Chapter 189 You just know

Chapter 189 You just know
RYAN'S POV
I loved the cabin. I loved it even though there were pieces of it I couldn't really remember. That was the part I was never going to forgive this illness for.
Not the pain, strangely enough. Not even the hospitals or the medication or the way my body had gradually become something I had to monitor like a machine with a faulty warning system.
It was my mind, my memory....my thoughts.
The private little world inside my head that had always belonged entirely to me. I treasured those things. I'd always been someone who liked remembering. I liked being present enough to experience something completely, to take it in without rushing through it and then losing pieces of it later.
I liked remembering the exact blue of a sky I'd seen once on a particularly cold morning. The precise note in a song that had made me stop what I was doing the first time I heard it. The way someone had said something, not just the words themselves, but the tiny pause before them, the expression on their face, and what it had made me feel.
I remembered books that had made me cry years after I'd finished them. I remembered where I'd been sitting when I read certain lines. I remembered the smell of rain through an open window. The taste of a meal I'd had on a day that had turned out to matter for reasons I hadn't understood at the time.
I liked collecting those things.
Little pieces of being alive.
So no, I was never going to forgive this illness for reaching into that part of me and taking things without asking. But despite all of that, I really loved the cabin. I'd always liked waking up beside Michael. I'd liked falling asleep beside him even more. But there was something different about doing it here. The bedroom had these enormous windows that let the morning in. Beyond them were trees and green and an expanse of sky that seemed almost indecently beautiful at certain hours.
The sunrise was the most ‘sunrise’ sunrise I'd ever seen.
The kind I assumed people wrote about in songs because nothing else could quite explain it. Everything was bright at once, almost painfully so, and for a few minutes the entire world looked like it had been washed clean.
And I had Michael.
My boyfriend.
Still my boyfriend....
I kissed him more here. Held him more. Teased him more. Maybe because being surrounded by that much quiet made it easier to remember that we were still allowed to be young, even if neither of us felt particularly young.
Michael had changed, too. He'd started getting this sad and distant look in his eyes. Sometimes he'd zone out almost as much as I did, except he didn't have the luxury of blaming it on a disease.
He'd started running every morning. I didn't ask why, I think I knew.
And he cried surprisingly easily now. Like on our last night at the cabin when we'd been dancing again to the same kind of “not sad” music and I'd stepped on his foot. He'd laughed, then he'd looked at me, and I'd watched the smile slowly disappear from his face. His eyes filled. And then he was crying.
Just like that.
I liked to believe it was a good thing. I liked to believe he wasn't only crying for me. I liked to think some of those tears belonged to Michael, too. For all the moments in his life when he'd been supposed to cry and hadn't. For everything he'd swallowed because he'd thought he had to. For every grief he'd folded neatly away and convinced himself he could live around. Maybe loving someone had made it easier for him to finally let himself feel.
We'd made a time capsule, too. It had been Michael's idea initially, although I was the one who became ridiculously invested in the logistics. We'd written each other letters and folded them carefully before putting them into a glass jar. Then we'd carried the jar with us on one of our walks to the beach and buried it among the trees.
We'd picked the spot together.
I memorized it.
I memorized it the way you memorize something you're afraid you'll need later. The tree. The shape of the exposed roots. The distance from the path. The particular crooked branch that looked like it had been reaching sideways for years. I doubted I'd ever forget it.
Anything but that....
We were supposed to dig it up in two years. I wanted that so badly it almost hurt to think about. I wanted to be there when Michael pulled the jar out of the earth. I wanted to watch him brush the dirt from the glass. I wanted to unfold the letter he'd written and read the words he'd put down that night on the heated bathroom floor, when he'd been trying desperately to distract me from the pain. He'd brought pens and paper. I'd been hurting so badly that I could barely think. And somehow we'd ended up writing letters to our future selves.
I wanted to read his. I wanted to see what he'd thought we'd become. I wanted to laugh at how wrong we'd both been.
I wanted to be there.
