If You Miss It

34. overwhelming sex drive

"Are you okay with eating something right now?" he asked Tariq as he took the microwaveable popcorn out of the shelf, holding it up for Tariq to see.

And in an instant, a smile broke out on Tariq's face, a real one, one that reached both, his eyes and the corners of his face. The prettiest kind of Tariq smile, according to Dmitri.

"I'm fucking starving," he said, the smile not leaving his face. I did that. "Are we eating popcorn? At seven in the evening?"

Dmitri hummed, waiting for the popcorn to get done in the microwave, the orange light in the microwave hurting his eyes, but only for a moment before they adjusted themselves to it.

"I hate that we can never hang out before the evening," Dmitri lamented, starting up the conversation for once. Tariq never really led the conversations when he was sick, so Dmitri knew that he was going to have to do it today.

If it were anyone else, Dmitri wouldn't have started a conversation. He would have let it slide, sat in silence throughout.

However, this was Tariq. Tariq was one of the easiest people to have a conversation with, one of the only three people he didn't have to overthink his words around.

"Yeah," Tariq mumbled, glancing at Dmitri from his position on the sofa, fiddling with a loose string on his even looser t-shirt. "Especially when I'm sick. For example, today, because then I just don't show up to work and we don't even see each other through the day."

Emptying the popcorn into a bowl, a red one because that was Tariq's favourite colour, Dmitri nodded. "That's not your fault. I can just come over here every time you're sick, we can hang out after. Well, if you're feeling up to it."

Tariq smiled, getting up from the couch and dragging himself to Dmitri, his walk slow but still confident. "Yeah. If I'm feeling up to it."

That seemed to be all that Tariq planned on saying, so, they entered Tariq's room, Tariq instantly crashing into bed, letting out a relieved sigh, a deep one.

"I missed my bed," he stated. Weirdo. "I missed my blankets. Every day, I go to work, and as soon as I'm at work, I miss my bed."

Tariq always got a little delirious when he was sick.

There weren't many situations where Tariq wasn't slightly delirious, Dmitri realised. When he was sick, when he was sleepy, when he was happy, when he was emotional. It was amusing, if Dmitri was being honest.

"Yeah?" Dmitri questioned with an amused smile, getting into bed with Tariq, his t-shirt that he had tucked into his jeans coming untucked, only on the left side. But he just let it stay like that, because he didn't have any reason to look nice, it was just Tariq, and they were just in bed.

Nodding, Tariq looked up at Dmitri, a lazy smile spreading across his face. "I miss a lot of things, and I miss out on a lot of things," he mumbled, moving his head, as if to rest it on Dmitri's shoulder, but pulling it away at the last minute.

It's okay. You can rest your head on my shoulder, Dmitri wanted to say, but all that came out was, "Yeah."

"Like— because of my constant tiredness, I can't do things that other people do," he continued, but this time, he didn't sound sad. He didn't sound happy, but he didn't sound sad either. "I've accepted that I just can't do things that everyone else can. Like, no matter how much I want to live in the same way that other people do, that healthy people do, I can't. And that's okay."

Humming, he just echoed a faint, "That's okay."

Then, Tariq said something that Dmitri wouldn't have expected him to say. Not in a million years.