Zach and I met in March of 2003, three months after I came home from Kathmandu. It was almost a year later, at the end of February, in a Chicago hotel room, that he kissed me for the first time. It was dusk, and we'd been drinking; we were watching the snow fall from the window of his hotel room. It would have been awkward, with me lying on the bed and him in his wheelchair, if we hadn't both been expecting it for so long. He just looked over at me, caught my attention. I leaned closer to him and put a hand on the arm of his wheelchair because I was suddenly unsteady. Then he kissed me, one hand holding on to the wheel of his chair and the other on the back of my head. His lips were soft against mine; he tasted like beer and pizza, and I had been waiting for him forever. Not just since we met, or since I started working for him, or since I fell in love with him--but forever, since I read his first book when I was nineteen and since before that, when he was only the faceless presence of a prince in my adolescent dreams.
He kissed me, and then he pulled back and looked at me as if he, and not I, had just committed a mortal sin. "I'm sorry."
"Please don't be sorry." I sat up, hung my legs over the bed and held onto his hand. He watched the snow fall out the window, sipped expensive scotch from a plastic cup.
Across the room, my laptop began to play "Sugar Coma". Outside, the snow fell. Zach put his cup between his legs and started to wheel away from me. Thousands of miles away I had a husband, who at least presumably loved me, who was working very hard to save the lives of other people. There I was, locked in a room with my hero, my friend, the man I was more in love with than I'd ever expected I'd love anything. And he'd kissed me. And he was pulling away.
I didn't mean to start sobbing, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it once it began. Zach, startled as he always was by sudden emotion, came back to sit beside me, put a hand on my calf and called my name. I cried into my sweater until I thought I would choke. Eventually, concerned, he transferred from the chair onto the bed, pulled himself slowly into a sitting position against the headboard and then tugged at me. I lay my head in his lap, curled up in a ball wishing I could reach my drink.
"What are we going to do, Katy?" he said quietly when I was done crying. He reached for the bottle beside the bed. I sat up, took it from his hand and turned it up.
"I don't know. I just want to kiss you again."
His blue eyes were huge and round, rimmed in red. He kissed me, then pulled away. "I don't think you want to do this, Katy-girl. It's a real bad idea." His voice was bitter.
"I haven't wanted to do anything else for a long time, Zachary."
He shook his head and cleared his throat. "No. You really don't understand. Katy," he gestured at his wheelchair with the bottle in his hand. "You know what that's all about? You've never asked, so I don't think you do."
"It doesn't bother me that you're disabled, Zach, I don't care about that. I just care about you. I want to be with you."
"Katy, I'm not in that chair because I got hurt. I'm in the chair because I'm sick--because I have a serious, degenerative illness. I'm not just crippled, I'm dying. So, whatever this is that we're doing here, I want you to think about it very seriously before it gets any further."
There was no more air in the room, and I was sick. Dizzy and hot, I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. Zach took another swig of scotch.
"I'm sorry, Katy."
"What are you talking about?" Balancing myself by holding on to the wall, I stood up and walked to the other side of the room. The computer had the nerve to start up another sad song and I slammed it shut.
"I'm talking about MS," he said. "It was progressing pretty rapidly, at first. Mostly, now, it seems to have leveled off. It's in remission, but the damage is already done. And it can start tearing me down again at any minute. There's nothing I can do."
"But, Zach, people live with MS for years, they have whole lives..." There was desperation in my voice so that it shook. I wanted to call Bijendra, to have him explain the disease to me and make me believe it wasn't going to kill anyone I loved.
"Some people. And some people die in their sleep. And some people go into a come and hang on there for months while the paralysis takes over their respiratory organs..."
"Fuck you. You don't know what's going to happen to you, you don't know that."
He shrugged, shook his head. "Maybe. But why should I expect the best, Katy? I got sick in the first place. It crippled me, why shouldn't it kill me?"
I went back to sit on the edge of the bed. He offered me the bottle again.
"Should you be drinking?" it occurred to me to ask.
"Don't start that, Katy."
I took a big gulp of the hot liquor, felt my head swimming as it went down. He was sitting with his back against the headboard of his bed, his legs thin and still, straight out in front of him. I touched his wasted calf muscle lightly with my fingertips.
"I had wondered," I said, quietly.
"I meant to tell you. A thousand times. But, I knew..." he sighed. "I knew there was this thing between us, and I'm selfish. I wanted it to happen."
"But, Zach, you being sick doesn't change the thing between us. It doesn't change anything."
He shook his head. "You don't mean that, Katy. Think about it. I know you and Bijendra have problems, but he's a good man, and he can take care of you. He can take care of you for the rest of your life. I can't do that. I can't even take care of you now," he snorted derisively and gestured to his lap. "I can't give you what you need. You don't want to fuck up your marriage, your life; not for me."
I crawled up to the top of the bed to sit beside him. I pressed my shoulder against his as I leaned into him and held his hand in mine, tightly. I wrapped my leg around his so that we were twined together like a pastry. A little scared of what he would do in response, I leaned over and parted my lips. He kissed me. He squeezed my hand until it was painful and he kissed me hard, like it might save both of us from the fate he imagined was waiting for him. After a moment of that kiss my hand moved for his crotch. It took him a moment to notice, since he couldn't feel the touch. When he realized what I was doing he laughed slightly.
"It won't do any good, Katy. It doesn't matter."
I was still for a moment, and then I looked up at him, moved my hand away from his penis and used it to touch his cheek instead. "Okay."
"Okay, what?"
"Okay you can't fuck me, and okay you're not immortal." I let my head fall forward so our foreheads were touching. I held his hands in mine, rubbing each finger individually with mine, thinking while I did so about the things his fingers had done, the things they'd written and the way they'd affected me and the world. I was overwhelmed by him, as I always was when I stopped long enough to think about it; but this time I was touching him, and this time I knew he wanted me, too.
His breath was hot on my face, laced with scotch and much more intoxicating. "I don't want to ruin your life."
"Oh, but you already did that."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We'd spent the flight home holding hands, kissing occasionally and both trying not to think about the fact that I was going to go home to my husband as soon as the plane landed. At that point, so early on it seems like decades ago, it never occurred to me that I had a choice. I went back to my husband, when he wasn't at work; and Zach went back to his book, his classes, and waiting for me to decide what I was doing with our lives.