He looked at her under the flickering light bulb and kissed her on the nose so delicately she could hardly stand it. He was so close she could smell his honey soap, crowding out all the other scents of chopped mirepoix and cedar. In that cabin, there was only him.
“Instant Pots are incredibly portable. You focus on feeling better. I’ll get you into bed and set dinner up at our place.”
Our place.
Chapter 16
Stop Discussing My Hydration with the RoyalWe
70 Days until the Longest Day of the Year
Many of hermigraine 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. Nowthoseare 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 wassointo 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 forpeople, 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. Youarehonest. 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 notcompletelyhonest, obviously, but you are about the things that matter.”
