19. Lina
NINETEEN
Lina
I start seeing two of Superintendent Daniels towards the end of our meeting on Friday.
I realize that I’ve slowly been listing to the side when he frowns at me. “Are you okay, Ms. Sanchez?” he asks me.
I’m sick and tired of people asking me this question. “I’m fine, Mr. Daniels. Is that all for today?”
“You really don’t look well,” he repeats, inspecting me. “Have you been doing okay with this responsibility? You know, with great power and all. Are you handling it?”
I steel my back, force myself to sit up straight. I don’t admit this requires an extreme amount of energy. “With all due respect, Mr. Daniels, I don’t remember you ever asking Oliver this question. I am handling it quite well. Would you like to me to reshare the survey results from the PS 2 community? The community thinks I’m handling it stunningly.”
The Department of Education sends a survey out to the families and staff members of each individual school in the city. It asks all types of questions, about leadership, support, academics. My scores were fantastic.
I force my body out of my chair, ignoring the rush of lightheadedness and gripping onto the handle of my door when I reach it. “If that’s all, Mr. Daniels, I have a lot to do before I leave for the weekend.”
Daniels seems unconvinced, but he gets up to go. He shakes my hand and raises an eyebrow while looking down at our clasped hands. “You seem unnaturally warm. I may be your boss, but I’m still a dad, and I know what a fever feels like. I’d check your temperature.”
“Thank you, Mr. Daniels,” I say firmly and finally.
He walks out.
The last of my energy gives out. I shut the door and slide down the back of it, eyes closed. I manage to crawl to my desk to get my phone. The ibuprofen I took a few hours ago seems to have fizzled out of my system way earlier than advertised. Fucking Big Pharma. I pull up the Uber app and request one home.
* * *
I take in my surroundings. I’m in my bed at home. It kind of smells and the duvet cover is very wet. After a few minutes of attempting to claw my way out of a haze and into coherent thought, I realize it’s wet because I seem to be sweating from every orifice of my body, including the places I didn’t know had sweat glands, like between my toes and behind my ears. I’m not quite sure why I’m sweating though, because I am absolutely freezing cold. Arctic cold. Shivering and shaking cold. My lips feel tender. The space between my joints feels tender. Everything feels tender.
It’s a monumental effort to get under my covers, because I’ve lost most of the voluntary control of my limbs and because my sheets feel like sandpaper on my skin. It hurts . Fucking 700-thread count sheets. There has to be a thread count conspiracy. If so, I’m the number one subscriber.
It’s probably a bad sign that I don’t remember how I got to my bed. It’s probably the number one sign that I should go to the doctor. That, and because my Egyptian cotton sheets feel like knives.
This is the last thought I have before my eyes close.
I dream of Blackbeard. He goes to Costco to buy the value pack of matches. There are thousands and thousands of matches. He is annoyed that Costco doesn’t provide shopping bags, so he has to use a Chiquita banana box to carry all his matches to his ship, which is parked in the parking lot. Under the cover of darkness, he sticks matches into every crack in the brick facade of PS 2. He lights them all, and it gives a very spooky effect to the school. Blackbeard has no concept of fire safety.
When I regain consciousness, it’s pitch black and I can’t breathe. Oh yes, I’m under my covers. I won’t be moving. I’m not sure I can.
I have a pounding headache, and I wonder why the hell I woke up when my dream was clearly about to get really good.
“Lina?!” a deep voice calls out. Oh, maybe I’m still dreaming. Blackbeard seems to be calling for me. Maybe he needs help carrying the matches. I told him to use a shopping cart.
“Lina, baby.” Oh, okay Blackbeard, it’s like that?
I am assaulted by a gust of frigid air and a spotlight. Maybe Blackbeard has taken me to the North Pole.
A rough hand feels my forehead, my neck. Blackbeard smells like my boyfriend, Dom. He is my boyfriend Dom.
“Holy shit, Lina. You’re really hot.”
“You too,” I tell my boyfriend Blackbeard Dom.
“Fuck. You’re soaking wet.”
“Always, for you.”
“When was the last time you took any medicine?”
I try to open my eyes to make sure I’m not hallucinating Dom, but it just isn’t possible. I decide to hope for the best. “Sometime this afternoon. Maybe around lunch?”
“Fuck,” he mutters again. “Okay, stay here,” he says sillily. Obviously.
Maybe hours later, Dom comes back. I am manhandled into an upright position. “Oh, honey,” he says, voice dripping with worry. A touch too dramatic for my liking. “I’m going to put this ibuprofen in your mouth, and then you’re going to drink some of this water, okay?”
I do as he asks. He annoyingly makes me drink a lot of water.
I guess Dom also feels this urge to unnecessarily narrate his movements, because he tells me, “I’m going to change your clothes first. Then I’m going to lift you up, put you in the armchair, and then change your sheets. Then you’re going right back, okay?”
