My Rebound (On My Own #2) - Carrie Ann Ryan Page 0,52
the bed. I froze. “Go inside. He’s waiting.”
I looked at her then, and she smiled kindly again. I propelled myself forward.
Pacey lay in the bed, his usual debonair attitude a little softer, his face pale, his hair disheveled. He had an IV in his arm but a small smile on his face. He also had oxygen going into his nostrils, and it scared me.
“Pacey,” I whispered.
He smiled again and held out a hand. “Come on over here, though you should probably wash your hands first before the nurses yell at us.”
I nodded, looked at the sink, then correctly scrubbed my hands, noticing that they were shaking. I added hand sanitizer after I dried them and then wordlessly walked over to the side of the bed. “Sit, Mackenzie. I’m okay.”
A single tear fell, and I swallowed hard, trying to catch my breath.
“You say that, and yet I don’t know if I believe you.”
“Mackenzie,” he whispered and held out his hand.
I slid mine into his as I sat, trying to breathe. “What’s wrong?”
“A lot of things. But nothing,” he said, and I frowned.
“That’s the worst non-answer ever.”
“True,” he said before letting out a breath. “First, I need you to know I’m going to be fine.”
The nurse walked in at that moment and handed me a paper cup full of water.
“When you’re done, I can show you where the guest lounge is and some other things, but I’ll let you finish talking. You keep resting, Mr. Ziglar.”
“Call me Pacey,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Don’t think that little smile and accent will get you out of resting.”
She shook her head and then walked away, and Pacey just smiled wider. “They like taking care of me. They’re good at their jobs here.”
“You say that as if you’ve been here before,” I said slowly, trying to catch up. What’s going on?” I asked, swallowing hard after I took a sip of water.
He sighed and patted my hand. “I’m okay. I promise. This is something I’ve had to deal with for a while.”
I wanted to shake him so he’d open up and tell me more, but I knew that would only hurt him and not help anything. “Okay, but how? Why don’t I know this?”
“Because it’s all a bit embarrassing, and I don’t talk about it. In my family, we don’t talk about illness.” He frowned. “We don’t talk about a lot of things, actually, but I digress.”
“Pace,” I said.
“When I was eight, I had a kidney transplant,” Pacey began, and my eyes widened.
“Pacey,” I said, not having expected to hear that at all.
“The fact that I made it to eight without needing one was a miracle. When I was born, my right kidney decided to stop working. It gradually dropped to fifty percent capacity and slowly worked its way down to barely three percent. When it got below that, it started to secrete other hormones that hurt my body and increased my blood pressure to the point where I was in and out of hospitals until I was eight. When I was two, they removed that kidney. However, my left one began to overcompensate and was working too hard for my body.”
“Oh,” I whispered, not knowing what else to say.
He smiled softly. “I had the best doctors. And who knows, if it had happened now, maybe I could’ve saved both kidneys. Medicine has changed a lot in the past twenty years.” He let out a breath as I just sat there, staring at him, squeezing his hand for dear life. “When I was seven, my left kidney finally decided it’d had enough. I was on dialysis for a year until they found a kidney that was a perfect match for me. So, I only have one working kidney, and it isn’t even the one I was born with. But I still call it mine.”
I sat there, trying to breathe, attempting to catch up. He’d been through so much and had never mentioned it. We might be new in terms of a relationship, but I knew that he hadn’t told anyone else this story either. He’d kept so much to himself, held his secrets tightly to his chest for so long. “So, all of this is from your kidney?”
“Not precisely,” he said softly. “Thanks to the kidney transplant, I got a lovely, long-term autoimmune disease. Something that’s chronic and recurrent. It happens in only a small percentage of people, but I guess I was lucky. It’s called hypogammaglobulinemia.”