“Let’s get you to bed,” I said, and she nodded pitifully. I walked her upstairs into the bedroom, tucked her in, and curled up beside her. I didn’t want to squeeze her, but I wanted her to know I was there, and soon we drifted off to sleep.
32
Chloe
No matter what I did, I couldn’t make myself fall asleep for more than a few minutes at a time. Before bed, I took a long bath with my favorite lavender-scented shower gel and drank a cup of hot tea. Usually that was good for knocking me right out. Even at the end of a stressful day, that combination had always relaxed me so much it lulled me right into a deep sleep.
But not that night. I lay curled up on the couch for a long while, trying to get myself comfortable enough to rest, but felt antsy and out of sorts. Eventually, Matt took my hands and pulled me to bed, gently tucking me in and curling up behind me.
I wanted to stay there with him. He was comforting and warm, at least making me feel less anxious. But the longer the bouts of sleeping for a few minutes and then waking up with my stomach uneasy or heartburn making my throat sting went on, the guiltier I felt. He needed to get some sleep, too. He had a business to run. I couldn’t expect him to be my own personal teddy bear, even if I was feeling sick.
Eventually, I slipped out of bed. I was trying to be as careful as I could not to disturb him, but he immediately rolled over and looked at me.
“What’s wrong? Where are you going?” he asked.
“I don’t want to keep you up,” I said. “I’m having trouble settling down, so I’m just going to go into the spare room and maybe read for a while.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
I knew he was having the same uncomfortable flashbacks to when I retreated to the spare room before we finally acted like adults and talked things through. That was not a good time for either of us, and I didn’t want to bring back the memories. But at the same time, I was miserable. There was no need to make him miserable along with me.
“At least one of us should get a good night’s sleep tonight. You go on and rest. Hopefully I’ll feel better in the morning. I’ve got to shake this thing eventually,” I said.
“You still think it was the Chinese food?” he asked. “I mean, I thought it tasted a little funny, but I didn’t think it was going to mess you up like this.”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of the customers at the bar had a little bug or something and I caught it. I’ve never had the best immune system. That’s something else you’ll get to learn about me. I’m a big baby when it comes to being sick. Just wait until I have a real cold. Pathetic all around.”
He was falling back to sleep, and I had to smile at his efforts to keep engaging with me.
“I bet you’re adorable,” he murmured.
“I whine the entire time, eat nothing but double noodle soup and butter crackers with cream cheese, and there are copious amounts of tissues used. Yeah. It’s a whole thing. And that’s what you’re signed up for,” I said.
He flashed me a sleepy thumbs-up, and I made my way quietly out of the room and into the spare room. Rather than getting a book, I tucked myself under the covers and tried to will myself to sleep. Even as I did, I was thinking about the idea of food poisoning versus a stomach bug. I didn’t know what might be going on.
My symptoms didn’t really sound like food poisoning. And no one in the bar had seemed sick. If that had been the case, I would have also expected by now for someone else working there to have gotten sick. I might not have the best immune system ever made, but I wasn’t going to be the only person in an entire area to catch something as contagious as a stomach virus.
There was another option. One I wasn’t really prepared to think about right then. But I was going to have to if I didn’t open my eyes to a miraculously better stomach.
Eventually I managed to crash for a couple of hours, but it was still woefully early when my stomach lurching woke me up and sent me scrambling for the bathroom. This didn’t bode well for that third option.
I was glad the bag Hannah brought me was safely tucked away in the very back of the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Unless there was a very sudden urgent need for carpet cleaner, Matt wasn’t going to discover it before I used it. Which I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to do. When she showed up and handed me that bag, I thought she was being ridiculous. I took it and hid it away, thinking it was going to be a big joke.