Page 60 of Accidental Mile High Daddy
I grumbled, protested, and called her overdramatic. But deep down, I was scared enough to go.
I’d spent weeks, almostmonthsnow, trying to convince myself that I was okay and just dealing with either the stupidest heartbreak of my life or a really shitty stomach bug. But it was becoming more and more unmanageable.
Jules had let me go in alone, opting to sit in the car and wait for me instead. The nurse I spoke to was nice enough — she took my vitals, asked the usual questions, furrowed her brows when I told her how long the symptoms had been going on, jotted it down in her notes with a nod. She took my blood pressure, my pulse, listened to my heart, checked my weight, and glanced at me when I cringed at the number that was definitely lower than it had been months ago.
“Let's run a blood panel,” she said calmly, wheeling over to me with a cart full of needles and tubes. “Just to rule some things out. Okay?”
I rolled my lips between my teeth, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay.”
I didn’t ask what “things” meant. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.
When I got out, I had a missed call and about ten texts from Jules profusely apologizing for needing to run, but that someone had called out of her summer job and she got called in. She’d sent me the money for a ride with at least twenty hearts in the reference line and a,“Please call me when you know what’s going on.”
So, I stepped out into the stupidly hot Georgian heat with a band-aid on my inner elbow and my stomach in a nervous knot, only half as nauseous as I was before but just as panicked, and walked.
I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go, wasn’t sure if I should just book an Uber, but I didn’t want to be at home. I felt too antsy to sit still, but too queasy to go far.
I ended up at a little coffee shop a few blocks away after spending approximately ninety seconds in the bookstore next to it before deciding that the candle burning on the counter was so intensely sickly smelling that I couldn’t be in there a second longer.
The AC was too cold and the sound of steaming milk and banging metal too loud inside the cafe, so I took an iced coffee to go and sat at one of the little tables outside, watching the street like somehow it would solve my problems and give me solutions to questions I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.
A few hours. That’s what they’d said.
So, I left my phone face-up on the table, waiting, not quite panicking, butnervous.
In my head, I was trying to give myself the least damaging possibilities — iron deficiency, stomach ulcer, mono. But the worse ideas crept in instead, something autoimmune, something unpronounceable and incurable, something permanent. I tried to tell myself not to spiral, but my chest was tight, my skin too warm, and the longer my phone screen was off and without a notification, the more it felt like the floor was crumbling beneath my feet.
By the time I’d managed to take a sip, the ice in my coffee was almost fully melted, people had come and gone, the world moving around me despite as I sat stationary, locked, stuck, checking my phone every two seconds to see if anything new had popped up.
Nothing.
My list of already-read emails taunted me every time.
I willed myself to look at anything but my phone. Stared at the massive oak beside the cafe, stared at the stones on the sidewalk in front of me, stared at the pigeon with a foot missing standing on the table two over from mine.
Stared at the man across the street.
The man with mostly silver hair and a phone held to his ear, walking with his back to me, a boy with dark curls walking beside him with a dinosaur backpack and his hand clutched in his father’s.
For a second, I convinced myself that I was losing my mind, now, too — that it wasn’t just the nausea, the exhaustion, or the way I felt like death, but now I could addhallucinationsto the list.
But the world wasn’t that kind.
Zach’s head turned in my direction, and he stopped in his tracks, nearly losing his balance when Matt failed to notice in time and almost pulled him along with him. A smile so wide it cracked my fucking chest in two broke across Zach’s face, and then he was being hauled up, one arm around his waist as Matt easily lifted him onto his side without so much as a question.
I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know if I should do anything at all.
But Zach was pulling on his dad’s shirt, trying to get his attention, and I didn’t know if I was going to be sick again or if my heart had actually just given out on me out of pity.
Matt paused. Looked down at Zach, furrowed his brow, mid-step and mid-sentence on the phone, the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with hesitation and just screamedwhat do you mean?
But he turned.
He looked straight at me.
Straight across the street, straight through traffic, straight through two months of silence and nights neither of us had spoken of again.
I couldn’t breathe.
