Please stay

I woke with a start to the now unpleasantly familiar sound of Curry coughing, more feebly than before, and understood I had slept much longer than twenty minutes. I rubbed my eyes and stood up, squinting at the clock in the dim firelight. One in the morning. “Are you yourself again?” I asked, shaking him gently.

“Who else would I be?” Curry looked dreadful, his eyes and cheeks hollowed, lips chapped and irritated-looking, and voice barely above a whisper.

“Never mind. I’m worried,” I told him. “I expected you to be coughing up more stuff by now. Do you think you can sit up? I thought maybe if you sit up and have something hot to drink, you could bring up some of that phlegm and breathe a bit deeper.”

Curry nodded vaguely and let me help him up to a sitting position, which made him cough again, except when I gave him a clean rag and told him to use that, his lungs were too sensitive and painful to actually bring up any of the stuff clogging them.

“We’ll loosen it up a bit with something to drink,” I decided once I could no longer bear to listen to him trying in vain, “and try to make you less tender with some more of the syrup. Would you rather have the broth, or willow tea?”

“Don’t care,” he wheezed, shaking his head and letting me get two spoonsful of the cough syrup down his throat.

“Then I’ll go down and heat some of the broth,” I decided. That was the better choice, since it would let him take at least a little nourishment, better than willow tea anyway. I poured a cup of hot water, squeezed some lemon and honey into it, and gave him that to have while he waited.

“Can you leave me the jar?” he whispered, so exhaustedly that he didn’t even register the same embarrassed resignation he had earlier. I gave him that, and set the lemon water on the bed stand where he could reach it, then closed the door so he could have a bit of privacy.

When I came back up with the broth, the lemon water was partly gone, and I took the jar away, and while I emptied that and cleaned up, he drank the hot broth. I’d thought by now he must surely be able to cough up some of that stuff from his lungs, but he only managed to spit a disappointingly small amount into the rag before getting so tired he had to stop and lie back down.

“I think maybe I ought to go to the hospital and fetch someone back,” I told him after I returned from washing my hands again, for I was getting quite worried by now.

“Please don’t leave me,” he exhorted me weakly, looking so abjectly bleak at the prospect of me going that I didn’t have the heart to tell him no. “Stay, will you? Just let me rest a bit. And I always worry about you being out alone at night.” This short speech tired him out so much he had to lie back, and in only a minute or two he was already dozing.

I climbed on the bed on the side opposite him, like I had earlier, but since neither of us was in the mood for anything amusing this time, I curled my arm around him and let him snuggle up to me, while I warred silently with myself over what to do and whether I was wrong to let him have what he wanted right now. If I’d been able to get him to cough anything up, I’d have been less anxious, but now I was starting to worry about any number of things—what if it wasn’t the grippe at all, and everything I’d done was wrong? Or what if I waited too long and he got much sicker because of it?

“When was the last time you slept properly, honey?” Curry whispered when he drifted momentarily out of his doze, and I worried at first that calling me honey meant he was delirious again, but he was just being sentimental.

“Recent enough. I slept plenty today,” I lied.

“In a chair,” he pointed out.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said, and Curry leaned his head hard into my side.

“I always worry about you,” he said, in that awful, feeble voice.

“Then worry about getting better, because I can’t even do my own mending. So what will become of me, if you don’t recover fast enough?”

Curry smiled and fumbled up through the bedding with his free hand, looking for mine.

“Hey, I’ve got you,” I said twining my fingers with his, trying to tamp down how acutely worried I had become—that I’d either already made, or was in the process of making—some fatal, unforgivable error. To cover my fear I leaned over and kissed the top of his head.

“You should sleep a little,” he told me. “I’m going to.”

I really meant not to, because there were so many things that wanted done, and it felt very important to be vigilant right now—plus I needed to make a decision about whether to go or wait things out—but he was warm, and I had only dozed a handful of scattered hours since this time last night. Without really knowing it I fell asleep there on the bed with him.