“No problem,” I whisper.
I type in the rest of the information and wait for our turn. He snuggles back onto the pillow and closes his eyes. His hair is a curly mess, and I have an urge to push it back, to soothe him again with something physical. I wonder if he’d purr like the cats, leaning back into my touch the way he did earlier.
But the reverie is interrupted by the chiming of my phone.
“Hello, Mr. Whitman,” a friendly voice says. I hold up the phone so it’s facing him and he doesn’t have to expend the effort, although he does sit up, as though he can’t quite bring himself to be so informal in front of a doctor. “I’m Dr. Banks. I see in your notes that you took a rapid strep test and it came back positive.”
I hand him the test, and he holds it up to show her. “Yes, I’ve been feverish all day but trying to ignore it. Obviously that wasn’t going so well.”
She chuckles, clearly not surprised by that course of action. “What’s your fever now?” she asks.
“I took some medicine, so I’m hoping it’s a bit down, but when I took my temperature before, it was ... I’m sorry, this feels so silly to say, but 103.4? Fahrenheit?”
“Well, that’s not silly, Mr. Whitman; it’s actually quite a bit higher than we’d expect.”
“Oh, I just meant ... in Celsius you’d be dead with that ... never mind,” he says, the effort to explain clearly more than it’s worth. “What do you mean ‘higher than we’d expect’?” he asks nervously, suddenly realizing what she said.
“It’s not at a level where we’d be concerned, so don’t be alarmed,” she says in a soothing voice. “I just meant we normally see those fever spikes in small children, not grown men.”
He grumbles something inaudible, and I have to stifle a laugh at his annoyance at the comparison.
“It probably means you were overdoing it and this is your body’s way of fighting back. I’m glad you finally took some time out for yourself,” she says, and I see him wince. I know that feeling too—the understanding that you haven’t put yourself first, and the way it eventually creeps up on you.
“So what do I do now?” he asks, skirting past it.
“I’m going to prescribe you some antibiotics. You’ve got your pharmacy info already in, so I’ll send it over right away. That should knock it all out, and you should start feeling better in a day or two. If you’re not,then you’ll want to go see a doctor in person. But that would be very unlikely. Strep, once it’s diagnosed, is usually pretty easy to get rid of.”
“Thanks very much, Dr. Banks,” he says, and with a few more basic instructions, she lets him go.
He shifts toward me once the phone is off, moving with effort to sit up taller, as though buoyed by the knowledge that there’s a plan ahead.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” he says sincerely.
I can feel my face heating up, along with the rising urge to minimize. “Just think of it as though we’re even now. I ruined one night by locking you up on a roof but fixed another one by inappropriately barging in and shoving a doctor in your face.”
I try to smile and make it into a joke. But he reaches out and tenderly takes hold of my wrist.
The sensation of his thumb sliding across my pulse point makes every part of me flush, as though the touch has transferred the heat from his body to mine. There’s something in the simplicity of the movement that makes it all the more affecting. This isn’t a thumb-war grip; it’s affection and gratitude. It’s softness, something that seems so hard won when it’s coming from Eli.
I lift my eyes from where his hand is touching me and see him staring back at me.
“You’re decisive,” he says, and I’m not sure exactly why that’s what’s stuck out to him, but I do know he means it as a compliment.
“It’s in my nature to try and fix people’s problems,” I say with a shrug, once again downplaying, trying to ignore the heat crawling its way up to my cheeks.
“Most people don’t,” he says, watching me, his gaze burrowing past the defenses I’m throwing up.
But before the heat of the moment engulfs me, he gingerly removes his hand from my wrist and sinks back into his pillows. As though he knows a little distance is necessary.
He’s silent for a moment while he looks down at his hands. Then he speaks so softly I almost don’t hear him at first. “When you went tothe store,” he says, “I was thinking how, if you hadn’t happened to come by, I probably would’ve just suffered alone, carrying on and pretending like everything was fine. And even if someone else had come and asked if I was okay, I would’ve begged them off and underplayed it.”
“Whereas I just barged in,” I scoff, the heat still not quite gone from my face.
But he shakes his head and looks back up, straight into my eyes. “You know how to handle me,” he says, an unanswered question written into his expression that I already know he’s not going to ask. “I don’t know why, but you seem to always be one step ahead of me in a way no one else is. I didn’t like it as a quality in a therapist,” he says with a chuckle, and I can’t stop a sheepish grin from showing on my face. “But I like it like this.”
That tactile sympathy I’ve been feeling for him all day, the urge to push his hair back, to have his thumb graze over my wrist, to give comfort in a solidified way, feels especially present now. I reach out and squeeze his forearm, still so hot to the touch. “I’m glad I could help,” I say honestly.
But I stand up, before the moment can get any more charged.
