When I was done, a pale-faced Quinn shuffled through the living room draped in his thick bedding. He gave me a cursory, runny-nosed nod, and slumped his way to the bathroom.
Cough! Cough!
Right. Sitting here wasn’t helping him any.
I held my breath and darted into his room to grab his laptop.
I hurried back into the living room, plugged the laptop in, and opened it up. Of course it was password-protected. I stared at the ceiling as if it might provide some inspiration.
Instead, it provided the sobering fact that I still knew so little about Quinn. I couldn’t even conjure an obvious password, like his favorite pet’s name or his birthday. The laptop hummed, warming my thighs.
Quinn emerged freshly showered but still moving with that pitiful slump. He trudged to the armchair coddled in a blanket—no doubt a sweat-drenched blanket. I shifted a few inches to escape the path of his contaminated breathing.
“What are you doing with my laptop?” He rested his head like I just had and closed his eyes.
“What’s your password?”
One eye peeled open. “I want to know why. But since I have nothing to hide, I’ll give you a clue.” He angled his head toward me and closed his eyes.
“You’re sick, and you want to play games?”
“I’m sick, and if this is the only entertainment I’m going to get...”
I ran the tips of my fingers over the keyboard. “Okay. Clue.”
“It’s a comic book character.”
I typed, hit Enter, and just like that I was in. “Thanks. Might want to make it a tougher clue next time.”
“You got it already?”
“Sure. It was either Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, both of whom you like without their costumes on.”
Quinn laughter morphed into a bout of coughing, and I slid further down the couch.
“Where would I find your paper?” I asked, confronted with a mess of files on his desktop.
“In the right hand corner, just above the trash symbol.”
I clicked into it. “That’s no way to organize your work.”
For the next few hours, I stayed in the living room, steadily inching toward the other end of the couch with every one of Quinn’s coughs.
Arches of light stretched over the floors and onto Quinn dozing in the armchair. He snored lightly with his blocked nose, nuzzling his ear against the red-and-gold upholstery.
I fished out my notebook and pen, and let the words soak into the paper in the same heady, drowsy manner as the sun soaked into Quinn.
Ethereal. Calm. A golden king claiming his throne even in sleep....
Sliding the notebook into my pocket, I read over Quinn’s paper one last time. It had been mostly written, save for the conclusion, so reading it once had provided enough information for me to finish writing it for him. His main issue was poor grammar. I would have to sit him down sometime and introduce him to the comma.
Quinn stirred, his tongue clacking against the roof of his mouth as if parched. He blinked at me, his eyes unfocused, and said croakily, “Do I distract you today?”
A sound, something like an attempt to laugh, warbled from him.
“You seem to have a way of doing that, Quinn. Even when you’re this sorry looking.”
He frowned, and then shook his head as if to clear it.
