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I wake Cole and make him take a few pills for his fever. His skin is burning to the touch, but his eyes seem a little less glassy than they did previously. I pull a chair to his bedside, and he smiles.
“Are you going to watch me sleep after all?” He grins. “Psychopath.”
“Hush. Shouldn’t you eat?”
He shakes his head against the pillow and rolls on his side to face me. “This is perfect.”
“I fail to see the perfection in this situation.”
“If I were at my shithole flat, I’d be doing this alone.” He closes his eyes for long moments. “Kind of tired of that.”
“Have you no family?”
“Not anymore. Don’t know who my dad is. Mom struggled a lot and eventually gave me up to my grandmother, Margaret-Anne. She raised me. Always called me her little treasure.” He smiles, his eyes distant. “She was a firecracker, you know? A flower child in the sixties, a free spirit. She was full of love and joy. She was seventy-five when she died, but she always seemed younger to me. Always laughing…”
“When did she pass?”
“Last year.” Cole’s eyes shine. “She was diagnosed with dementia during my last year at the Academy. When it got worse, they said to stay here, that she wouldn’t know me anymore. But a few months ago, I got a bad feeling, you know? I scraped together the money for a flight to Boston and got there just in time.” A tear slides across his cheek and over his nose. “They were right, she didn’t know me. But I think maybe she did. Somehow, she knew. I held her hand as she died. That’s something, I guess.”
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
Cole coughs and wipes his eyes. “Anyway, after she passed, it seemed like my life had shrunk. I have a best friend, Lucy, and that’s basically it. It’s my fault though. I threw myself into the art magazine at Uni. Made no time for anyone. Then things started to fall apart.” He inhales shakily. “I’ve been so busy struggling to stay afloat, I haven’t even mourned my grandmother. I had to set that grief aside because it was too much. I couldn’t deal with it all.”
I have no idea what to do or say. I expect Cole to let that grief loose, but he pulls himself together and settles deeper into the pillow.
“Anyway…feel better now.” His eyes fall shut. “Thank you.”
“That’s the medicine working.”
He smiles. “Yeah, that must be it.”
Cole sleeps, and when I’m certain he’s under deep, I touch the back of my hand to his forehead. It’s still hot, and I curse the storm, the cold, and the unrelenting fear that has come alive in me like a different sort of fever. It won’t break until Cole’s does.
For three days, I keep vigil. The illness that plagues him teeters on the edge of being grave and then improves, again and again, so that I’m constantly at my wit’s end. Finally, in the blackest hour of night, I witness the fever release its hold on him. Sweat beads on Cole’s forehead and neck, and he begins to toss and turn, as if battling with the last of the malady. He mutters and cries out, and then the grief he’d been holding in breaks too.
In his sleep, he sobs, his hands grasping for something. Without thinking, I climb into the bed behind him, my chest to his back, and wrap my arms around him. Instantly, he clutches my arms and holds on. I feel his body shudder against mine and I weather the storm with him. Years of loneliness flood out. I can feel it as surely as I can feel his strong body pressed to mine.
“I’m here,” I whisper against his neck.
I don’t know who theIis I speak of, but I say it over and over until Cole’s ragged breaths smooth out and deepen. I stay with him until dawn’s light seeps into the room, then extract myself. He’s as reluctant to let me go as I am to leave. But I slip off the bed without waking him and move to the window.
I sit on the sill. The storm has passed at last. Watery, gold light pierces through gray storm clouds that are moving away, leaving a blue sky.
In time, Cole stirs. “Hey,” he croaks.
“Feeling better?”
But I can see that he is. The relief that floods me is so profound, it washes away the lies I’ve been telling myself—the lies Ashtaroth spun in that distillery. The emotion I feel crashes against his every false promise, breaking them to pieces. My heart is naked and raw, exposed. I burned my flesh, and it wasn’t enough.
I know what I must do.
I recoil at the thought and the finality embedded in it. I’m not ready to let him go. Not yet.
I affect a casual tone. “You look improved, though that isn’t saying much.”
Cole nods absently. He’s staring at me sitting at the window as if he’s never seen me before. Without taking his eyes off me, he reaches for his sketchbook that’s on the floor next to the bed. He props himself on the pillow and grabs a pencil.
“Don’t move.”
