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.
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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.
Drew fetched his baggage and walked to the customs office to retrieve the boxes of medical supplies that were sent here for him. Each step away from the plane felt like one more step away from her, from the life he'd unintentionally grown so attached to. A quick glance at the inventory of each box and his stomach plummeted. This was not a standard field trip for him. He was not there to treat disease or save lives. He was there to treat only symptoms. Drew was there to give comfort, not hope.
He turned on his phone to send Nora a short text, suddenly desperate for a tether to a more optimistic world: I've arrived safely. There are no green zebras here. What's for dinner?
The chaos around him while he waited for a taxi was a stark contrast to the calm of his life with Nora. There were people everywhere. It was hot and the air was suffocating. He felt burdened by how many bags and boxes he had to transport, and finding a taxi that was large enough for his parcels seemed to take hours. Nothing about the experience was familiar, and yet, everything about the experience should have been. This routine—bustling travel, crowded airports, foreign surroundings—was his life, was what he knew.
Suddenly it seemed almost impossible that Drew had known Nora for such a short time. Every trace of her seemed to have back-filled his memories in such a way that even his trips before he met her were somehow colored differently.
Although Nora had never really been anywhere, Drew found that he was able to imagine her everywhere. It never would have occurred to him to ask her to come with him but he found, with a crushing realization, that perhaps given enough time to prepare, she could have.
Would she have?
The drive to the village would add another couple of hours to his trip and once Drew was tucked into a van, he struggled to calm his fidgeting, tense limbs. Traffic slowed their progress and the late summer air was thick and hot. He didn't know what to expect when he arrived, only that his friend and colleague Tommy would be there and that people would be sick and in pain.
Drew wanted to close his eyes and think of her, but he knew if he did that, when he opened them, he wouldn't be able to resist asking the driver to take him back to the airport, to the comfort of her soft wet lips, her endlessly accepting dark eyes.
Instead, he focused on the passing landscape, on the road diverging from the familiar route to Xianghuajian village where the Lanzhou hand drum originated and where he found comfort in the community but no intimacy other than through music. Only through music had he ever found any semblance of intimacy, and always fleeting.
. . . Before dinners on the floor together . . . Before being able to reveal himself bit by bit with someone every night . . . Before Nora . . .
He looked around as the driver drove on barely passable roads and felt the crushing weight of helplessness. The Yellow River, the Mother River, was dying. The river had sustained this region, and many others, for centuries. Now, stained with pollution, its beautiful color altered by sewage, crowded with dams that should never have been erected, it trickled almost lifelessly. Although its path used to stretch thousands of miles, in the past decade, there had been years when the river failed to reach the sea at all. This dwindling was apparent everywhere, but the pollution was most apparent here, just outside the city limits.
Drew gave in and closed his eyes, swallowing his desire to reverse their route. He tried to imagine Nora at his sink back home, snapping the tops off of beans fresh from her garden. Her foot would be tucked against one leg as she scratched her calf absently with her toe. Her hair would be in a high messy ponytail. Her legs would go on forever beneath her shorts, and when she looked at Drew, her eyes would turn up into a smile that was just for him.
A large pothole on the road roused him from his daydream, and he realized he hadn't heard back from Nora.
He looked at his phone, deflating immediately. He had no cell service out here.
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Tommy stood, waiting at the small mouth of the village, having seen the dust cloud of the van approaching for miles. Drew’s old friend looked exhausted. No longer the round-faced and grinning med student he knew years ago, now Tommy was thin and worn. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and Drew imagined Tommy often stayed awake solely with the help of caffeine and will power. Clearly, he was barely keeping enough energy for himself.
Drew stepped from the van as it stopped and climbed out to embrace his friend. Tommy wore a lab coat that was yellowed from wear and, presumably, from being washed in local water. Drew glanced at the embroidered pocket: 趙醫師. Dr. Zhao.
"Hey Little Zhong," Drew said, grinning as he used the familiar nickname. "How're they hanging?"
"Neglected." Tommy smirked, returning the hug and patting Drew’s back with surprising vigor. He seemed to almost deflate with relief. "Welcome to ChenghuaCun," he said, stepping back and sweeping his hands in a grand gesture. "You need a drink?"
