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Horrid knocks against the inside of your skull, your head pounds with the light of your bedroom as you blink awake. Your eyes sting with the dense air of the room, weighed down with rocks on your eyelids that crack along your waterline. Heat presses in on your temples, an unpleasant burn that settles behind your eyes and has you squeezing them shut against the assault of bright sunlight.
It feels like misery. A thick mucus misery that sniffles in your nose and stabs across your sinuses. It zings through your senses. Your taste a murky rot stuck between your teeth and your touch a sluggish movement beneath your blankets as you try to scrub the feeling from your face. It doesn't work.
You're sick.
A sickness that centers in your chest and strings itself throughout your limbs. Making you feel dry, it aches in your joints and has you whining into the pillows beneath you. Fluffy and soft, you hide in their granted comfort, wishing for a swift passing or a reprieve from the rumble of your thoughts.
Neither come, leaving you withering in the large empty bed. Under the thick covers and beneath the spinning of your ceiling fan, your mind slogs around the fact that- it's empty. The bed is empty.
You sit up, reaching out for the warm body that usually resides beside you. That fills the cold space your blankets fail to make up for in his absence.
Your boyfriend is gone. Lost to the square footage of your small apartment, your bedroom is empty of his deep voice and swimming green eyes that you fell asleep in the arms of only hours prior.
Your window, just past the rug and across the room from your bed, sits open. The gentle sound of pattering rain and passing cars filling your head as you stand, dragging the thick blanket with you into the cold of the open air. You bundle within it, wrapped around your head in a mock scarf that drowns out the louder sounds of your sock clad feet on the hardwood as you sniffle your way to the window and look out below.
In search of your shared car, his bike, maybe him on the stoop smoking or chatting with a neighbor. But nothing. A slate gray mess of dripping water and splashing puddles that holds nothing of the man you're looking for. His bike, custom painted and well loved, sits in its usual place. Covered from the weather against a small alcove wall with the motorcycles of the other residents.
Your car, on the other hand, is missing. A deep green paint job that he had insisted on missing from the line of them that usually sits parked on the road, creating a blank in your thoughts that floods with disappointment.
Not only do you feel awful, now you have no one to complain about it to. Nor someone to possibly make it better. Soothe your rocking head or the dry heave in your lungs that struggles into the shape of a cough.
You'd felt it coming, if you're honest, the growing sick in your lungs that clung to you with a stubbornness only matched by your willingness to ignore it. Felt it creeping in the back of your mind as you sat in class and wiped down counters at work. A tickle in your throat and a sniffle from your thoughts that had you standing in a daze last night as you made dinner, when said missing boyfriend waved you into the living room to sit so he could finish without the fear of you burning the kitchen down.
You were thankful for the help in the moment, and hadn't remembered most of going to bed that night, leaving you here, now, with a shiver through your body and the heat of chills down your back. It's dreadful. And once more, you've got no one to complain to.
Which is, of course, a staple of being miserable.
Frustration pricks at you, a dastard feeling that you cough around, blanket still wrapped tightly around you as you shamble back to bed. To wait, you figure, sleep away the time it takes for the gentle hum of your car to approach. For the heavy footfalls up the stairs that signify he's home, the sound of his keys in the deadbolt or the soft sound of him singing your name as he bumps the door open with his hip and kicks it shut with little tact or thought.
As is his normal. His expected.
His practiced routine that the house aches with in his absence. His silence that stretches uncomfortably over the home, leaving its corners and whispered words a half spoken wish of his warmth. His smell and his touch, his comfort and his company as your brain thunders with static pain. You curl up in the sheets that still remember his presence. That still waft with his heat and have you bundling up into the pieces of him that remain.
You reach for your phone, halfhearted and mostly dead weight, hand falling short of the bedside table where it rests plugged in and forgotten about in your scramble for rest last night. Your clamber into the sheets that he followed moments later with a kiss to your forehead and arms around your waist that hugged you tight and kept you grounded into the darkness behind your eyelids.
The same that spring with pain as you eyes move, a dull sharpness pressing in on the bridge of your nose as you muffle a groan into the sheets. Miserable. With no one to complain to.
A fate worse than death with a headache that has you pleading with the scythe.
You grab your phone, with a great deal of difficulty rivaled only by your triumph, and fumble it to life with clumsy, sickly hands.
