Chapter 14
Vee
Finn is sick.
I hear him in the bathroom at three in the morning, retching miserably. The sound pulls me from sleep like a hook on a fish. I just lie there in the dark, listening to the flush of the toilet, the running water, his quiet groan of misery.
My body moves before my brain catches up. I'm out of bed and padding down the hall in bare feet, my oversized sleep shirt hanging to my knees.
He's sitting on the bathroom floor when I push the door open, his back against the tub, head tipped back against the porcelain. His face is pale and clammy.
"Hey," I say softly.
He cracks one eye open. "Go back to bed. I'm fine."
"You're sitting on the bathroom floor at three a.m."
"Strategic positioning."
I kneel down next to him and press the back of my hand to his forehead. He’s hot. Too hot.
"Stomach bug," he mutters. "I've only been around you guys, though. No idea where I picked it up."
"Come on." I stand and offer him my hand. "Let's get you back to bed."
He looks at my hand like I'm offering to carry him up a mountain. "Vee, I'm disgusting right now."
"I've dealt with worse." I wiggle my fingers. "Up."
He takes my hand and lets me help him to his feet. He sways a little and I steady him with a hand on his elbow.
"Water," I say. "Then bed. I'll be back in a few minutes."
"You don't have to—"
"I know."
I get him settled and go back to the hallway to find Rhys standing outside his door.
He must have heard from his room. He's in sleep pants and nothing else, arms crossed, looking at Finn's closed door with the expression he gets when something has upset the order of things.
"He's okay," I say. "Stomach bug."
Rhys looks at me.
Then he disappears back into his room.
I think that's the end of it until I come back from the kitchen with a glass of water and he reappears with a spare blanket from the linen closet, which he deposits outside Finn's door without knocking, then retreats again.
I stand in the hallway holding the water glass and look at the blanket on the floor.
"That was… actually very sweet," I say to no one.
By the time the sun comes up I'm moving through the house on autopilot. There’s broth simmering on the stove, ginger ale on Finn's nightstand, a cool washcloth for his forehead, and crackers within reach.
My hands know what to do. They've done this before. Measured out fever reducers, checked temperatures, adjusted pillows. It's familiar in a way that grounds me. It gives me something to focus on that isn't the constant low hum of anxiety living in my chest.
I'm doing this because I want to. I'm not doing this to meet some unspoken expectation or to justify my presence here. Finn needs someone, and I can be that someone. Simple as that.
Malcolm appears in the kitchen doorway around eight. Shirtless, because of course he is. His hair is mussed and he’s squinting at me like he's not sure I'm real.
"You're up early."
"Finn's sick," I say, stirring the broth. "Stomach bug."
Malcolm's expression shifts immediately. "Fuck. Is he—"
"Resting. Keeping water and crackers down so far."
"You've been taking care of him."
Not a question. I nod anyway.
Malcolm runs a hand through his hair, making it worse. He looks around the kitchen like he's searching for instructions. "I'll handle his stuff today. The inventory spreadsheet and the client call at two."
"You know how to do that?"
"How hard can it be?"
By noon, the answer is clear. Very hard.
Malcolm burns the toast. Not slightly. Actual char. The smoke alarm goes off and he stands there waving a dish towel at it while cursing under his breath.
I take the towel from him and finish clearing the smoke while he dumps the blackened bread in the trash.
"Toast is supposed to be easy," he mutters.
"It is easy."
"Then why—"
"You set it too high and walked away."
He looks at the toaster like it personally betrayed him.
From the corner of the kitchen, Rhys makes a sound that’s somewhere between sympathy and amusement.
Malcolm points at him without looking. "Don't."
Rhys says nothing but the corner of his mouth twitches.
An hour later Malcolm is at the kitchen table, staring at a spreadsheet with the expression usually reserved for bomb defusal.
"I can't find the file," he says flatly.
"Which file?"
"The inventory one. Finn said he saved it but it's not in any of the folders."
I lean over his shoulder and scan the screen. "Did you check the cloud drive?"
"The what?"
I reach past him and click through. The file is right there, labeled clearly.
Malcolm stares at it. "How did you know that?"
"Finn's organized. Everything goes in the cloud."
I pour myself a glass of water and set it next to him, watching how the muscles in his arm flex when he lifts his hand to rub at his forehead. I try not to stare, but it's hard not to notice.
"So how do you do your job if you can't find the cloud?" I ask. Only half teasing.
