I close my eyes and take a deep breath. In. Out. Controlled. The specific technique I use when a situation has variables I can’t account for and I need my mind to stop throwing itself at the walls and start functioning.
“Fuck this shit,” I mutter and grab my jacket. Sometimes risks need to be taken… and tonight it’s one of those times.
The gold 3C on her door stares at me as I stand motionless, ear to the wood, listening, waiting, already running contingencies in case she’s awake. My watch reads 3:04 a.m. She should be asleep by now. She always is. But I adjust the buff around my face, tugging it higher, sealing every edge. Just in case.
Her lock takes eleven seconds, and I ease the door open one centimeter at a time. It’s dark, except for the streetlight through the gap in her curtains. I’ve been in her apartment many times before. I know the layout the way I know everything about her—thoroughly, completely, in a way she will never know and I couldn’t justify.
But you don’t even know the name of her doctor. Idiot.
I move through the dark to the bedroom doorway and stop. When I see her, something inside me snaps clean in two. A silent fracture. Steel shearing without warning. Irreversible.
She’s so fucking small in that bed, like one strong breath could scatter her. Skin too pale. Lips cracked. Body curled like it’s trying to hold itself together. Breakable in a way that makes my chest feel too tight, too full of something I have no name for and no right to feel.
On her side, facing away, her hair is loose and splayed across the pillow. One arm is tucked under it, the other stretched across the empty half of the bed like she reached for something in her sleep and didn’t find it. She’s wearing a thin shirt, the kind that’s been washed so many times it’s lost its shape, and her breathing is audible from the doorway—congested, labored, catching slightly on each exhale in a way that pulls a wire taut across my lungs.
The blankets are half off, kicked down in sleep, twisted around her waist, her shoulder bare to the cold air of the room. A half-empty bottle of cough syrup sits on the bedside table, cap off, the thick purple liquid still clinging to the inside of the glass. She’s knocked out cold, the deep, medicated kind of sleep that only comes when the fever finally wins and the medicine drags her under.
Crumpled tissues litter the floor, and I avoid stepping on them as my feet find the familiar path to the armchair, one I’ve sat in more times than I’d care to admit…reading private thoughts that aren’t mine.
While I sit in the dark and I watch her breathe, cataloging every move she makes, I count her inhales. I count her exhales. I count the seconds between each, and when her breathing stutters, I feel it in every muscle. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I can’t explain it, but her being sick—even from something as trivial as the goddamn flu—it does something to me I don’t like. It makes mefeel, and feeling isn’t something I’m wired for. Not feeling is how I’m still alive. That’s how I win in this fucked-up world.
She shifts. The restless half-turn of a body searching for relief it can’t locate. The blankets twist further, dropping from her shoulder entirely, the cold air of the room reaching her bare skin.
I’m up before I decide to move.
I cross to the bed, pull the blanket up from where it’s bunched, and draw it carefully across her shoulder. My hands are steady, but for some reason I don’t move them away as I study her face. The fever’s flush paints her cheek, her lips slightly parted, the dark fan of her lashes—and I reach out and put the back of my fingers against her forehead.
She’s burning up, and with my hand on her skin I feel the full, devastating weight of how much I can’t stand this. This is not how I want to see her. I want her outside this apartment, wearing that cherry-red lipstick, smiling at strangers simply because the sun’s up. And when she’s in here, in her safe-space, I want to watch her sit in the windowsill, drinking her cinnamon latte, writing in her diary so that tomorrow, when I sneak inhere, I have more of her thoughts to collect, more pieces to the puzzle of her.
Not like this. Not heat-wracked and shivering and quietly suffering in the dark. I hate this, and I hate how fucking much I care.
A soft moan presses against her lips, and she rolls her head slightly to the side, like she’s trying to lean into my touch, like it gives her relief somehow. Something shifts under my sternum that I have no name for and no use for, so I pull my hand back.
I can’t stay here. Not with her so vulnerable, so in need of someone to take care of her. Everything about it draws me in, and I can’t let it. It’s already too deep, too real, and too fucking dangerous.
I force myself to walk away and cross the room without looking back, because if I look back, I won’t leave. When I reach her front door, something catches my eye—a black mid-heel lying on its side, scuffed at the toe, thrown carelessly against the baseboard. I try to ignore it, my fingers twitching. Right now, I don’t have time to debate this, so I crouch and pick it up, aligning it perfectly parallel to its mate, toes forward, heels flush, exactly one inch from the wall. The symmetry settles something in me, and I exit her apartment, sliding her door closed until I hear the click of the lock.
My pulse hammers in my throat as I lean against the wall outside her building, thumb scrolling through search results for“pharmacy 24-hour delivery.”I tap through screens with mechanical precision. Fever reducers, menthol drops, those gel packs you snap to activate.
I hesitate at beverages, then select the coconut-lime electrolyte shit I found in her fridge one time, plus ginger tea. My finger hovers over the checkout button, then slides back to the candy section. The green apple lollipop—not heart-shaped, and not pink—goes into my cart. Practical items only, except for that one thing that isn’t.
I pocket the phone and head to my usual position on the street. The city moves around me, indifferent—a few late stragglers, a lone cab, the particular hush that settles in the last hours before the morning shift kicks in and the whole machine starts again.
It’s just before dawn when the delivery arrives, a young woman with a bag, checking her phone. I watch her go into the building. Four minutes later, the light in Sophia’s apartment goes on, a warm yellow glow behind closed curtains. Relief settles on my shoulders.
She’s up. She’s moving. She’s okay.
I stay there on the street with my hands in my pockets and watch her lit window, letting myself feel the full, specific warmth of it. It comes from knowing she has what she needs, from being the reason she has what she needs, from having stood in her dark bedroom with my hand on her forehead and straightened her blanket and watched her breathe—all of it done without her knowing, without asking for anything back, without any version of this that makes operational sense.
Whatever it is I’m feeling, I refuse to name it. I can’t. Naming it means I’m acknowledging it, and that’s something I can’t afford to do.
I turn up my collar and walk back into the city, telling myself I won’t think about any of it.
I think about all of it.
18
RETH