I hoped I'd be there.
But there was this unexplainable and terrifying fear. Impossible to push away. I'd tried. God, I'd tried so hard. I'd told myself that fear wasn't foresight. That knowing something felt wrong didn't mean it was wrong. That plenty of people were wrong about the things they were most certain of.
But sometimes you know.
You know the way you know you've flunked a test before the results come back, even though a tiny, stubborn part of you keeps calculating the possibility that maybe the teacher was feeling generous that day.
You know when someone says ‘we need to talk’ and something inside you quietly starts grieving before the conversation has even happened.
You know when a phone rings at an odd hour and your stomach drops before you've even looked at the screen.
Some things don't need to be explained. They settle somewhere deeper than thought. They become a kind of knowledge without evidence. And lately, my body had been teaching me things I didn't want to learn.
I could tell myself it was all temporary. I could let Michael tell me it was temporary. I could stare out at a beautiful sunrise and pretend the future was waiting patiently for me. But when your body is becoming less and less your own, you just know.
But Michael had a book to finish.
He had a manuscript waiting for him somewhere in the world beyond the cabin, pages that still needed to be written and rewritten and eventually held in someone else's hands. He had a story that wasn't finished yet.
And I had classes to go back to. Students who would complain about assignments and forget deadlines and ask questions they absolutely could have answered themselves if they'd read the instructions. Students whose names I knew, whose lives I had somehow become a small part of without ever meaning to.
Ember had annual vaccinations coming up, and I needed to be there for those because she was my responsibility. Because some random cat video online had said a pet might only be one small part of your world, but to them, you're the only world they know. So I couldn't exactly leave her wondering why her world had abandoned her.
And we had to go to Hawaii. The real Hawaii, this time. Hopefully on an actual honeymoon, not one we invented because pretending was easier than admitting how badly we wanted the real thing.
There were restaurants we hadn't tried. Places we'd saved on our phones. Dates still sitting on my list with little boxes beside them, waiting to be crossed off. And there was a jar buried somewhere beneath a cluster of trees that we were supposed to dig it up in two years.
So it would be incredibly unfair of me to simply decide I wouldn't be there. Selfish, too.
Michael deserved to finish his book. Ember deserved her vaccines. My students deserved to complain about me giving them homework again. We deserved Hawaii. We deserved more dates. More mornings where I stole the blankets. More arguments about what to watch. More photographs I would probably never get around to organizing.
We deserved to dig up that stupid jar....
So I joined Michael in believing we'd come out on top. Because we had to. I'd done it before. That was the part I kept returning to whenever the fear got too loud.
There had been periods during that time when I'd been absolutely convinced I wasn't going to make it. I'd lain awake imagining what my parents would look like standing beside a grave with my name on it. I'd pictured my mother crying so hard she couldn't speak.
I didn't picture my dad crying. He hadn't been the kind of man who did that where I could see him. But I'd pictured all of it anyway. And then somehow, impossibly, I had lived. I had gotten better...I'd won. So I had to win again.
Only this time, it wasn't just my parents waiting for me on the other side of it. There was Michael. And Michael needed me. Maybe more than he would ever admit. Because I was beginning to suspect he wasn't only struggling because I had cancer.
There were things inside him that had existed long before I came along. Things he'd spent years carrying so quietly that maybe he'd forgotten they were heavy. Things he was only now allowing himself to feel because loving me had somehow made it impossible to keep everything locked away.
He was tired, he was frightened. And maybe, just maybe, he was a little depressed. And I wanted to be there while he figured himself out. I wanted to see what he became when he wasn't afraid. I wanted to know what his face looked like when he finally got to write the ending he'd always wanted.
I wanted to be there when he finished his book. When he held it for the first time..When he looked at me and said, ‘We actually did it.’
And maybe that was enough reason to be stubborn. Maybe that was what hope was supposed to be. Not certainty or some childish belief that nothing could go wrong. Just the decision to keep making plans anyway.
So I made mine.