Chapter Text
The ring-light burns a halo over Janis’ hacked-together throne of thrift-store pillows, one of which may or may not be a retired poncho. The wall behind her is a shrine to sticker residue and thumbtack wounds. She smacks the record button with a sigh, then shoves a chipped mug of iced coffee into frame like a peace offering to the audience she hasn’t met yet.
“Hey, internet. My name is Janis ‘Imi’ike. I’m twenty-eight and I’m a big, bad lesbian. I like women, strong opinions, setting things on fire recreationally, and ruining dinner parties with poorly timed personal facts. Also, according to Dr. Doom last week, I am now the proud, involuntary owner of a six-month countdown.”
She flashes a hospital bracelet like it’s VIP access to the bad-luck club.
“Don’t freak out. They can try to fight it,” she continues, voice lilting with practiced indifference and not at all masking the way her fingers have curled tight around the mug. “They still want to pump me full of shit that feels like alien death rays and drain my blood like I’m a fucking Capri Sun. It’s not looking good and I told them fine, I’ll do what I can, but I’m not rotting in a hospital bed while staring at motivational posters and being told to manifest survival through positive thinking. That’s not my brand, but you know what is?”
She yanks a crumpled notebook into view.
“This. Behold, the Bucket List of Questionable Decisions. Item one, get into a bar fight. Not like an accidental fight. No, I want to walk in, pick the meanest-looking dude, and provoke him with such unholy confidence that people question if I’ve been possessed. Bonus points if it’s over karaoke.”
She flips a page. There’s a doodle of a duck with devil horns in the corner.
“Two, kiss a hot girl. Like, really hot. The kind that makes priests lose sleep and forces God to file a restraining order because he got carried away and made her too sexy. Preferably while music swells and something explodes behind us. Maybe fireworks, maybe a gas leak, I’m flexible.”
The grin she flashes is all teeth and defiance but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Three, commit mild arson. Not major, I’m not trying to go to prison unless they have decent WiFi and a good library. But I want to see flames, I want to hear sirens, I want to feel the heat and know it’s not from a fever this time.”
Janis tosses the notebook aside and leans forward with a smile that wobbles between giddy and grief-struck. “There’s more and there's a secret one at the top,” she says, quieter now. “The real number one, but I’m not sharing that one yet. Feels too... stupid. Anyway.”
She sits back, eyes blazing again. The switch is instant, like a match being struck.
“If you came here for self-help mantras or yoga with candles or some girl crying about the meaning of life, click out now. This isn’t that kind of ride. I don’t have time for resolutions. I have time for chaos. For unfinished business. For the shit I always said I’d do later. Later is here, she’s drunk and ready to set something on fire. I’ve got six months to raise hell, and you’re officially accomplices.”
Janis smiles, and it’s the kind of smile you see in a mirror at 2 am right before everything goes sideways.
“Welcome to Terminally Yours. Let’s make some fucking mistakes.”
—
The rise is almost immediate. One day, she’s a girl with a camera and an expiration date, yelling into the void. The next, she’s got comments pouring in faster than her oncologist appointments, fan edits set to pop songs, and three separate Etsy stores selling ‘Let’s Make Some Fucking Mistakes’ shirts in varying fonts of violence.
People really love her, which is equal parts confusing, flattering, and deeply cursed. Janis, who thrives on chaos but still flinches at compliments, finds it hilariously obscene. They call her brave and bold and unfiltered. A darkly hilarious oracle. They stitch her TikToks with their own bucket lists and send her DMs that could double as eulogies. Someone from Wisconsin crochets her a hat shaped like a flaming dumpster. She wears it in a video and calls it her battle crown.
Two hundred thousand souls pledge fealty in a week, and Janis, for all her bravado and firecracker charm, doesn’t know what the hell to do with any of it. She refreshes the page, heartbeat pogo-sticking in her throat. Again and again.
