In Sickness

Contagious

Whatever Kai had, I definitely caught.

Kai recovered quickly for how bad he had been and was allowed to finish recovering at his place (wherever that was) after two days. In those two days, I kept my word, whether he had heard it or not, and stayed over to make sure Tyson didn't take any more pictures. The others dropped by as well to help, though there wasn't much to do besides forcing Kai to go back to bed whenever he started wandering around and making sure he kept sipping at fluids and Peptol. I think Ray might have done better at that than me, though him and Max kept making me the delivery girl.

I wasn't stupid. I knew they were trying to make something happen between me and Kai, or thought Kai would appreciate it more. Thing was, I didn't care. It wasn't like it made any difference. No need to say why.

The day after Kai left Tyson's house, I went home early after throwing up in school. By the time I reached home I barely had the energy to close the door behind me, forget about going upstairs to my room. And since my mom was rarely home, the couch was as good as any bed.

Sleep was strange with this fever. I got up a few times to throw up, but my senses of my own motion and reality blurred with my dreams, which were incoherent at best. Colors, places, impressions and needs. I curled up as tight as I could, shivering under a layer of sweat, but somehow couldn't come up with the motivation or energy to get up and find a blanket. So, instead, I pushed myself back into the crevice of my couch, hoping it would somehow eat me. At least it would have been warm. Like a mouth. Perhaps being eaten wouldn't be so bad.

Then, between awake, asleep, and crossing a desert with red sand and blue skies, a blanket came down over me. I nearly wept in relief. It melded about me, gloriously heavy and soft.

"Where is your mom, Hillary?"

I answered the best I could. Thing was, I didn't know where she was. At work, of course, but sometimes her schedule changed, and sometimes she went to another city. A thought crossed my mind that I should have called her rather than just send a short "Got the stomach flu text, and I felt instantly guilty. Mother wasn't here a lot, yeah. But she still loved me. She was just a single parent. So busy.

Hard, cool arms pushed under me, unsettling my world. I thought I could smell the blanket. Plaid. Warm. A well used blanket. A well loved one, used for curling up while it stormed outside, like it did when Kai got sick.

Kai...Kai was here.

I opened my eyes, even though they ached as though someone had shoved a buttload of cotton balls behind them.

I saw gray hair and a strong, smooth neck. Then I saw the blue triangles on his cheeks. I watched my fingers touch one. Kai had never been in my house before. Weird.

"Why do you paint your face?"

I didn't realize I had asked it out loud until he spoke.

"Because I like how they look. Irritating my grandfather is a plus too."

My finger pad went up again and got sort of stuck on the bottom triangle. The makeup or paint or whatever it was didn't smear. It was like marker. How strange. But they did look good on him. Though I had once seen him without them, way back on a beach, with the pink surf jumping up about his feet as he ran.

I fell back into my soup of reality and dreams. Though being comfortable and warm at last deepened my sleep, giving the fragments of dreams time enough to meld together into something a tad more coherent. I'd see my mother, scolding me for having Kai in the house and letting him sleep in my bed, not believing me when I told her he'd never been there, just to be confused by cropping images of his sleeping face and those blue triangles tucked up close besides me, using his arm for a pillow, wrapped in a purple afghan I kept hanging on the foot of my bed. The next minute I was being blinded by bitbeasts, trying to see their shape but only getting flashes of Dragoon or Dranzer, just to be thrown off by random animals too ugly to be bit beasts. Then I'd be thrown into color again, onto deserts. There I'd be shaken awake to sunshine making squares on the ceiling and Kai, warm, wonderful Kai, wrapping cool things around my face and propping me up as he handed me bottle after bottle of sweet, cool drinks.

Except he didn't have his triangles. His triangles were gone.

And I would see him on the beach again. Except this time he was looking down at me and his eyes weren't wild as I had envisioned. They were calm and...soft. Too soft to be his. So soft it transformed his whole face till I saw a boy where the mature, brow wrinkled, life worn Kai use to be.

"Where is your mom, Hillary?"

I blinked hard, focusing. Wait a minute. I could see the undersides of my eyelids. And I could feel the rest of me, icky and gross with old sweat. At least I didn't hurt anymore.

I forced my eyes open to see, not Kai, but Tyson, who did not look pleased.

"Meh? What are you doing here?" my voice sounded awful and unused.

"Checking up on you since I haven't heard from you in three days," he said, and I blinked at the anger. "So, where's your mom?"

"Do you need her?" I asked, bemused. Three days?

Tyson gave me a look as though he thought I was stupid, but it was different from the ones he gave me when we were fighting or I had done something especially exasperating.

"She hasn't been here this whole time, has she?" he asked.

I groaned. I wasn't awake enough for this. And now that I thought about it, I was thirsty. So thirsty it hurt. "I guess not. How did you get in here?"

"Well you sure as hell didn't lock your door." Oh yeah, he was angry now. "Why didn't you call me? Call any of us? You could have died in here and no one would have known! If I had known..." he trailed off into muttered curses, running his hands down his face, then finally ended at a great heaving sigh. "Hil...don't do this again. Next time you get sick call someone, okay?"

"Okay." I had no problem with that. It wasn't that I hadn't wanted anyone around, I just hadn't thought of it. "I did text my mom when I got home."

"And she stayed at work?"

I groaned again and sat up, rubbing my eyes hard. They still ached a bit. We'd been over this before. "She's a single mom, Tyson, trying to live in the city. Besides, I think I just got what Kai had, and he lived."

"Only because he wasn't alone," Tyson snapped. But then he took a deep breath. "Okay. Whatever. I'm here now so what do you need?"

"A shower," I said. I felt nastier than I did after five days of rough camping.

Tyson had the mind to roll his eyes and not mention that he could help me bathe. It wouldn't have been a funny joke. "Okay, food wise then?"

"I thought you could only make sandwiches?"

"And rice balls. I can make some freaking beautiful rice balls."

"That sounds great."

He clapped his hands together. "Rice balls it is."

And with that, he was gone. I got up to the sound of him banging around in my kitchen, wondering if I cared if he made a complete wreck of it, and decided I didn't. I was too tired, and too relieved to not be nauseous or in pain anymore.

I slid my legs off the bed and my foot hit a plastic bottle. It rolled across the floor, flashing its fruity label as it went until it stopped against my dresser. I stared at it.

It was one of the bottles Kai had given me to drink in my dreams...or, whatever that had been.

I looked down at the foot of the bed where my purple afghan should have been, but found it draped over my feet instead. I never did that. I had a thing with not having too much weight on my feet while I was sleeping, as it made them feel like they were being bent in the wrong direction.

Smiling, and a bit too warm and fuzzy inside for safety, I picked up the bottle and carefully padded my way to the bathroom. And, since there was no chance of anyone seeing me, I ended up taking the bottle with me into the shower, where I curled up on the bottom and grinned to myself like the stupid, crushing, teenage girl I was.

It wasn't like anything was going to come of this, after all. So I could be weird and dream. Dreaming never hurt.