Chapter 16 Stop Discussing My Hydration with the Royal We
Stop Discussing My Hydration with the Royal We
Many of her migraine headaches behaved in the same terrible way.
They followed a similar, predictable, excruciating pattern, and they responded to medication in an equally disappointing fashion.
But every so often, one bold, renegade migraine headache decided to forge its own path into the great unknown of her pain receptors and act like an utterly unpredictable tyrant.
Tonight, she was having one of those nights with one of those nightmares.
“You don’t normally get sick like this, do you?
” Elliot whispered, stroking her hair as he spooned her in her bed.
She had to focus on processing his sentence.
That’s what happened when her head turned on her.
Each small, automatic function now required effort.
A simple conversation had to be broken up into small, discrete tasks that she muscled through.
She listened. She processed. She thought of an appropriate response. Then, she said it out loud, in that order.
“Sometimes,” she finally answered. “But this is really bad.” Curled in her hands was a freshly cleaned metal mixing bowl. She didn’t want to talk about what the bowl had been through earlier that evening.
“We should stay in my room. You’ll be closer to the bathroom.”
“No,” she whined. “I like being in my space. It makes me feel better.”
“Can I get you another pill?” he asked her.
She shook her head. Or she tried to. “I can’t take any more tonight.”
“You poor thing,” he hummed sweetly, kissing the top of her head. “Can I get you some water?” he whispered. He kept his voice low for her, noticing each time she flinched away from any noise, even his.
She shook her head weakly, barely moving the pillow. “No. I’ll just throw it up.”
“See, I don’t like that answer.”
“I’ll try again in a bit. This really isn’t so bad. They used to be so much worse before I got on your insurance,” she assured him, even as her face felt weighed down, like her skin had turned thick and heavy.
“I don’t see how they could get worse than this.”
“You should see me when I run out of meds. Now those are bad,” she told him, attempting a playful poke to his chest and missing by half a foot.
“Now you never have to run out of medication again.”
His arm swept across her shoulders to her bedside table.
Slowly, he lifted a cool washcloth just above her eyebrow, painting her skin with a brush of damp fabric.
Her head chased the soothing feel of it, turning until they faced each other.
He lifted the cloth, revealing what she imagined was a stringy mess of wet bangs plastered to her forehead.
“I’d be embarrassed about looking so much like a ratty mess right now but, lucky for me, that’s how I looked when I met you.”
He laughed lightly, as though worried his joy might hurt her.
“The first moment I saw you…” he murmured, adjusting his position so that more of him cradled more of her.
“I was so into you. Immediately. Your hair was wet, and there were these droplets of rain caught on your eyelashes. And you were so beautiful. I froze getting into your car. It was like the rain stopped. Then I saw Isaac in the front seat. That threw a wrench in my grand plan to woo you from the back seat of your car. Which I’m not sure is sized for people, by the way. ”
The warm affection in his voice fell over her body like a wool blanket. She laughed nervously in an attempt to appear unaffected by his tenderness and then promptly winced in regret as knives drove into her skull. “Ah, Isaac. Always there for our big moments.”
“He’s reliable in that way.”
He lifted the cool compress from her head, and her eyelids fluttered shut. “You were so sure and intense that day,” she told him, wanting to offer her own memory of him without giving away too much. “And I could tell it wasn’t a front. You were honest. You are honest. I like that about you.”
Every day I like you more and more. She internally grimaced at the version of herself who’d exposed her soft underbelly to this man only ninety minutes ago. Lainey didn’t do things like that. She didn’t give people the power to stomp on her heart so readily.
“I like that about you, too,” he said, his lips gently sweeping across her temple. “Well, you’re not completely honest, obviously, but you are about the things that matter.”
“So generous of you,” she eked out on a breath.
“Water. Now,” he urged.
“Fine,” she relented. His arms hooked under hers and lifted her up to the headboard. She brought the bottle to her lips and took a sip over the bowl, demurely.
The water came back up with a vengeance.
“That’s it. I’m taking you to urgent care,” he ordered, removing the bowl from her lap the moment it all seemed “finished.”
