At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (6 page)

Her mouth slacked open and she worked her jaw for a moment as if trying to figure out what to say. Perhaps she didn’t understand my meaning. I wanted to be part of her dream, too.

She surprised me by reaching out to take my hand, closing her smaller one around it. “Of course not.”

“Then let’s not talk about this now,” I said in the most neutral voice I could manage. “Let’s see if we can figure this out later.”

A bicoastal relationship for four years, likely longer. It wasn’t any dream of
mine
. It sounded like a goddamn nightmare. Sure, I could fly out there every weekend, but who wanted five hours in the air each way just to spend forty-eight hours trying to cram in every conversation, every look, every caress, every event, every fuck—and go another drawn-out week with an empty bed and meals alone? I’d fall right back into my old patterns again. I knew that for a fact. It would be the only way I could cope without her.

We’d be without each other for long stretches of time. And long-distance relationships—I knew damn well they didn’t last. My cousin Britt had been engaged to her high school boyfriend—once supposedly the love of her life and one of my closest friends in high school. Once she went off to college in Chicago, the relationship hadn’t held out more than a year. By then she’d met Rik, who would become her husband, and my friend Todd had been devastated.

Long-distance relationships did not work. And ours couldn’t survive three thousand miles and four years—probably more.

Fuck. She wasn’t even gone yet. Hadn’t even made the decision to go and it felt like someone had shot me in the chest with a twelve-gauge.

She moved back into my reach again and pulled me into her arms. I closed my eyes, allowed myself a grimace when she couldn’t see me and bent my head to kiss her hair. There was no fucking way I was going to be able to do without her. I’d just have to convince her that UCI was a wonderful alternative to her longtime dream.

Somehow.

***

The day after Emilia got her acceptance letter, we sat at the card table in the game room at my house. Emilia was across from me, impatiently tapping the cards on her hand as if to remind us that we had a game to play here. But Heath had just laid down the gauntlet by bringing up the age-old question: In a fight, which would win, the ships from
Star Trek
or from
Star Wars
?

“Well, which version of the
Enterprise
are we talking about? Because that makes a big difference.” I turned to Heath as I grabbed another pita chip from the nearly empty bowl and popped it into my mouth, sending a wink at Emilia across the table in response to her long-suffering sigh.

“Does it matter? Any version of the
Enterprise
against a star destroyer would be vapor,” Heath replied, snatching up the last of the chips from the bowl before I could get the rest.

I cleared my throat of crumbs and sipped some ice water, thinking. “Okay, the
Enterprise
from the reboot movies then. But any version beats a star destroyer in maneuverability alone.”

Emilia huffed and slapped a hand on her forehead. “This is such a man discussion. You guys will be at this for hours. Come on! I have some ass to kick, people,” she said, holding up her handful of cards.

Heath reflected for a moment while chewing his chips, then nodded. “Sure, a star destroyer can’t maneuver its way out of a paper bag, but it doesn’t need to. As demonstrated in
Empire
during the asteroid field scene, the sheer amount of firepower far exceeds that of the
Enterprise
.”

Emilia’s head clunked the table. “You guys are killing me. Play a card already!”

I fought a chuckle. “But if you’re comparing sheer firepower—”

“The Battlestar
Galactica
jumps in and blows them both away. The end.” Emilia waved her arms in a cutting motion to emphasize her point.

“Are we being too geeky for you, Mia? You poor baby.”

She rolled her eyes. “Gawd, you might as well be discussing who could take who in a fight, Captain Kirk or Darth Vader!”

“Darth Vader,” Heath and I both said in unison and shared a grin.

“He’s got elite force power, yo,” Heath added. “He can choke a dude on the other side of the galaxy through a hologram.”

I held up a finger. “Yeah, that’s not an argument,” I said, then threw a playful glance at Emilia. “Now, Darth Vader versus Gandalf, on the other hand…”

Heath’s eyes lit up. “Oooh, epic!”

Emilia sighed. “Gandalf wins. He’s the wizard who killed a Balrog by himself. End of discussion. Now…is this game over? I don’t even remember whose turn it is.”

