Chapter 29 - Marco
It was getting worse.
My prescription had been changed after the last appointment.
The new medications were stronger. Aldenberg had explained why: optimized dosage and adjusted regimen and cardiac function support, all of which sounded very clinical and reassuring in his office and then turned into something entirely different once they were inside my body.
In the beginning, when I started taking them, I was always throwing up. After every dose I could barely eat.
I lost weight.
The doctor said it came with the side effects but normally it shouldn’t happen, that most patients tolerated the new dosage without significant disruption, my reaction was unusual but not unprecedented. But oh well, I was lucky like that.
So they had to give me food with infusions for a while.
That part was worse than the throwing up, somehow.
Sitting in a clinic with a needle in my arm - again - while nutrients dripped slowly into my bloodstream because my body couldn’t be trusted to do something as basic as absorb food.
It felt like a defeat. Like admitting that I was no longer capable of the most fundamental act of staying alive.
It got really bad when my mom would cook.
She didn’t know. I mean she knew I was sick but she didn’t know it had gotten worse, because I hadn’t told her.
She would make these meals. Big ones, and then she would make me sit down and eat.
Sometimes the nausea would hit mid-meal and I would have to grip the edge of the table and breathe through it very carefully while she turned away to get more bread or check the oven.
At the end I would tell her it was delicious, so good, Mama, thank you.
And then I would excuse myself to the bathroom and lose all of it in the dark, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressed to my stomach, my whole body shaking with the effort of being a good son while my organs rejected every act of love she tried to give me.
Lately I was barely home, though.
Alexei mostly kept me at his apartment now.
My parents trusted him. My mother thought he was such a nice boy. They let me stay over without question.
I let him take me.
Not because I didn’t love my family.
I loved them so much it hurt.
But I was suffocating in that house.
I was suffocating trying so hard to seem okay when I hadn’t been okay in so many months.
At Alexei’s apartment, I didn’t have to perform. I could just be sick.
And Alexei would handle it.
He would hold my hair back when I threw up. He would adjust my medication timing when the side effects got bad. He would sit beside me in the dark and not say anything, just be there, a presence that asked nothing of me except that I keep breathing.
Today, Alexei was in the kitchen.
I sat on a chair at the counter, watching him move around.
He had learned how to cook better. Okay - better was generous. Decent was more accurate.
He had one thing in the oven and one thing on the pan.
He was checking both simultaneously while also, somehow, chopping something on the cutting board.
There was flour on his face.
On his cheek. On his jaw. A streak of something red - sauce, probably, or strawberry - across his forehead.
He looked like a disaster. A beautiful, ridiculous, deeply endearing disaster.
“Can I help?” I asked.
He turned to me so fast the spatula in his hand almost flew across the kitchen.
“Don’t even fucking think about it.”
I pressed my lips together hard. I was trying not to laugh but it was difficult.
He turned back to his work, muttering something under his breath in Russian that I didn’t catch but suspected was unflattering.
It was nice, actually. Sitting here. Watching him do something normal.
It was the most human I had ever seen him.
By the end, he was a mess.
I mean, an absolute mess. There was flour in his hair. There was sauce on his shirt. There was something sticky on his wrist that I didn’t want to identify.
But he was putting a plate in front of me.
Chicken. Cooked properly, with herbs and a glaze that actually smelled good.
Rice on the side, fluffy and seasoned. Vegetables, roasted, cut into pieces that were uneven but clearly made with effort.
And on the side, on a small separate plate, a single baked strawberry cookie, slightly misshapen but golden and warm.
I stood up and got on my tiptoes, then I reached up and patted his head, my fingers brushing through his flour-dusted hair. “Well done,” I said, flashing him a smile. “You worked hard.”
I sat back down, still smiling, and picked up my fork.
He was still standing there, looking slightly stunned.
The chicken was good. The glaze was a little too sweet, and the herbs were a little uneven, and the rice was slightly overcooked on one side, but it was warm and filling and my stomach accepted it, which was more than I could say for most food these days.
“This is good. Thank you.”
“Are you lying?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No.” I held out my fork, a piece of chicken balanced on the tines, and lifted it toward his mouth. “Try it.”
He leaned forward and took the bite. “I guess it’s not the worst.”
“Not the worst,” I repeated, shaking my head. “High praise from the man covered in egg yolk.”
