I’ve just about finished my sugar free vanilla latte when the train lurches to a stop at 66th Street, and I step out into the swarm of people on the platform making their way to the street level. When I get to my apartment, my cat Louis greets me in his way, by giving me a bored look and swishing his tail before deigning to jump down from his perch and come rub against my leg as I kick my shoes off. By the time I get to the bedroom, I’m already shedding my sensible, office-ready button-up shirt and my beige bra so I can trade them both for something a little sexier. Thumbing through the hangers in my walk-in closet, I finally decide to go with a tight black pencil skirt and a red top that accentuates my chest nicely. It’s not that I’m trying to win anyone over with the way I’m dressed -- I don’t need to -- but I like wearing things that showcase my figure. I might be in my mid-40s, but I’ll be damned if anyone is going to look at me and think I’m a day over 35. I take good care of myself, and I like to show that off. It’s for me and nobody else. I wear what I want, and if anybody dares to disrespect me because of it, they’ll be wishing they’d never been born.

I exchange a few more text messages with Rich as I finish getting ready for our date, until he sends me one letting me know that he’s waiting in a cab in front of my building. I give Louis a quick scratch behind the ears on my way out the door, before greeting Rich with a hug and a kiss as he holds the car door open for me and slides into the back seat of the cab alongside me. He always dresses well -- a lot like Brian, really, which makes it even funnier to me that Brian hates him so much. Truthfully, they have a lot in common. Sometimes I actually wonder if Brian’s dislike for him is some sort of bizarre form of jealousy, since I’m kind of his “work wife.” But I know he’d never admit to that, even if I called him out on it. Hell, he probably doesn’t even realize it.

At the restaurant, Rich and I order several small plates to share, along with a bottle of wine. By the end of the night, I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m also pretty damn mesmerized by Rich’s blue eyes, which means I’m more than ready to take him back to my place. Things have already escalated quite a bit before we even make it out of the cab, and his tongue is pushing into my mouth as his body presses against mine in the elevator on the way up to my floor. He’s peppering the back of my neck with soft, gentle kisses as I unlock the door, and I barely have a chance to kick my shoes off and close the door behind us before we’re both undressing each other on our way to my bedroom.

Rich is probably one of the most talented men I’ve ever been in bed with -- the way I imagine Brian would have been back in the day, given the legend that surrounded him before he met Justin and everything started to shift. So suffice to say that I really hate to have to say goodnight to him and send him on his way around midnight, but we both have to work in the morning -- me especially, since I’ll be running the office solo for at least the next day, and hopefully the rest of the week. I’m used to that though; it happens. Sometimes it’s planned, and sometimes it’s not, but we always get through it, even when it’s unexpected.

I arrive at the office around 9 a.m., halfway expecting to find Brian there as well, having conveniently “forgotten” about our agreement. But his office is empty and the lights are off, and along with that comes blessed quiet, at least until my phone rings thirty minutes later with a call from Brian.

“Hello?” I answer, fairly sure I already know exactly why he’s calling.

“What the fuck did you do?” Brian asks, and he somehow sounds even worse than he did yesterday, like he’s been up half the night coughing, which he probably was. “I asked Justin if the wi-fi was working and he just shrugged and said, ‘I think so,’ but he wouldn’t look at me. And since everything is working except my email and my network drive, that looks a little bit suspicious.”

“You said you were going to rest,” I remind him, while I’m clicking around on my own computer, looking at the tasks that other people have added to Brian’s calendar for today, so I can move them to my own.

“I’m in bed; I am resting. I was trying to check my damn email because I’m expecting something important from Remsen.”

“I’ll make sure anything that needs taken care of gets taken care of. I promise. I’m just as invested in this company as you are.” I think sometimes he forgets that -- that I’ve been with him from the beginning, when this company consisted of a handful of people working out of an old bathhouse in Pittsburgh, and the reason I agreed to make the jump with him in the first place was because I believed in him and his ideas. No way in hell am I going to let anything not get done or be less than our best work.

“I’m not a goddamned invalid.” Brian’s voice is starting to rise now, though it’s not as powerful as it would be had he not spent the last several days coughing his head off. “I can check my fucking email without--” He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, however, before he dissolves into a fit of hacking that it takes him a long time to get control over -- much longer than any that I heard yesterday -- to the point where by the time he finally does manage to catch his breath, I’m starting to become concerned.

“Are you by yourself?” I ask, trying not to let too much of said concern bleed through, because -- again -- Brian almost never reacts well to other people being worried about him, and the last thing I want is for him to get any more agitated than he already is and end up making himself sicker.

