Page 124 of Ghost Ribbon

The doctor said it came with the side effects but normally it shouldn’t happen, that most patients tolerated the new dosage without significant disruption, my reaction was unusual but not unprecedented. But oh well, I was lucky like that.

So they had to give me food with infusions for a while.

That part was worse than the throwing up, somehow. Sitting in a clinic with a needle in my arm - again - while nutrients dripped slowly into my bloodstream because my body couldn’t be trusted to do something as basic as absorb food. It felt like a defeat. Like admitting that I was no longer capable of the most fundamental act of staying alive.

It got really bad when my mom would cook.

She didn’t know. I mean she knew I was sick but she didn’t know it had gotten worse, because I hadn’t told her.

She would make these meals. Big ones, and then she would make me sit down and eat.

Sometimes the nausea would hit mid-meal and I would have to grip the edge of the table and breathe through it very carefully while she turned away to get more bread or check the oven.

At the end I would tell her it was delicious, so good, Mama, thank you.

And then I would excuse myself to the bathroom and lose all of it in the dark, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressed to my stomach, my whole body shaking with the effort of being a good son while my organs rejected every act of love she tried to give me.

Lately I was barely home, though.

Alexei mostly kept me at his apartment now.

My parents trusted him. My mother thought he was such a nice boy. They let me stay over without question.

I let him take me.

Not because I didn’t love my family.

I loved them so much it hurt.

But I was suffocating in that house.

I was suffocating trying so hard to seem okay when I hadn’t been okay in so many months.

At Alexei’s apartment, I didn’t have to perform. I could just be sick.

And Alexei would handle it.

He would hold my hair back when I threw up. He would adjust my medication timing when the side effects got bad. He would sit beside me in the dark and not say anything, just be there, a presence that asked nothing of me except that I keep breathing.

Today, Alexei was in the kitchen.

I sat on a chair at the counter, watching him move around.

He had learned how to cook better. Okay - better was generous. Decent was more accurate.

He had one thing in the oven and one thing on the pan.

He was checking both simultaneously while also, somehow, chopping something on the cutting board.

There was flour on his face.

On his cheek. On his jaw. A streak of something red - sauce, probably, or strawberry - across his forehead.

He looked like a disaster. A beautiful, ridiculous, deeply endearing disaster.

“Can I help?” I asked.

He turned to me so fast the spatula in his hand almost flew across the kitchen.