28. Friday
CHAPTER 28
FRIDAY
B ecker had wanted to stay after he’d dropped Maggie back at the cottage Thursday evening, but she had wanted to be alone. Or, at least, she had assumed she wanted to be alone. That was what she always wanted when she wasn’t feeling well — the space to be grumpy and whiny and miserable in peace. Becker had already gotten much more than a peek behind the curtain, but there was no reason to invite him in for an encore performance.
So, Maggie put her business degree to work and negotiated Becker out the door, forcing him to concede that he had no actual medical training, that she had a literal on-call nurse, and that there was, therefore, no logical reason to worry and no need for him to hang around.
Becker did leave. Reluctantly, but he left. Maggie gave herself a B+ for overall persuasiveness. In hindsight, she probably shouldn’t have used the phrase “totally fine.”
The clinic had told her that she could take the second part of her medication abortion regimen anytime the following day. Maggie wanted to get it the fuck over with, so she let her alarm wake her at her usual time and took it first thing, along with some extra strength Tylenol and the same anti-nausea medication she’d immediately thrown up the day before. Then she got right back in bed. God, she missed her morning runs. It had been almost a week. She was going to lose to Becker next time for sure.
The rest of her day was crampy, vomity, and exhausting. Zero out of ten, would not recommend. She’d planned to stream something soothingly pointless on her laptop, maybe House Hunters International or Real Housewives depending on how much she wanted to yell at the TV versus how much she wanted the people on the TV to be yelling, but she found that she couldn’t even get her brain to focus on what could only very generously be considered the “plot” of either. In the end, she mostly stared at the ceiling or the wall or the toilet — really just whatever was in front of her.
April stopped by twice, and Maggie let the nurse take her temperature and answered all her questions.
Becker texted a few times to check in. Maggie sent him, respectively, a gif of the bloody elevator scene in The Shining ; a gif of Lucy Liu holding a very badass sword behind what looked like a blood waterfall, which she thought was from one of the Kill Bill s; and a gif of Amy Poehler in Parks and Rec cheerfully declaring to camera “everything hurts and I’m dying.”
When it was just about getting dark, and Maggie had begun to dare to hope that the worst of it was over, she got another text from Becker.
8:28 p.m.: I’m dropping off a care package. Don’t come to the door.
8:29 p.m.: Unless you want to. But otherwise don’t.
She didn’t. Or, she kind of did? But no, she didn’t.
She gave it five minutes past when Parton stopped whining by the porch window before she went to see what Becker had left.
It was a beat up grocery bag. She took an inventory of its contents on the kitchen table: Unflavored Pedialyte, saltines, a heating pad, an assortment of runner’s caffeine-free energy gel packs (someone had clearly raided the nurse’s office), and three paperback books that, on closer inspection, were all Agatha Christie novels with Becker’s name scrawled inside the front cover.
Well, fuck.
It was perfect.
Maggie tried for ten minutes to find a gif with exactly the right vibe, but her head hurt and her stomach hurt and her back hurt and she was still bleeding pretty heavily, so she finally gave up and just texted him back the best words she could.
8:51 p.m.: Thanks, Becker.