He grins, sheepish. "I install the security systems. The physical stuff. Drills, screws, wires. Heavy lifting. Technical setup is Alex's deal."
I glance at his arms again. The corded muscle, the tattoos. How his bicep flexes as he types. He’s leaner than Alex and Rhys, but everything is… toned. Yeah. That tracks completely. I hide my smile behind my water glass and mutter, "Seems about right."
Behind me, a chocolate muffin appears on the counter next to where I'm standing.
I didn't ask for it.
I look back.
Rhys is already walking away toward the living room.
I look at Malcolm.
Malcolm looks at the muffin, looks at me, then looks at the doorway Rhys just disappeared through.
He says nothing.
He turns back to the laptop with the expression of a man choosing his battles.
By mid-afternoon we've settled into a rhythm. I direct, Malcolm follows. I tell him where things are, how Finn organizes his systems, which calls can wait and which can't. He listens and doesn't argue when I redirect him away from decisions that would make more work later.
It's a comfortable inversion of what I'm used to. Being the one who knows. The one leading instead of following.
It feels good.
At some point Rhys drifts back into the kitchen and takes up a position leaning against the far counter. He’s not in the way or asking for anything. He’s just present in the way he has of being present, quiet and solid, like a piece of furniture that also happens to be watching you.
Every twenty minutes or so he finds a reason to set something near me.
A small bowl of crackers, a fresh glass of water to replace the one I finished. A section of the clementines he apparently found at the back of the fruit bowl and peeled without comment.
Malcolm watches this happen with the expression of a man cataloguing data.
"Does he do this at the pack house?" I ask Malcolm, low enough that it might not carry.
"He once brought me a beer after I'd had a terrible week," Malcolm says, equally low. "It was a few months after we bonded. I nearly fell off the couch."
"Why?"
"Because it meant he'd noticed I'd had a terrible week." Malcolm glances at Rhys. "He notices things. He just doesn't do anything about it for most people."
I look at the peeled clementine sections on the counter next to me.
Most people.
I eat a clementine section and don't say anything.
The smell of the broth simmering on the stove pulls me somewhere else.
Late fall, Eli with the flu.
He was a terrible patient. The worst. He ran a fever of 102 and still tried to read medical journals from bed, squinting at the pages while his hands shook from the chills.
I walked into his room with soup and found him propped up against three pillows, a journal spread across his lap, highlighter in hand.
"You're supposed to be resting," I said.
"I am resting." He coughed, winced, and went right back to highlighting a paragraph about cytokine response.
"Reading academic papers is not resting."
"It's light reading."
"Eli."
"I'm fine, Vee. Just a little—" Another cough, harder. The journal slipped off his lap.
I set the soup down on his nightstand and plucked the glasses right off his face.
"Hey—"
"No reading until your fever breaks." I folded them carefully and tucked them into my pocket. "Doctor's orders."
"You're not a doctor."
"Neither are you. Not until you finish your internship anyway."
He pouted. Actually pouted, his bottom lip sticking out like a kid who'd had his favorite toy confiscated. "That's not fair."
"Life's not fair. Drink your soup."
The pout intensified. He crossed his arms and glared at me with unfocused eyes, his hair a wild mess from lying in bed all day.
Drake appeared in the doorway at that exact moment, took one look at Eli's face, and immediately pulled out his phone.
"Don't you dare," Eli said.
Click.
"Drake."
"This is gold." Drake was grinning, thumb already moving across the screen. "Pouty Eli. The world needs to see this."
"I will end you."
"You can barely see straight right now. I'll take my chances." He winked at me. "You're doing great, Vee. Don't give them back."
He kept that photo as his phone wallpaper for a month. Every time Eli saw it he'd get flustered and demand Drake change it.
Drake never did. Not for a long time.
I sat on the edge of Eli's bed that day and made him eat the entire bowl of soup, spoonful by spoonful, while he complained that I was being tyrannical and he felt fine and this was completely unnecessary.
By the time the bowl was empty he was half-asleep, his protests getting quieter and less coherent.
"Vee," he mumbled as I tucked the blanket around him.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for the soup. And the tyranny."
I smiled and brushed his hair back from his forehead. "Anytime."
The memory is sweet. The memory hurts.
Warm memories are harder to carry than bad ones. Bad memories I can be angry at. I can use them as fuel, justify the distance. Warm memories just hurt.
I blink and I'm back in the kitchen, the broth still simmering, my hands wrapped around a mug of tea that's gone cold.