Chapter Seventeen
HERE'S WHAT I KNOW about being sick. I'm terrible at it, I narrate it without mercy, and somewhere around the third hour the ceiling starts giving notes on my performance.
"You're being dramatic," the ceiling says.
"I'm dying," I explain to the ceiling.
"You have a temperature."
"A fatal one. Tell Maximo I forgive him. Tell him he was my favorite—"
"Jassy."
That last one isn't the ceiling. That one has a hand, cool against my forehead, and a voice with something underneath it I'm too cooked to name.
"How high?" he demands, of someone. A phone. "And with her medication?" A silence I don't like the shape of. "No. I'm bringing her in if it climbs another degree."
"'m fine," I inform the room. "It's a small fever. A starter fever."
"You're on immunosuppressants and you're burning up. There's nothing small about it." The cloth on my forehead goes away and comes back colder. "Drink this."
"Bossy," I can't help remarking even as I do as asked.
After that, I drift back to sleep, and when I wake up again, he's still there, which is strange because Maximo doesn't do this, Maximo keeps oceans of couch between us, and yet here he's on the edge of my bed in the ugly hours, changing the cloth, checking the little thermometer, holding water to my mouth like the job matters more than sleep.
Because here's the unfair thing about my Maximo, the textbook billionaire hero who's supposed to be allergic to anything with feeling attached.
Apparently he also does this. Sits in the ugly hours playing nurse to a broke girl with a borrowed heart, like there's nowhere else he'd rather be.
And that heart, the one I borrowed, the one that's supposed to be resting through this fever and behaving itself on its pills, picks the worst possible night to go reaching for him anyway.
A smart girl's heart would know better. Mine just knows him, and it has since before I did. "You didn't have to stay," I mumble.
"Be quiet."
"You could've had the housekeeper—"
"Be quiet, Jassy."
So I shut up. I turn my face into his hand because it's cool and it's his and the fever has burned off every wall I usually keep up, all my careful nothing-to-see-here, and in the warm swimming dark I say the truest thing I own, easy as breathing, the way you can only say a thing when you're too sick to protect it.
"I love you, Maximo," I tell him. "Did you know that? I love you so much it's embarrassing."
And then I'm gone, under, asleep before I can watch it do anything to his face.
MAXIMO DIDN'T SLEEP.
He sat where he was, her cheek gone slack against his palm, her breath evening out into something safe, the fever loosening its grip degree by degree while the windows went from black to gray to a morning he hadn't asked for.
He had heard the words before. From family, meaning it dutifully. From women, meaning something they'd revise by morning.
He had never once heard them said like that. Thrown away, unguarded, expecting nothing back. Said the way she did everything, all in, holding nothing in reserve because it'd never once occurred to her to keep score.
And she had said his name like that too.
Maximo. Not the guarded way the rest of the world said it, but easy and sure and already hers, the way she'd said it since the day he handed it over.
Except tonight, with her guard burned all the way down, he finally heard what had always been underneath it.
She had said his name like it belonged to her. Like he did.
I love you so much it's embarrassing. He was still holding a cool cloth he'd stopped needing, still counting a pulse that had evened out an hour ago. He was, he understood, going to sit here until she woke, and then he was going to pretend, with everything he had, that he hadn't heard a word.
Because she loved him.
And she had no idea that the heart saying so had been carved out of the one person on earth he could never stop grieving. She thought she was giving him something new.
She was giving him back the dead.
Maximo looked down at the sleeping girl, and for the first time in two years he couldn't tell whether the thing cracking open in his chest was grief or the other thing, the forbidden thing, and that, more than the fever, was what kept him awake until morning.