AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The slight wheeze in her voice didn’t help. He’d had the flu years ago and hadn’t wheezed. Maybe this was related to her virus. Not just that it made her more at risk for illness, but that anything she caught was likely to be worse.
“I’m bored,” she whined, eyeing the chair with disgust.
“You’re sick,” he repeated. “The doctor said rest. So I’ll insist on rest.”
“Tomorrow I’m helping with dinner.” She was still negotiating with him, and she sounded put out, but she was also sitting in the chair he’d gotten her, so she probably felt worse than she was willing to admit.
“We’ll see about that tomorrow.” The bag crinkled as he pulled out a head of garlic and some carrots.
There was a moment of quiet from Mina, enough that he started to worry until air rasped behind him. “Did you force Kimmie to stay in bed when she was sick?”
Not only was Mina more tired than she let on, but she was more irritated, too.
“If Kimmie was sick, she never had to be reminded to rest.” Kimmie had been the type of person who was on or off. She’d not had any middle gears. Part of his joy in Mina was watching her not just exist in different gears of life, but shift between them.
“Why do you think I needed to be reminded to rest?”
“Because you’re getting up and moving around,” he said, much louder and with more exasperation than he had meant. He turned to face her, carrot in one hand and peeler in the other. “You’re weak and you’re sick, and who knows what other viruses are in your body, plotting against you.”
As she crossed her arms, the blanket lifted up from the chair like great wings she was flapping, and he knew that he’d fallen into the trap she’d laid for him. It wasn’t fair, really. She’d had all day to plot through her bored sickness, while he was only learning about this now.
Then she said, “Is all of this extra care and attention because I have HIV?” And he’d been walked right on top of a hole without realizing it.
He turned back to the cutting board. “No.”
“Can you look at me when you say that?”
The knife clunked on the counter as he set it down. He held himself stiff as he turned. “No. This extra care is not about your HIV. It’s about the flu I had to take you to the emergency room for.”
She made another unhappy low grunt at the back of her throat, like she didn’t believe him. “Would you give this much care to me if I didn’t have HIV?”
His hands came out in front of him, his hands fisted around the knife. It was all he could do not to toss his hands—and the knife—in the air and go home. “I’ve never taken care of anyone with the flu who didn’t have HIV. I have nothing to compare it to.”
The truth was that he really didn’t know. Removing Mina’s illness from who she was wasn’t fair, but neither was focusing on it. His conversation with Brook only made matters worse as her words lingered heavily in his mind. He trusted Mina to take care of herself, but the thought of what could happen if she didn’t was a weight he couldn’t push off his heart.
“Why are we even fighting about this? What are we even fighting about?”
“I don’t...” She sighed, her shoulders drooping and looking as weary as he had seen during her illness. “I don’t know.”
“Can we stop? HIV or no HIV, you’re recovering from the flu. And I’ve been working all day. Can I just make dinner, and we eat dinner and watch a movie or something?”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she pasted a smile on her lips. “You’re right.”
The smile was fake, the admission was halfhearted, but both would do for tonight.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ON THURSDAY, MINA felt well enough not just to take another shower, but also to poke around her kitchen for something other than chicken soup for dinner. She was grateful for the care Levi had shown her over the past week—Lord knew that being sick alone and single was a miserable experience—but she wanted something for dinner that took effort. Not effort from the cook but effort to eat. Something she had to chew.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything in her kitchen other than bread, carrots, butter and cheese.
