Chapter 10 #2
The words come out sharp enough to draw blood.
Mom blinks like she’s just remembering I exist beyond convenient respite care.
Because yeah, I bought a fucking nebulizer with money I didn’t have because she forgot to bring one last time, and now I hide it under my bed like drug paraphernalia. Just in case.
“Oh.” Relief and guilt wage war across Mom’s features. “Maine, honey, you didn’t have to?—“
“It’s fine,” I lie.
Nothing about this is fine, but what else can I say?
Hi, I’m Maine, I’m drowning in debt and my breakfast was water from the tap.
But it doesn’t matter, because the lie isn’t probed at all. They don’t ask how classes are going (badly). They don’t ask about hockey (better go pro if any of us want to eat). They don’t ask why my jeans hang loose or why my hands sometimes shake from caffeine substituting for calories.
Because I’m fine. Always have been. Have always had to be.
“Two hours.” Dad’s already backing away, keys jangling the retreat. “Three tops. We just need to?—“
“Take your time.” The smile feels carved into my face with a rusty skate. “We’re good here.”
They’re gone before the door fully closes, leaving me with my sister’s labored breathing and the familiar feeling that I’m the last resort dressed up as the first choice. And?—
“Was that your family?”
Maya’s voice cuts through my pity party.
Right. She witnessed that whole pathetic production.
Nothing says “sex-god potential” or “relationship material” like watching a grown man get treated like unpaid nursing staff by his parents.
But I can’t think about that now, because Maya and the bet are the furthest things from my mind.
So I just nod, and she retreats to the kitchen as I guide Chloe to the couch. “Easy does it, Chlo. Couch sweet couch.”
“She’s pretty,” Chloe manages once she’s settled, even with lungs operating at forty percent capacity. “Good bone structure.”
“That’s a weird fucking thing to notice.” I arrange pillows behind her back exactly how she likes—two vertical, one horizontal.
“She keeps looking over here.” Chloe’s eyes, sharp despite the exhaustion, track Maya’s movement. “Like she’s checking on you.”
“She’s probably running from your germs.” I tuck her blanket-covered feet under a cushion. “Some people are weird about lung diseases. Can’t imagine why.”
“Maine.” Her serious voice sounds wrong filtered through wheezing. “You look skinny. And tired. Like, more tired than usual.”
“I’m fine.” The response is hardwired into my DNA along with the genetic inability to ask for help. “Let me get your blanket. Try not to die while I’m gone.”
“No promises.”
I escape to the hallway closet where Grandma’s quilt lives in protective custody.
Bottom shelf, wrapped in a garbage bag. The thing’s a crime against aesthetics—clashing patterns that might’ve been flowers before they gave up on life, colors that don’t exist in nature, held together by stubbornness.
But Chloe decided at age three it had healing properties, and who’s going to argue with a sick kid about her magic blanket theory?
When I turn, Maya’s there in the narrow hallway. “I—“ She starts, stops, eyes dropping to the quilt explosion in my arms. “That’s quite a statement piece.”
“Family heirloom.” I heft it higher, six-foot-five of athletic muscle clutching a blanket like emotional support. “It’s hideous, I know.”
“It’s loved.” Her voice goes softer than I’ve ever heard, like she’s handling something breakable. “You can tell by how carefully you’re holding it. It matters.”
My chest does something complicated and painful. But before I can process that, she presses against the wall to let me pass. The move brings us close enough to share breathing space, close enough to feel her body heat through thin cotton, close enough to see her pulse jumping in her throat.
For one insane second, I consider dropping the ugly quilt.
Pressing her against that wall.
But then Chloe coughs.
Wet and painful and full of fluid that shouldn’t be there.
Reality calling.
I slip past Maya and head back to the living room, where Chloe’s listing sideways now, that particular exhausted slump that means breathing is a full-time job with shit benefits.
I cocoon her in the quilt how she likes it—tucked under her chin for security, loose around her chest for breathing room.
“Treatment or just meds today, squirt?” I sigh, slumping onto the couch next to her, wishing I could wrap myself in the blanket as well.