She moaned in dissent.
“Yes. You’re dehydrated.”
She sensed him buzzing around the pitch-dark room. “Urgent care costs money,” she whined.
“Good thing you married someone for his insurance.” He was smirking. She could hear it in his voice.
Placing one arm under her knees and cradling her head with the other, he lifted her from the bed. There was no grunting. No griping. Just ease. Safety. Comfort. Someone was holding her. She was allowing someone to hold her. She wasn’t certain which of those two things was more miraculous.
“Come on. We need liquids.”
His chest was warm against her forehead. “Stop discussing my hydration with the royal we.”
“Can’t. I have to factor in my hydration, too, because if I think too hard about how much water I’ve watched exit your body, I’ll freak out.”
She had no rebuttal.
The urgent care was packed. She kept her eyes shut to block out the fluorescent lights humming overhead as Elliot wove her through rows of hunched bodies.
Scents of antiseptic and something she did not wish to identify mixed and mingled into the fibers of the high-traffic-area carpeting.
Everyone looked as agitated and miserable as she felt, which was comforting in its own way.
Here was a place where everyone was a mess.
In the back corner were two empty chairs. “Lie down across these and face the wall to block out the light,” he suggested. “I’ll get us checked in.”
She did just that. She appreciated not having to think. Thinking hurt. Everything hurt. She kept an ear open while Elliot spoke to the brown-haired woman snapping her gum at the check-in desk.
“Please let them know that my wife has a chronic migraine condition and is severely dehydrated,” he told the woman managing the check-in desk.
My wife. It was the first time she’d heard him say it. It sounded like it meant something to him. Like she meant something to him.
She felt a tap on her shoulder. “She’s trying to bump you up the line,” Elliot told her, lifting her head to take his spot on the chair and then gently placing her onto his lap.
She nuzzled into him. “Good. Children and babies can take a hike.”
“I explicitly said not to bump a baby, but I think we have a shot of jumping in front of a guy named Mark with a ‘nasty sliver.’ ”
“Mark?” she asked. The name sent her neck craning around the room, pain be damned. There, next to the double doors, was a familiar, frail-looking man, holding up a finger wrapped in so much gauze it approximated the size of a child’s fist.
She turned back into the protection of Elliot’s stomach. “That’s my lawyer.”
“That guy?” Elliot sounded unimpressed.
“You have to make sure he goes in before we do. If he loses that finger, he will blame me forever.”
“He will leave here with all of his fingers. I promise.” She felt the soft tug of his hands in her hair. “You’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little more concerned for your well-being right now.”
“You need to hide my face when we walk past. Just to be safe.”
He laughed breezily. “Deal.”
“I’m sorry I ruined your dinner.”
“I know,” he teased her. “I didn’t even get to show you your room.”
“Room?” she asked, confused.
“For you to stay in when we’re renting out Forest’s Bridge this summer. The place is all set for us. It just needs a range hookup and…all of our stuff. The couch is a pullout for me. I thought you should have the bedroom. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.” He rubbed her back soothingly.
“I keep forgetting we have to leave. I was getting used to the two of us there.”
“You were always planning on leaving eventually, though, right? Wasn’t that the plan?” There was a question in his voice she could just barely detect. A question she didn’t want him to ask, because suddenly, she wasn’t sure how to answer it.
She hummed a noncommittal response.
“Hopefully, we don’t have to wait much more,” he said after a long silence.
“I’m okay to wait,” she responded, warmth spreading into her limbs as his fingers drew lazy circles on her back.
He looked down at her, and she wondered if there were more things in her life he was hoping she’d wait a little longer for. Right then, she might have considered it.
“It’s not so bad here,” she said, the words feeling truer than they had in a while.
One IV of fluids and a cocktail of pain medications later, Elliot was leading Lainey out the double doors, but this time she was standing upright.
“Give me a second,” she told him, exhausted but hydrated and with the echoes of pain lingering at the edges of her skull. “I need to get a favorable payment plan going, and I think the woman with the puppy scrubs is going to love our story about Waffle and the truck.”
