by MJ Masucci
I promise I won’t say anything. I haven’t told anyone else. I need to go. It’s very early here, and I want to get to Lidia’s before the traffic gets busy. I haven’t slept in almost two days. I’ll text or call you later. I love you.
I love you, too.
Ava didn’t feel the need to tell Xander that she was sick. When they were together, he became a mother hen when she was ill or injured. If he found out she was sick, it would cause him more stress than he already had in California. She could take care of herself. Robert, Rachel, Sam and Jacob were around if she needed help.
She got home and stripped off her clothing. The chills were coming more frequently now, and she closed the air conditioning vent in her bedroom. She opened the pajama drawer in her dresser and got out a pair of flannels. It was hardly the weather for it, but she was freezing. She crawled into bed and got the digital thermometer from her nightstand. When it chimed she checked it, and it read one hundred point eight. Shit, I truly am sick, so I guess I will be spending the rest of the day and weekend in bed. She pulled the covers over her and went to sleep.
The incessant vibrating of her phone woke her up. She checked the clock by her bedside, and it was after five. She had slept all day and still felt horrible. She was bathed in sweat, and her sheets were damp. She got out of bed to change, and the thermostat in her room was registering eighty-six degrees. Upon checking her phone, she saw that Tim had left several messages. Dammit, I completely forgot to let him know I was sick. He’s probably waiting for me in the park. She texted him.
I’m so sorry. I’m sick and got into bed earlier today. I thought I would only sleep a few hours, but I slept all day!!
Ava, you know you don’t have to lie to me. If you don’t want to go running with me then just say so. I have been waiting for you for the last fifteen minutes.
Tim, why would I lie to you? I am sick. My fever was over one hundred the last time I checked. I went to work this morning, and they told me to go home right after I got there.
He didn’t text her back, and she was just fine with it. She didn’t feel like arguing with him via text or any other mode of communication. She changed her pajamas and was lucky that the sheets had dried by the time she got back to her bed. She sat down and took her temperature again. This time it read one hundred one point four.
She decided that she better take some aspirin before she went back to sleep. She also needed something to drink. When she was all settled, she set the air conditioner on low and got back into bed. The next time she woke it was well after nine o’clock. She had been sleeping most of the day and evening. Her fever must have broken because she was sweaty but very warm. She kicked off the covers, sat up to remove her pajamas, then pulled off her panties and went back into bed, pulling just the sheet over her.
Saturday morning was no better. She went to the small bath and looked in the mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her tongue was white. She felt warm again and took another aspirin. The chill had returned, and she dug in her drawer for a t-shirt. The first one she pulled out was that same now-threadbare shirt that Xander had packed in the suitcase he had left in her apartment four years ago. She slipped into it, thinking of him.
Tim was agitated. First, Ava had told him that she was back with that guy Xander than she stood him up for their run in the park. He was sure she was lying because she sounded fine the day before when she dumped him. Yes, they had only dated for a week, but he was sure he had finally gotten through to her about moving on from the guy. What dumb luck for her to break down in the same town in which Xander was now living. Tim had so many plans for their relationship. She was a real catch: beautiful, intelligent, sexy. She also had a large inheritance that would help supplement his teacher’s salary if they ever married.
When she had dumped him, he was cordial about it. He didn’t let her know how disappointed he was. It was reminiscent of the times in high school when girls would say they wanted to go out and would meet him somewhere. He stood around like a jerk waiting for them for hours. When he saw them in school, they would claim they never made a date with him. He thought those days were behind him.
He had been married, but his wife had died; he was glad to be rid of her (a fact he neglected to tell Ava). His wife had gained a lot of weight after their first year of marriage. She also was an incessant whiner and complainer. She had nagged him constantly about making more money, but when he asked her to get a job she said it was up to him to support them. She spent most of her days watching television, and he was lucky to get a hot meal when he came home. She had gotten cancer, and within less than a year she was gone. He had been relieved.
Now he was going to have to figure out a way to win Ava back. He knew that he had a lot of competition from Xander. The man had everything. Looks, brains, a career that would make him much more money than Tim ever would. Xander also had history with Ava. Tim used to have many conversations with her while sitting on the dock at camp. She had told Tim that Xander was her first and she was still deeply in love with him, even after four years of no contact. It was going to be hard to get her to shake him, but he had a plan.
Chapter 13
Ava slept most of Saturday. She got up occasionally to drink something and take aspirin, but that was all. Watching television was out of the question because her head hurt. By late afternoon, she got out of bed to use the bathroom. She checked her phone and saw that she had missed two phone calls from Xander. She called her voicemail.
“Sweetheart, I thought you would answer since it’s Saturday. Lidia and Brett are both awake now. The doctor thinks that if they keep progressing, they can be out of the hospital by next week. Please call me so we can discuss things.”
“Ava, where are you? I thought you would at least call me back since it’s been hours. I need to talk to you about something. Please call me.”