I make a noise that I hope conveys consent.
I vaguely note that I’m still in my work clothes, and Dom has to peel them off me because they are soaked through, and I imagine this is what being flayed alive feels like. I’m stuffed into a soft shirt, and then I’m airborne, then freezing cold. Then airborne, then freezing cold with dry sheets.
“Sleep,” he commands, and it’s still sexy when he gets all bossy like this, even if I’m dying.
I dream of thermometers and rough hands checking my temperature. I am disappointed that Blackbeard is gone.
* * *
I feel a little more human when I wake up. It’s daylight, so I assume I slept through the night. I turn my head, and Dom is asleep next to me. I take a long moment to trace the sharp angles of his face with my eyes, but he feels it with his Super Dad powers, probably, and his eyes shoot open and immediately focus on me.
“Hey,” he says, with a smile, hand automatically moving up to check my forehead. “You’re still pretty hot.”
“You too,” I tell him again.
He launches himself out of bed, walking around to my side. I notice a bunch of pills and a full water bottle on my bedside table. “Here, take this. Your last dose was maybe six hours ago. And please finish the water bottle.”
My eyes start to water, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the fever or my helplessness or this feeling I’m feeling about Dom, or because I realize that he’s here without Frankie.
“Where’s Frankie?” I decide to go with. He watches me like a hawk to make sure I finish the water.
“She’s still with Tita Gloria,” he says gently. “She’s fine. I’ll call her in a bit.”
“I missed our date,” I say. I’m horrified to find a tear or three running down my face.
“Hey,” he croons, not missing it. He crawls over me and back into bed, tugging me into his body. “It’s okay, Lina. You’re incredibly sick right now. Let’s focus on you. What do you need? Do you need the bathroom? Do you think you feel well enough for me to take you to urgent care? I have a feeling you have the flu… parents have been saying in the parent chat that the flu has been going around the school. Did you get the flu shot this year?”
“Which question should I answer first?” I ask after a moment of processing.
He winces. “Sorry. Do you need the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
He hops out of bed and runs around the bed to give me an arm. I’m about to snap that I don’t need it, but then I try to stand up, and realize I do. “Shit,” I whine, still inexplicably crying. “I fucking hate this.”
“I know,” he murmurs, walking me to the bathroom. “But even boss-ass bitches get sick and need help once in a while. Especially ones that are in a building with nine hundred snotty kids every day.”
“Hey. One of those snotty kids is ours,” I say without thinking. Oh, wow. I went there. I did. I blame it on the fever dreams.
Dom’s head whips towards me with surprise, because he never misses a fucking thing when it comes to me or his daughter. He turns ahead towards our destination again, but it looks like he is attempting to smother a huge grin, suddenly shy, and the tips of his ears are red. “Frankie is exceptionally snotty.” And that’s all he says about that.
He gives me privacy after making sure I’m firmly secure on top of the toilet. He’s back inside as soon as he hears me flush.
“I had some soup and some super sugar electrolyte drink delivered last night,” Dom says as he tucks me back into bed. “Let me go heat up the soup.”
I sit back on my headboard and feel generally miserable until he comes back. “How did you get in here?” I don’t remember giving him a key, because we’re always at his place for Frankie.
“Your mom let me in,” he says, handing me a bowl of broth. “But I didn’t tell her you were sick because I figured you wouldn’t want her to worry.”
This statement brings a fresh wave of stinging behind my eyes. How did I get so lucky, to be dating this magnificent man who happens to understand me on a bone deep level?
“Did she give you the evil eye?” I say, sniffling.
Dom laughs. “No, she was very lovely. But I’m generally good with parents,” he says. “I am the President of the Parents, after all.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re annoyingly charismatic.”
“Thank you,” he grins.
He makes sure that I eat slash drink before asking his next question. “How are you feeling? I think you should go to the doctor, so I can either get you in an Uber to urgent care, or we can do a telehealth visit.”
“It hurts when I blink,” I admit.
“Let’s do telehealth,” he says. He picks up my phone and holds it to my face to unlock it. “What’s your insurance? I’m assuming all your info and passwords and things are saved on your phone.”
I’ve never felt so useless. Stripped bare, like my chest and ribcage are ripped open so that you can see my insides. The last person to see me in a state like this was my mother, probably over twenty years ago. If I get sick, I typically just make a nest out of my pillows and burrow for a few days. But when was the last time I was this sick? I made a disgusting puddle of sweat in my sheets, and Dom touched them.
“You can leave me,” I tell him quietly, as he fiddles with my phone. “I can do telehealth myself. I’m sure Frankie misses you.”
Something in my voice makes him put my phone down and turn the entire force of his attention on me. “She might miss me, but you need me more. She’s fine with Tita Gloria.”