“Full treatment.” The wheeze worsens, developing that whistle-edge that makes my own chest constrict in sympathy. “But can you…”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Storytime.” I ruffle her hair, gentler than I’d ever admit. “Let me get the contraband.”
The medical supply box lives under my bed, hidden behind hockey gear that might get pawned if my finances get worse.
But inside is the most priceless shit I own, everything arranged with military precision—medication vials standing at attention, tubing coiled with obsessive neatness, mask that’s hospital standard.
My hands move without consulting my brain: medication check, saline measure, everything loaded with the muscle memory of too many years, too many treatments. And, when I return, Maya’s claimed the arm of the recliner, close enough to observe but maintaining distance.
She wears an expression I can’t decode—not pity, thank fuck, but something that makes me feel stripped past skin.
“Okay, so picture this clusterfuck,” I start, ignoring Maya for the moment but content to have her close as I settle beside Chloe, fitting the mask with the exact tension needed. “A week ago, my buddy Rook decides he’s going to make a protein shake, and?—“
I pitch my voice low and steady, the exact rhythm that syncs with the nebulizer’s hum.
I tell the story, full of shit, totally made up, but it calms her as I administer the treatment.
Like she has since she was a kid, Chloe’s eyes dance with silent laughter, breathing already easing as medicine does its magic.
My hand stays steady on her shoulder, counting respirations without conscious thought, telling the story without even thinking about what I’m saying.
This is us. This is what we do. I make her laugh when she can’t breathe, because it helps her, and she laughs as much as she can, because it helps me.
So was born the Maine Show, and so it continues to this day.
As the story goes on, Chloe’s shoulders shake with suppressed giggles. I keep my hand steady, making sure laughter doesn’t trigger another coughing fit. The nebulizer hums its mechanical lullaby, and I match my breathing to hers without meaning to. Twenty minutes later, the medicine runs dry.
“Better?” I ask, gently removing the mask and wiping condensation from around her mouth, because she hates how moisture feels on her skin.
She nods, already drowsy from the meds, and her hand finds mine under the quilt. “You’re good at taking care of people.”
I snort. “Yeah, well. One of us has to be the talented one.”
“I mean it.”
The words hit like a diagnosis I didn’t want. I’m good at taking care of people because the alternative is being invisible. Because being needed beats being nothing, even when it’s killing me one treatment at a time, even when I can’t take care of myself, even when?—
“Maine.”
Maya’s voice pulls me from the spiral. She holds two mugs, steam rising between us like a peace offering. She extends one carefully. When I take it, our fingers overlap on warm ceramic longer than physics requires. I give her a thin smile, because I don’t have any words right now.
The coffee burns my tongue, but I drink it anyway, needing something to do with my mouth that doesn’t involve spilling my guts all over Maya Hayes’ designer empathy. The coffee is exactly how I take it, and I wonder when the hell she noticed that.
More importantly, why did she bother filing that information away?
“Your sister’s lucky.” Her voice comes quiet, careful as a skate on thin ice. She watches Chloe fade into post-treatment sleep, with the practiced eye of a nurse who’s probably seen far worse, but I can feel her really looking at me. “Having someone who knows exactly what she needs.”
“It’s just what you do,” I manage, words rougher than intended. “It’s family… you just show up…”
Something dark and sharp cuts across her features—something that’s somewhere between shock and pain—but it’s gone before I can identify it. Her fingers strangle her mug until knuckles go bloodless, jaw working like she’s grinding expensive dental work to dust.
“Right. Family.”
The word comes out like broken glass, sharp edges barely contained. Like maybe she knows something about family herself. But before I can excavate that landmine, before this moment can crack open into something dangerous and real, Chloe coughs.
Not the scary kind, just leftover irritation, but it’s enough.
I switch back to caregiver mode, setting down coffee that tastes like possibility, checking her color, adjusting the ugly blanket that’s older than my failed dreams. Because this is what I do, and this is who I am when the performance stops and reality hits me between the eyes.
And Maya just got a front-row seat to the show nobody’s supposed to see.