"Yes," Drew laughed, grabbing a box and beginning the process of carrying his baggage to the small group of buildings in the distance. "Are we at the same hotel?"
Tommy laughed as he fell into step with him and nodded his head to a small home at the end of the long row. The houses were barely habitable but, even so, the accommodations were better than others Drew had had in the field.
"That one's yours," Tommy said, adjusting the weight of the box of supplies in his arms.
Once they’d carried all of the supplies to a small building that seemed to be serving as the medical headquarters, Drew wandered to his temporary residence to change and unload his luggage. He knew without having to ask that it had been recently vacated because of a death.
The home was neat and well kept, if sparsely furnished. There were three rooms: a larger main living area with a bed and small table with two chairs, a bathroom area that housed a wash-basin and small tarnished mirror on the wall, and a small kitchen area with a camp-sized stove, some dented aluminum pots and pans, and a chest for food storage. There was no running water, no plumbing, and no electricity in the village. The toilets were grouped outside, down the hill. Existence here was simple, straightforward, and until the last decade or so, had required little help from the outside world.
Drew pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at it, willing the bars to appear in the corner. Never before had he even pulled his phone out of his bag once he arrived in the field, but now it was his only connection to Nora. He unpacked his small manual generator and placed it on the table. Although his action was futile—he didn't need to bother to keep his phone charged—he was unable to stop the compulsion. Drew texted her again, knowing now that she wouldn't see it for weeks, but with the hot wind blowing in and the near total silence coming from the tiny village outside, he suddenly didn’t care. Even if it was just a symbolic act, he needed Nora there with him.
Drew walked to Tommy's residence several houses down from his own and felt the eyes of the village's inhabitants watching him from inside their homes. He smiled at each dark window and the invisible faces beyond, hoping to communicate that he was here to help them. Tommy told Drew that there was a dinner to welcome him later that night, but he knew they needed time together before that, for Tommy to debrief him on the situation.
Drew handed him a bottle of Talisker and his eyebrows shot up. "Dude," Tommy breathed. "Nice." He carried it to his small table and grabbed a couple of aluminum cups before turning and staring at the label. "How'd you get this here?"
"I'm a sneaky bastard." Drew smiled, looking around Tommy’s place. His friend had clearly been here awhile. "When did you get here?"
"February," Tommy said, pouring a couple of fingers into a glass for each of them as Drew sat at the table. "I am totally fucking drained, man."
Drew nodded, taking the cup from him and watching as he sat down across the table. "When are you leaving?"
Tommy shook his head and shrugged. "I don't know. They've set up a heavy ion cancer center for the area, but are still not able to accomodate everyone here. ChenghuaCun is low on the list, because almost everyone left here is over forty. I think they just see this village as a lost cause."
"They didn't send me any Ara-C or Daunorubicin," Drew agreed quietly. "All I have is Zofran, morphine, and a few other symptomatics." When Tommy nodded into his glass, Drew realized Tommy probably hadn't requested any chemotherapeutics to be sent along. Tommy didn't hope to cure anyone, either. "What is the goal here, Tom? Are we just giving comfort?"
Tommy nodded again, not meeting Drew’s eyes. This was a fairly simple medical assignment, if not completely depressing.
"You need to head back to the states and recover?” Drew asked. “I can cover it for a few months."
"No," Tommy said, looking resigned. "I just needed help. I was burned out when I called Steve and asked for you. I'm trying to get samples of local water to help the Lanzhou environmental council, and sometimes it requires long day trips. I just can't treat everyone and also do those support activities at the same time."
The two men grew quiet as they sipped their scotch and gazed out Tommy’s back window to the lush earth sloping down to the river. In the back yard between the homes was a newer stone building, presumably for bathing. It was surrounded by hungry and wild vines and looked like a small oasis. The wilderness appeared to be thriving, but it was deceiving: nearly everything outside was as poisoned as the people of the village.