She reads the avalanche of love curled up in her bathtub, dry as hell, hood up to ward off the intimacy. Every “you’re my hero” and “I hope you get to kiss the hot girl” hits her like a fucking freight train hauling affection. It would be easier if they hated her or ignored her. But this? This mass, feral tenderness from people she’s never met? It’s unbearable. Her spine goes stiff like her body doesn’t know whether to laugh or vomit. There's a pressure behind her eyes she refuses to acknowledge.
She tells the camera one night, “If I wasn’t so emotionally constipated, I’d probably cry about all this support. Unfortunately, I was bottle-fed sarcasm, trauma, and exactly one hug every other Christmas, so you degenerates are stuck with me like this.” She smirks, flips off the lens, then pauses. “Thanks, though. For real.”
She almost deletes that last part in the edit. No one needs to see her crack.
Not even Damian, even though he’s been there from the start, helping her film, helping her sort through the shit, helping her pretend this isn’t terrifying. He holds the camera steady while she throws herself off metaphorical (and occasionally literal) cliffs, and he laughs with her, which is the most sacred kind of friendship Janis has ever known.
When she told him, when she sat in his living room with a bottle of tequila, they did cry. She did.
“Six months. Tops.”
He held her and he didn’t say anything like no, no, you’ll be okay, because Damian may be dramatic but he’s not delusional.
Now she’s banned him from talking about it.
“We are not,” she tells him a week later as they film her stealing a traffic cone, “discussing my expiration date ever again. From here on out we are living, loving, and causing mild property damage. That’s it, that’s the plan. If you bring up mortality again, I will replace all your skincare products with expired ranch dressing.”
“You’ve got randos making fan art of you riding a velociraptor out of a burning hospital while flipping off the Grim Reaper, and I’m supposed to not cry?!”
“Yes,” Janis deadpans. “That is exactly what you’re supposed to do. Bottled emotions. Like wine or the trauma of middle school.”
“You don’t get to stop me from loving you dramatically. It’s how I process things!”
“I already let you cry once,” she reminds him. “That night we drank the fucked up tequila and I told you about the six-month countdown. That was your cry. You don’t get a second one.”
“You sobbed, too.”
“Lies and slander.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘what if I die and I get to punch God in the dick’ and then you sobbed.”
Janis pauses. Shrugs. “I stand by that statement. Now stop fucking crying.”
“You’re so mean when you’re emotionally stunted.”
“And you’re downright moist when you cry.”
“I’m not moist, I’m heartfelt,” Damian insists.
But Janis sees the way his eyes rim red every time her channel blows up more. He scrolls through the comments on her latest post with fat, theatrical tears tracking down his cheeks.
“People love you,” he says. “They love you, Jay. They see you the way I see you.”
She sees how he clenches his jaw when fans post side-by-sides of her first video and her most recent one, pointing out how pale she’s gotten. She feels how he hugs her just a little longer every time they say goodbye. He doesn’t say it, but she knows he’s grieving in real time and she lets him. She doesn’t say thank you and she doesn’t cry again, but she lets him wear his ridiculous sequined blazer to film days and pretend it’s not because it makes her smile.
“You’re making the whole world fall in love with you,” he marvels one day.
Janis picks at the hem of her hoodie as something sour-sweet rises in her chest. “That wasn’t the plan,” she whispers.
“I know,” Damian replies. “But it’s happening anyway.”
When she sees him watching her latest video with glassy eyes, biting his lip to keep it together, she only says, “God, stop crying, you sentimental fuck, I’m not dead yet.”
Damian wipes a tear and grins through it. “Not yet, so let’s make it count, bitch.”
Regina has survived back-to-back twelve-hour shifts, three Code Blues, one adult man who pissed on her shoes and called her mommy, and a vending machine that ate her last five dollars without so much as a whisper of remorse. By every law of God and gravity, she should currently be either face-down in a coma or face-down in a holding cell.
