VIOLET

My eyes fluttered open to the pulse of pain radiating from my hips and knees. Not the start I was hoping for. A morning evaluation was my standard practice, and I could already tell today’s results would not be encouraging. 

Everything hurt. Fingers. Wrists. Ankles. Hips. The joints were stiff and sore, like they hadn’t moved in years. I half expected to hear them creak as I flexed.

God, I was exhausted. Not sleepy. Not tired. Utterly spent—as if someone had opened the drain and flushed every ounce of energy from my body. This level of fatigue was difficult to explain to people. It wasn’t the same as a long day or a bad night’s sleep. This exhaustion was bone-deep, wringing out every cell. Like in movies when someone’s life-force is getting siphoned and they turn into a skeleton right there on the spot. That was me now—a skeleton with swollen joints.

I rolled to my back, and my breath hitched as an intense ache bloomed across my middle. My hand drifted to my lower ribs, gingerly finding the swelling, hot and tender, protruding from my chest. Inflammation in the cartilage of my rib cage—one of my oldest, weirdest, and most hated symptoms. When it flared up, it could be relatively minor with a prickling sensation and a bit of discomfort, or it could look like half a softball stuck under my skin, causing blinding pain and impeding my ability to breathe. Today was…medium…I guess. 

Medium. So very eloquent. I was great with the words today. As a professional words expert, I was well-qualified to make these evaluations. I mentally placed a “needs work” note on my internal monologue, but I didn’t have high hopes. My brain was wading through dense fog in search of fragments of thoughts, and I wasn’t convinced it could put the pieces together even if it were to find them.

Focus on the checklist, Violet.

Joint and muscle aches. Yes. Fatigue. Big yes. Brain fog. Densely foggy. Ribs. Damn. Maybe more than medium.

Fever? I placed a palm against my forehead. I don’t know. Probably.

Rash? Moving my hand to my cheek, I didn’t even need the mirror to know it would be bright red. The heat in my skin announced the raised splotches forming downward-pointing triangles on both cheeks like some sort of sad lupus clown. They called it a butterfly rash because of the way it unfolded somewhat symmetrically across the cheeks like a butterfly’s open wings, but that imagery always seemed a little too pleasant for the reality. Sad lupus clown was a far better fit.

Looked like check marks across the board, symptom-wise. I was in a flare. It didn’t come as a great shock. I’d felt kind of off yesterday but held on to hope it was a blip and I’d wake up feeling improved this morning. 

No such luck.

The situation demanded drugs—both Regular Meds (immunosuppressants, symptom reducers, and supplements) and Get Rid Of This Flare Meds (steroids). But I needed to feed myself something so the pharmacy I was about to consume didn’t turn my stomach. I also really needed to pee. That could go to the front of the line.

Pee. Food. Meds. What else?

I didn’t have any pressing deadlines. I was working on edits for a manuscript in which the client used the word moist seventy-four times—so not exactly making notes on the next Great American Novel. This round of notes wasn’t due for a couple of days. It could wait.

What else?

Evan. I was supposed to have dinner with Evan tonight. Ramen at my favorite spot. Well, one of my favorite spots. I was a connoisseur of ramen, so I had at least four favorite spots, each with its own special strengths. Tonight’s ramen place had the best marinated eggs—perfectly jammy yolks and exactly the right amount of salt. An absolute delight.

Eggs…why am I thinking about eggs? Right. Ramen with Evan. Text him to cancel.

Evan. Pee. Food. Meds. Nap.

Grabbing my phone, I fired off a quick text.

Violet: Bad day. Rain check tonight?

His response came in seconds.

Evan: Of course. You ok? Need anything?

Violet: I’m okay. Taking meds and heading back to bed. I’m sorry.

Evan: No worries. Take care of yourself.

He didn’t need many words from me to understand, a fact I appreciated on days like this.

With an embarrassing amount of effort, I made it out of bed, performed my restroom ministrations, snagged a package of peanut butter crackers (a go-to for low-effort food), took a fistful of pills, and slid fuzzy socks onto my icicle feet before climbing back into bed. The single circuit around my apartment had cost me. Even more pain. Even less energy. Nothing else to do but hunker down and ride it out.