A message, sent with the utmost typos and whining pity, is sent your boyfriend's way. A plea, you hesitate to call it, more a desperation for survival, to know where he is. When he'll be back and if in any possible way food will be involved. And how much you'd like for it to be involved.
Minutes, moments, seconds and yet somehow decades later, comes his response. With messy grammar and one too many abbreviations, he responds to your call for assistance with a sympathetic tone that leaves sadness in its wake. A flowery description for him using too many W's in an aw and a frowning face that feels mocking. He does say he'll be home soon though, a comforting thought that drops your phone back to the bed, where you succumb to the ringing pain that leaves you motionless.
Your body refuses to move, shivering under the mountain of warmth you've accumulated. The heat of your own body that drips off you in globs of sick that soak the sheets with sweat. And yet, you can't stop trembling, a freezing grip around your heart that has you mourning into the plush of your pillows.
A fever, most likely, striking through your system and rendering it dead to the fresh air that drifts in some outside. Travels with it the rain, a chilling presence you enjoy nearly as much as you shrivel from, that ices the air and clears your nose.
A refreshing drink of wind that feels a blessing through your heated thoughts.
They press into the grooves of your brain, molten lava along your pathways that melts any thought or reason in magma pools of sweating exhaustion.
You relax, as best you can, dry mouthed and clinging to the only feeling you can focus on- a dull thudding that resonates in your head and beats in your jaw. It knocks around your skull, draining down your throat and filling your stomach with nausea.
Maybe food isn't such a good idea.
But still, the needs sticks out to you, a hunger that fights its own existence in your gut.
With the hunger comes a deep tiredness in your bones, a waging war on sleep that bottles beyond your eyes, your thoughts and your gooey awareness.
So much so that you aren't aware of when the darkness becomes deeper, heavier on your mind until you're jolting back awake minutes, days, hours or seconds later with a hand at your side and a murmuring voice above you.
"Hey, hey, no, go back to bed. I was just checking on you." David's voice is hushed, gentle and soothing where he pets over your thoughts and shushes a kiss to your forehead. You mumble, easing back into the sheets.
"You're back." you grumble through blotted teeth and a churn in your stomach. The rain is heavier. Thicker in the air, a strong stench of wet pavement and dewy grass. Serenity and clear glass glaciers, it blankets the room in a sheet of sweet ice. It feels good on your exposed back, where the blankets have revealed your heated skin to the touch of his hands and the calm of your dark bedroom.
You don't remember it being dark.
"Have been for a bit. You've been knocked out, baby." he hums, sitting on the edge of your shared intimacy. The forest green of your covers and the pale mint of your sheets, the pattern of faux flannel and the deep browns that criss-cross with autumn oranges and subtle reds.
Reminders, David has shrugged in the home decor section, of the softer parts of his childhood. Of hand made quilts and the warmth of keepsakes.
Mimicking the threads of his grandmothers and the women in the small town he was raised in, he feels over the pattern that encases you, that wraps around your legs and keeps you warm when he can't, "Almost worried you were dead, you were sleeping so good." he jokes, a rumbling gruff to his voice pressed to your hairline.
"Feel like it." you complain, rolling over onto your back and tossing an arm over your eyes. It sticks to you, and you grimace. The roll has your stomach protesting, a gurgling mess that's equal parts enraged nausea and ravenous hunger. You can't tell which is worse.
"I didn't get you sick, did I?"
"Eh, maybe." you shrug, difficult and begrudging. You doubt it. With the colder months coming and going, the air dryer and the amount of customers caring less and less for proper etiquette, you figure it was much more a likely passing interaction than anything he did, "Only fair you take care of me then." but as if you're going to admit that.
"Oh, is it?" he smiles, and you can hear it, the soft crescent of his amusement that pulls at the liens on his face and morphs the scar across his cheek into something pleasant.
"Mhm." you reach out for him, and he barely hesitates to slip his fingers between yours, leaning down to press another kiss to your forehead.
"Yeah, you're warm." affection trails down your temple to your cheek, scratching with his unshaven stubble and languid with the gentle press of his lips, "Why don't I make you dinner? Get something to settle your stomach?"
"Could you?" he brings your hand to him, kissing the heated line of your knuckles and humming against the line of your fingers entwined with his.
"Course, baby." with great difficulty and with the simplest motion of a stretched out back, David pulls from you and stands. You follow him pitifully, rolling onto your side and holding onto him as long as you can until he's slipping from your fingers and toward the door. Your head is already storming with missing him.
