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Just a really good day.

Happiness

LaVieEnRose



I woke up drowning in pillows, balled up on the side of the bed with Martha slung over my legs and sunlight streaming through the windows. I didn’t see anyone else in the room, but after I drifted off to sleep for a few more minutes and finally yawned and stretched, I felt a hand smooth over my forehead, and I smiled and opened my eyes. “Hi.”


Brian leaned down and kissed me, slowly, and I played with the collar of his t-shirt.


How is it today? he asked.


I stretched again. Not bad.


Did you sleep?


“Mmhmm.”


Good. Ready?


I nodded and held my arms up, and he carefully slid me out from under Martha and the comforter and helped me right myself on the edge of the bed. Everything spun for a minute, and he waited patiently while I held onto his arm, eyes closed, before I gave him the okay and he set me on the floor.


I put my arm around his waist on the way to the bathroom. “Someday my chest isn’t going to feel like this, right?”


Yeah, it’ll stop hurting.


Brian already had the shower running, and steam was starting to fog up the mirrors and the glass walls. He helped me sit on the bamboo stool we have, took a minute to step under the spray and take a deep breath, his head back, and then got to work on me, washing my hair and running soap down my arms. I felt myself melt.


“What do you have to do today?” I asked him.


Not a damn thing.


“Me neither.”


Brian nodded in approval and took the handheld showerhead off the wall to rinse my shoulders. He held it close to the back of my neck so the water could knead out some of the knots there, and I shivered and breathed out.


He chuckled. Good?


“God yes.”


He held it there for a while, then had me hang onto it while he crouched down and started soaping up my feet and legs. I looked at him there, on the ground for me, handling me so carefully, and I waited for the shame I usually get about making him take of me to wash over me and it just…it didn’t come. Part of it was just that I was so tired and I’d just been through a pretty major medical emergency and even I couldn’t convince myself that I didn’t deserve to be handled with some care right now, but part of it was also that I was looking at him and feeling something very distinctly not small and guilty about the fact that Brian Kinney was washing my feet like I was his king. Mmm. Yeah. Not small and guilty. Not meek and weak. Not the vein I was thinking in at all.


“I want to top you,” I said to him.


He laughed. From the shower stool? He surveyed the distance between me and the floor. I don’t think I bend that way anymore. Wait ‘til we’re back in bed, then you can.


Hmm. Not good enough. “Suck me off, then.”


What, right now?


“Right now. Stop and suck me off.”


He looked up at me, and I saw him cluck his tongue the way he does. Bossy.


“Yes. What are you waiting for?”


He kept staring me down, just to fucking piss me off, and then cracked a smile. Not a damn thing, he said, adjusting his angle.


**


Sickness and caretaking and duty and concern…they can mean what you want them to mean. That’s all I’m saying.


They can mean bringing Brian Kinney to his knees, and that can mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean.


No one gets to say that you have to be a sad story.


**


Okay, I…no. Evan frustration-thrashed the comforter. No.


You just kicked the dog.


I’m sorry, Martha. He squirmed until he was next to me on the pillows. I don’t know why I thought I could fucking take this class. I can’t read.


You can read.


I just…whoever told me I could speak English lied to me. Look. He showed me the page. This paragraph is so long. It’s like a page! I don’t know how to remember the beginning by the time I get to the end. And it keeps changing what it’s talking about and saying things that don’t make sense.


I read it over and said, Okay, show me what doesn’t make sense.


Here, this sentence. All her life she’d been fighting against a current, and now she’d found a harbor. I have no idea what this is. I know what all those words mean individually, but…what is she talking about? She was supposed to be talking about this guy she’s going to marry, and now all of a sudden there’s a harbor?


It’s a metaphor, I said. Not a literal harbor. It’s a feeling.


Doesn’t current mean ‘now?’ How do you have A now?


It does, but it also means tides, like in the water. That’s what it’s talking about here.


But she’s not in the water. Is she in the water?


No, I said, but I started coughing before I could explain any further. Since I got sick a few weeks ago it kept coming on suddenly like that.


Evan looked up from his book when it didn’t let up. Oxygen?


I shook my head and took a few steadying breaths, trying to get it under control. Metaphors are there to make everything more visual. So that instead of just decoding a sentence word-by-word, you can picture what’s going on.


But I can’t do that, he said. I have to read the words and then figure out what all the words mean and remember where they are in the sentence and what every part of the sentence is referring to and then remember the sentence that came before it and somehow I’m supposed to just know that she’s not actually in the water when it’s telling me she’s in the water.


I pointed to the nightstand. Can you hand me that sketchpad?


He grabbed it for me, then a pencil, and snuggled into my shoulder as I started sketching. He loves watching me draw, and I love him watching me, so it works out.


So imagine a boat, I said left-handed as I drew. Fighting against the current. It keeps beating it back…see? I drew a figure on the deck, holding onto the line. She’s trying to sail this…so how would her face look? What would she be feeling?


Tired.


Yeah.


Frustrated. Overwhelmed. Scared, maybe.


Right. I drew that expression on her. And so here’s the harbor. You know that word?


Boats, right? Where they leave.


Where they leave, but also where they come in from the sea, I stretched out my hand a little, then sketched a few sailboats. So she’s been out at sea for ages, fighting this current, and then she sees this harbor. So how’s she going to feel?


Relieved. Safe. Happy.


I erased her expression and drew that in instead. See? There.


Evan studied the picture. Okay. I get it now.


It’ll get easier, I said. It will. You’re just practicing.


All right, well, stick around. I might need you again next paragraph.


I will.


