by Olivia Hayle
Charles shoots me a look in the mirror. “Everything OK, sir?”
“She’s sick. I’ll give Dr. Johnson a call. Hopefully you can pick him up after you drop us off.”
Skye doesn’t protest—she’s no longer listening to our conversation. It’s not a good sign for someone who always wants to have the last word.
I call Dr. Johnson and keep an eye on her the entire car ride. It’s late, but he says yes. He always does for me or my family.
“Come on,” I tell Skye as we slide to a stop. “Time to get out.”
She makes a valiant effort at opening the door but it barely budges, her arms weak with fever. Charles is there an instant later and she shoots him a delirious smile. “Thanks, Cole,” she mumbles.
Charles gives me a look that is more concerned than amused. With his graying hair and mustache, we look nothing alike. “I’ll head to Dr. Johnson’s right away.”
“Excellent.”
I wrap my arm around Skye and take her purse from her dangerously lax grip. She doesn’t protest as I help her unlock her front door, or as we walk the flight of stairs up to her apartment.
I push her door open as soon as she unlocks it. “God,” she breathes. “Finally home.”
And then she does something I don’t expect.
She faints.
I catch her before she sails to the floor, my arms under her in a heartbeat. Her body is limp and far too hot as I carry her into the small apartment and kick the door closed behind me.
“Damn it,” I tell her, not that she’s listening anymore. “And you didn’t want a doctor?”
I find her bedroom, laying her down gently on the queen-sized bed. Taking a seat next to her, I touch both her forehead and her wrist. Fainting is one thing, but being unconscious is quite another.
“Skye?” I ask. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyes blink open. They struggle to focus, finally landing on my face. “Hey,” she says weakly. “What are you doing here?”
I want to laugh in relief. Instead, I pull my hand from hers and start untying the laces of her shoes.
“You’re sick.”
She covers her face. “So that’s why I feel awful.”
“Yes.” I get both of her shoes off and she immediately turns over, snuggling deeper into bed. With one hand she searches for the comforter and I help pull it up and over her. Her eyes drift closed.
As she rests, I explore the rest of her apartment. It’s not hard to find a tall glass of water or a small towel from her bathroom, which I run under the faucet. I gently put it on her too-hot forehead.
She sighs a breath of relief. “That’s good. Very good.”
“I’m glad.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs.
“For what?”
“This.”
“Don’t be,” I say. “We all get sick. No fault of yours.”
Her hand flits over my arm, down to my sleeve, her fingers gripping the fabric. “Will you stay? Just for a little bit?”
I take her hand in mine. “Of course I will,” I say, finding that I don’t mind the prospect. Not at all.
9
Skye
I dream the most absurd things.
Vivid colors and swirling images of faces. I see Karli and Timmy and my sister Isla. I see my mom. I see Cole, and whenever his face drifts into view, he’s wearing a concerned frown. He’s usually smirking, so I know it’s a dream.
I dream that there’s a strange man in my apartment, too. Cole lets him in, even when I beg him not to.
“It’s the doctor,” he tells me in a voice that brooks no arguments. Even convinced he’s a dream, I don’t argue.
The face of an older man with a kind smile swims in front of me. “Hello,” he says. “I’m Dr. Johnson. I’ve been told you think you have the flu.”
“Mhm.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Hot.”
He opens his bag and then I’m poked and prodded, my temperature taken and heartbeat listened to. I close my eyes gratefully when he’s done, seeking the blissful half-dream again.
“She’s running on one hundred and four. No wonder she fainted.”
“She’s been pushing herself very hard with work,” Cole adds, but he doesn’t add that he’s the reason I have to. I consider pointing it out, but my tongue feels heavy.
The doctor puts a hand on my forehead. “How’s your head doing?”
“It hurts like hell,” I mumble. “Except there’s no Virgil to show me around. It’s not nearly as nice as Dante’s.”
Cole’s voice is exasperated. “She’s an English Literature graduate.”
They head into my living room to talk, their voices hushed. It’s draining to try to listen. It’s not long until I’m fighting a losing battle with my eyelids.
“She needs rest and a lot of fluids.”
“I shouldn’t take her to the hospital?”
“Not for a flu. If it gets worse, call me. And I want her to take these. Two pills every four hours.”
“All right.”
“Does she have someone you can call? Can you stay here overnight? She shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’ll stay,” Cole says.
“If her throat starts feeling sore, make her some tea. Keep the cold towel on her forehead. I’ll leave this thermometer with you—call me if she’s running one hundred and four for more than a couple of hours.”
“I will.”
There’s more talk that I don’t catch, and a door closes. I snuggle deeper into my bed and lose the fight with my eyelids. Every piece of my body is exhausted.
Cold hands put the wet towel on my forehead back into place. It feels divine. “Thanks,” I murmur.
“Anytime, Holland.”
It’s the last thing I hear for quite some time.
I wake up to a strong hand on my shoulder and something cold pressed to my lips. “Skye, I need you to swallow. Two pills, that’s all.”
The room is dark and I have to blink a few times for things to come into view. Cole is sitting beside me.