It takes Brian a few seconds before he says, “Yes,” and his voice is barely above a whisper now. “Justin went to work.”

“Ah, he didn’t want to stand too close to the bear, huh?” I say, trying to shift the tone of the conversation away from concern and more toward lighthearted teasing. Also, I know all too well that Brian is a highly unpleasant person to be around when he’s sick, and this is a time when I wouldn’t want to be in Justin’s position. Though given the hours Brian often spends at the office, I’ve spent plenty of time with sick Brian over the years too. Maybe almost as much as Justin has.

“Fuck you. I can manage my own damn self.” I hear Brian stifle another cough. “Jesus Christ.”

“You need to go to the doctor, Brian,” I say in my no-nonsense voice -- the one that’s often required to make Brian actually listen. “This could be something serious, and it’s not getting any better on its own.”

If I could actually see Brian, I’m sure that he’s probably trying to say something, but his body’s involuntary response is instead yet another coughing fit, though thankfully not as long as the previous one. However, it seems to be enough to back up my point, because when Brian can finally speak again, his response is a scratchy, breathy, “I know.”

“Okay, good. And in the meantime, since you don’t have any emails to check or respond to, please go take a nap.”

“Yes mother.”

“I’m not your mother; don’t you dare wish that curse on me.”

I hear Brian’s familiar sardonic laugh, but that too turns into a cough, followed by a frustrated groan. I want to finish the conversation with, “See you Monday,” but I don’t want to push it. With any luck, the doctor will take care of that for me and tell Brian in no uncertain terms that he needs to stay home from work tomorrow. So instead, I simply say, “Goodnight, call me if you need anything that isn’t work-related,” because it does kind of worry me that Brian is home alone, given that he sounds like he’s about to choke on his own breath. But I also know he’d have to be practically dying before he’d ever ask for anything. Still, the offer is out there.

Given that I already know that Brian’s stubbornness can sometimes do him more harm than good, I decide to send a text to Justin. I know he probably won’t be able to respond right away because he’s likely in class, but I want him to know just how awful his husband sounds, just in case Brian was somehow able to put on airs this morning and make Justin think he was “fine.”

Your husband sounds like he's about to cough up a lung any minute now, I type. Please tell me you're planning to drag his stubborn ass to urgent care later.

I get a response back about fifteen minutes later that says: I know. He kept both of us up all night, but there’s nothing I can do for him. I tried. He already has a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. I didn’t want to leave him, but he insisted that I go to work, so…

Justin doesn’t finish that sentence, and I don’t need him to, because I know there would have been absolutely no arguing with Brian, even if he could hardly speak.

The next time I hear from Brian, it’s in the form of a text message later in the afternoon, letting me know that he won’t be in until Monday, and I’m grateful that he finally sought some medical advice and listened to it. Best of all, that actually turns out to be the last I hear from him until Monday morning. The rest of us manage to keep the office going without a hitch, despite the anxiety Brian always seems to have about how on earth we’ll do that without him there to strike fear in the hearts of the art department and overanalyze everything that’s already finished.

When I get to the office on Monday, Brian is already there (surprise, surprise), looking at least marginally better than he had on Wednesday. He still sounds like shit, and he hardly even has a voice by this point, but he isn’t coughing quite as much, so it seems like taking a few days off (and some medication) has helped. However, his mood doesn’t seem to have improved at all, because he’s getting pissed off at every little thing, and although I’m not hearing as much coughing coming from the office next door, now I’m hearing cursing and the sound of objects being thrown and drawers being slammed. So I give Brian a wide berth, trying to keep my interaction with him as limited as possible -- not because I’m afraid of him, but because it drives me fucking nuts when he acts like this. Finally, after our early-afternoon staff meeting mostly consists of Brian grousing about stupid shit that doesn’t really matter, I decide I’ve had enough, and follow him back to his office after our meeting wraps up.

“What the fuck is your problem?” I ask, closing the door to his office behind me. “I know you feel like shit, but if you’re going to treat our employees like shit too -- even the ones you like -- then you’d do better to just stay home and let me handle it. And I can handle it.”

In that moment, Brian looks like every bit of the fire and anger that he’s been spewing at random intervals all day long has suddenly drained out of him as he lets his head loll back and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He lets out a long sigh, but doesn’t say a word.

“If you need to stay home, then stay home,” I continue, my tone a bit gentler to match Brian's completely changed disposition. “It’s fine. We’ve got everything covered.”