Instead, she’s on her couch, aggressively horizontal. She’s post-shift, post-shower, post-dignity. Her hair is in a claw clip she bought at a gas station and her scrubs are in a sad heap on the floor. The apartment lights are off because she can’t stand overhead lighting after a shift, it makes her feel like she’s still at the hospital. One flick of a switch and she’ll swear she hears an orderly yelling for a crash cart or a mother begging her to please, please, please fix their baby, while she’s pretending she doesn’t feel anything herself.
She’s too tired to eat, too wired to sleep, so she doomscrolls through the algorithmic wasteland of social media.
Suddenly there’s a girl. Pale, wiry and defiant. In the thumbnail, she’s flipping off the camera. The title bypasses all of Regina’s built-in filters for what she should and should not care about.
Terminally Yours Ep. 1: I HAVE SIX MONTHS TO LIVE SO LET’S DO SOMETHING ILLEGAL
Regina squints. Her first thought is clickbait. Her second is god, I hate this generation. Her third thought is already executing and tapping the video.
Three minutes in, she mutters, “Oh, fuck you.”
She does not, however, hit pause. The progress bar creeps forward, harsh blue light strobes across her tired face, and the apartment stays dark.
Janis, if that’s even her real name, which Regina doubts, is ranting about bar fights and mild arson and the philosophical merits of kissing hot girls before the universe yanks your plug. She talks about dying and about not dying quietly. There’s a wildness to the girl, a strange, unrelenting fire that feels aggressively alive. She’s chaos with a vlog and a death sentence, and Regina hates her on sight.
So naturally she can’t stop watching.
She watches the next video. And the next. And the next.
By the time she realizes what she’s doing, the sun is starting to rise, and her phone is clinging to 1% battery. Her eyes are bloodshot, her jaw hurts from clenching and she hasn’t blinked in at least a full minute.
“What the fuck is wrong with you,” she mutters to her phone, but it’s not really directed at Janis. Or maybe it is, it’s unclear. “Fucking idiot.”
She hates the way Janis throws herself at life like it owes her a fight. She hates how she makes death feel like a fucking performance art piece. She hates the wild defiance in her eyes and the way she dares the universe to finish her off. Regina has spent years trying to keep people alive, holding them together with saline, morphine, and pure spite, and this girl is out here daring the world to try her.
It’s so deeply, personally infuriating.
She pulls her blanket up to her chin and watches another video.
She doesn’t tell anyone. Not her coworkers, not her therapist, not her group chat. When someone at work mentions the Terminally Yours girl going viral, Regina shrugs and pretends she hasn’t watched the entire channel twice.
She even leaves a comment once, just to say maybe try not dying on purpose, dumbass.
She refreshes the video ten minutes later and Janis has hearted it.
Regina doesn’t cry, she learned to cauterize that reflex in nursing school. But her jaw aches from clenching, and her chest feels tight in that familiar, traitorous way, like someone’s pressing a thumb right under her ribs, not hard enough to break, just enough to bruise. She doesn’t know what she wants. To argue with her. To fix her. To shake her and yell what the fuck is wrong with you, then kiss her until she forgets how to self-destruct.
She doesn’t know and she doesn’t want to find out either, so she goes to work.
She checks vitals, changes dressings, and threatens a radiologist with bodily harm for fucking up a scan. She tells a teenager that yes, it’s okay to cry, and no, you’re not weak for being scared. She’s terrifying and competent and so emotionally repressed she might as well be a brick wall with a nursing license.
Still, when the silence gets too loud, when the weight of her patients’ pain clings to her skin, when the ache in her chest won’t go away and the only thing she wants to do is scream, she puts Janis back on.
And watches.
And watches.
And watches.
—
Regina is good at her job. Disgustingly good and annoyingly competent. She’s the kind of nurse who haunts administration dreams and makes lesser mortals cry in supply closets. Yelp doesn’t technically acknowledge the hospital, yet randos on the internet still leave gushing five-star reviews about her and management pretends not to see because they can’t figure out how to monetize it.