Elliot pretended to be shocked. “You would leverage Waffle like that?”
“I would and have leveraged my own grandmother like that. I’ve pretended to be identical twins to get two free consultations with an acupuncturist.”
“Easy, Tom Ripley. I’ve already taken care of this one.”
“Okay…” Her brain couldn’t process the information, but that could’ve been the residual effects of the many pain medications she was on. “How much do you need me to Venmo you?” She pulled her phone from her dress pocket.
He pushed her phone down as he wrapped his arm around her. “It’s handled.”
Handled. She repeated the word over and over in her head until it no longer sounded familiar. “You can’t just pay my urgent care bill. That’s not our arrangement.”
“Counterargument: it’s exactly our arrangement.” He strode them into the dark parking lot. It was late, and the world was quiet. The only movement was the bugs circling the lights.
“Elliot.” She pressed her hand to his chest, stopping him. “When I said I don’t borrow money from Bree, that wasn’t specific to her. I don’t borrow money. Money makes things messy.”
He held up his hand. “Look. I have no doubt that we will sit down and figure out all the ways we can divide up these kinds of costs. But how about, just for tonight, you let me handle it? Don’t worry about how you’re paying to feel better and just focus on feeling better.
” He tucked a strand of her sweat-dampened hair behind her ear.
“It’s two in the morning, and we have to let Waffle out.
I promise we’ll get this sorted, but you don’t have to worry about this tonight. ”
She looked up at him, her eyes having adjusted to the dark. She could just barely make out his gentle look behind his glasses. The soft, hopeful edges of his smile.
“Lainey, please,” he begged, fatigued.
She narrowed her gaze. “It’s too much. This goes beyond the arrang—”
“Did you know it’s Grayson’s birthday today?”
Her eyes blinked fast. “Uh, no?”
“Well, it was. And after I did the whole surrogate-uncle thing of watching him put together a puzzle of the Chrysler Building over FaceTime—my gift, naturally—my best friends asked what was going on in my life, and I realized I didn’t have anything I could tell them, because you’re at the center of everything that matters to me.
The only thing I wanted to talk about was you.
I wanted to so badly my chest hurt, and I don’t want to have to keep it in anymore.
I want to tell them about how funny you are and how capable and smart.
You’re so smart, Lainey. You’re always ten steps ahead of me.
I don’t even try to keep up anymore, I just enjoy it.
Because I love watching you figure things out.
I love the way your forehead creases when you think you might be in over your head and the way you bite your bottom lip just as you realize you’re not.
I think about you all the time. I make up reasons to see you and touch you and make you laugh.
All I want is to hear you laugh. It’s the perfect sound. ”
“Elliot.” It was all she could think to say. What did a person say to something like that?
“I know what I said yesterday—and I know what you said yesterday—but that didn’t feel like ‘just one time’ to me.
It felt big. This already means something to me, and I think it always has.
” He winced, like whatever was happening in this urgent care parking lot was the greatest agony he’d ever experienced.
“Are you…? This isn’t all in my head, is it?
This is real for you, too?” Elliot asked, his voice raw and aching.
A beating drum reverberated through her limbs and into her chest. “Of course it’s real for me,” she answered.
He took her hand in his as his whole body loosened into his smile. “Good. Then stop fighting me on this. There have been a lot of times I’ve wanted to make your life easier, and I’ve held myself back, because I thought you’d hate it. So do me a favor and let me take care of you this one time.”
Who was Elliot Hodges? This man who’d dropped into her life and saw so much of her. Who wanted to care for her. It would be so nice to let him. It would feel so good—so safe—to trust him in that small way.
“Fine,” she relented, trying very hard not to look pleased.
Right there in the dark, he drew her into another breath-stealing kiss. “This is real,” he whispered, not to her, but to himself. As though reminding himself he hadn’t fallen into a dream.
Elliot held her close all the way to his truck, past the bench where Mark, whose sliver had apparently escalated into something requiring a full arm cast, was waiting for a ride home.
Then, back at the house, Elliot held her in bed all through the night and late into the next morning.