I huddled under my blankets, attempting to create a cocoon of safety. Too bad the thing I needed protecting from—my turncoat defective body—was sharing the cocoon with me. I closed my eyes, a tear spilling down my cheek. 

I was so tired of this.

I had my first symptoms—aching knees, a rash on my chest, and the weirdo rib thing—when I was in middle school in a small West Texas town. Not the cute kind with charming downtown shops and a plucky mayor. The kind with one blinking stop light, a convenience store, and dirt. My parents were good people and did their best with what they had, but we weren’t exactly flush with resources. Mom drove me in to see a parade of doctors in Odessa, but my symptoms were inconsistent, and when they finally disappeared, Mom and Dad were relieved to chalk it up to a fluke and move on with life.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning. When I was twenty and in my junior year at the University of Texas, the situation escalated. I missed classes. I saw more doctors. But my presentation was unusual, and answers remained elusive. I basically stumbled through my last two years of school, relying on the goodwill of sympathetic professors and sheer determination to get my degree and escape my blinking-light town.

I wouldn’t get a diagnosis and treatment plan until I was twenty-five. Now, three years later, I was making progress. My daily life was still affected but not completely derailed by my condition. Flares were shorter, fewer, and further between. But they would never be gone. Days lying in bed being crushed by pain and exhaustion would always be a reality. 

This was forever. 

I blinked as the tears came faster, then screwed my eyes shut and willed my body to sleep through the ache.

***

I woke from my nap to rustling coming from my kitchen. 

He can’t help himself.

I tested my limbs, chanced a deep breath, and concluded I was feeling a bit better.

We’ll call it a win.

Grabbing a scrunchie from my nightstand, I wrangled my mane, gave my button-up pajama set a once-over to make sure everything was closed, and shuffled my fuzzy sock feet down the hallway, finding Evan unloading bags in the kitchen.

He…needed a haircut. Wavy and chestnut brown, his hair was slightly shorter on the sides and back but had grown a little overlong on top. It flopped over his brow as he reached across the counter. 

Maybe the haircut can wait.

Objectively? He was gorgeous.

His features were strong—square jaw, high cheekbones, prominent brow—but they were all a bit rounded at the edges, as if the gentleness inside of him had reached out to soften them. He had warm brown eyes and an easy smile with three deep dimples that appeared one at a time as it widened, like a Richter scale of happiness. 

Anticipation of those dimples appearing at the sight of me was enough to send a little flutter through my belly.

Good grief. You can shut that right down, ma’am.

I hadn’t had those kinds of thoughts in a while. This flare had my brain addled and my defenses down. Giving myself no more time to ruminate on illicit topics, I stepped quickly out of the hallway and into my tiny great room.

His smile grew as he spotted me until two dimples creased his cheeks. “Good morning, sunshine. How ya feeling?”

“I’m okay. A little better than this morning.” Coming to stand beside him, I gestured to his haul. “You didn’t have to do this, Ev—”

He gently laid his palm over my mouth. “I’m here to help. Let’s not waste energy on arguing. Agreed?” Having abandoned my wayward thoughts, I didn’t dwell for one single second on how my lips tingled at his touch. I nodded and he released me. “Good. Now are we setting up shop back in bed or on the couch?”

“Couch.”

He started to move, then hesitated, running a thumb over my cheek and drawing a sigh from me. Whatever unauthorized paths my mind was trying to lead me down today, his touch would always be comforting. I fought the urge to lean into his palm. 

“You’re pretty red. It’s bad today, huh? Where are you?”

I hated that question. I was historically unreliable with the pain scale. I tended to undershoot because I didn’t want to be dramatic. Ideally, I’d never have to try to come up with a number at all. “I don’t know. Five or six?”

“So seven?”

My expression must have broadcasted both that I was annoyed and that he was correct.

He grinned. “Let’s get you to the couch, rickety.” Taking one of my hands in his, he wrapped his other around my waist, supporting me as he walked me to the couch. “You all roided up?” 

