How I Found Love in Bangkok

Chapter Forty-five

Keep Running

Rhnull—nicknamed Golden Blood for its rarity—is one of the rarest blood types in the world, found only in the veins of one in six million people. My Ja was a Golden Blood. He was one in six million.

Though the Rhnull carriers can donate blood to other rare blood types, they can only receive blood from Rhnull carriers such as themselves. Ever since Ja was a boy, he'd been donating to a special blood bank that catered to only rare blood types, but also saving up his own blood for a day he too might need it. Especially, since he was born with a heart defect.

His doctors had avoided open heart surgery when he was a baby after discovering his blood type. With medication, they said it'd be manageable, as long as his heart never suffered anything strenuous, as long as he avoided getting sick. Viruses, bacteria, anything that could expose him to getting sick or catching an infection. As a child his parents took extra caution and hid him away from the world. He couldn't play with other kids, or go to the same school as other kids. They were extra careful, dedicating long hours to limiting his exposure to infections.

"Ja cried for weeks," Khun Sampastisiri explained. "Begging I and his parents to let him go to high-school, promising never to interact with the kids or join any physically tasking pursuits. Our resistance weakened the more he pleaded, refusing to eat. When we suggested he'd go to a private school in Bangkok, he insisted we send him to Chiang Mai. He said it was far away and there is a little school on a hill with few students. He had it all planned and worked out." She chuckled. "It made sense at the time, there weren't a lot of students so there wouldn't be much to do we thought. So we sent him."

"And he did it anyway," I said.

"Only after a semester." She smiled. "We had someone keep an eye on him and they'd send us pictures of him participating in marathons, volleyball, academic competitions. He was excelling at it. All of it. So we let him continue. But as an adult, there was no telling him to stop. He went bungee jumping, surfing, skydiving. He was risking it more and more, doing the first thing that popped into her head. There was only one way I could slow him down."

My brows knitted knowingly. "That's why you fired him from the Phuket project?"

She nodded. "Cutting off his funding was the only away I could get him to stop. That and getting married to keep him grounded."

I scoffed, shaking my head. "That explains it."

She reached out and held my hand. "That was not why he asked." Her tone was soft and precise.

"Asked what?"

"To marry you," she said, her head tilting to the side. "I think, he just needed a little push to go after what he really wanted."

"Why did he ask?'

"He'll tell you, when he wakes up."

"And if he never wakes."

"I highly doubt he is going anywhere without marrying you first," Khun Sampastisiri said.

It had been a week since we arrived in Singapore. He'd been laying on that rooftop for over fifteen minutes before Wut found him. It had done severe damage to his brain, and his heart was too weak to beat on its own, or pump enough blood through his body.

After he was revived, he was put in a coma and medical professionals from all over the world flew in to see him. With every day that passed, a new organ was failing, a new thing in his one in six million body was breaking. They couldn't understand how everything was faulting so quickly and so severely, the doctors were scrambling to catch up. Surgeries after surgeries, new treatment plans week after week, new procedures to try. They wouldn't let me go in and see him, I could only watch from behind a glass wall, far away from him.