Will reaches over to grab it from my purse, which I flung to the ground near the bed as soon as I entered the hotel room. “What’s your passcode?”
“Three two eight three.”
After a pause, he says, “That’s Zoe’s passcode.”
I smile against the covers. “We made them matching back then. I guess neither of us ever changed it.”
Now that the room is dark, my eyelids fall heavy. Will locates the sound machine app, and fabricated noises from the rainforest flood my ears. Owls hooting, rain falling, trees rustling.
I’m folded against myself, horizontal on my right side and facing away from Will, but I can hear his every shift as the bedspread rustles. He rises to his knees, bending over me, and sets one hand in front of my face to steady himself. Hair flops down across his ocean eyes.
“Do you want to stay down here?” he asks.
“No. I’m cold.”
“Do you want to stay curled up in a little ball?” There’s a note of humor carrying through his tone, even as it’s mostly swallowed with concern.
“Yes. This is how it hurts the least.”
Will’s hands settle against my body, almost tentatively searching for the right spots to grip. Every touch is a soothing balm. It spreads from that one spot until I feel him everywhere. Eventually, he hauls me up the bed, somehow without disentangling me from my curled position.
It usually isn’t blatant how much bigger he is—it usually doesn’tmatterto me, one way or the other—but I notice now, as Will cradles me against him and my head fits right into the crook where his arm meets his firm side.
He pulls the covers over both of us, letting his legs go long against the mattress, slumping down the headboard to create the perfect angle with his body for me to rest against. I’m practically perpendicular to him, but we fit together seamlessly.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks.
I nod up and down, unintentionally grazing the muscles of his upper arm. “If I had even a fraction more of my faculties right now,” I mumble, barely able to form words the way they’re supposed to sound, “I would be mortified by how helpless and desperate I appear.”
“Everyone needs help sometimes.”
My fever hits in full force. I’m desperately thankful for his warm body around mine while my skin erupts into shivers.
I doze in and out of sleep after that, no clue how many minutes or hours are passing. A slip of light is splayed against the far wall of the hotel room, and every time my eyes crack open, I watch the light shrink in direct correlation to the temperature of my body. The ache in my stomach eases as the fever peaks.
I dream of nothing. And then I wake up again to Will’s snoring.
My brain is still foggy. I come into consciousness slowly, then all at once, when the sound of his snoringwrecksmy eardrums. It’s a consistent, greedy breath, in and out, in and out, and even though I don’t quite have enough oxygen to make it happen, my body attempts a laugh.
I’ve slipped down further. My head is in his lap. His hands are fisted in my hair. When I try sitting up, his deadweight grip keeps me down.
Carefully, I extricate his fingers from my hair and sit up, testing out the state of my head. The dizziness is gone, and so is most of my tummy ache, but I’m still oscillating between freezing and sweating.
I turn to look at Will, unobserved.
We’rein bedtogether.
Sure, we’re fully dressed, but thenakednessof this situation can’t be ignored. He’s snoring louder than a freight train, his lips parted, head resting against the headboard, hair dry now but impossibly messy. His eyelashes are brushing against his cheekbones. Kissing them.
I feel the full momentum of my affection for him approaching me in a tidal wave. In mere moments, it’s going to knock me out.
The wave arrives, and my affection crashes all around us both.
After an amount of time I don’t care to analyze in which all I do is watch him sleep upright, he snore-snorts himself awake on an inhale, eyes blinking rapidly.
“J? You okay?” His voice is almost nothing.
“Does that happen often?” I whisper.
