A Taylor-Made Life by Kary Rader Page A

fell across her
body. “What couldn’t wait until morning?”
    She wrung her hands in her lap. “I
couldn’t sleep.”
    “And you thought I could help or keep
you company?”
    The shadows of her shoulders moved in
a shrug. “I don’t know. I keep thinking…I can’t get Rachel out of
my head. You know, I told her about you. About our
kiss.”
    His mouth went dry, and he tried to
steady his voice. “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.” Her voice broke, and the bed
shook with her quiet sobs.
    He scooted toward her and wrapped her
up in his arms. Taylor needed to grieve for her friend, the brave
young woman Rachel had been and the one she never got the chance to
be. Nothing wounded the soul like a fresh life cut too short. She
cried, and he let her.
    After a while the tears dried. The
silence of night stretched over the room.
    He could make out the soft rise and
fall of her chest. “Can you reach my overnight bag at the foot of
the bed?”
    She leaned over and looked. “I think
so.”
    “Right on top is a stuffed animal.
It’s for you.”
    She grabbed the white bear and sat up
next to him. “When did you get this?”
    The wonder in her voice made him
smile. Out of all the things he could give her, she was thrilled
with a little bear. “I bought it at the hospital before we left.
When I thought I was leaving.”
    “Oh.” Her voice fell in
disappointment.
    “But I want you to have it now. For
Rachel.”
    She held the bear out and lifted it
even with her face. “Then I’ll name her Racer15. That was Rachel’s
online name.” She hugged the toy with a gasp as if to stay a new
flow of tears. “I taught her how to play LAION and Rift. She
was pretty good, too.” She turned her head toward him. “You know,
lots of the kids in the ward play your games.”
    A chill rose over his body. “I didn’t
know that.”
    “They occupy the empty hours but it’s
more than that. They make us feel like we can fight and win. And
when we don’t, there’s always another life waiting to be
played.”
    The holiness of the moment crashed
over him like a tidal wave. He’d never realized he’d helped anyone.
It was all fun and games, or so he’d thought, and it suddenly
brought the true value of his company into focus. And it made the
urgency to find someone to preserve it more acute.
    “Gavin, how did you find out?” Her
quiet voice broke through his thoughts.
    He didn’t have to see her face to know
what she was asking. “I went to the dermatologist for a mole that
was growing on my left shoulder blade. He told me not to worry.
That it was a normal mole.” He fluffed up his pillows and leaned
back against the headboard. “Six months later it had grown so big I
insisted he remove it, regardless. Three hours after leaving the
office, he called me back in. It was malignant, Stage IV
Melanoma.”
    Taylor angled toward him. “Were you
scared?”
    He shook his head. “Not at first. I
thought skin cancer was on the skin. And they’d gotten that, right?
But when the doctor scheduled me for an MRI, a PET scan and got me
an appointment with an oncologist, I realized it was something much
more serious.
    “In the first scan, they found a small
spot on my liver and several lymph nodes. I had surgeries to remove
those and began Interferon treatment.” He snorted derisively. “That
was bullshit. Interferon was never designed for melanoma, but
because it has no unique treatment path, the doctors treat it like
other types of cancer. But the chance that Interferon will work on
a melanoma patient is less than twenty percent. When I asked the
doctor how I’d know if the cancer was gone, he said, ‘if it doesn’t
ever come back.’”
    Taylor sucked in a long
breath.
    He could feel her gaze on him and took
her hand, the warmth radiating up his arm into his chest. “After a
year, I completed the Interferon and waited. I had PET scans and
MRIs done quarterly. Six months ago they found more, and I started
a clinical trial, because I sure as shit