The way he referred to my steroids always made me smile. Like I was out there flexing my guns and throwing some cars. The contrast to reality was striking. My frame was slight and my muscle tone squishy, rigorously forged from approximately half a dozen gym trips over the last decade and many, many, many hours curled up reading. I was being half carried the six steps to my sofa. A juicer, I was not.

“I started a round this morning.” He deposited me on the couch and burritoed me in a fuzzy blanket before disappearing down the hall, emerging a few moments later with my stainless steel water cup. 

My apartment was essentially a dollhouse. You could make it from the front door to the back wall in sixteen steps. Entryway—two steps. Great room, with living room to the left and eat-in kitchen to the right—eight steps. Hall—six steps. It had one bedroom, one bathroom, and a laundry closet. Luxury! In fairness, my decorating choices likely contributed to the dollhouse feel. My interior design priorities were character and coziness, so my belongings were a collection of flea market finds and three thousand blankets. Evan called it an elderly hermit’s fever dream. He was right. And I loved it.

Light streamed through the window of the living room. It was summer, so it was harder to tell, but didn’t seem like evening light. “What time is it?” It was a Wednesday. He probably should’ve been at work.

“Almost four. I cut out early so I could grab a few things.” He bustled about, making my water, adding ice to the cup from the freezer then opening the refrigerator. “You’re out of lemon wedges.”

“Yeah. I don’t even have more lemons to cut. I need to get some—”

He stuck a hand out from behind the refrigerator door, holding a produce bag. “Got ya covered. I’ll cut extra before I leave.” He cut a few slices to add to the cup he was making now. “All right. Brace yourself. I’ve got a new entry, and this one is a winner.” We had an ongoing game, Weird Shit I Saw In Austin. Our city never disappointed, but I could tell by the way he bounced from foot to foot that this would be a particularly good one. “A guy on a motorcycle…with a sidecar…where the passenger was a dog…wearing riding goggles.”

“No way.”

“I shit you not. See for yourself.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and tossed it to the couch. I freed my arms from their burrito blanket confines, keyed in his password, and opened his camera roll. Sure enough, a photo of a beagle wearing riding goggles in a sidecar was his latest image.

“Oh my god, he’s perfect. Seven points for originality and an extra point for extreme cuteness.”

“I think it deserves a nine, but I’ll agree to eight.” He closed the lid on my cup and held up a takeout bag. “Do you want your ramen now or later?”

“You brought ramen?”

“From the good egg place…with an extra egg. You hungry?”

Warmth suffused my chest, and my stomach rumbled. He was the best best friend ever. “Starving. I managed a package of crackers earlier but haven’t eaten since.”

“Then dinner is coming right up. I also put a couple of bowls of soup from the deli in the refrigerator for tomorrow.”

He assembled my ramen and delivered it and my water before returning to the kitchen island for his own. He’d done so much today. Gratitude and guilt welled up inside of me. He was always doing so much, always making sure his people were taken care of. It was one of his loveliest qualities, but it also stretched him too thin at times. I, on the other hand, was the textbook definition of high maintenance. I hated putting him out like this, taking advantage of our friendship.

He settled on the couch with his dinner.

“I’m so grateful for all of this, really, but you didn’t need to go to so much trouble.”

“I thought we agreed to no arguing about this.” He continued before I could protest. “We take care of each other, Vi. That’s not trouble. It’s what we do.”

Begrudgingly, I let the subject drop. He meant what he said. We did take care of each other. But I could never take care of him enough to balance the scales.

He dug into his bowl. “So what’s the latest at work?”

The mere mention of it had my gut pinching with anxiety. 

Sometimes my job wasn’t so bad. Yes, there was the manuscript that didn’t use a single contraction because the author wanted it to sound “literary.” And the one that was 450,000 precious-words-that-couldn’t-be-parted-with long. I had navigated seas of adverbs and paper-thin plots. But they weren’t all like that. I also got to work with some truly talented authors. Authors who were reaching for the same dreams I’d once entertained. Authors I envied.

This week, however, had been particularly rough.