She dialed his number and hoped her voice would hold. She didn’t want him to know she was sick. He had enough to worry about without having to worry about her too. The phone rang three times before she heard his deep timbre voice on the other end.
“Ava, where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you all day.”
“I’ve been busy,” her voice cracking and sounding nasal.
“Are you sick? You don’t sound good.”
“Yes, I’m not feeling well, but I’m resting.”
“I wish I was there to take care of you.” He didn’t know how much she was in agreement. He always had catered to her every need when she was sick.
“I have some news and let me speak before you say anything. Lidia and Brett are probably being discharged next week. They’re going to need someone to assist them around the house. They cannot afford an aide twenty-four hours a day.”
Ava could see where this was going and it made her feel overwhelmingly disappointed.
“They have asked if I can stay and assist them until at least one of them can get around. I have agreed. Brett has no family, and my mother is not in the best of health right now. I think I would have to be here for at least two or three months.” He suddenly stopped talking waiting for her to say something.
She sighed loudly. “It’s not the best scenario, but we have been apart for four years. What’s another three months? Maybe I can visit you if you aren’t too busy taking care of them.”
Xander agreed that three months was nothing compared to the four years they had been apart. He promised her that he would make it up to her once he got back to Manhattan. He hung up the phone telling her he loved her.
Ava lay back in bed looking at the ceiling. She was upset, but she knew that arguing with Xander was the wrong thing to do. They would make their relationship work long distance. They were going to do that anyway until he had gotten things squared away in Saratoga. Now it was just a matter of three thousand more miles and several states between them.
She took comfort knowing that eventually, they would be together all the time. It would give her time to break the news to her family an
d let them know that she wanted to be with Xander for the rest of her life.
She decided to get up to take a shower hoping that the hot water would help her sinuses. She couldn’t take any time off from work since she had taken so much already. Tomorrow was Sunday, and she needed to go back in whether she was well or not. She turned on the shower as hot as she could get it. The steam filled the bathroom, and she breathed it in. She wasn’t sure what happened, but she stepped into the stall and fell.
She might have passed out from her sickness or the heat of the shower. She came to and noticed a stream of blood on her forearm that mixed with the water as it went down the drain. She pulled herself up and turned off the shower then used a towel to stem the flow of blood. After five minutes the blood continued to stream. Ten minutes and it wasn’t stopping even with pressure and holding it above her head. She wasn’t sure who to call.
Her aunt and uncle were still in California with the Wilders. She needed someone close to come and help her. She didn’t want to call an ambulance. The person in closest proximity to her was Tim. She dialed his number hoping he wouldn’t ignore it because he was still angry at her. Unfortunately, it went to voicemail, and she hung up. Minutes later, he called her back.
“Ava, what’s up?” She could tell his voice was strained.
“Tim, thank God you called me back. I fell in the shower, and I’m bleeding. Can you take me to the hospital?”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“Please, I’m not joking.”
She heard his door slam on the other end of the phone. He hailed a cab and kept her on the phone while he was on his way over. In the meantime, she dried herself as best she could and put on sweatpants and a t-shirt. It was complicated because each time she moved, the towel wrapped around her arm shifted.
The lobby phone rang, and she told the front desk to send Tim up immediately. He didn’t wait for the elevator but ran up the fire stairs instead. He was out of breath by the time he got to her door.
“Come on. I have the cab waiting downstairs. You need stitches so let’s hurry.” He picked her purse off the foyer table and she let him lead her to the elevator. He jammed his finger on the L button hoping it would get down to the lobby quickly. He ushered her out of the building and into the waiting cab while directing the driver to the nearest hospital.
On the way, he kept pressure on the wound with the towel and tried to smooth her wet hair out of her face.
“Ava, you’re burning up. You are sick aren’t you?”
She gave him a weak smile, “I wasn’t lying,” she softly said.
Tim felt like a jerk. She wasn’t playing with him; she really was sick, and he had gotten nasty with her about it. He should have known she wouldn’t lie to him the way other women had.
When they arrived at the hospital, the cab pulled up to the Emergency Room and Tim paid the driver. He ran around the car to help Ava out and practically carried her to the front desk.
“She needs to see a doctor right away. She’s bleeding,” he said to the nurse.
The nurse could see the towel that they had used to stem the flow of blood was stained red. She immediately called for triage, and they came with a wheelchair to take her into a room for treatment. They left Tim standing outside in the waiting area with her purse.
The nurses placed Ava in a bay and transferred her to a bed. Two more nurses entered to take her vitals and a doctor followed a minute later.
“I’m Dr. Kalinsky. Let me see what we have here,” he said as he removed the towel. He cleaned the wound that was no longer heavily bleeding. It was just oozing. She looked at the gash as he worked on it.
“How did you manage to do this?”
“I’m not feeling well, and I decided to see if I could clear out my sinuses with a hot shower. I stepped under the water, and I passed out, I think. When I woke up, my arm was bleeding. I think I hit it against the shower bench when I fell.”
