Page 77 of Hilarina and the Ogre

He didn’t. “I must have picked it up somewhere. I’ve had it a long time.” There was also the toy ring he kept in his underwear drawer. It was so chipped and cheap-looking—a piece of garbage really. He had no idea why he had it, had probably picked it up off of the sidewalk or something, but no matter how many times he told himself to get rid of it, he couldn’t.

Hilary put the penguin in his pocket, a safe enough place. “Ready to go?”

Hilary was tired when they got back, and he didn’t have much of an appetite. It was concerning, and Trenton found himself reaching to check for fever.

“I’m not sick,” Hilary said. “I never get sick.”

He still made the man drink down some tea with honey and tucked him right into bed. “Maybe you should call out for tomorrow’s shift.”

“I told you, I’m not sick.”

And he wasn’t. The next day, Hilary’s appetite was more or less back to normal, and after a nap and some early dinner, he got ready for his shift. At the door, Hilary gave him an apologetic smile. “I just get sad sometimes. It’s nothing to worry about.”

It did seem like something to worry about because Trenton knew how it felt. Sometimes he’d wake up with a terrible hollowness inside, as if everything good had been scooped out. And he’d cry and cry and feel like a small boy in a big body, lost in time. “I’m sorry.”

Hilary gave him the kiss on his cheek that had already become a custom. “Don’t be. I have you now, don’t I?”

“You do.” But that didn’t feel like enough. Trenton wanted to offer something, even if it was just some nice words, but he had no practice with that sort of thing. “You do have me.”

It was a long night. He should have just gone to sleep, but the house felt too big without Hilary, and he found himself wandering through the rooms as if he might find the man in one of them by accident. He did sleep for a portion of the night, but it was choppy and unrestful. At around four in the morning, he gave up and found some projects for himself. One was fixing the toilet that had a tendency to keep running after flushing. The other was to fix the hinge on a closet door that groaned wretchedly every time it was opened or shut. Hilary was very pleased with the fixes. “I’m going to keep you on retainer,” he said the next morning, barely getting the door open before he had his arms full of his new roommate.

It was fun to spend the day in bed, waking to eat and read a little before falling back asleep. But he was still glad when Hilary came home a week or so later to announce he’d been moved to days. “I had to switch to med surge though.”

“Is that bad?”

Hilary had been an ICU nurse for as long as he’d known him.

“It’s busy. My patient ratio will go up a lot, and it’s harder to take shifts off because the unit’s always running on a shortage.”

So it was worse. “I’m sorry.”

Hilary ruffled his hair. “At least it’s not psych.”

Hilary did seem to have more energy after that. After a short while in his new position, his sleep schedule had become like clockwork. For both of them, actually. Trenton found that in being Hilary’s bedtime police he’d also successfully upgraded his own, so he was sleeping mostly normally for the first time he could remember. The resting helped with his focus, and he might even have become a little cleverer. Or maybe that was just what Hilary said whenever he was annoyed. “What a clever fellow,” he’d say, or, “Check out this clever fellow.”

There were a lot of lazy days. Many slow walks and casual reading sessions on the new shag carpet. They also had a “date” once a week. That was what Hilary called them. “Let’s have a date,” he’d say when he woke up, and over breakfast they’d figure out a plan or a place to visit. Trenton worried sometimes about expenses. He had one of Hilary’s credit cards to use for things like buying groceries or household items, and always there was some guilt until about a month in when Hilary sat him down at the table and opened his banking app. “You’re a math whiz, right? Why don’t you look at some numbers and tell me how last month’s budget compares to this one.”

The results surprised Trenton, and it wasn’t just a one-off. He looked over six months of expenses before he was ready to admit to the pattern.

“It turns out that eating at home, even when you’ve got an extra mouth to feed, is cheaper than having nearly all your meals out. Who would have thought?” Hilary was laying the sarcasm on extra thick just in case his darling roommate was deaf as well as stupid.

“But all that eating out was because of me,” Trenton argued. “Because I was working at the restaurant. If you hadn’t been coming to see me, then—”

“For fuck’s sake, Trenton. I save over a third of every paycheck. Can you stop it? Why do you think I go to work?”

“To pay the mortgage?”

It was a trick question, apparently.

“For my big handsome hostage to spend my money, that’s why. I’m doing my part in earning it, so it’s up to you to do yours in spending it. Though if it’s going to be this difficult, maybe you need to pick up that Italian sports car hobby after all.”

Trenton thought he might cry. He had the lump in his throat and was staring hard at the table.

Hilary took his hand. “Why are you upset? Do you want to go back to work that badly?”

“No.” He had never missed work. Not for a day. Not for an hour. He was happy like this. Waking up and cooking and watering the plants Hilary kept bringing home for him and getting through all the books on the shelves. He’d started running, an exercise he’d never thought to try, especially in winter, but the park near the house with all its bare trees was starkly beautiful and every time he came back in from out of the cold he looked around himself at the cozy house and felt, for once, glad to just be alive. “I love it here.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Hilary’s voice had softened. He always spoke quietly when he sensed any upset, as if even a normal speaking voice might put him over the edge.