His hand feels like the sort of temperature I should be striving for. Everything we do is tit for tat, so I raise my hands up and put them on his forehead.
“Okay.” He is amused.
I’m touching my colleague Joshua on the face. I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up on the bus with him sneering at the trail of drool on my chin. But a minute ticks by, and I don’t.
I slide my hands down, over sandpaper grit on his jaw, remembering how he cradled my face in the elevator. No one has ever held me like that. I open my eyes and I could swear he shivers. I touch his pulse. It touches me back.
I have my hands on his throat now, and I remember how badly I wanted to strangle him once. I spread my hands lightly around his neck, just to check the fit, and he narrows one eye.
“Go ahead,” he tells me. “Do it.”
His throat is way too big for my tiny hands. I feel a tension shimmering through him, a tightening in his body. There’s a sound in his throat.
I’m hurting him. Maybe I’m strangling him to death right now. Color is sweeping up his neck. When he pins me with his eyes, I know something’s coming. I am not prepared when it happens.
The world explodes apart as he begins to laugh.
He’s the same person I stare at every weekday but lit up. He’s plugged into the mains and electric.
Humor and light radiate from him, making his colors glow like stained glass. Brown, gold, blue, white.
It’s a crime I’ve never seen these smile lines before. His mouth is in an easy curve, perfect teeth and a faint dimple bracketing each corner.
Each laugh gusts from him in a husky, breathless rush, something he can no longer hold in, and it’s as addictive to me as the taste of his mouth or the smell of his skin. His amazing laugh is something I need now.
If I’d ever thought he was good-looking before, in passing or noticed in irritation, I never knew the full story. When Josh smiles, he is blinding. My heart is pounding and I frantically catalog this moment in the half-light. It’s the only one I’ll get, while delirious with fever.
If only I could hold on to this moment. I already feel the sadness that will hollow me out when it ends. I want to tell him, Don’t leave yet. My fingers must be flexing, because he laughs until the mattress is shaking beneath us. A diamond wet sparkle of light in the corner of his eye is a bullet to my heart. I’ll be able to replay this beautiful, impossible moment in my memory when I’m a hundred years old.
“Go ahead, kill me, Shortcake,” he gasps, wiping his eye with his hand. “You know you want to.”
“So bad,” I tell him, like he once told me. I’ve got a tightening in my own throat and I can barely get the words out. “So bad, you have no idea.”
MY PAJAMAS ARE soaked with sweat when I jolt awake and there is a third person in my bedroom. A man I’ve never seen before. I begin screaming like an injured monkey.
“Calm down,” Josh says into my ear. I scramble into his lap and press my face into his collar bone, huffing his cedar scent so hard I probably suck out his ghost. I’m about to be taken to a scary medical facility, away from the safety of my bed and these arms.
“Don’t let them, Josh! I’ll get better!”
“I’m a doctor, Lucy. How long and what symptoms?” The man puts on some gloves.
“She wasn’t one hundred percent this morning. High color, distracted, and she got worse throughout the day. Visibly sweaty since lunchtime, and she didn’t eat. Vomiting at five P.M.”
“And then?” The doctor continues to select things from his case, lining them on the end of my bed. I watch suspiciously.
“Delirious by eight. Trying to strangle me with her bare hands by one thirty. Burning up closer to one hundred four, and now she’s one hundred five point six.”
I squeeze my eyes shut when the unfamiliar rubber hands feel the glands in my throat. Josh rubs my arms soothingly. I’m sitting between his thighs now, feeling his solid weight behind my shoulder blades.
My own human armchair. The doctor presses his fingertips into my abdomen and I make crying sounds.