After we hang up, I stare at my phone for a long moment. This situation is spiraling way beyond our control. We need a strategy, boundaries, something to keep this whole mess from consuming us both.
I dial Logan. His phone rings and rings, then voicemail. I don’t know what his deal is, but I fully intend to find out.
“Where are you going?” Chrissy asks as I walk toward the foyer.
“Next door. Be right back.”
Chapter 15
Iknock and knock, but Logan’s house remains silent as a library after hours. Is he even home? Maybe he’s ignoring me. Or sleeping with noise-canceling headphones. Or hiding in a secret celebrity panic room I don’t know about.
I hesitate for half a second before trying the doorknob. It turns with suspicious ease, and the door comes slightly ajar.
I step in. “Logan?” My voice bounces off the walls of his sparsely decorated living room.
Eerily, the house looks like no one lives here. What if he took one look at the news and fled town?
Inching closer to the living room, I spot a bedroom across the hall, bed empty but covers kicked off. Then I see him.
My heart half melts, half seizes with alarm. Logan lies collapsed on the couch, his gray t-shirt ridden halfway up to reveal an unfairly symmetrical strip of abs, his normally beige-toned cheeks flushed crimson, brow glistening with sweat, and his breathing shallow and uneven.
I rush to kneel at his side, sudden panic making my movements clumsy. “Logan?”
He mumbles something unintelligible.
I press my palm to his forehead. Holy blazing inferno. He’s burning up.
“Come on,” I say, looping his arm over my shoulder and bracing myself for the deadweight of a six-foot-two pop star. “Let’s get you to bed.”
His skin is hot and clammy against mine, radiating heat like asphalt in July. He’s barely upright as we shuffle down the hallway toward his room, his feet dragging with each step.
“Maisie?” he mutters, voice gravelly and distant.
“Don’t talk,” I say, gentleness replacing the panic in my voice. “You need to rest.”
He stumbles once—a dramatic lurch that nearly sends us both careening into the wooden floor—but I fight with everything I’ve got to keep us vertical. How can someone so lean be as heavy as a bag of cement? Through sheer determination, we make it to his bedroom in one piece. I ease him down onto the mattress before pulling the comforter over him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
When no answer comes except labored breathing, I spring into action. In the kitchen, I fling open the cupboards desperately, only to discover three nearly empty shelves and a half-eaten bag of barbecue potato chips mocking me with their inadequacy. The next one reveals four packs of cookies and instant noodles. There’s not a single bottle of medicine in sight—not even the basic pain relievers most normally functioning adults keep on hand.
I pull open the fridge: water, Coca-Cola, one bottle of mustard standing sentinel in this otherwise barren arctic wasteland. Is that it? The sad refrigerator of a man who apparently subsists on delivery and hopes.
“How are you even alive?” I mutter to the fluorescent-lit void before slamming it shut.
I hurry back home and rummage through my work bag. Liquid acetaminophen, which I keep handy for my students’ inevitable playground mishaps. Thermometer. Washcloth. I grab everything in sight and race back next door, feeling like I’m starring in my own medical drama.
Once at his bedside again, I check his temperature with the steady hand of someone who’s dealt with dozens of flu-ridden six-year-olds.
103.5 degrees.
Not good. He must’ve caught this while shivering his way to get my blanket at the hot spring. This is all my fault. Guilt coils in my stomach like a snake.
I pour twenty milliliters of medicine into the tiny cup that came with the bottle and prop him up gently so he can drink it, then I lay him back down as he coughs a little.
If only I hadn’t taken him to the hot spring, he wouldn’t have caught a cold. My chest squeezes as I watch him take shallow, rapid breaths. We have to bring his temperature down before his brain cooks inside his admittedly pretty skull.
I soak the washcloth I found underneath the kitchen sink in cold water and press it to his forehead before bringing a chair from the kitchen and sitting beside him.
Logan shivers beneath my touch, so I bring the blanket up to his neck and tuck it in gently, just like my mom used to do for me every time I fell sick.
