A Little Crazy

Chapter Six

Hi again and thanks for coming back! Thank you for all the love, comments, follows, votes and flail over the last chapter, we love hearing from you guys. This story is finished and each chapter requires only minor edits, but we're going on book tour soon so please bear with us. Our schedule is crazy right now but we promise to keep posting. This story was originally in two parts, so you'll notice a change. From here on out we'll be in Drew's POV. Also! We updated this on our ipads from a hotel in Chicago, so please forgive if the formatting is a bit wonky. You're the best lets hug. xoxo - Lo & C

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July 16th

Nora was touching me, tasting and wanting to see me come on her skin. She knew nothing ever sounded strange when she said it to me. She knew I wanted to be everything for her, that I would wait a hundred years for her to figure out how to say what she needed to say.

Her soft hands were running up my arms as I moved on top of her. "Oh god," she whispered.

And then she was above me, moving over me in the dark room.

Her moans were just for me. I knew instinctively that she'd never made that sound for anyone before. I knew, because she'd told me, that no one had ever made her come, that she had always had to do it herself.

I knew when she said she loved me, that it was the first time she really meant it. 

Drew woke up with a jerk, slapping the bottom of his tray table and nearly knocking over the lunch the flight attendant had just placed in front of him.

He looked down at the gray pasta covered in dull, brick red sauce. Gone were the tomatoes, the habaneros, any trace of Nora.

He had no appetite for this food. 

挂念 

July 17th

The plane descended into the haze of Lanzhou and Drew had been sitting for so long that his legs were coiled and tight, trapped in the small economy seat. He feared he wouldn't be able to exercise for many days, certainly not until everything had been unloaded and his presence in the village had been accepted. With a final, indulgent breath of filtered airplane air and after squeezing his eyes shut to burn the image of Nora into his mind, Drew stood up to prepare himself for what he had ahead of him. 

He had been to Lanzhou twice before. It is a city with a vast history—common for most of China's larger cities—but to him Lanzhou had never been a city of politics, activism, or even associated with his general routine of traveling to treat illness. It was a city of discovery, of unearthing the history of early ceramic drums and finding a true and deep passion for the origin of Asian percussion. 

Lanzhou was large and sprawling, but choked with pollution caused by rapidly expanding industry and decades of unregulated waste disposal. In recent years, the government made an effort to curb the generation of pollution, but Drew felt certain, as he looked around the air just outside the airport, that he wasn't the only one who wondered if these efforts weren't already too late. In any case, from what he gathered from the assignment letter, the city population wasn't his concern. Drew’s concern was ChenghuaCun, a small village outside of the city—one of the hundreds of "cancer villages"—where almost every inhabitant was struggling with various malignancies, most of them presently untreated. The healthy youth had long since fled the small farming community. What remained were the older generation, the farmers who had taken pride in their land their entire lives, and who now had nowhere else to go.