Drew looked back at Tommy and took in the circles under his eyes, the prominence of his cheekbones. Tommy’s request to the parent organization, although posted as urgent, was relatively straightforward. He had been doing everything here by himself and simply couldn't do it alone anymore and knew Drew would be sent immediately. Tommy clearly also couldn't find it in himself to leave a helpless situation, even if it was slowly breaking him down.
Drew was suddenly gripped with a nearly overwhelming sense of loneliness, of defeat.
"Not eating so much," Drew observed quietly, thinking of Nora, of everything he’d left. He tried to swallow his resentment at the realization that he had come halfway across the world because Tommy was burnt out. Drew wanted to conjure strength for his friend, as he would have done readily and without hesitation before his life had changed so dramatically.
He needs me, Drew thought. He matters.
Still, his stomach remained knotted.
"There's not so much to eat from here. Only for about eight weeks have we been able to have the food trucked in from Lanzhou. Before that we had vouchers but no way of getting anything easily. It nearly drove me insane. People can’t eat vouchers, for fuck’s sake."
Drew nodded, looking past the stone building to the withering crops beyond. The food had to be horrifically toxic. To imagine the residents were getting food shipped in only for the last couple of months sent a chill across my arms.
He changed the subject. "Are you seeing anyone back home?" Tommy was a famous serial monogamist.
But he shook his head as he finished the last of his scotch in a single gulp, and Drew realized he'd need to keep an eye on his friend’s drinking.
"Nope," Tommy croaked, wiping his lip with a finger and reaching for the bottle. His face was flushed already and he didn't seem to care. "I need to get laid."
Drew sat quietly, wondering why he'd chosen that topic—women, relationships, sex—as the distraction. He had made love to Nora less than two days ago and still felt the burn of her touch on his chest.
The return question hung in the air and Drew felt it several seconds before Tommy mumbled, "You seeing anyone?" It was a polite question and he expected the answer to be 'no'.
But Drew swiped a hand across his mouth and then leaned his forehead into his palm, rubbing his eyebrow ring absently.
"Yeah?" Tommy asked in a reverent whisper, and Drew could feel him sitting straighter in his chair. "Is it serious . . . ?"
Drew moved his head lower and then rubbed his face roughly in both hands. What the fuck was he doing here?
"Really?" Tommy whispered, amazed.
"Yeah," Drew mumbled. He could feel the weight of Tommy’s realization as it sunk in.
"You left her to come here," Tommy said, leaning forward in his chair slightly, ". . . for this." His voice held an unmistakable color of apology, his expression one of dismay.
Looking down at the table, Drew ran a finger along the scarred wood as he considered this. He knew without question that what they did as an organization was important, that they saved lives and made a difference. He'd always given his energy and time without hesitation, knowing that the life he'd chosen was what he was put on this earth to do. People lived, and villages just like this recovered because of their efforts, but looking around at the desolation and utter hopelessness surrounding him, he felt more grief than hope. The world hadn't changed. He had.
"Drew?"
Drew looked up to find Tommy still watching him, waiting for an answer. He took in the new lines in Tommy’s face, the heaviness of his jowls. This life in the field generally brought gratification beyond description, but it also disguised the passage of time. Their lives beyond this didn't stop when they worked; they moved on, without attachment, without milestones.
"Yeah," Drew said again, knowing it was all he could manage.
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June 8th
She stood before me, bouncing lightly on bare feet. Her toes curled up to protect the soles from the hot porch. Her hair was pulled away from her face; her lips were smooth and wet from what I would come to know as her continual and unconscious habit of licking them. She thrust a dish at me—a pie, leaking deep purple juice and with yellow fruit peeking through the lattice. I looked up at her face, disbelieving. This vision before me was for me. The pie, yes, but also the transition of her cheeks from pink and excited, to scarlet and amazed.
I knew what she felt in that instant because her expression perfectly mirrored the violent hammering in my chest.
Wonder.
Thrill.
A sharp spike of desire and longing.
I could see all of this in her blush, in her restrained smile, in her eyes. She looked slightly wild, bursting from behind everything.
"For me?" I asked, feeling my entire body lean towards her.
She licked her lips again and smiled, nodding. Her eyes crinkled into beautiful crescents when she smiled.
I thought she was the sweetest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
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