Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
T HE SNOW DID not let up. The next day, it had piled up even higher than it had the day before. She called the local department of transportation and was told they couldn’t plow up her way yet, as long as it wasn’t a safety issue.
“No, we’re just fine,” she sighed, hanging up the phone.
But the good news was, her cold was much, much better. The bad news? Was when she heard Rocco sneeze.
“Oh, no ,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he growled, his voice much rougher than it had been the day before.
“No, you aren’t,” she said.
She didn’t need to know him well to know in advance he would be the worst patient imaginable.
“I never get sick,” he said. “I am fastidious about germs.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “As you pointed out yesterday, I was sporing in your vicinity.”
“You can’t get sick that quickly, can you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not an expert in anything. Except maybe home remedies.”
“We need a home remedy for your snowplow. So that we can get out of here.”
Great. His response to this illness she very obviously had no control over was going to be him being growly at her.
How nice for her.
“Well, I am more likely to be able to help your cold than I am to deal with the carburetor or the starter or whatever is happening with that thing.”
“ You did this to me,” he said.
She threw her hands into the air. “You just said that you don’t get sick that quickly, or ever.”
“Well, now I’m convinced it was you .”
She huffed. “Maybe it was somebody you encountered on your travels.”
“I travel in a private plane.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was your driver.”
He looked stormy, and she went to get a cup of coffee from the kitchen.
“ You seem well,” he said.
And he seemed petulant, but she did not say that.
“I am,” she agreed. “Which is good news for you. Because that means that you’re probably going to be just fine in not very long.”
“I should hope so. Also, I sincerely doubt that this is going to diminish me in any way.”
“Oh. Do you?”
“I have business to attend to, I don’t have time to be ill.”
Of course, of course he had been working the whole time he was here.
“You know, sometimes getting sick is your body’s way of telling you to rest.”
“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” He was thunderous, and he was ridiculous, and still handsome and she had no idea what she was supposed to do with this—the feeling inside her—or him.
Though one thing she was sure of was that no matter how handsome he was, he was annoying.
“Sorry. I’ll try to talk to myself next time. I’m sure that I can come up with something even better.”
“Why are you so relentless?”
“Am I relentless?” He looked infuriated. He looked ill.
“Go sit in the library. I’ll start a fire, and then I’ll bring you something to eat.”
He felt terrible. He was quite certain that he felt much worse than she had, his whole body beginning to shake as hot and cold flashes racked him.
This was absurd. He couldn’t remember the last time he was sick. Well. He could. But he deliberately pushed the memory aside.
Because he didn’t want to think about being alone in his bedroom. He didn’t want to think about going into the kitchen to try and find someone to get him some food. He didn’t want to think about climbing over endless stacks of garbage and expired products...
So he didn’t.
Except his head was swimming, and whenever he closed his eyes he saw his childhood bedroom. And then the rest of the house.
He stood, enraged when the floor dared tilt beneath his feet.
“What are you doing?” Noelle asked, sticking her head into the room.
“I’m going to lie down for a moment.”
“You seem... You seem feverish.”
She crossed the room, and before he could pivot away from her, she pressed her hand to his forehead. “You’re burning up. You need to go lie down.”
“I just said that I was on my way to go lie down,” he growled. He could still feel where her hand had touched his face, cool and comforting. Softer than he would’ve expected.
Earlier, when he had grabbed her arm to steady her when she had lost her balance, he had felt a bolt of sensation, one that he was intent on denying now.
He did not engage in indiscriminate physical affairs. He certainly wasn’t going to engage in one in this house. In this state. But this creature. He tried to picture her with the antlers, but he was unsuccessful. All he could see was her freshly scrubbed face, her sweet smile, her freckles.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“I don’t need help,” he said.
“I think you do,” she said, beginning to propel him from the room and up the stairs.
“You’re tiny,” he said as she grabbed hold of his arm and tried to move him.
“I’m not that tiny,” she said, sniffing angrily.
And right then, he felt like he had been hit in the side of the head. Not from illness, from something else entirely.
This chaos, and she was chaos. This tornado of desire that was wholly and entirely connected to her.
“You are,” he said.
“I think you’re ridiculous.”
She shifted, bringing herself beneath his arm, and that was when he felt like he had been shot clean through with an arrow.
It was like the illness itself had stripped away something. Himself, maybe, because all he could see was how beautiful she was. It didn’t matter that the first time he had seen her she had been dressed like a reindeer. And it didn’t matter that her house was ridiculous, or that she was a barrier to getting what he wanted, which normally made someone his enemy and nothing more.
Suddenly, she was a beautiful enigma.
“I think my fever might be dangerously high,” he said.
“Well, that’s concerning. But I can take your temperature.”
He narrowed his eyes. “How?”
She started laughing. “Oh, don’t worry about that. There’s no reason to get that medical. I’ll just put it under your tongue.” She guided him to the room that he was staying in. And then she disappeared.
He was suddenly overly warm, and he stripped his shirt off, then went to the closet where he had deposited his belongings earlier, and took out a pair of sweatpants. He put them on, then lay down on the top of the bed. This illness had come on like a freight train. And entirely without his permission. He was incensed. As he did not allow for things like this. And yet. Nothing was going the way that he wanted it to.
You cannot control the weather.