His warmth pressed to you and his comforting presence soothing the ill that has taken your thoughts and filled your veins with a thickness you can feel. A mucus rotten sludge that seems to fill your sanity completely, driving you to a mellow madness that tastes bitter and warm on your tongue.
The rain outside continues, heavy on the smudged glass of your bedroom windows, splattering softly onto the ledge of the sill in the sing-song tone of thundering clouds miles above your stuffy head.
You should close that.
You leave it, for a moment, for an eternity, simply enjoying the sound. The calm that ghosts through the droplets, dew peppered wings fluttering between the drizzling gray. Surrounding your cozy bed as you snuggle into the thick of your covers.
You do stand, eventually, when the chill becomes unbearable tremors in your hands that rake nails down your bones. You stand and drag your blanket with you same as you had done this morning. You wrap it around yourself and shamble to the window to shut it. You heave with the effort, a sigh on your lips that puffs a cloud onto the cool glass as it creaks closed. You lock it, for good measure and nothing more, and watch the racing lines of rain trickle down its expanse.
Obscuring the view of your street into blotting oranges and deep swirling black, the city is stained lines of tall building and the whispering clouds of evening. Deep and dark, the night is lively with cars that splash puddles onto the sidewalk and a rumbling thunder that shakes your apartment into a harmony you hum with.
It's not too late, a glance at the clock on your bedside table tells you, only around six. A reasonable time for dinner but not to close to morning, there's a pinch of guilt in your gut for being out for so long. Unconscious and unaware of your boyfriend meandering throughout the house touching up this and that.
Cleaning the messy shoe rack and tidying up the kitchen, he aided to the house in all the ways he could without risking waking you, as he does most morning when his routine has him rising hours before you do. The dark break of dawn an easement to his frazzled mind that calms with a heated pot of coffee and a morning jog that ends with him scooping you out of bed and into your own routine, into the heat of your shared morning showed and the burnt toast of your before work breakfast.
You sniffle, wiping at your nose and dreaming of the gentle walls of your shower, the tender heat that works relaxation into your muscles and the mind-numbing feeling of his hands working shampoo into your scalp.
Unfortunately, you think you'd collapse if you stood for too long, a theory you prove when you stumble your way out of the bedroom. Stepping between the threshold of your room to the soft light of your living room, you feel your awareness swirl and you're stopping for a moment more than usual to get your bearings.
Your cheeks feeling fuzzy and your mind drifting from the grounding form of your body, you feel a wave of nausea at the mere audacity you have to be standing. Truly, how could you, "Whoa, hey now, easy there." David stops your careening contact with the hardwood floor, hands on your shoulders as he gets you to the couch, "I could've brought it to you."
"Wanted to be with you." you slur, mumbling your reasoning with eyes barely open and a foggy thought process that misses when he lays you down. Head on the armrest with the blanket draping off the side, he maneuvers you into something comfortable and more stable than you were a moment ago.
"Yeah, and I want you with all your parts intact. You feelin' that bad?" he nabs a pillow from the foot of the couch and fluffs it up before placing it under your head, petting over your mind before he's feeling your forehead again, the back of his hand void of his gloves and pressed to you skin with a tenderness inherent to him.
A kindness that he bursts with, woven in his blood and stitched along his frame, there's a love there that you can see in the shine in his eyes. The way the honeyed light of your living room lamp reflects in the forest green of his eyes that read of a golden morning in the mountains. Sun-kissed blades of grass and a chirping in the wind that frames his handsome features.
He feels like the woods, oddly, a dense comfort that stands tall with century old tales and worn down paths home.
"I've definitely felt better." you cuddle into the offered pillow, and he sighs, a huffed little thing that sounds more humored than it does annoyed.
"Have you taken anything?"
"No, I actually wanted to tough it out. That's why I slept all day."
"Alright, smartass." he flicks your side, pulling a laugh from you as he passes, "Lemme get you something, try to break that headache if nothing else."
"Thank you." your arm hangs off the couch, barely grazing the plush of your rug. It's soft brown a shade lighter than the hardwood, lined beige and intricate with a spiraling pattern of curled shapes and orange hues, it fills the space beneath the coffee table and lines the transition to the tile of the kitchen.
