

"Can I see?"

"It's a chair."

"It's a nice chair."

"You haven't seen it."

"It's got your hands on it."

He put the plane down.

I walked across the floor between the half-built chairs, and the sawdust crunched under my clogs.

I stopped in front of him.

I took his glasses off and set them on the bench, beside the plane.

"Laurel."

"Shh."

I pushed him back against the workbench and kissed him.

I kissed him until the breath went out of both of us.

He tasted of coffee and cedar.

His hands went to my hips and dragged me against him, and I felt him through his jeans, hard already.

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