She knows her patients, all of them. Not just names and numbers but the stupid, messy, human parts. The ones who always ask for warm blankets even in July. The man who only takes his pills if you call them spicy Tic Tacs. The teenager who pretends to sleep through vitals but flips her off just to be a little shit. She remembers who needs a gentle hand and who responds better to threats. She doesn’t just read charts, she understands them. She sees the story beneath the stats, the people beneath the pathology.
When she gets the new file on her tablet she scans it like usual.
'Imi'ike, Janis
F/28
Stage IV
She notes the vitals, the meds, the next-of-kin listed as “Damian Hubbard (bestie, not blood, don’t be weird).” She rolls her eyes. Typical.
She doesn’t think much of it, it’s just another case, another hour, another broken body for her to try and hold together with tape and practiced detachment. She shoves the melancholy down where it can’t chew holes in her resolve, because empathy is useful only until it makes your hands shake. She walks in with a tray of IV supplies balanced in one practiced hand, expression neutral, bored and mildly homicidal. It always is when she’s got a full patient load and two coffees fighting for dominance in her bloodstream. She’s already thinking about the next room, the next chart, the next vein.
It’s her.
Terminally Yours. The girl from the screen. The chaos engine. The self-declared arsonist with a death sentence and a punchline for every prognosis.
Janis is sitting in the chair like she belongs there, which is already fucking weird because no one ever looks like they belong in a hospital. Not unless they’ve given up and this girl’s brand is anything but surrender.
She looks up, and for a half-second, Regina isn’t sure it’s her because the creature in front of her is dialed way down.
She’s quiet and her hair’s pulled back in a lazy bun, face free of the usual eyeliner wings and warpaint bravado. She's wearing a criminally hideous tie-dye hoodie with a cracked ‘SORRY I’M LATE, I DIDN’T WANT TO COME’ print. Her shoulders are tense and her posture respectful in a way Regina recognizes instantly. People who have spent too much time in hospitals all sit the same.
She’s nothing like the explosive, larger-than-life creature Regina binge-watched for nine hours straight in a fit of insomnia-fueled obsession. She’s not talking to the camera. She’s not throwing up middle fingers. She’s not cracking jokes about dying or cremation discounts if you pre-order before the PET scan.
She’s also not alone. There's a little girl beside her, maybe six or seven, bald and bright-eyed and wrapped in one of those hospital blankets that look soft but somehow manage to feel like sandpaper soaked in bleach. The kid’s swinging her legs, clutching a sparkly iPad and vibrating with excitement. Janis is leaned in close, murmuring back responses Regina can’t catch. Something about flame height, maybe, because the kid mimes an explosion and they both break into whisper-giggles that stab Regina right behind the sternum.
“I saw your video,” the girl says louder. “The one where you tried to ride a shopping cart down the escalator.”
“That was a terrible idea.”
“But it was funny,” the girl says, beaming. “I made my dad watch it and he said you were definitely gonna get arrested.”
“Almost did,” Janis replies. “But I charmed the security guard with my tragically limited life expectancy.”
The little girl gasps. “Did it work?!”
“I’m not in jail, am I?” Janis smirks, eyes twinkling.
The girl grins like she’s just been let in on the world’s best secret, and Regina, still standing in the doorway like some kind of malfunctioning statue, feels something in her ribcage twitch. There's a hot, prickling itch under her skin. Something too big, too much, rising up inside her chest and demanding she feel something.
She hates it. She hates it.
This version of Janis, gentle and open and kind, is somehow worse than the one with fire in her eyes and gasoline on her hands. This version makes her feel like there might be something underneath all the bravado. Something breakable. Something worth mourning, which is not her job. Which is never her job.