He disappears around the corner of your short hallway, consisting of your small entry and the door to the bathroom, the light bleeding into the hallway. Fluorescent hell that breaks up the rich brown of your wooden floors into shards of toothpaste mint, a jarring sight to your straining eyes as the medicine cabinet pops open and the sound of rattling bottles meets your ears.
You don't keep a lot of medication around. Needed things for seasonal allergies or day long headaches, the name brand and trusted medication David takes for his wandering thoughts and some old sleep meds you sued when exams were kicking your ass. Liquid, mainly, or candied gummies is what you stick to for medication. A safer alternative for both of you, less hassle and less risk, less shaking hands and a need for history. It works, for the most part, but he returns with two pills in hand anyway.
You sit up, barely, as he fills a cup with crisp cold water and returns to the couch to hand over both.
"Here. Don't choke." they swallow down biting and dry, the water doing little for their travel. You huff with their necessity, but lean into the offered drink as David lifts the cup for you, letting you rest as you gulp down what you can of the water. It refreshes your dry mouth and soothes down your throat, a sore knot in your chest easing up under the gush of something fresher than rain, "There ya go, halfway to getting better already."
"You're a terrible doctor."
"Eh, I've been called worse." he sets the glass off to the side, still half-full and tempting, before he's off back to the kitchen. The lights are low, kept dim to aid the ache in your splitting skull and the pain that stings across your eyes as you move, shifting onto your stomach to see him better. Resting your chin on the armrest and watching as he moves throughout the cluttered space.
The homely decorations that litter the walls and the mountain of mundane life that takes up the countertops. The dirty dishes off the side of the sink and the discarded boxes and work clothes that hang off the edge of the island chairs. His jacket, thick leather and studded, sits on the counter just barely obscuring him from view.
David stands at the stove, moving the coffee pot off the back burner as he sets a small pot there instead, an opened can of soup sliding into his hand and dumped as he clicks it up onto high heat and sets the discard tin near the sink. His sleeves, a dusty deep gray and thin, are rolled up to his elbows as he moves about the kitchen. Pulling a bowl down from the cabinet and plucking a spoon from the drawer, he sets both off to his right and spins the handle of the pot away from himself.
It's domestic, the man framed by the yellow sunlight of the oven light and cushioned in by the darkness of the rest of the apartment. Of the deep blanket of indigo outside and the trickling of rain that muddles the sound of the TV in your ears, a lost to thought show cut off to the place of commercials and dramatic trailers.
He looks right, here, you think.
Perfected.
In his element, if you would, the heavy hand of the bags under his eyes soothed from years under the safety of your shared roof. The old twitch in his hands lost to the grease of his grill or the care of his bike. The frightened shake that you'd met him in transitioning into a sturdy frame that rests a hand on the handle of the oven that he leans on, broad shoulders blocking the view of the stove as he cooks for you.
You forget, sometimes, with the oddness of it, that he was almost married. Engaged with a thick band around his finger that you still find him absently spinning in the place it no longer sits. Bare hands a startling thing for him as his thumb traces a missing link between him and then. A life he left behind, ran from in some aspects, drug himself out of with bloody hands that stained your clothes the day you met.
The day you saw him in the stairway of your building and offered him a hand. The day he said he felt like he made the right decision to move away.
You wonder, with the thought of a sick fool, if he ever misses it. The domestic glint of a gold band or the intimate sound of silence that replaces the need for words. Your stomach flutters with the thought. Echoing a sense of place at his side, at his health and at his sickness, a pondering inkling of speculation that recalls his extra shifts at work recently. His dragging hours at the diner he complains about just as much as he reminisces on during his days off.
You wonder, with an anxious thought tangled around a heated illness, you wonder.
The click of the stove turning off perks your attention from your winding thoughts, pulled to the vision of David pulling the pan from the burner and pouring it into the bowl. He stirs it with his free hand as he puts the steaming pot away, scooping the bowl into a fabric cozy to protect your hands from the simmering heat, hand made by a friend of his and lovingly wrapped around it's base he plops in the spoon before making his way back to you, "Hope this is okay. I can run to the store and grab something a bit better in the morning if you're still feeling all blegh."
"No, this is okay. Thanks."
"Course'. It's the least I can do." he motions for you to scoot over, and you do, albeit with a twinge of annoyance. He slips onto the couch behind you before motioning for you to come back, leaning against his chest with his legs either side you, he cages you in. He hands the bowl to you once you're comfortable, using his freed hands to grab the blanket and bundle the two of you up together, "There, that a bit better?" you relax into him, his arms around your waist and his chin on your shoulder.
