“I didn’t want to get up,” he reasons, and I hiss when I press my palm against his face.
“You’re burning up.” Another big shiver rocks through him, and I push his hair away from his forehead. “Let me up.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m comfortable.”
“I’m just going to get more cold medicine,” I promise, sliding out from beneath him. I curse my shitty nursing skills all the way to the kitchen, where I grab the cold medicine, a glass and bowl full of cold water, and a washcloth.
“Here,” I say so that he’ll sit up when I get back. Standing in front of the couch, I hand him a measuring cap full of blue medicine, and then I give him a glass of water. He drinks it down and stares up at me, waiting until I sit back down in my seat at the end of the couch.
Two seconds later, his head is in my lap again. No pillow. Just his cheek and his scruff and his breath against my jeans.
My trembling hand dips the washcloth into the bowl I set on the side table. I wring it out one-handed and gently place it against Mike’s forehead. “Does that feel okay?”
His arm wraps around my legs, his fingers tucking beneath my thigh. I couldn’t wiggle out from under him now even if I tried. “Yeah.”
My whole body aches from how tense my muscles are, but still, I brush that washcloth over Mike’s forehead again and again, slowly and softly. I comb his damp hair away from his forehead with the fingers of one hand and follow it with the cold washcloth I hold like a lifeline in the other. “You should be in bed.”
Mike’s fingers slide a little further beneath my jeans, his hold on my legs growing even snugger. “I should be right here.”
“Danica wouldn’t like this,” I blurt, because my heart is pounding and my blood is rushing and Mike’s cheek is on my legs.
“Danica isn’t here.”
I freeze with the washcloth against his temple, and Mike turns his chin to look up at me. “It’s fine.” At my doubtful expression, he swears, “It’s fine. Trust me . . . It’s going to be fine.”
I don’t know if I believe him, but when he turns away from me again, I run the washcloth over his forehead. I let him hold me, and I take care of him, even though in my heart, I know none of this is fine.
Danica should be taking care of him.
She is who he should be holding.
I shouldn’t have these feelings.
“I’m not her, Mike.”
“I know,” he says. “Trust me. I know.”
Chapter 17
“I stayed because I had to,” I tell the bobble-head zombie gnashing at me from my dashboard. “He was so sick. You should have seen him, Danica.”
The bobble head nods furiously as I drive over a railroad track, its level of crazy a good match for my cousin’s.
“Why didn’t I call you?” My thumbs pick at my steering wheel as I try to brainstorm a good answer. “Because I didn’t want you to get worried and come over and end up getting sick and having to miss the music video. I know how important it is to you.”
I release the inside of my lip between my teeth, remembering what Mike said about my tell.
“Of course nothing happened. I’m your cousin, Danica. God.”
The zombie judges me in silence.
“I swear! All he did was shiver and throw up all night. I wanted to take him to the doctor’s, that way I wouldn’t have to hang there all night, but he wouldn’t let me.”
I frown in the rearview mirror when I realize I’m chewing my lip again. My dark eyebrows turn in, and my bottom lip pushes out. Unbrushed curls remind me of hours spent sleeping on Mike’s couch—his head on my lap, his arms around my legs.
“I’m not lying,” I say to my reflection, and then I tell the zombie, “I have nothing to feel guilty about.”
He nods at me, I nod back, and I reluctantly turn left into the parking lot of the apartment I share with Danica.
I concentrate on my lip as I walk up the entryway stairs, as I turn the doorknob, as I cautiously step inside. And when Danica leaps off the couch and flies at me, I nearly throw my arms up to protect myself.
“Which color?” she asks as I flinch, thrusting a nail polish bottle in my face. “For the music video. This one, or this one?”
I stare at two identical shades of hot pink and then up into my taller cousin’s dark eyes. Thrown off by her nonviolent greeting, I jam my foot far, far down into my throat. “Don’t you want to know where I was?”
Danica stands with the bottles still held in the air, her eyebrow lifting into a skyward arch. “Weren’t you at the dog shelter?”
“I stayed with Mike,” I confess, and when her face twists with some emotion that hasn’t fully formed yet, I admonish, “He was really sick, Dani.”
I wasn’t expecting this—this anger that’s come over me—but it works to my advantage, because instead of breaking a nail polish bottle against the wall and stabbing my eye out with it, she lowers the bottles and asks with only a slight amount of skepticism, “Like how sick?”
“Like sweating uncontrollably and throwing up all night.”
Her face wrinkles. “Ew.”
“Yeah.”
“How is he now?”
“Better,” I answer, my hard tone softening. “His fever broke. His throat is still scratchy and he’s still really weak and exhausted from being sick for so long, but he should be fine in a couple days.”