He closed his eyes for a long moment, then nodded. He pressed a soft kiss onto the tip of my nose. “Exactly. Both of us. Together. Either way, no matter how my test comes out.Together.” His hand tightened on the back of my head. “We need to make you a doctor’s appointment. Get you started on treatment right away.”
“Did.” I shuddered out a breath, the sobs starting to space out enough that I felt like I could get words out. “Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Good.” He kissed my nose again. “You’re ok, though? I mean,” he went on before I could do more than direct an incredulous look at him, “obviously notokay, but like…you’re not hurt? The cats are ok? You had me so scared when you called and couldn’t talk, honey. I don’t even remember the drive over here, I was so focused on getting to you.”
God, that was so unsafe. I shouldn’t have called him until I had myself under control. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m…we’re ok.” I wasn’t ok by any stretch of the definition, but he needed to hear that I was, so that was what I was going to tell him.
He dropped his hand from the back of my head and wrapped both his arms around me tightly. “Everything’s going to be ok.” He paused. “I feel like we’ve said the word ‘ok’ about five hundred times in the last two minutes. Everything’s going to be…fine? Does that sound any better?”
I managed a wet giggle. “Fine,” I echoed. “But…”
He shook his head, his hair tickling my forehead as it moved. “No ‘but’s. We’re going to get you on medicine - whatever the latest is, I don’t know - and you’re going to have a perfectly normal life, just with a chronic medical condition like tons of people have.” His hug tightened. “And if I come back positive, the same goes for me.”
“You’re not mad?” I whispered into the side of his head. “Even if…?”
“Not mad,” he interrupted me definitively. “Worried, yes. Not even about your health, really. Just about you being safe and happy. It hurts to see you this upset. But mad? No. None of this is your fault.”
I sighed quietly, feeling some of the tension leach out of me, and sank my weight against him. He crooned something too low to make out and rocked me gently from side to side. And I breathed.
***
I came to, an unknown amount of time later, with my head cushioned on Jamison’s lap and a cat curled up near my nose. His hand was tangled in my hair, stroking smoothly against my scalp in a rhythm I couldn’t identify. Trying not to dislodge his hand, I turned my head slightly up until I could see him out of the corner of my eye.
“Hey,” he said at the movement, smiling down at me. “You ok?”
I queried my body and soul. I ached, both physically and mentally, but the tears seemed to have abated at some point while I slept. My face felt tight with their dried remnants, but I could breathe. “I think so,” I said quietly, into what felt like a reverent silence.
His fingertips ran over my scalp again, raising goosebumps. “I’m glad. You want to talk about it, or do you want to relax some more?”
I turned my face into his thigh, inhaling his comforting scent of vanilla and musk. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to worry. I just wanted to…be. “Relax,” I said into the leg of his jeans.
Somehow he must have understood me, because he made a low noise and petted me again. His free hand came up and scratched on the cat’s butt in front of me. I belatedly recognized Solo’s silver-and-white floof as the furry bundle stood up and stretched his rear end into the air. “We’re just going to sit heretogether for a while,” he said in that low, soothing voice. “And then I’ll make you something to eat while you cuddle the cats.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Ah, ah, ah.” He pressed a finger to my lips. “I didn’t say Ihadto; I said I wasgoingto.”
Why was this man being so good to me, after all that had happened - was going to potentially happen? “Why?” I asked, and it came out like a whine. I winced.
He tilted my head up to face him again and smiled softly. “Because it makes me happy to take care of you, and you need to be taken care of right now. Win-win.” His hand returned to stroking through my hair. “Just keep breathing.”
I sighed deeply and let the side of my head sink into his thigh. Solo’s tail twitched in front of me, occasionally brushing my nose and making it itch. We sat in silence for what felt like an immeasurable amount of time, and somehow it didn’t feel awkward or ominous. Finally, Jamison gave my scalp one last scratch and gently lifted my head off his leg so he could slip out from under me. “Have you eaten anything today?”
I blinked, trying to remember. “I had breakfast,” I said after some consideration. “And then I was going to break for lunch but I decided to check my messages first and…” I sighed and waved a hand in the air meaningfully. “Well.”
He made an understanding noise and gently extracted his hand from my hair. I fought the urge to protest; the man couldn’t spend the rest of his life stroking me like a spoiled cat. “I’m gonna go see what you have in the kitchen.” He stood slowly, making sure to not lower my head to the couch cushion too roughly. “Keep breathing.”
Obediently, I took a deep breath and let it out. Without his hands on me, I could feel my anxiety trying to rise again. HIV. Positive. Jamison. Death. Infectious. My breath stuttered, and then Curie was there, curling up in the impossibly tiny spacebetween my front and the edge of the couch. I nearly choked on a mouthful of floof and spent the next minute trying to clear the fur from my tongue. By the time I’d done that, the panic had abated some and I could think again.
I listened to Jamison clattering around in the kitchen, muttering to himself, and I stroked Curie’s flank. Her little body vibrated under my hand and I closed my eyes, taking deep breaths at a forced slow speed. I was fine. This was fine. We were fine.Everythingwas fine.
Jamison was here.
I kept breathing, focusing on the in and out and the soft cat under my hand.
A plate clanked onto the coffee table, startling me out of the light doze my breathing had hypnotized me into. I took a moment to wonder that my mind had gone quiet enough to let me drowse, then cracked my eyes open to see Jamison standing in front of me with a kind smile on his face. “I brought you a sandwich,” he told me, gesturing to the plate he’d put in front of me. “It’s not fancy, but I figured it was better to get something into you now than make you wait while I tried to cook something.”
I levered myself up to a sitting position, wincing as my body aches reasserted themselves. My shoulders felt like I’d been standing at attention for hours, my neck was stiff from laying on the couch, and my lower back was, well, better not thought of. Even my forearms hurt. For a wild moment, I wondered if body aches were a symptom of HIV infection, then I reminded myself that even if they were, they wouldn’t have come on this fast the very moment I got my test results. No, this was just the result of tension and panic permeating my body.