He picked up the chart the nurses had deposited on the bed, and he looked at the vitals the nurses had taken.
“You’re temperature is elevated. It’s one hundred one point two. I think we need to prescribe you a course of antibiotics. Let’s get this numb first; then I’ll stitch it up. Six stitches should do the trick.”
The nurse brought him a suture kit along with a syringe. He inserted the syringe in her wound. Ava gritted her teeth until he removed it. Within seconds she started to feel the numbness taking hold. In the meantime, he checked her ears, nose, and throat. The nurse came back, and he instructed her to take a strep culture.
“You have a couple of blisters on your tonsils and your throat is red. I just want to make sure you don’t have strep. How long have you been feeling ill?”
“I guess for a couple of days. I was very busy last weekend and early part of this week. I didn’t sleep much, and I went running in the rain.”
As the doctor tended to Ava, Tim sat in the hospital waiting room. Her phone had chirped several times in the confines of her purse. He normally wasn’t a snoop, but if he was going to get a leg up on Xander, he needed to do some reconnaissance. He unzipped her purse and pulled out her phone.
He was fortunate that she didn’t have a password on it. He scrolled through the text messages between Ava and Xander. Pretty tame stuff but he did gather some information. It seemed that Xander was away somewhere and might be there for awhile. That would give Tim some time to work on Ava. He wanted her for his own, and if he could spy on her to do it, then that is what he would have to do. He had finally gotten somewhere with her, and just when they started to date, this jerk had come back. He wasn’t going to stand by while Xander swiped her away from him.
First, he installed a cell phone tracking app. This way he would know where she would be at all times. He would have done more, but a nurse came out and called him into the ER. He quickly shoved Ava’s phone back into her purse. He would make sure to undermine her relationship with Xander as much as he could.
Tim entered the room with Ava. Her arm was being worked on by a doctor. She waved to him with her free hand, and he smiled at her as he sat down in a chair opposite her bed. After the doctor was done, he wrapped her arm with a bandage and gave her instructions on how to care for the stitches.
“How many stitches did you get?” Tim asked as the doctor left the room.
“Six. The doctor couldn’t believe I cut it slipping in the shower. He said it the edges were very clean. I have to make an appointment with my regular doctor to have the stitches taken out in a ten days. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to run or workout for a few days.”
“Did they check out why you have a fever?”
“They took a fast strep test and said it came up positive.”
The nurse cut their conversation short as she returned to give Ava discharge instructions and a prescription for antibiotics. On the way home, she leaned against Tim in the cab, resting her head on his shoulder. He sniffed at her hair, which was slightly matted and still damp from her shower. He smelled lavender and made a mental note that she favored that scent.
They stopped at the drug store not far from her house to fill the prescription. She started to feel woozy, and Tim put his hand on her head. She was very warm. He led her to the chairs by the pharmacy counter and waited in line for her prescription.
Later, he helped her into her apartment, got her a glass of water for her medication and tucked her in bed. She fell asleep quickly, and when he was going to leave her apartment, her phone rang. He removed it from her purse and saw that Xander was calling.
“Son of a bitch likes to keep tabs on her,” he muttered under his breath. A minute later the phone chirped, indicating a voicemail was waiting for her. He wished that he had her password so he could listen and maybe erase it but he would figure it out in due time.
Xander tapped his foot as Ava’s phone went to voicemail. He left a detailed message asking how she was feeling and that he missed her. He hoped she would call him back because it had been
a stressful day. He and his parents had been working with the social worker at the hospital trying to get some hospital beds and wheelchairs over to Lidia and Brett’s home. They would need those items until they were more mobile and that would be weeks. He loved his sister, but he loved Ava more, and now that they were together again he wanted to be with her. He knew she would wait for him no matter what, but they had already wasted so much time.
He went back into Lidia’s house and opened the refrigerator. Right now, he needed a beer or better yet, something stronger. Lidia was not much of a drinker, but he checked her cabinets, finding a dusty bottle of vodka in a bottom one. Xander got himself a glass, filled it with ice and poured a generous amount. Then he went out to sit on her patio.
He sat drinking until he drained the glass. He would have had more, but his parents were napping in the guest bedroom. The last thing he wanted was to give his father a reason for getting on his case. He didn’t want to upset his mother with an argument. He sucked on the vodka-coated ice cubes and then went in the house to clean up. He had put the bottle away just as his father entered the kitchen.
“We’re probably going to be leaving by next week to go home to New York. Your mother needs to be near her doctors. I think it’s better that she get out of this stressful environment.”
There wasn’t much Xander could do but agree with his father. The sooner his mother got back to her doctors for Lyme treatment, the better. She seemed to be on the upswing until Lidia had her accident. Now it looked like she had relapsed.
“I received a call from the hospital equipment company. They said that they could deliver the beds and wheelchairs on Tuesday. Have you picked a day to go back to New York? I could use your help the first day that Lidia and Brett are home.” Xander said.