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And which only made her talk more.
Which didn’t set this conversation up for success.
But she followed his outstretched hand to her couch and sat. Communication was key to relationships. She’d read enough women’s magazines to know the truth of that statement, even if she’d never made it fully work in relationships past.
“What’s up?” he asked, sitting next to her. He was close enough for her to reach out and touch, his jeans covering thigh muscles that she knew would feel magnificent under her hand. With her parents here and her tiredness, feeling the way his thigh muscles clenched when her hand touched them might be all the action she got for a while.
“I’ve been tired recently.” She waited for him to agree or nod, but he sat there, his face impassive and not even a lift of his brow to ease her nerves. She sighed. “It’s not the HIV. I mean, it’s related because the meds and the virus don’t help, but I think I’m anemic.”
“Anemic?”
“A shortage of iron in the blood.”
“I know what it is,” he said, his voice teetering on the edge of insulted.
“Oh.” The floor above them squeaked, and she looked at her stairs to see if her parents were coming down. She wasn’t quite so lucky.
They sat in silence for several minutes. The trouble was that she knew she was being ridiculous but couldn’t seem to stop herself. Between this and the flu, she didn’t want to be Levi’s sick girlfriend, and that was how she felt.
Especially with him looking at her like he did, with patience making his face placid when she wished he would get frustrated with her.
“Are you going to tell me why?” At the cutting edge to his voice, her shoulders relaxed. Maybe it seemed silly, but so long as he could get mad at her, she wasn’t the sick girl to be treated with extreme gentleness and caution. People could get mad at those they loved, but they didn’t get mad at those they pitied.
More than the disdain and the judgment, she feared the pity if her health condition were ever revealed. The “Oh, I’m so sorry” people who took an unconscious step back in case what she had was catching.
Of course, what she had was catching, but that wasn’t the reason they stepped back. They’d step back for Echo and her breast cancer, too. The people who stepped back from her didn’t want to face the possibility of illness and death in their own life. She’d dated a guy like that once. And even when she’d broken up with him, he’d been sympathetic and understanding to the point of pitying. Because if he pitied her, then he wouldn’t have to think about the possibility he would be chronically sick sometime in his life, too.
“Anemia isn’t new for me.” She shrugged. “When I was a teenager, I got these awful periods, and my doctor put me on iron pills.” Which had helped, but the side effects had been uncomfortable. “Now I get anemic when I’m stressed, and my period hits. I probably would have grown out of it, if it weren’t for the HIV, but who knows? Maybe it’s related. Maybe it’s not.”
“Your period started on Monday.” He stated the words as a fact, not as a question he was asking. The man was quiet, but she should never forget that he noticed the world as it went around him in intricate detail. He’d probably had her cycle pegged within two months of their dating, which was when he started showing up with particularly well-timed bags full of ice cream. “What is stressful?”
God, what wasn’t? “Grading has gotten out of control, which is my fault because I keep assigning all this work, and the kids are doing a great job, and I want to give them lots of feedback. I have a deadline coming the first of this month for that book of poetry, which is turning out to be harder to craft and draw than I’d anticipated. It had seemed like such a great idea, and now I don’t think it was. Russian poetry in comic-book form. God, nobody reads poetry anymore. Why do I think that my sketches will change it?”
She took a deep breath, both to slow herself down and to ensure that she had air to keep talking. Because she wasn’t done.
“That would be enough, but I’m also behind because I had the flu. And because you had the flu, and I was taking care of you and taking care of me when I should have been working.”