“Come on.”
I open my mouth like a toddler and he pops two pills in my mouth. I reach for the glass of water he hands me, and he helps support me as I drink. I’m breathless by the time I finish and collapse against the pillows again.
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
“Still Cole, last time I checked.”
I want to laugh, but all that comes out is a low wheeze. My throat hurts.
I try to roll over, but my jeans snag uncomfortably. I’m still in my work clothes. High-waisted pants.
“Ugh. Off, off, off.” I toss back the covers and try to get the button undone. My fingers tremble with the effort.
“I’ll help you.” Cole’s hands are cool and strong around mine. He finds the button and zipper in seconds and helps pull the skintight jeans down my legs.
His hands stop at my ankles. “Socks on or off?”
“Off,” I groan. “I’m so warm.”
He tugs it all off and I feel about a thousand times better once they’re off my skin. I feel like laughing, seeing this large, well-dressed man at the edge of my messy bed, in my small bedroom, taking off clothes. It’s ridiculous. It must be another one of my fever-induced dreams.
A while later, I blink my eyes awake to another cold compress against my forehead. “Skye, is there someone you want me to call?”
I smile at the male voice. It really is a lovely voice, all deep and powerful. “Nope,” I say. “No one at all.”
“Your sister?”
Another wheezy laugh. “Noooo. She wouldn’t care.”
The beautiful voice is silent, and I snuggle into my pillow again. It’s fluffy like a cloud. My entire bed is. It’s the best bed in the world.
“I find that hard to believe,” the voice says, and I don’t know why or what it’s referring to.
“Your voice is lovely,” I mumble. “Great voice. Excellent.”
The next time I hear
it, it sounds amused. I should know the person it belongs to, but I can’t for the life of me remember who it is.
“You’re delirious with fever.”
“And you don’t know how to take a compliment, Mr. Voice.”
“Maybe I’m just not very used to them from you.”
I open my eyes and peer to the other side of the bed, but I can’t make anything out in the darkness. “That’s stupid. I love to give compliments. I give them to my friends all the time.”
The bed dips, and then a large, cool hand curves around my forehead. I lean into it. “You have great hands, too.”
A masculine snort. “Yes, you definitely still have a fever. It should break soon.”
I don’t want to talk about fevers or sickness. I fumble blindly for his wrist and keep his hand glued to my forehead, to where his skin is cool and just a little rough. It feels like heaven.
“This is nice,” I breathe.
He snorts again. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
“We’re friends, aren’t we?”
The voice is quiet again, and for much longer this time. Figuring he won’t answer, I content myself in stroking the skin of his wrist and relishing in the feel of his hand on my forehead.
“Well,” he says finally, “I’d like to be.”
“Me too,” I breathe. Having this voice in my life forever seems like a first-place prize.
He laughs, the voice washing over my feverish senses like a cool wave. “I wish you’d remember that when you’re no longer feverish.”
“Of course I will.” My hands claw up his arm, up his sleeve, until I find the very solid chest of the man the voice belongs to. It’s like steel beneath my hands. I feel too weak to explore it, which must be one of life’s cruel jokes. Deliver me a delicious man in bed and render me too weak to take advantage of him.
He lets me examine in silence, until finally, his hands capture mine. “Sleep, Skye.”
“Mhm. Okay.” It does feel good to relax against the pillows again, and darkness beckons. But there’s something I need to know first. A memory that flashed through my pounding head, clues that my tired brain puzzled together with the voice and the hard chest. “Hey. We’ve slept together, right?”
He gives a low, dark laugh, and I want to bottle it so I can have it on demand. “Yes, we have. Weeks ago.”
“Mhm. I remember.” I turn over so I’m closer to the voice. “I think about it aaaall the time.”
Brief silence. “You do?”
I don’t see why he seems surprised. Even in my fever-addled brain, I know the memory is one of my favorites to revisit.
“Best sex of my life,” I mumble.
A hand flits across my hair, smoothing. “You’ll really hate yourself for saying that later. And me, for being here to listen.”
I try to laugh and break into a cough instead. He’s there, pushing me up to sitting and handing me a glass of water. When I can breathe again, I collapse against the pillows in a worthless, energy-less heap.
His voice is the last thing I hear. “I think about it too,” he says quietly. “All the time.”
I blink my eyes open to faint sunlight streaming in through my curtains. My head feels like it’s made of lead bricks, my mouth cloudy. Ugh.
A cold compress slips from my head to the bed beside me. Something large moves and I startle in response.
“Hey, it’s just me.” Cole is sitting up against my headboard, a book in his hand. There are circles under his eyes.
“Hey,” I whisper.
He reaches over and puts a hand on my forehead without hesitation, like he touches me all the time. He must have, during the night. I remember fever and sweat and whispered conversations in the dark.
I close my eyes at the feeling of his skin against mine. “Much better,” he declares. “I think your fever broke a couple of hours ago.”
I glance over at the clock on my nightstand. 6:50 a.m.