“Yours,” I said. “Heath laid down a land and summoned a goblin lord.” I pointed to the cards lying face up in front of him.

“This game sucks with three players, anyway,” she sighed, plunking down an island card.

“That’s ’cause you’re losing,” Heath said.

“Either that or she’s calling
you
a third wheel. And not too subtly, either,” I said giving her a wink.

“That’s okay. I’m about ready to send over my horde of goblins to kick her ass anyway.” Heath waggled his eyebrows at Emilia. “All your base are belong to me,” he said, quoting the famously ill-translated script from a foreign video game. Emilia replied by making a face at him.

She only lasted one more round, then Heath and I ended up battling it out for half an hour after that. Emilia had long since wandered off. I was vaguely aware that she had been acting off all day. Even inviting Heath over to “celebrate” her acceptance to med school and to try easing the tension between us hadn’t worked.

After our game, Heath decided to call it a night. I watched Emilia, trying to determine if she was still irritated with me. It was deserved, I guess. The one time she’d tried to bring up the med school discussion since getting the news yesterday, I’d put her off. I hadn’t been ready then. I hadn’t devised my line of attack. I’d needed to prepare.

I opened a bottle of beer for each of us and took a long drink while she picked up her cards and tidied up at the table from our game, studiously avoiding my scrutiny. I watched every move she made, every expression that crossed her face.

So she wanted to talk about this? I was ready now. I had strategized, because games were all about strategy and I had learned, seemingly, at the knees of a master. Sun Tzu’s words from
The Art of War
now whispered to me across a thousand years.

Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

We wouldn’t fight. I’d start this out casually, nonthreateningly. And then I’d show her reason. Emilia was a rational woman, almost too rational, sometimes. She lived in fear of letting her emotions rule her. That fear had almost prevented us from beginning our relationship in the first place. So I’d treat this like two war leaders sitting at the table for a calm negotiation, a division of spoils.

Damn if I hadn’t even mentally sketched a flowchart for this as well. “That’s not a bad deck,” I started, nodding to her cards. “You could have beaten Heath if you’d gotten the right cards out in time.”

She raised a brow at me. “But not
you
, of course. You know, if you win every single game, no one’s going to want to play with you anymore.”

I took another sip of beer and watched as she slipped her deck of cards into a box and scooped up some dice, tucking them inside a leather pouch. It was Sunday night, the end of the weekend and I wasn’t looking forward to getting up and going in to work tomorrow. There was something sobering in that realization. I couldn’t remember
ever
dreading Monday morning before. I used to thrive on Monday mornings, excited to start a new workweek even as the old one had barely ended.

Emilia went to stand up from the table when I waved to her untouched bottle of beer and she shrugged, saying she wasn’t thirsty. I reached out and pressed my hand on top of hers, preventing her from getting up to leave. “You want to talk now?”

She froze for a split second, then let out a long breath and leaned back, grabbing the beer and taking a long pull from the bottle. Suddenly she was thirsty—and very visibly nervous. I felt a slight rise in my blood pressure at this realization. What would she have to be nervous about unless she’d made a decision she knew I wouldn’t like?

I swallowed, tried to remember scraps of ancient Chinese military wisdom to help me through this. There would be no emotions. It would be a calm, rational negotiation. One that I would win, of course. One way or the other.

I smiled, hiding my own sudden nervousness. “Thanks for being patient with me,” I began. “I just had to think things through for a little bit.”

She nodded, watching me warily with her eyes the color of autumn leaves. What was that color, anyway? If I were a chick, I’d be able to name it. They were lovely, golden with darker flecks around the pupils. I waited for her to speak first.

“I can’t stop thinking about going to Hopkins,” she said quietly, a slight tremor in her voice. Good. She’d started out sounding unsure. Something I might be able to exploit. She was unsure about going despite what she said.

I rubbed my jaw, hesitating. “So as I understand it, you’ve chosen this school because of its oncology program.”

Emilia looked at me and then quickly away. “They’re doing some fascinating work with stem cells.”

“They’re not the only ones. And no state has more supportive laws concerning stem cell research than California.” I was about to add some facts about Proposition 71 that I had found in my research, but cut myself off, judging that it might be over the top. I didn’t want her getting defensive.

