Chapter 35
Four Days Later
Adam
The blankets aren't right.
I know that's a weird thing to be fixated on when my joints feel tight and my skin is so sensitive that the weight of a sheet feels like sandpaper, but the blankets are wrong and I can't stop thinking about it.
They’re thin, and too rough. The wrong weight. The one on the left smells like the detergent Raff bought last month that I've asked him three times to stop buying because it's too sharp, and now it's making my head hurt on top of everything else.
I've been in Cliff's bed for three days now, and I've rearranged it approximately forty-seven times but it still isn't right.
"Stop doing that," Perrin says from the doorway.
I look up. My brother is leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. He's been hanging out in the hallway a lot lately, close enough to hear me if I need something, far enough to give me the illusion of space.
"I'm not doing anything," I say.
"You've moved that pillow four times in the last ten minutes."
I look at the pillow in my hands. Then I put it down. Then I pick it up again and move it two inches to the left.
Perrin’s eyes narrow, deep worry twisting between his brows. "Can I get you some water? Or something to eat?”
"No.” I punch the pillow, frustrated. “It's not right," I say, and even I can hear how unreasonable that sounds. But I can't help it.
Something in my chest won't settle until everything around me is arranged exactly the way it needs to be. But I can't figure out what that arrangement is, which is making me want to pull every blanket off this bed and start completely from scratch.
A small “excuse me” drifts from behind Perrin, and he quickly steps inside the room so Elowen can come in.
The omega is carrying a stack of clean, folded blankets against her chest. She takes one look at me sitting in the middle of the bed surrounded by a nest of pillows and sheets in various states of disarray, and her expression does something that is trying very hard to be neutral and not quite getting there.
She must think I’m out of my mind.
"Okay, grumpy." She sets the blankets at the end of the bed. "Let's try these."
"The other ones aren't working," I say, which sounds insane but is completely true.
"I know." She sits on the edge of the mattress and starts unfolding the first one, shaking it out with a soft snap of fabric. "These are some old ones from the linen closet in the hallway. Different detergent."
I reach for it before she's even finished smoothing it out.
The second the fabric touches my hands, something in my chest loosens by one small, significant degree. It's softer. Heavier. It smells faintly like Cliff and Raff, which right now is the greatest thing I've ever encountered in my entire life.
I pull it toward me and press my face into it.
Perrin makes a sound in the doorway that he tries to cover with a cough.
I ignore him.
"Better?" Elowen asks.
"Better," I admit, my voice muffled by the blanket.
She reaches for the next one and hands it over without comment, and I add it to the pile, arranging it with the focus of someone defusing something.
"Should we take him to the hospital?" Perrin asks from the doorway. It's the fourth time he's asked today. I've counted. “He looks really flushed and sweaty.”
Elowen doesn't look up from the blankets.
"They'd give him Tylenol and tell him to wait until he can see his doctor," she says, with the patient tone of someone repeating something they've already said several times and are prepared to keep saying it.
"We'd spend six hours in a waiting room for nothing. "
"So we just wait until he can see his doctor?" Perrin's jaw is tight.
"We manage," she says. "There's a difference."
Managing, as it turns out, looks like this.
Every morning, Elowen appears in the doorway with a small lineup of medications in a little glass dish, like she's presenting me with an extremely disappointing charcuterie board. She explains what each one is, what it's supposed to do, and what she's hoping it will help with.
I take them all without argument because I feel too awful to have opinions about anything except the blankets.
And honestly, I am extremely thankful for the omega.
She’s tried everything she can get her hands on.
Anti-inflammatories for joint pain. Magnesium for muscle cramping.
A low dose antihistamine that she says sometimes helps with skin sensitivity in autoimmune cases.
A hormone supplement she ordered online two days ago which arrived yesterday, and that she described as a long shot but worth trying.
None of it is working the way it should.
My headache is gone and my joints no longer feel like they’re packed with broken glass, but some of my other symptoms just won’t go away, and it’s starting to annoy Elle.
I can see it on her pretty face.
"Your fever went up again," she says, setting the thermometer down on the nightstand and writing something in the small notebook she's been keeping since day one.
"I know," I say. "I can feel it."
"How's the joint pain?"
