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Carlos wakes to an empty bed, warm sheets underneath his hand when he smoothes out the wrinkles pushing a tidal wave of panic back out to sea. The clock on the nightstand clicks over to twenty-one minutes past two as moonlight trespasses through the blinds and paints the room in nightshade blue. Carlos’ fingers give one more pass down TK’s side of the bed, straightening out the blanket for whenever he can coax him back into their king size cocoon of comfort before going in search of his boyfriend.
It doesn’t take long, their open floor plan coming into full, lamp-lighted view the moment he slides their bedroom door back. TK’s figure gets lost half in shadow from where he stands next to the shelving along the brick, windowless wall but it does little to hide the fact that he’s shivering. Carlos purposefully lets his bare feet tap lightly across the concrete floor of the loft as he crosses the room, snatching TK’s favorite throw off the back of an accent chair as he goes.
“Babe,” he murmurs in the swell of an amber glow as he turns on another lamp. TK doesn’t react, gaze caught on what Carlos can now tell is the framed picture of the two of them sitting on one of the shelves. He shuffles over while shaking out the blanket by the corners and drapes it over TK’s shoulders when he reaches his side. “Are you alright?”
TK sniffs, an audible indiction he’s been crying considering he went to bed without any symptoms of having a cold, but when he turns to hide his face in Carlos’ neck the warm, stickiness of his skin and damp eyelashes are all that’s needed to know for sure. Carlos is enveloped in the fuzzy threads of TK’s blanket as the younger man holds the corners of it in his fists while hugging him around the shoulders, shielding the two of them from anything beyond their embrace.
“TK,” he whispers, lips warm against the shell of the man’s ear as he kisses the curve of it. “Talk to me, sweetheart.”
He feels TK’s breath shudder beneath his palms as he maps out the length of his boyfriend’s ribcage with his hands, palms sliding up and down the ridges more defined by weeks spent in the hospital after wiping his feet on the welcome mat at death’s door. “I’m right here with you,” he assures and feels breath come just a little easier.
“ ‘Los?” TK’s lips are chapped, but sticky with the remnants of tears against his throat, but Carlos has had so much less to ask for anything more than this.
“Yeah, baby?”
“I’m so tired,” comes the admission on quivering breath, the heat of it against Carlos’ collarbone a juxtaposition he’s yet to get use to.
“Then come back to bed,” he says, taking a few steps backwards until he breaks the blanket barrier around them when TK doesn’t follow.
“I…” TK starts, voice lost over the sound of the heat kicking back on and the decision of telling the truth, but it’s lies and layers of miscommunication that left their home empty of all the things that mattered before so TK steps forward now and reaches for Carlos again. “I can’t.”
TK’s fingers, cold and trembling and intertwined with his, make Carlos’ hands feel bigger somehow, like he can hold on just a little bit tighter to make the tremors stop. He gives a gentle squeeze and drops a kiss to the back of TK’s hand, right over the bruises still painting his skin from the needle pricks of IVs and maybe he feels the fingers wrapped around his steady like a boat tied to the dock on calm water rather than adrift out at sea.
“Why not?” He asks, because since the moment they met Carlos believed TK could do anything, and in the here and now, when Carlos knows that it’s not entirely true, he wants the love of his life to know that he’ll always be here to help with everything else.
He starts walking backwards again, pulling TK along by the small of his back and smiling when his boyfriend lets himself be guided like a vessel following the reflection of a lighthouse beam across the water. “You’re safe here, you know. With me, in our house, in our bed.” The backs of his knees hit the mattress and he peels the blanket from around them to discard it on the floor. With gentle pulls and tugs, they wind up underneath the comforter and a slim column of mattress between them as they lay facing each other.
Carlos tames the sleep rumpled ends of TK’s hair with slow strokes of fingers, the pad of his thumb catching the smooth skin of his temple with each pass. TK relaxes under his touch, eyes falling shut with an exhaustion that’s been put off for far too long and Carlos encourages sleep to come with the warm press of his lips against TK’s forehead.
