Only You by K.T. Quinn

47

Donovan

The Day I Took Care Of Her

I let Molly relax in bed and I went downstairs to make breakfast for us. I was still tired, but it felt good to walk around and stretch my legs. Maybe I was on the other side of the sickness.

“Knock on wood,” I said to myself, rapping my knuckles on a wooden table in the restaurant on the way to the kitchen.

When I went inside, I frowned at what I saw. The kitchen was a mess. All the pasta machines were used and covered with flour. Bits of pasta dough were scattered on the counters, and there was a pile of used pots and pans in the sink.

Rather than get annoyed, I realized what this was evidence of. Molly had been working hard to make fresh pasta for me. She had tried, over and over again, until she made something halfway decent. And all for someone who had lost his sense of taste.

She did all of this for me.

“God, I love this woman,” I said out loud. I decided then and there that I would go to the ends of the earth for her.

While making breakfast, I thought about my flight back. I was glad Molly had found out about it. Everything was out in the open now. No more secrets between us.

After breakfast, we napped some more. By the afternoon we found the energy to go down to the lounge and watch a movie. I brought the comforter from my bed so we could cuddle together on the couch.

We may have been sick, but at least we were sick together.

“I have a theory,” she said in a raspy voice during the movie. “You intentionally got me sick so you wouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m the one who quarantined myself away,” I pointed out. “You wanted to come take care of me, and I wouldn’t let you.”

“That was all a cover, for appearances,” she replied. “You secretly wanted to infect me all along.”

I sighed. “Okay, you caught me. While you were sleeping I breathed underneath your door, blowing all the infected particles into your room.”

“I knew it!” she said weakly.

Molly’s symptoms were worse than mine. In addition to fatigue and loss of taste, she had a sore throat that made it hard to talk. Then she developed a cough. At first it was like she was trying to clear her throat, but by nightfall it sounded like she was coughing up a lung.

The next morning she started throwing up.

She had two bites of buttered toast and one bite of scrambled eggs, then abruptly got up and ran to the bathroom. I followed her and held her hair while she vomited in the toilet.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she said while washing out her mouth in the sink. “I didn’t even know vomiting was a symptom.”

“Nausea is,” I said. “I guess I was lucky I didn’t get any of that.”

Since she couldn’t keep her breakfast down, at lunch I made her some tomato soup. I couldn’t make it from scratch since we didn’t have fresh tomatoes, which annoyed me to no end, but Molly didn’t seem to mind as she gently sipped on the soup.

“I actually can’t taste anything,” she said when I commented on it. “It tastes like thick water to me.”

I was beginning to really worry about her, but I patted her leg and made myself smile. “I think you just found the secret to becoming a great chef. Only make food for sick people.”

“You can start a restaurant with that as the… the…” She turned her head and coughed for ten seconds.

My smile wavered as I helped her eat.

I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and when I crawled back in bed I realized Molly was shivering. Her forehead was on fire, so I covered her with spare blankets from the other room and then cuddled with her underneath them. I was sweating from the blankets and her furnace-like body, but Molly clung to me for dear life while whimpering in her sleep. I didn’t dare leave her.

“I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m not leaving your side until you get better.”

The next day she got worse.