"Mhm." the bowl is warm in your hands, biting away the shaking chill in your core, the heated ceramic protected from your hands with the padded fabric colored rich red and deep burgundy, "Okay, maybe you aren't the worst doctor." he chuckles into your neck, kissing the base of your hairline.
"Look at that, I'm moving up in the world."
"Where were you earlier?" you attempt conversation, missing the rumble of his voice, the sound in your ears and reigning back your drifting thoughts.
"Vinny need some help with moving a dresser out of her car." his manager, you recall, you've met her a handful of times. The two of them are close, he'd explained the first time you questioned your frequent visits, similar in their pasts and long time friends. He's known her since before he got the job, offered it half out of begging and half from pity, she'd helped him when he needed it.
Siblings, you'd call them, if you didn't know any better.
"Moving again?" you bring the spoon to your mouth, swallowing down the broth, it eases down your throat and settles pleasantly. The nausea, a wriggling thing in your gut, subsides long enough to let you enjoy it.
"No, actually, finally found a roommate. Asked me to stop by to help him move some of his stuff upstairs."
"'Roommate', huh?"
"Oh, please, I wish it were that simple. Maybe then she'd stop being such a hardass." he jokes, rolling the fabric of your shirt between his fingers, "She doesn't even swing that way, nevermind would she ever admit to my face that she's dating someone, she knows that would give me too much leverage."
"Why do you insist on making her life a living hell?" you chew on fatty meat and thick noodles packed with vegetables, tossing your head back to look at him. Each bite a step closer to feeling more like a person, less like a lifeless husk in your bed.
"What else am I supposed to do at work?"
"Your job?" he gives you a look.
"Where's the fun in that? Besides, it's not like she treats me any different"
"The difference is that you deserve it." you swallow down another bite, warm and loving, it feels like tender tiredness, "I'm too nice to you at home, it's good someone out there is putting you in your place."
"Yeah, yeah, alright." you laugh, soft and quiet, teetering off into a cough that catches in your throat and has you groaning, "You okay?" he rubs at your side, thoughtless and loving, it works out a tension in your lower back.
"Yeah, just wish I knew where I picked this up." you spin your spoon between your fingers, and he hums against you, light pecks kissed to the back of your ear and the side of your neck.
"I'll find 'em and kick their ass."
"Aw, thanks, babe."
"Anytime." you finish in silence, only the soft scrapes of metal against ceramic filtering into the air of your comfort, aided only by the softened sound of the rain outside. The TV is low, replaying some old show both of you have seen countless times, barely on the edge of your thoughts as you focus all your effort on finishing your bowl.
It helps, somewhat, massaging away the ache in your body that tires your joints and has them protesting with each movement. David presses into the pain, with tender acts of love that pull at each strand of misery that bands around your body, attempting to wipe them all away with loving kisses that litter all the skin he can reach with hands that mold you to the heat of his body.
He soothes out thudding pains and croaking stiffness, leaving you a melted puddle in his lap by the time your spoon hits the bottom of the bowl and you're handing it to him to be set off to the side before his attention is back on you entirely, "You should get some sleep."
"That means I have to get up." you complain, cuddled to his chest and petulant.
"Psh, who said that? Just knock out right here."
"You sure?"
"Course I am- come 'ere." he shifts both of you down, allowing you to lay down on his chest better. Resting your head on his chest with his arms around you and a kiss to the crown of your head, "Get some sleep, we can move to bed whenever you feel up to it." you cozy up to him, easing yourself to your boyfriend's chest as you melt against him.
He holds you close, kissing your forehead and tracing patterns into your skin, full of love and gushing with an affection you feel smothered with. It's better than anything else. Tender and perfect, you feel surrounded in a wavering warmth.
You feel better.
No longer weighed down or miserable, you find a darkness there, wrapped around you and David, it calls you forward. Into drifting darkness, it holds close with the same love he does, and you feel yourself falling asleep.
To the sound of his voice, to the smell of his shampoo,. to the dinner in your stomach and the way his lips feel against your skin.
You fall asleep in David's arms, and he holds you throughout the night, a whispered 'I love you' being the last thing you hear under the drizzle of soft rain and the clutter of your shared home.
You feel better.
With him, you feel good.