“I’m sorry,” TK whispers, guilt unmuted despite the way half of it gets muffled by his pillow.
Their love for each other has moved beyond such trivial things as unwarranted forgiveness and putting band-aids over deep cuts so Carlos keeps his voice just as quiet when he asks, “What for?”
TK’s eyes open as slow as a sunrise cresting over a beached horizon, beautiful and mesmerizing and leaving Carlos wishing to see it a million times over just like this. “You can’t sleep because of me. I keep waking you up.”
Only half of that feels true, the lingering dread of the future without the love of his life had made sleep seem unobtainable for so long, for so many different reasons that he’s forgotten what it feels like to want it for the sake of being healthy. “You didn’t wake me up. I found you crying in our living room after waking up alone.” He softens the reality of it with a grin, but it still hurts too much to be a dream.
“I don’t know what to do, Carlos,” TK cries, slow tears spreading out across the thin threads of the pillowcase like lily pads atop a pond. “The nightmares. The muscle spasms. The..”
TK’s fingers search the curve of Carlos’ wrist until he finds a pulse that beats back against the tips of them, steady and strong and just for him. “I’m so afraid that if I close my eyes that all of this will be gone, that I’ll be-…I don’t want to be stuck there again.”
Carlos wraps around him, holding him here in this moment and in this life. “You’re here with me. I won’t let you go.” He feels TK hold him back despite the way his arms tremor under their own volition, something the doctors assured him would stop overtime and just another thing Carlos will love him through until it does.
“What was it tonight?”
“The spasms,” TK answers, bunching his fingers into fistfuls of Carlos’ shirt as if it’ll lessen the intensity of the tremors. They both know it won’t, but Carlos offers comfort down the length of his back with the slow drag of his hand down the knobs of TK’s spine. “I got up so I wouldn’t shake you awake.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he says as if he hasn’t said it a hundred times before. “You’ll never recover if you don’t stop putting my needs above yours. And you know I’m struggling, too. How many times have my nightmares woken you up?”
“We should keep a sticker chart on the fridge just to be sure,” TK teases, and the curve of his smile feels so good against Carlos’ neck he can’t help but to kiss him around a laugh.
“I’d do it, you know,” Carlos says once he’s sobered, voice still stained with humor. “Put little tiger stickers on the nights you woke me up.”
“Cows for you,” TK laughs underneath the wiggle of Carlos’ fingers when he tickles him for it.
“Carlos Cow Eyes strikes again,” he says, breathing deep when TK settles against him once more. “I would do anything for you, Ty.”
“I know, but I don’t think a sticker chart is going to fix this.”
“What do you think will?”
“Time,” TK responds with his hand splayed out wide across Carlos’ side, assuring both of them that they still have some left.
When he takes a breath, Carlos knows they’ll never come this easy if he ever loses this man again. “You have all of mine.”
TK trembles violently, groaning at the ache of it, but still smiles in the aftermath when he adjusts his head to look at Carlos. “I fought to have more of mine to give you and I always will.”
Carlos kisses the crown of his head, smiling at the feel of wayward locks tickling his nose and the way TK shifts closer. “I love you, you know.”
“I know,” TK promises. “I love you, too.”
Shuffling down further in the bed and pulling the blanket up around them, Carlos finds TK’s gaze in the dark and grins. “Then instead of thinking about losing this when you fall asleep, try thinking about having it all again tomorrow when you wake up.”
Carlos wishes it were that simple even though it might not be. But here on the other side of a miracle, in the home that’s theirs and not his, a love not lost but found again, he starts to believe it can be.
“And if that doesn’t work?” TK asks, his question slurred with sleep sticking to the vowels.
Carlos pushes his fingers through TK’s hair again, kissing the ruffled trail he leaves behind and breathes easy as sleep starts to claim him, too. “Then I’ll lay here awake until there’s a new tomorrow to love you.”