“There’s just so much on the line with this Remsen stuff,” he says, sounding every bit as tired as he looks. “I feel like it has to be perfect -- like I have to prove myself to them all over again.”

“You don’t, though. They chose you. They signed a contract.” I know why Brian is worried about this, and I know about the asshole that’s now on Remsen’s board of directors who apparently thinks Brian is less-than-capable, simply because he’s paralyzed. Ted told me what happened at that meeting, and it made me want to go kick some ass out in Chicago, but I didn’t. Still, though, I understand what that ignited in Brian, and that I’m seeing the direct result of it in front of me right now. “Lawrence Remsen knows you, and he knows you won’t settle for less than the best. But don’t kill yourself over it. There’s no need to. The campaign is perfect.”

“It’s not my best work, though. I know I can do better.”

I have to fight myself not to roll my eyes, because I know this is Brian’s raging inner perfectionist speaking, but I also know better than to brush him off when he’s being vulnerable. And, seeing the Brian Kinney that’s in front of me right now, suddenly the way he’s been acting all day makes sense -- he’s feeling insecure, and he’s masking it with anger. So, rolling my eyes right now would not be a good thing, because it would only cause him to throw his walls up and shut me out too.

“Brian.” I pull my chair a little closer to his desk and lean forward so that he and I are face-to-face. “This is what you have an entire staff for. You’re not a one-man band. You’re sick right now, and that might mean letting the rest of us take a bigger role on this, at least for a couple of weeks. We’re a team. A family, even. If one of us is down, the rest of us will pick up the slack.”

He’s quiet for a moment -- a quiet that signifies to me that he knows I’m right -- and when he responds, he’s not looking at me, but instead down at the desk, where he’s absently running his thumbnail over a tiny nick in its glass surface that was likely caused by one of his earlier temper tantrums. “I’m sick of being sick,” he says softly. “I was supposed to take Justin out last night for his birthday, and I couldn’t even do that. I fell asleep after dinner, and I didn’t wake up until this morning.”

So that’s what this is really about, I think to myself. It’s another one of the guilt trips Brian sends himself on when he can’t do something he feels like he should do for someone he loves, to somehow prove himself worthy of their affection.

“Justin gets it too,” I say earnestly. “You’re his husband. You’re family. He wants you to take care of yourself. All of us here want that too. You’ve got your trip to Toronto for Gus’ graduation coming up. You need to go home and rest, so you can get over this.”

It takes several more minutes of going back and forth to completely convince Brian that we really do have everything covered at the office, and he can go home -- and stay there for a few more days if he needs to -- without worrying about any of his campaigns. I have to agree to personally oversee the rest of the Remsen ads and send them on to him for his final approval -- which I begrudgingly agree to, on the condition that will be the only thing he does, and if any changes are needed, I’ll take care of making sure they get done.

Finally, I get him to go home, and he doesn’t come back in until the following week. In the meantime, I pull Christina in on the Remsen campaign, because I honestly think she’s our best graphic artist right now, even up against our senior staff in Pittsburgh. She makes a few adjustments that I think are perfection, and I practically dare Brian to disagree. Thankfully, he doesn’t, and when I send everything on to the publisher, I’m confident that we really have done our best work -- as a team.

While I’m busy running the office, I’m also trying to manage my social life, which is a little bit more difficult because I’m having to put in longer hours than I normally do, trying to cover my workload as well as Brian’s. Not that I mind doing that -- I don’t, because I know it’s what has to be done sometimes, and he’d do it for me in a heartbeat -- but all work and no play will never be a life philosophy of mine.

Still, there are a couple of nights when I don’t have a choice but to cancel my plans with Rich because I have too much that needs to get done at work. He seems irritated -- especially the second time -- but ultimately sighs and relents, and we make do with a quick hookup at his apartment on a Thursday night, which does a hell of a lot to lower my stress level.

Thankfully, when Brian comes back to work this time, it seems like he actually is over whatever the hell he had. It’s obvious he feels a lot better, though his voice still sounds like he’s been chain smoking cigarettes, despite the fact that I know he hasn’t smoked since his accident. I refrain from teasing him about it though, because honestly, I’m just glad he’s back and finally feeling better.

Of course, a week later, he’s gone to Toronto to spend time with Gus, and I’m back to running Kinnetik by myself. That’s when my office phone rings with a Chicago area code and a phone call from Remsen Pharmaceuticals, our biggest account.