Regina forces the feeling through a mental meat grinder, remembers who the fuck she is and shakes it off. Literally shakes to shed the weird emotional moment, and steps into the room like she hasn’t been here the whole damn time.
“Janis ‘Imiʻike?” she says, not a hint of recognition.
“That’s me.”
Janis’ voice is even, unbothered and deeper than Regina expected. A little rough, a little raspy, like it’s been dragged through too many sleepless nights. She speaks like someone who’s had to explain her condition to too many strangers.
“Great. I’m here to set up your IV. Let’s not make this dramatic.”
“No promises.”
Regina doesn’t react, but her hands are just the tiniest bit slower than usual when she reaches for the alcohol swab. When her glove brushes against Janis’ wrist she swears she feels it echo somewhere in her bones.
This is fine. This is just another patient. This is fine.
Even if it’s her.
—
The video opens with static, then a violently low-res zoom onto Janis’ face. Her hair is a mess, matted in the back from a nap she clearly didn’t consent to, with one side sticking up like it’s trying to escape her head entirely.
“Alright, gang,” she says. “Today’s episode is called: The angel of death has a fat ass and no mercy.”
“I have seen the face of God,” she adds. “And she leaves no survivors.”
Regina watches from home, curled up on her couch, still slightly damp from the world’s fastest shower.
“I roll up for my appointment today, right?” Janis says. “You know, the usual, bloodwork, needle fun, light existential dread. I’m chilling, I’m charming. I’m, like, peak Janis. Full charisma, jokes flying, dying with style, and then…” She pauses and sighs. “She walks in. My nurse. I say my nurse because she was assigned to me by fate. Or Satan. It’s unclear.”
She pauses again and takes a sip of juice. The straw makes a rude slurping sound Regina can hear through the screen.
“Guys. She was so hot,” Janis whispers. “Like distressingly hot. Like, forget your own name and lie about your pain level just to impress her. You know when someone walks into the room and suddenly you’re painfully aware of your own posture, breath, and mortality? Yeah, that.”
Regina arches an eyebrow.
“Anyway,” Janis shrugs, aiming for casual but landing somewhere around unhinged devotion, “She had on these scrubs, right? The kind that look tailored, like she got them custom-made. Face like an angel. An angry angel. Like, wings dripping blood, eyes that have seen too much, probably fought in a celestial war, lost her favorite sword and took it personally. You know the type. I was like, okay, cool, she’s here to euthanize me with a smile. But no.”
Janis leans closer to the camera.
“She didn’t smile. Not once. She didn’t laugh at anything. Not when I said my veins were shy. Not when I asked if the IV came with tequila. Not even when I told her I was technically a limited edition and should be treated accordingly. Nothing. She just stared at me with this look like I was the reason she drinks.”
She sighs, like she’s recalling a great disappointment.
“I cracked at least five jokes,” Janis says, indignant now, nearly vibrating with the rage of unappreciated comedic genius. “FIVE. That’s statistically impossible to ignore unless you’re dead inside. And when I asked, ever so sweetly, for an extra jell-o cup?” she places a hand over her heart, eyes wide in faux horror. “Just one. Lime. I was polite, I said please. She looked me dead in the face and said that’s not medically necessary. Like I’d asked for a heroin drip and a mechanical bull. I was wounded. Emotionally.”
She gasps.
“Not medically necessary. I’m terminal. I don’t think anything is medically necessary at this point. I could ask for a gallon of molten cheese and a therapy pony and someone would make it happen for the Make-A-Wish footage. But her? She drew the line at flavored gelatin.”
Regina watches, slowly devolving into stunned offense. She was not emotionally prepared to be called out from the comfort of her living room by a gremlin with internet access.
Janis, oblivious and possibly high on apple juice, smirks like she’s just revealed her deepest, most shameful truth.
“I don’t know if I want to kiss her or fight her,” she says. “Honestly, probably both. I want her to scold me and shove me into traffic. My loins made thunder noises. Children, ask your parents what that means.”