“Mostly I spent the week trying to come up with a constructive way to say, ‘Yes. You are correct. No one will ever see this twist coming. Because it doesn’t make any sense.’”

He snorted into his soup. “And?”

Clearing my throat, I slipped into my Writer Whisperer Voice. “You’ve achieved the shock factor for sure. Ideally, you want your twist to feel both surprising and inevitable. I recommend going back through the story and working in clues that point toward this. Not so much that you give it all away, but enough that it gives that unavoidable feeling to your reveal. It’s a tightrope, but I think you can find the balance.”

His mouth hitched at the corner. “Deft as always.”

“We’ll see. She’s…temperamental. I’m kind of expecting a nastygram in response.” 

Why some people paid to have their work edited and then got mad at me when I did exactly that, I would never understand, but it happened more than you’d think. And I was definitely waiting for that other shoe to drop in this situation.

Evan bristled. “And where’s Gemma in this? She should be running interference for you. Or at least backing you up.” We both knew that wouldn’t happen.

Gemma was my boss. She used to edit herself, but over the last few months, she’d shifted basically all of her workload to me and my counterpart—in addition to our own. That was annoying, but tolerable. Less tolerable was her habit of throwing us under the bus with clients.

“I’ll add that to my wish list.”

Setting his bowl on the coffee table, he squared his shoulders. Here we go.

“I think you should quit.”

I didn’t even attempt to contain my eye roll. “You know I can’t—”

“You could though. You hate this job.”

“Hate is a strong word. Editing is not a job to hate. Plenty of people love it.”

“But you’re not one of them. And even if you were, your boss is an asshole.”

I opened my mouth to argue but quickly snapped it shut. There was no argument to be had on that front. My boss was an asshole. I shoveled in another bite of ramen instead.

“Exactly.” He nodded at my no-response response. “So quit.”

“It’s not that easy. The money is decent. I can work from home. The schedule is flexible.” I’d repeated those things to myself so many times they’d become a mantra. So many chronically ill people would kill for this position. I should be grateful. “That’s not waiting around every corner.”

“But how do you know that if you won’t even look? You have to explore your options, at least. You could work for someone else. Or freelance—work for yourself.” He hesitated. “Maybe even start writing again.”

I tamped down a twinge of longing. Writing may have been my dream once, my first love, but if my illness had taught me anything, it was that swinging for the fences wasn’t a game I was made for. I needed to keep my plans small and manageable. 

He backpedaled, lifting his hands in surrender. “Or not. I’m just saying you don’t have to accept a job that makes you miserable. You’re brilliant. You can do anything. You don’t have to settle. You could—”

I sighed and dropped my spoon into my empty bowl. “I thought we agreed to no arguing?”

His brow wrinkled in concern. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I stand by what I said, but I shouldn’t have pushed when you’re already feeling bad.”

“I know you’re trying to help. But I need to be done for today.”

“Good enough.” He took my empty bowl and put it on the coffee table, then pulled my feet onto his lap. I snuggled down under my blanket while he switched on the TV and selected the profile labeled E&V’s Bingewatch. 

Guilt gnawed at me. Guilt over being a burden. Guilt over hating (yes, that was the right word) my job. Guilt over not doing more to change my situation. Guilt over not being content with what I had. But with a full belly of ramen, the soothing drone of comfort television, and the soothing presence of Evan, my tension eased.

I didn’t realize I’d drifted off until he half sat on the couch next to my hips and gently squeezed my shoulder. “Hey. It’s late. I’ve gotta head out.” My blurry eyes brought him into focus. “I did the dishes and left more lemon wedges in the fridge.”

“Thank you.” It came out as a croak.

“About next week. Do you think you’ll still feel up to going? I don’t want you to feel obligated. It’ll be fine if you can’t make it.”

I cleared my throat. “No. I think it’ll be okay. Or I hope it will. It’s more than a week away. I can’t make any promises, but I really do want to be there. Can we play it by ear?”

“Of course. I’ll check on you tomorrow. Get some more rest.” He dropped a kiss on my cheek and left, locking up behind him.