I sit up with a jolt and immediately groan. Everything hurts. Pain shoots up my neck and my head, and there are sharp pains in my joints. If this is the flu, it’s the worst bout I’ve ever had.
“Woah.” Cole’s arms cradle me as I sink back into the pillows. He fluffs one of them for me. “Steady there, tiger.”
“I have to get to work.”
“Absolutely not, you don’t.”
“Between the Pages…”
“I’ve texted Karli from your phone and let her know that you’re taking a sick day.” His voice is firm and I reluctantly relax back into the pillows.
There’s so much to be done, and there’s no one to cover for me, but even I have to admit that I’m not up for it. My head is still pounding from my feeble attempt at sitting up.
Cole’s hands push my hair back and out of my face. “I thought I’d be assaulted for making that decision for you.”
“I’m taking a day off fighting.”
He puts the book down. “Finally.”
I take a few deep, steadying breaths, and gradually the pain in my head abates. I turn on my side and look at him.
He’s still in his slacks and sweater, but he’s taken off his shoes, his sock-clad feet looking big and vulnerable at the end of my bed. Rumpled hair. Tired eyes.
“What are you reading?”
He shows me the cover. “Agatha Christie. I realized I’ve never actually read anything by her.”
“She’s a classic.”
“So I’ve been told.” He sweeps a hand out toward the other side of my bedroom, where books are stacked high. “You really are a bookstore clerk, aren’t you?”
“Mhm. And a failed writer.”
His eyebrows rise, and I know I shouldn’t have said that, but there’s no energy in me to fight right now. All I want is to lie in this bed forever, my eyes closed, making lazy conversation until this flu passes.
He scoots down until his head is on one of the pillows. “You said you were a writer when we met.”
“I haven’t published a book, though.”
Cole looks thoughtful. “Isn’t it quite rare to have published a book by your age?” He nods at the stacks of books that line my wall. I don’t even have a shelf. “Name any one of those writers who were published by twenty-six.”
“Dostoevsky,” I say. “Bram Stoker. And… mhm, David Foster Wallace.”
He smiles wryly. “You have to outsmart me at every turn, don’t you?”
“It’s kind of my thing.”
“All right, but can you at least admit that they’re outliers?”
I sigh. The last thing I want to talk about is my own inadequacies. “Yes. Like a thirty-four-year-old billionaire developer.”
Cole grimaces. “People like to remind me of that.”
I curl up on my side and ignore the protest of my sore throat, annoyed that I’m talking. “Tell me about it.”
“About what?” He looks the least composed I’ve ever seen him, and I decide that this is the Cole Porter I would be able to like, if we weren’t enemies.
“About people reminding you about your success all the time. It must be exhausting.”
Cole gives me a crooked smile. “I can’t tell if this is a trick or not. I’ll complain, and then you’ll tell me I’m not part of the oppressed class.”
I blink at him. “No. No, I won’t. I’m genuinely curious.”
He lies down on his side, so we’re facing each other in the dim morning light of my bedroom.
It feels surreal, having him here. “You must be invited everywhere,” I say. “To everything. Even events you have no interest in attending.”
His smile is self-mocking. “All the time.”
“By people you don’t know as well, right?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “I showed up to a few things in the beginning before I realized I’m just invited like a trophy.”
That strikes me as profoundly sad, and I tell him that, but he just laughs. “Not really. It’s a nice problem to have.”
“I suppose. I’m
not invited to a lot of things. But when I am, I always go.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“The newspaper spread about you that I read yesterday. No, don’t groan! I have a very serious question about it.”
His smile is gone, a sudden seriousness there instead. “You do?”
“Yes. Do you save all articles published about yourself? Do you keep a binder? I would, if it was me.”
His lips twitch. “You’re cute when you’re feverish.”
“Ugh.”
“You don’t like being called cute?”
“Not by you. Not at the moment, at least.” If anything, I want him to think of me as sexy or sensual. Irresistible. The things he’d said to me that first night in the hotel. At the moment, I feel about as cute as a potato, unwashed and sweaty.
“Noted.” Cole turns over on his back and stares up at the ceiling. “My mother saved all the newspaper articles when they first began. I don’t know if she still does.”
“I guarantee you she does.”
He smiles, and it’s a soft, private one. “Probably. I should ask her.”
I rise up on an elbow, suddenly distraught by this new version of Cole Porter, the one taking care of me when I’m sick and who answers my questions in a deep, soft voice.
Somehow, we’re in an alternate universe.
“You stayed. All night. Why?”
He glances over at me with narrowed eyes. “You were seconds from collapsing last night. You fainted.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember a doctor being here?”
“Mmm. Faintly. You called someone?”
He nods. “And I’ve already checked in with him this morning. You’re prescribed bed rest, lots and lots of fluids, and more of the pills on your bedside table.”
I’m speechless for a bit. My head is still spinning, and I close my eyes against the light of day. “Wow.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Better. Compared to last night, I mean. Whoa.”
He reaches over and fluffs my pillow. “I’m surprised,” he says.
“About what?”
“I thought I’d be chased out the second you woke up without a fever. You know, being your number-one enemy and all.”