Losing Streak (The Lane) by Kristine Wyllys Read Free Book Online Page B

the back of my neck, his hips angled and I was soaring. It was like breaking, like splintering apart. Only this time I didn’t feel the cracks. I felt
him.
His skin pressed up against mine in a way that was almost crushing but didn’t come with that drowning sense of hopelessness I knew so well. It was shattering, but a controlled one. One where his body wrapped around mine and held the pieces together so they didn’t scatter. So maybe when I patched myself up later, the cracks wouldn’t be so noticeable. So jagged.
    I was finally coming down when he gave a final thrust and I clung to his sweaty neck, eyes squeezed shut. Then he let his legs buckle beneath him and buried his face in my throat that was struggling to suck in air as hard as he was.
    “Never done that one before,” he said in a ragged voice after a few moments, still gripping me against him.
    “What? Had sex?” I should have pulled away, eased back at least, but I made no moves.
    “No. I mean that position. Fucking wall was too far away.”
    I glanced over his shoulder at the maybe three feet between us and the closest wall and grinned at him. “Not entirely sure how I should take that.”
    “It’s a compliment. Felt too damn good to stumble in that direction.” He grinned back at me and damn it, I kissed him before I realized what I was doing.
    “Next time we’ll get over that way,” I promised.
    “Yeah?” It was loaded, that yeah. He was asking more than one question and I didn’t hesitate like I probably should have.
    “Yeah.”
    * * *
    “His name is Brandon.”
    No matter how many times I said the words in my head, I couldn’t force them out of my mouth. Not to anyone. Especially not to Mama.
    I eased open her apartment door and peeked my head in, telling myself that this would be the time I said it. “His name is Brandon Williams and I’ve been seeing him for the past three weeks.” But when that relieved sigh escaped upon seeing her lying on the couch, I swallowed the words once again before they had the chance to escape.
    Oh, Mama.
    Every day it all seemed to get just a little bit worse until there was no relief at all for her. The word
relief
no longer existed for us. It was erased from our vocabularies completely.
    We’d been told, of course, when she’d first been diagnosed, that multiple myeloma was aggressive. Ruthless. That it was the ass-kicker of cancers and though it was incurable, it could still be treated. It wouldn’t save her life, but it’d extend it. But somehow hearing those things, knowing them, never prepared us for the decline. Because they didn’t warn us that we’d watch her waste away and it would be rapid. There would be no time to adjust or get used to what was happening. We’d know her and then we wouldn’t.
    We didn’t realize that there would only ever be bad days and worse ones. There would be days she never left the bed, when nothing I said or did could convince her to eat. Days when I’d have to drag her into doctor’s appointments and off to treatments and then physically prop her up while we were there.
    They never prepared us for the cold. She was always cold, always shivering, no matter how many blankets I piled on top of her. I even took over the set from my own bed, hoping the last of the stash would be enough. Of course it wasn’t. She lay beneath that soft mountain and shook so hard her teeth chattered and I was helpless to do anything more than watch, hands fluttering over her uselessly.
    They didn’t tell us she’d shrink.
    I didn’t even know that was possible, and yet it happened. She lost an inch here and an inch there off her height right before my eyes. What she didn’t lose, she hid, stooping like a woman twice her age, as though her body was drawing in on itself to escape the pain. As if it was so desperate to protect what little it had left that it was hiding it from the cancer’s grabby, ruthless hands.
    She was disappearing on me and it terrified me down to the