**


I don’t know what it is about hospital trips that make me sleep like I’m in a coma for weeks afterwards. Logic would say that it has something to do with the fact that I was sick enough to be in the hospital in the first place, but I don’t know. I think it’s some kind of dark hospital witchcraft they do to me while I’m in inpatient. Horrible places.


I kept just falling asleep in the middle of doing things, and it’s not like I was doing anything particularly exhausting. One minute I was on the couch folding laundry and watching a Mexican art documentary with Evan, and the next I was in bed, startling myself awake.


Brian’s hand appeared on my arm. Hey, it’s okay.


I nodded and started coughing, and Brian helped me sit up and handed me a bottle of water from the nightstand. I leaned against the headboard and sipped, looking around the room and trying to figure out what time it was. Early evening, maybe.


Brian was sitting in a chair next to the bed, and he had one of my sketch pads. Drawing me? I asked him.


He made a face. Trying to.


Let me see, I said, and he climbed over me on the bed and settled down on my other side, handed it to me. Brian would never tell you this, but he’s actually not a bad artist. He gets overwhelmed trying to come up with stuff out of nowhere, but he does a pretty good job of drawing what’s in front of him.


Still, not perfect. You can fix it, he said, and I laughed and…fixed it a little. God, he said. I don’t know how you do that.


A lot of figure drawing is just studying, I said. Once you know anatomy well, you can make anything look right.


He watched me re-shade my face and said, Anatomy, huh?


Anatomy and light.


He nuzzled my cheek impatiently while I worked, and finally I huffed out a sigh and put the pencil down and turned to him, and he kissed me deeply, urgently. I cupped his jaw in my hand and held onto the soft hair over his ears.


He rested his forehead against mine.


“You should draw more often,” I told him.


He shrugged and kissed me again. Just something to do when you’re asleep.


“You don’t have more important things to do?”


Can’t think of any.


You really do get sappy after I’ve been sick.


He pouted at me, leaning back against the pillows. I know.


I shook my head sadly. Where’s the emotionally repressed asshole I fell in love with?


Oh, he’ll be back in a few days, I’m sure.


“Hey, no, wait,” I said, and Brian laughed with his head back.


**


I was on the couch the next time I woke up, and I felt kind of dizzy and disoriented, so I stayed still at first and just watched Brian and Evan. They were setting the table for dinner, and Evan was laughing at something Brian said. From the way they were moving I was pretty sure there was music on, and I smiled and nuzzled my pillow.


Is he still asleep? Brian asked.


I think so, Evan said. I’ll get him in a minute. He set a plate down. I like his hands.


Brian nodded thoughtfully. They’re good hands.


Delicate.


They are. Which you wouldn’t expect, since…


Evan nodded knowingly. God, these two. Obsessed.


I hauled myself up eventually and kissed them both and we had dinner Evan made, pasta with Alfredo sauce and peas and asparagus, so good. Evan checked his phone as we were finishing up and said, Kel wants to know if we’re coming out tonight, to Brian. Casual clubbing friend they’d made. Also their drug dealer.


Brian thought it over. Do you want to?


I think so. He looked at me. If you’re okay.


I’m okay. You should go.


Evan said, Let’s go. I want to dance.


Brian hedged.


Come on, Evan said. You don’t want to dance?


Brian thought for another moment, then said, Let’s have everyone over instead.


Everyone?


Everyone. Derek, Daph, Molly, April, the girls. Thalia if you want. Invite Kel, I don’t care.


So Evan started making calls while Brian and I cleaned up. “You don’t have to do this,” I said to him.


Ah, I do hate socializing, you’re right.


“You can go out,” I said. “Go dance. I’ll be fine.”


He shrugged. Everyone I want to dance with tonight is here.


And so everyone came over. We put Jane to bed in her room and had edibles on the floor and blasted music and danced. Brian pulled me up and put his arms around my neck, touching our foreheads together.


I looked at the people dancing around us. Is this even a slow song?


That’s never stopped us before.


Everyone got drunk. April leaned her head against my shoulder and told me she loved me. Thalia couldn’t make it, but she came up in conversation, specifically one that began with Emily asking Evan, So how bi are you? and Evan saying, I don’t know, want to find out? and ended with the two of them making out on the couch.


Gwen cracked up; really, we all did, once we got a look at the sheer bewilderment on Brian’s face. I… He gestured to them. What. No.


You are such a slut, how does this faze you? April said.


I’ve calmed in my old age, Brian said, as if he weren’t still having back room group sex twice a week. Kinneys don’t lose their spots. And I never fuck my friends.


Really?


Really. Strangers and Justin. And I leave sleeping with our friends to him.


I don’t sleep with all my friends, I said.


Brian gave me a skeptical look.


Okay, but…I get curious! I said, and he laughed and kissed me, tilting me back on his arm.


It was just so nice. At some point we all ended up tangled in some huge pile on the floor. Brian disentangled himself to go check on the baby at one point, and when he came back he stared at the pile of us and said, Where are my two? and Evan and I threw up our arms at our opposite ends of the knot and yelled “HERE WE ARE!” and God, Brian’s smile.


Daphne and Derek went home when it got late, but everyone else stayed over, some in Molly’s room, some in the basement, some in Brian’s office upstairs. The perks of having a large house. Evan realized we’d need more coffee in the morning so he took Martha on a walk down the block to the bodega, and I sat on the couch, doing a nebulizer treatment and watching Brian clean the kitchen.


We should go to the beach house next weekend, I said to him.


Sounds perfect.


I leaned my head against the couch and just looked at him.


He caught me as he was putting a dish away and quirked up his mouth. What?


I shrugged. Just happy I’m here.


God, me too, he said, so quickly.

 

I hugged a pillow to my chest, breathed in medicine, and waited to be carried off to bed. And I kept watching Brian.

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