“I don’t?—”
“Lina,” he sighs, pulling me into him and wrapping me in his tattooed tentacle arms, smoothing my hair. My hair . What the fuck does my hair look like right now? “When we agreed to give this a shot, this was part of the package. Me taking care of you. Let me take care of you. I want to be the one who takes care of you.”
“I don’t like it,” is all I can manage to say. “It makes me feel… unbalanced. Out of control. Weak.”
“This doesn’t make you any less of a boss-ass bitch. You’re still a boss-ass bitch. Just one with the flu.”
I realize I’m weeping again when I realize his shirt is getting wet.
“You told me this exact thing earlier this week, when you said accepting help doesn’t make me any less of a dad. You don’t have to do everything. I’m here for you. Always.”
I think I’m falling. This is what it feels like, and I forgot how scary of a thing it was, how out of control and wild and all-consuming.
“This is what being a partner means,” he continues. “Sticking around. Making sure you’re okay. Treating you like the queen you are. Serving at your beck and call. Not because you need it, but because you fucking deserve it.”
With this, he burrows deep through my skin and my flesh and my bones and into the deepest recesses of my soul to force out any reservations I could have about loving him.
* * *
It’s probably the flu, the tiny doctor head tells me over my phone video. He prescribes a five-day medication that Dom runs out to pick up. He comes back with grocery bags and spends the next hour cooking something called arroz caldo , which is a soupy chicken and rice porridge thing his mom used to make him whenever he got sick, loaded with garlic and ginger and other magical feel-better herbs. He only gets a little mad when I can only take five bites.
I alternate between sleep and sweat and sipping sports drinks all day. Dom’s next to me on the bed every time I wake up, leaning up on the headboard, long legs stretched out, a new movie pulled up on my laptop each time.
At one point, I make the mistake of bringing up the Fall Festival.
“It’s in a few weeks, and I’m in charge of planning and organizing it,” I tell him.
His face breaks into that stern angry papa bear look, and it would make me wet if I weren’t so dehydrated. “That’s something Jean told me I’m definitely supposed to be doing as the PTO President. I don’t want to see you doing any of it, except maybe last stage approval stuff. The Fall Festival is for fundraising. From the community, from families. This is something I’m supposed to handle, and the perfect thing to delegate at the school staff level.” Still glaring at me, he pulls out his phone and dials a number. “Hey Georgia, it’s Dom.”
I try to take the phone away, and he jumps out of bed like a huge jerk, because he knows I’m too weak to follow him.
I get a front-row seat to Work Dom, and I soon see how he has found so much success as a Business Operator Serial Entrepreneur. He enlists Georgia to build a Fall Festival team of school staff who have done it before, including herself. He calls a few parents, gives them a list of tasks, typing on his phone here and there and taking notes. He does this all in under fifteen minutes. He puts his phone down for a moment.
But then Dom seems to remember something, picks it back up, and FaceTimes someone else.
“Daddy!”
We break into identical smiles.
“Hey, anak . How you doing?”
“Amazing.”
Dom climbs back into bed and snuggles into my side, angling the phone so both our faces are on the screen.
She launches into a thirteen-minute recap of her last twenty-four hours, thrilled at her first sleepover without Dad. Most of it Titanic-related, the rest snack-related, with one toilet-related emergency. It’s punctuated with hmm s and wow s and no way s and will you unwrap your sweatshirt arms from your neck and please stop choking yourself like that from our side of the line.
“Are you still sick, Lina?” she asks me, suddenly becoming concerned. Her eyebrows furrow. She looks identical to Dom.
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” I tell her. “Thanks for letting me borrow your dad.”
She grins, easy to smile, like her father. “He’s a sick expert.” Dom’s eyes narrow at the oversimplification. She launches into story time. “One time, I had diarrhea?—”
“Okay,” both Dom and I cut in.
“We’re gonna go, Frankie,” Dom quickly adds. “I really miss you. Give Lola a hug for me, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow morning, probably.”
“I miss you too,” she screams.
“Love you,” he says.
“Love you, Daddy. Love you, Lina,” she says, then ends the call.
Those three words fill my body with warmth, and not fever warmth either. It’s happening , I say to myself. Dom senses this and emphasizes it with a kiss to my temple, holding me tightly, making sure the feeling stays in my body and doesn’t have a chance to escape.
* * *
I’m well enough to go back to work on Monday. At least, this is what I tell myself, as I work every day from seven to seven and only feel very exhausted instead of extremely exhausted. I feel like I have to make up for all the work I didn’t do this weekend. I’ll look at AP resumes… soon. Not right now, though, because maybe I’m a little overwhelmed. Because it seems like I have a family now, a kid. And even though my instincts might whisper that I should stop for a fucking second and think about it, that voice is drowned out—completely, entirely—by feelings. By that feeling. So, yeah. Fuck those instincts.