Page 126 of Ghost Ribbon

I needed to see Rei. So I begged.

And when begging didn’t work, I felt the tears gather in my eyes. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I saw his face change.

The flatness crumbled and he knelt in front of me, and wiped the tears from my cheeks with both hands, and I saw him fold. “Okay,” he murmured against my forehead. “Okay. I’ll take you.”

Now I was visiting again.

It was a bit easier this time, physically. The medication had settled into something my body tolerated, more or less, though the trade-off was a permanent low-grade exhaustion. I was unsteady during the day. I felt dizzy often - sometimes I needed to sit down and take deep breaths but I had to put a good mask on in front of Rei.

That was the hard part.

When we arrived at the hospital, Alexei looked anxious. He always did when he wasn’t a few feet away from me. “I’ll be in the hallway,” he said. “If you feel dizzy—”

“I know.”

“If you need to sit down—”

“I know, Alexei.”

Then I went inside. When I pushed the door open I stopped.

I swear to God his room looked like a garden.

There were flowers everywhere.

Everywhere.

On the windowsill. On the bedside table. On the cabinet across the room. On the chair in the corner. On the floor, in vases and arrangements so large and so numerous that I was afraid to step forward in case I crushed something.

Roses. Lilies. Peonies. Orchids. Sunflowers. Flowers I didn’t know the names of, in colors that ranged from soft pink to violent red to the kind of yellow that looked like captured sunshine.

I had to dodge the floor.

I stepped over a vase of white lilies, sidestepped a bouquet of pink roses, navigated around a sunflower arrangement that was taller than my knee, and finally made it to the chair beside the bed.

“Hey,” I said, slightly breathless from the effort.

Rei looked up. He beamed. “Hi, sunshine!”

His smile was so wide it almost split his face. His silver hair was slightly mussed from the pillows, and there - tucked behind one ear - was a pink flower.

He looked radiant.

I sat down in the chair, slightly unsteady, and turned to face him.

“How are you feeling?”

I ducked my head automatically because there was a damn flower vine attached to the wall behind him.

“I’m good,” Rei said. Then he glanced around the room with a sheepish expression. “Sorry about this. Dimitri doesn’t know how to stop.”

I arched an eyebrow, looking around at the floral explosion that surrounded us.

“Is the hospital okay with this?”

“I don’t think they have a choice.”

“I guess he threatened them.”