He looked away but I saw it.
The curve at the corner of his mouth.
The ghost of a smile, breaking through the surface like light through a crack in the dark.
A few hours later he was driving me to the hospital.
This time it wasn’t for me.
Today, the hospital was for Rei.
Two weeks ago, he had been admitted.
When I found out, I had to basically beg Alexei to let me see him.
That wasn’t an exaggeration. I begged. I sat on the edge of his bed with my hands clasped in my lap and my voice cracking around the words please, please, I need to see him, please just take me - and Alexei had stood across the room with his arms folded and his jaw set, his eyes doing that terrible thing where they went flat and immovable, and he had said no three times before I even finished asking.
He had reason.
I was barely starting the new medication, and the side effects were even more ruthless than they were now.
I could barely stand. The nausea came in waves.
The dizziness hit without warning, tilting the floor sideways.
My body was in open revolt, adjusting to the new chemical regime, and Alexei made a very logical argument that dragging me to a hospital while I was in that state was counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst.
He was right but I didn’t care.
I needed to see Rei. So I begged.
And when begging didn’t work, I felt the tears gather in my eyes. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I saw his face change.
The flatness crumbled and he knelt in front of me, and wiped the tears from my cheeks with both hands, and I saw him fold. “Okay,” he murmured against my forehead. “Okay. I’ll take you.”
Now I was visiting again.
It was a bit easier this time, physically.
The medication had settled into something my body tolerated, more or less, though the trade-off was a permanent low-grade exhaustion.
I was unsteady during the day. I felt dizzy often - sometimes I needed to sit down and take deep breaths but I had to put a good mask on in front of Rei.
That was the hard part.
When we arrived at the hospital, Alexei looked anxious. He always did when he wasn’t a few feet away from me. “I’ll be in the hallway,” he said. “If you feel dizzy—”
“I know.”
“If you need to sit down—”
“I know, Alexei.”
Then I went inside. When I pushed the door open I stopped.
I swear to God his room looked like a garden.
There were flowers everywhere.
Everywhere.
On the windowsill. On the bedside table. On the cabinet across the room. On the chair in the corner. On the floor, in vases and arrangements so large and so numerous that I was afraid to step forward in case I crushed something.
Roses. Lilies. Peonies. Orchids. Sunflowers. Flowers I didn’t know the names of, in colors that ranged from soft pink to violent red to the kind of yellow that looked like captured sunshine.
I had to dodge the floor.
I stepped over a vase of white lilies, sidestepped a bouquet of pink roses, navigated around a sunflower arrangement that was taller than my knee, and finally made it to the chair beside the bed.
“Hey,” I said, slightly breathless from the effort.
Rei looked up. He beamed. “Hi, sunshine!”
His smile was so wide it almost split his face. His silver hair was slightly mussed from the pillows, and there - tucked behind one ear - was a pink flower.
He looked radiant.
I sat down in the chair, slightly unsteady, and turned to face him.
“How are you feeling?”
I ducked my head automatically because there was a damn flower vine attached to the wall behind him.
“I’m good,” Rei said. Then he glanced around the room with a sheepish expression. “Sorry about this. Dimitri doesn’t know how to stop.”
I arched an eyebrow, looking around at the floral explosion that surrounded us.
“Is the hospital okay with this?”
“I don’t think they have a choice.”
“I guess he threatened them.”
“I think so, yeah.”
“When will you be discharged?”
“Shouldn’t be too long,” Rei said, shifting slightly in the bed. “Just need some therapy. I should be able to talk normally after a while.”
I was relieved, because when I first found out he was hurt, I nearly fainted.
But now, sitting here, watching Rei smile, I was so happy he was recovering.
“I’m glad,” I said softly, and meant it with every piece of my struggling heart.
Rei smiled. Then his expression shifted. He looked at me the way he sometimes did when he was reading past the surface of things.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Of course I am.”
“You know,” he sighed, “I don’t want to force you to share things you don’t want. But I am here if you need anything, Marco.”
He paused. “And I mean anything,” he repeated. “You can tell me.”
I forced another smile.
It was harder this time. The muscles in my face were tired. “I know, don’t worry.”
I leaned down and I kissed the top of his head.
He smiled and I wished that he would keep that smile even after I’m gone. That he would always be happy. That the world would be kind to him in all the ways it had not been kind to me.
I wished him every good thing.