"Not terrible." I shift slightly against the pillows, testing. "Maybe a little worse in my wrists."
She writes that down too.
"Elowen," I say.
"Mm."
"You have that face."
She looks up. "What face?"
"You know that one,” I say firmly, but her eyes widen, telling me she has no clue. “You clearly think something’s wrong with me, but you’re not saying it." I hold her gaze. "What is it?"
She's quiet for a moment, her pen hovering over the notebook. Then she sets it down in her lap and looks at me properly.
"Your symptoms aren't tracking the way I'd expect them to," she says carefully.
"Coming off Verenthicin should produce a predictable pattern.
Inflammation, fatigue, joint pain. All of which you have.
" She pauses. "But there are a few things that don't fit that pattern, and I'm trying to figure out why. "
"What things?" I ask.
She hesitates.
"Elowen,” I whine, incredibly aware of how pathetic I sound.
"The fever," she says. "And the sensitivity. And the—" She stops, choosing her words carefully. "The nesting."
The room goes very quiet.
"I'm not nesting," I say.
She looks at the elaborate arrangement of blankets and pillows surrounding me on all sides.
"I'm cold," I say. "And the blankets help."
"You could always put on a shirt," she says, glancing at my bare chest.
“Clothes sound awful,” I say flatly.
“Okay,” she says with a very pleasant smile.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Agree with me like that."
"I'm not agreeing with you to make you happy," she says, drawing the words out, speaking clearly like she's explaining something very simple to someone very small, "I’m agreeing with you because I agree with you.” She says slowly. “It makes sense that you don’t want to wear a ton of clothes when you don’t feel good,” she snaps like I started this fight.
Perrin snickers and I frown.
"I thought you were humoring me,” I say, annoyed with both of them.
"I would never." She presses a hand flat against her chest, her expression shifting into something so genuinely wounded that for half a second I almost believe it. Then the look on her face drops. Just like that, the whole performance dissolves, and she fixes me with a look so flat and so pointed that Perrin actually turns around so I can’t see the smile on his face.
"Are you done?" she asks.
“You suck,” I mumble, but Elle has already picked her pen back up and is writing in her notebook. I can't read it from where I'm sitting, so instead I stare at the ceiling and try to figure out why the word nesting landed in my chest the way it did.
Like a key finding a lock.
I shake the thought off.
"Cliff and Raff are driving me insane," I say, partly because it's true and partly because I want to talk about something else.
Elowen's mouth curves slightly. "They're worried about you."
"They're climbing the walls," I say. "Perrin said that Raff reorganized the garage yesterday. The whole thing. Every shelf. He color-coded the socket wrenches."
"He color-coded the socket wrenches," she repeats, cocking one brow.
"By size and finish," Perrin says. "Satin, chrome, and black oxide all have their own sections now." He nods like he approves. “It looks nice.”
Elowen presses her lips together, clearly fighting a smile.
"And Cliff," I continue, "has cleaned the kitchen three times. The same kitchen. In two days." I look at her. "I saw him scrubbing the grout on his hands and knees this morning at six a.m. Cliff does not scrub grout. Cliff has never in his life scrubbed grout."
"They need to tend to something," Elowen says, her voice going softer. "When an alpha can't fix a problem, they redirect their energy. It's instinct."
"It's annoying," I say.
"It's love," she says, then she quickly adds, "Also annoying. Both things can be true at once.”
I look at her for a moment, at the notebook in her lap and the careful line of her mouth. She's been sitting in this room with me for three days straight, without complaint, managing my medications and my pillows and my increasingly unreasonable feelings about blanket texture.
"You've been here every day," I say.
"I know."
"You don't have to be."
She looks up at me. "I know that too." She holds my gaze. "But I'd never make you go through this alone."
She reaches over and places her hand on my knee, squeezing once, and the look on her face is so wonderfully warm and unguarded that something in my chest cracks open a little without my permission.
I stare at her hand on my knee.
Then at her face.
This woman showed up in our lives like a wrecking ball, and I have spent every minute since keeping her at arm's length, and she has sat in this room with me every single day anyway, and not once has she made me feel like a burden or an inconvenience or a problem to be solved.
The guilt hits me so fast and so hard that it actually makes my chest hurt.