There’s a silence long enough for galaxies to be born.
“I think I’m in love,” Janis whispers. “If I die because of this woman, please note, it wasn’t the cancer. It was lust-related organ failure. Put that in the obituary.”
Regina stares at the screen, jaw tight, chest tight with some mix of pride, confusion, mild horror, and the very specific rage that comes from being perceived.
“I was being professional,” she growls to the empty room. “It’s called boundaries, you hormonal trash-goblin.”
Her face is warm. Her pulse is faster than it should be. Her heart is doing something complicated and definitely not medically necessary. She’s trying to decide whether she’s furious, flattered, or mildly aroused. Possibly all three, and the corners of her mouth are threatening to curl up into something that could be mistaken for a smile if anyone looked too closely.
“No extra anything, ever.”
Her heart, utterly disobedient, drums back: We’ll see about that.
Janis has been marinating in her vinyl chemo throne for what feels like half a century by the time the thought solidifies in her brain. A divine revelation from a god she doesn’t believe in. Today is the day Regina The Uncrackable fractures (splinters, crumbles, whatever metaphor fits), and Janis will happily resort to emotional water-boarding, psychological arson, or interpretive dance with IV poles to make it happen.
Her hair is in two little space buns that are doing too much for how pale and vaguely damp she looks today, but fashion doesn’t die just because you are. She’s cold. Her hands are cold. The room is cold. Everything in here is set to the exact temperature of medical apathy, and the lighting is that hideous fluorescence that makes you feel like your entire soul is under examination.
But she doesn’t care. She’s not here for comfort.
She’s not here for labs or vitals or another poorly microwaved hospital lunch tray, though she will be stealing extra graham crackers. She’s here for the chemo, sure, but she’s also here on a specific mission. A holy crusade. A spite-fueled one-woman stand-up special aimed directly at an audience of one. The humorless Valkyrie.
Regina.
The nurse from hell. The walking violation of every thirst-trap fantasy Janis has cultivated since puberty. The one who denied her lime Jell-o and ignited a psychosexual war in her soul.
Janis is ready.
The door sighs open and in glides Nurse God Complex herself. Regal and composed, looking so professionally unbothered it’s offensive. Regina’s in dark scrubs today, that cling just enough to make Janis consider abandoning every scrap of dignity she still has. A tablet is tucked under one arm, and her face is carved into resting surgical scalpel. The hospital lights shiver over her cheekbones, throwing prisms that make Janis wonder if you can get legally blinded by lust.
“Vitals,” Regina says, already reaching for the blood pressure cuff with the indifference of a hangman prepping rope.
Janis beams. “Heyyyy, bestie. Back again so soon? You just can’t stay away.” She gestures at her own decaying majesty like she’s a chef introducing a fresh side of beef.
Regina does not blink. “Arm.”
Janis flops her forearm into Regina’s palm, limp-wristed and dramatic. “Why yes, my liege. Use me for your little machines. Violate my personal space. Did you miss me?”
“I miss quiet.”
“Oh, so you do have a sense of humor,” Janis says, eyes glittering. “It’s just deeply repressed and buried. Relatable.”
Regina straps the cuff on with a cold efficiency that’s borderline erotic. Janis lets out a soft, theatrical gasp.
“Oh, is it that kind of appointment?” she purrs.
Regina, unflinching, inflates the cuff. Janis winces slightly at the pressure, but she refuses to break eye contact. She’s too deep in it now. She needs to win. She needs that smile.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says casually. “Your face haunts me. Like a sexy sleep paralysis demon.”
“Your pulse is irregular,” Regina replies, tapping notes into her tablet without missing a beat.
“Probably because I’m in the presence of greatness.”
“You’re dehydrated. And annoying.”
“You love that I’m annoying, don’t lie. Keeps your day spicy.” Janis tries again. “I’ve been workshopping new material just for you.”
