Dom laughs. “No, she was very lovely. But I’m generally good with parents,” he says. “I am the President of the Parents, after all.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re annoyingly charismatic.”
“Thank you,” he grins.
He makes sure that I eat slash drink before asking his next question. “How are you feeling? I think you should go to the doctor, so I can either get you in an Uber to urgent care, or we can do a telehealth visit.”
“It hurts when I blink,” I admit.
“Let’s do telehealth,” he says. He picks up my phone and holds it to my face to unlock it. “What’s your insurance? I’m assuming all your info and passwords and things are saved on your phone.”
I’ve never felt so useless. Stripped bare, like my chest and ribcage are ripped open so that you can see my insides. The last person to see me in a state like this was my mother, probably over twenty years ago. If I get sick, I typically just make a nest out of my pillows and burrow for a few days. But when was the last time I was this sick? I made a disgusting puddle of sweat in my sheets, and Domtouchedthem.
“You can leave me,” I tell him quietly, as he fiddles with my phone. “I can do telehealth myself. I’m sure Frankie misses you.”
Something in my voice makes him put my phone down and turn the entire force of his attention on me. “She might miss me, but you need me more. She’s fine with Tita Gloria.”
“I don’t?—”
“Lina,” he sighs, pulling me into him and wrapping me in his tattooed tentacle arms, smoothing my hair.My hair. What the fuck does my hair look like right now? “When we agreed to give this a shot, this was part of the package. Me taking care of you. Let me take care of you. I want to be the one who takes care of you.”
“I don’t like it,” is all I can manage to say. “It makes me feel… unbalanced. Out of control. Weak.”
“This doesn’t make you any less of a boss-ass bitch. You’re still a boss-ass bitch. Just one with the flu.”
I realize I’m weeping again when I realize his shirt is getting wet.
“You told me this exact thing earlier this week, when you said accepting help doesn’t make me any less of a dad. You don’t have to do everything. I’m here for you. Always.”
I think I’m falling. This is what it feels like, and I forgot how scary of a thing it was, how out of control and wild and all-consuming.
“This is what being a partner means,” he continues. “Sticking around. Making sure you’re okay. Treating you like the queen you are. Serving at your beck and call. Not because you need it, but because you fucking deserve it.”
With this, he burrows deep through my skin and my flesh and my bones and into the deepest recesses of my soul to force out any reservations I could have about loving him.
* * *
It’s probably the flu, the tiny doctor head tells me over my phone video. He prescribes a five-day medication that Dom runs out to pick up. He comes back with grocery bags and spends the next hour cooking something calledarroz caldo, which is a soupy chicken and rice porridge thing his mom used to make him whenever he got sick, loaded with garlic and ginger and other magical feel-better herbs. He only gets a little mad when I can only take five bites.
I alternate between sleep and sweat and sipping sports drinks all day. Dom’s next to me on the bed every time I wake up, leaning up on the headboard, long legs stretched out, a new movie pulled up on my laptop each time.
At one point, I make the mistake of bringing up the Fall Festival.
“It’s in a few weeks, and I’m in charge of planning and organizing it,” I tell him.
His face breaks into that stern angry papa bear look, and it would make me wet if I weren’t so dehydrated. “That’s something Jean told me I’mdefinitelysupposed to be doing as the PTO President. I don’t want to see you doing any of it, except maybe last stage approval stuff. The Fall Festival is for fundraising. From the community, from families. This is something I’m supposed to handle, and the perfect thing to delegate at the school staff level.” Still glaring at me, he pulls out his phone and dials a number. “Hey Georgia, it’s Dom.”
I try to take the phone away, and he jumps out of bed like a huge jerk, because he knows I’m too weak to follow him.
I get a front-row seat to Work Dom, and I soon see how he has found so much success as a Business Operator Serial Entrepreneur. He enlists Georgia to build a Fall Festival team of school staff who have done it before, including herself. He calls a few parents, gives them a list of tasks, typing on his phone here and there and taking notes. He does this all in under fifteen minutes. He puts his phone down for a moment.
But then Dom seems to remember something, picks it back up, and FaceTimes someone else.
“Daddy!”
We break into identical smiles.
“Hey,anak. How you doing?”