“Umm. Okay. That’s true, but Hopkins has its own stem cell research fund from the state. And their research in epigenetics is foremost in the world.”

I’d run across that word during my own research—remembered it eidetically, as I remembered everything I’d ever read. Epigenetics was the study of change in inheritance not caused by DNA. It was directly related to how some cells become cancerous over time. And she was right, Hopkins had the top physician studying in the field. But I wasn’t completely unarmed to battle that fact.

“Dr. Philippa Nguyen studied under that physician at Hopkins—the one leading that team. And she’s got her own project going on at UCLA. Her program is fully funded for another seven years at least.”

Emilia’s face grew serious as she digested this. Perhaps she wouldn’t have anything to rebut against that. “You’ve been doing some research, I see.”

I shrugged with one shoulder. “I assumed you already knew that. And I like to have all the facts. Dr. Nguyen’s team seems comparable to the team at Hopkins. And the two are coordinating their research and studies with each other.”

Emilia’s eyes dropped to the table in front of my casually folded hands. I tried to break the tension of her sudden silence by grabbing my bottle and taking a sip of beer.

“You want me to go to UCLA.”

I opened my mouth ready to answer that without another thought, but closed it just as quickly. Careful, Drake. This might be an ambush. I had a tiny image in the back of my brain of Admiral Ackbar, the fish-like commander from
Return of the Jedi
, yelling, “It’s a trap! It’s a trap!” So I took a deep breath and considered how to best—and carefully—answer that question.

“It would be easier for us if you could stay.”

She blinked. “If I went there, I’d have to live in Los Angeles. UCLA is in Westwood and that’s a ridiculous commute from here.”

I looked down, fiddling with the table pretending to think that through—as if I hadn’t considered every possible objection from her and prepared for each and every one already. I had to make this sound casual, off the cuff.
All warfare is based on deception
.
I had no wish to deceive her. But I had no wish to give her cause to be angry. The less premeditated this appeared, the less she would think I was manipulating her.

“Well, I could have a driver take you. You could use the commute time to study. On top of that, if you lived here, you wouldn’t have to worry about other things like housekeeping tasks, laundry, cooking. All of that is taken care of, whereas if you lived in Maryland—”

“You could live with me there,” she said.

Yeah, I was prepared for that answer, too. I tilted my head, trying to appear as if considering how to answer that. “I could. Under normal circumstances, I could attempt to run the company from there and fly out monthly to spend a week or two here.” Was she adding this up yet? More time away from each other if she left. Even if I went with her.

“But…I’m not sure how this case is going to progress. If it goes to suit, I will be dealing with that and I can’t leave.” That wasn’t entirely true, though, and I knew it. Maybe I
could
make that work, but it just didn’t make sense to me when she could attend a school just as good out here.

Her eyes dropped and she considered her thumbs, which traveled in quick, jerky circles around each other. She was silent for a long moment, so I took another long pull of beer to let her think. Without looking up, she took a deep breath and spoke in a quiet, but unwavering voice. “When I first started my premed program, I had no idea what my specialty would be. I’ve known since the seventh grade that I would be a doctor. I didn’t care what kind of doctor. I just wanted to help people. To be a healer.”

I licked my bottom lip, not liking the firm tone of her voice as it grew in certainty.

Then she looked up and captured my eyes with hers, and they were luminescent. I couldn’t look away. They glistened with some inner fire, a passion. “But when my mom got sick—and God, she got so sick—she almost died and she was my everything. I—” Her voice trembled. She shook her head and looked away, swallowing. “I vowed that I was going to do whatever it took—that I’d fight it in the only way I knew I could. I promised Mom that if
she
kicked cancer’s ass, then I would, too. I’d go to the best school. I’d learn from the best and I’d
never
give up. And when I failed that goddamn test I thought that dream was out the window.”

I was barely breathing at this point, simultaneously rapt by the passion in her recitation and terrified by it. This decision wouldn’t be based on just facts and cold hard rationality—things well within my comfort zone. She was
emotionally
attached to this decision. I was fucked. I went cold inside. Because how could I fight
this
?