Silence.
“Okay, okay. What did the IV say to the vein?”
More silence. Dead air. The sounds of hospital beeping and Janis’ own impending ego death.
“‘I’m just here for a quick hookup.’” She wiggles her eyebrows. “Come on. That’s funny.”
Nothing. Regina adjusts the dial on the machine like she didn’t just hear the best bad joke of the century. Janis narrows her eyes. If funny isn’t enough, she’ll escalate. She swings her legs a little, heels knocking gently against the floor.
“You know, it’s kind of rude, actually. Most people would be flattered if someone was actively trying to impress them.”
“I don’t need flattery,” Regina says, checking her watch.
“Oh, that’s obvious,” Janis snaps, voice sliding toward the knife-edge where flirting and homicide share a zip code. “You run on caffeine, rage, and unaddressed control issues.”
Regina finally looks up.
Good. Janis bares her teeth in what is technically a smile.
“Bet your apartment’s clinically spotless. Bet your closet’s arranged by color, then sleeve length, then emotional significance. Bet you alphabetize your trauma.”
Regina calmly starts typing notes into her tablet like she didn’t just get psychoanalyzed by a dying gremlin in space buns.
“Pulse is high,” she says.
“Yeah,” Janis mutters. “I wonder why.”
Another silence. Another long, slow scan of vitals. Janis sits there, chewing the inside of her cheek. She wants something. A smile, a snort, a twitch of the lips. Hell, she’ll take a murderous glare. Anything to prove Regina bleeds red.
But Regina remains an iceberg in scrubs.
Janis slumps dramatically. “Okay. Fine. If polite, charming and drop-dead sexy isn’t enough to win you over, I’m changing tactics.”
Regina finally, finally raises an eyebrow. “To what?”
“To being annoying.”
“That’s not a new tactic, Janis,” Regina sighs. “That’s your baseline.”
Regina pauses for half a second. Just long enough for Janis to see it. A half-second mutiny of facial muscle that would be invisible if Janis wasn’t actively hunting for it.
“Hold up,” Janis gasps like she’s won the lottery. “Was that... did you almost smile? Did I witness the rare Regina ‘No Jell-o For You’ muscle movement?”
“Deep breath,” Regina commands as she lifts the stethoscope.
Janis obeys with a monstrous vacuum-cleaner gulp, enough air to inflate a parade float, then wheezes it out theatrically while Regina plants the stethoscope against her sternum with a pressure that flirts with bruising. The metal is cold, hospital-grade Arctic, and Janis bites her lip hard enough to taste copper.
“I didn’t smile,” Regina says.
“You totally did, you twitched. I felt that little seismic event in my bones. I will yank a giggle out of you if it’s the last thing I do.”
Regina pulls the stethoscope away, checks her watch, and mutters, “Not if I quit first.”
Janis throws her head back and howls with laughter. “I love you,” she announces, voice full-volume, zero chill.
Regina exhales slowly through her nose and walks over to the sink like she didn’t just get verbally ambushed with nonsense. She washes her hands meticulously.
Janis tracks every movement. “Still no extra Jell-o , huh?”
“Still not medically necessary.”
“Cold and cruel. You’re the love of my short, tragic life.”
Regina dries her hands. Her back is turned, but Janis sees it. The shoulder twitch. The breath that’s half a laugh but quickly swallowed.
Janis shrieks triumphantly. “I win,” she says. “I win. And I didn’t even have to fake flatline.”
“Careful, or your next blood draw is tomorrow at seven am.”
Janis groans like she’s being stabbed. “You wound me, Nurse Ratched. You wound me deep, right in my fragile heart.”
But her grin splitting her face is stupid and bright and wide, and her chest feels like a firework went off inside it, all fizz and light and barely contained combustion. She’ll keep showing up, and she’ll keep trying because nothing’s more intoxicating than a challenge.
Janis leans back smugly, loins definitely tingling.