Hell and damn. He had controlled plenty enough for a good while now. Why was everything suddenly out of his hands?
“Oh!”
She sounded immediately like a heroine from an old movie, offended and horrified all at once, when she stepped into the room and saw him lying there on the bed, bare-chested.
“I thought that I would get comfortable,” he said.
“Of course,” she said.
Then she seemed to avert her gaze as she came to the bed with a thermometer in hand. She knelt down beside him. “Open your mouth.”
She slipped the thermometer inside, and he knew a sense of warmth and care like he had never known before.
He’d been sick as a child, of course. But there had been no hand on his forehead. There had been no concerned figure by his bedside. Maybe there would have been if he hadn’t shut them all out. If he hadn’t put so much distance between himself and his mother even then.
There was no way to know.
And he could not ask her now.
She put her hand on his forehead again. And he was... Undone. “You are very warm,” she said. “I wasn’t this feverish. I’m concerned that you have something worse.”
“It wouldn’t dare,” he said.
“The virus?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You are formidable, but I don’t think you’re that formidable. Sorry.”
“All tremble in my wake.”
Even he knew he was being ridiculous at this point.
“I am very sorry that you have been so sorely offended,” she said. “But you have to stop talking, because you’re ruining the temperature.”
He stopped. It was an old-fashioned thermometer. Glass. And it took minutes for it to get his temperature. He almost thought she was using it on purpose. To keep him quiet. But he didn’t mind, because there was something somewhat comforting about having her there, kneeling beside him, holding the thermometer.
“Yes. You are quite feverish,” she said. “It’s over one hundred. That is concerning.”
“Now what are you doing?”
“I’m going to get you some medicine. I’m going to get you soup.”
“What if I don’t want to eat it in bed?”
“I’m going to ask that you eat in bed,” she said. “Because I don’t want to have to maneuver you up and down the stairs every time. You can eat at the writing desk if you like. Otherwise, I’ll bring you a little bed tray to prop your food up on.”
She fluttered out of the room, and when she returned a little while later, she was fully supplied with anything he might need.
He took the medicine, and began to eat, but he felt like his thoughts were only becoming less and less clear. His throat hurt, his body beginning to ache fiercely. He soon fell asleep, but he was very aware that cool cloths were continually changed on his face.
He woke up when the sun was setting.
“How are you?”
“I’ve been better,” he said.
“Well, I’m going to keep watch. Because... Well. I’m worried about you. I’ve been checking on you every twenty minutes or so, which is maybe silly but... I don’t know. You just seem very unwell.”
Had anyone ever worried about him before? It scraped him raw, and he forgot why he ever held anything back. He forgot why he had fashioned himself into a fortress, because it was all too easy to forget the life he’d built in these past twenty years.
It was easy, right now, for him to believe there had only been his childhood, and this moment. Like all the space in between had evaporated. Been swallowed whole by his illness.
“I have never been cared for when I was sick. That’s one reason I decided to stop being ill. It’s very inconvenient when you still have to do everything for yourself.”
He was only half aware of what he was saying.
“What do you mean no one ever took care of you?”
“Just that. But then, I didn’t allow anyone in my room.”
“When you were a child?”
“I had to make a boundary. I had to lock her out. And I could never go out the door. I had to use the walls.” He’d maybe been...seven when he’d discovered that trick. He’d felt very big then, but now in his memory the boy was so, so small.
“I think you’re delirious.”
Maybe. But he could remember it so well. He described it to her. “One of the bookcases turned. I kept it empty. I didn’t like all those books sitting there and collecting dust anyway. I always kept the door locked. And I don’t think she ever knew about the passages. If she had known about them she would’ve filled them up. They were my secret. And they helped me get around the house.”
“You locked your mother out of your room?”
“Everyone. Everyone. But then, she didn’t take care of me when I was sick. No one ever has. Who took care of you?”
He wanted to imagine her life. Not his. Not that little boy.
“Oh. Everyone. My grandmother. My mother. Even my dad.”
“What was that like?”
Suddenly he wanted to know. He wanted to know what it was like if the people around you were... If they were normal. If they could care in a way that was normal. He just was very desperate to know.
“Well,” she said. “They used to make me tea and soup. Wipe my brow, like I’ve been doing for you. Keep me cool. They’d rub menthol on my chest.”
He looked at her, and then down at her delicate hands. And suddenly, his feelings were much less that of a child longing to be cared for. He didn’t wish her to touch him in an abstract, caring way. He wanted those hands on him in a different way.
“Are you going to rub my chest?”
Her cheeks turned pink. He supposed it was very bad form to say something like that when she was trying so hard to take care of him. But he found he couldn’t help himself.
“I think you can rub your own chest,” she said.
“But it sounds nicer to think of you doing it,” he said.
“Are you trying to flirt with me?”
He chuckled. For some reason that was funny.
“I don’t flirt.”
“No?”
“No. If I want a woman I simply tell her. And then I have her.”
“I see. Do they need to want you to?”
“They always do.”
She moved away from him then. He wished that she hadn’t.
“I’m going to come and check on you again soon. I’ll just...get more water. And get more cool cloths. Hot water and cold water. Everything.”
And then, when she left, he found himself drifting out of consciousness again. And dreaming of her hands.