I quickly sat down beside her and rubbed her back as her body lurched, trying to ignore the fact that she felt way too frail under my hand.
“How long have you been sick?” I asked when her body finally calmed down. I needed to figure out if this was a virus or if this was just… grief.
She took in a deep breath, still looking down into the toilet. “I’m just… I’m just so upset, Griff.”
I felt my head fall back against the bathroom wall. It was hard to see her hurting. It tripled how badly I already felt. “I know.”
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, and I continued to rub her back.
“I’m sorry,” I offered her. “About last night. I was a complete asshole.”
Still facing the toilet, she reached out to hold myhand.
“You, Benjamin Griffiths, always deserve a redemption arc,” she saidsoftly.
Those words made my chest swell with love for her.
We stayed there together for a while. Only when it looked like she was falling asleep against the toilet did I quietly stand and carefully lift her small body up in myarms.
I walked down her hallway and stood facing their bedroom… but I couldn’t move any further in. It felt wrong to enter their room.
Instead, I moved back out toward the living room and laid her down on thecouch.
I quickly found the clicker, muted it, and turned on a rerun of a sitcom I knew she liked, then carefully moved her feet into my lap so I could sit as well.
For the next half hour or so, she slept while I casually gave her a foot rub, and I wondered if she’d gotten any sleep at all since it happened.
“That feels nice,” she mumbled finally, then stretched out. When her legs straightened she immediately winced.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
“Charlie horse,” she said through gritted teeth and reached for her calf.
I immediately rubbed it up and down for her, kneading the muscles.
“You’re really good at that,” she said with her eyes still closed.
“Might as well put all my physical therapy courses to use,” I told her. I always thought I’d go to grad school for it as well, but that plan kind of fell by the wayside of hockey.
“I always forget you wanted to be a physical therapist,” she said. “Why did you choosethat?”
I froze for a second and then let my hands roam to her left ankle. “Remember when you broke this? Here and here, right?” I traced my fingers over the small bones I remembered her breaking.
I felt hernod.
“During those weeks you were laid up, I spent a lot of my free time looking up exercises for when ya got your cast off. I wanted to help you get back on the ice faster. You were so good…” In my mind, I could still see her jumping gracefully through the air. “Anyway, it made me interested in sports rehab.”
I never actually told anyone the real reason why I chose it… But I figured maybe it would help her feel better to hear. Maybe she’d understand how much better my life was from her being in it.
She made eye-contact with me then and looked like she wanted to ask me another question, but instead she just said, “Thank you, Griff.”
I nodded and moved to get up then. “How about I make you something different to eat?” I asked. The breakfast sandwiches I brought over were still laying uneaten on her kitchen table, but she needed something easy to keep down to help her out a bit. I started searching through her cabinets forsoup.
“Chicken noodle okay?” I asked her.
She looked at me from the couch and chewed her lip. “I’m not hungry, Griff.”
My heart hurt seeing her laying there… It felt like we were stuck in some kind of parallel universe where everything was flipped on its head. I wasn’t supposed to be the one making her food to feelbetter…
