Chapter 196 Read slower

Chapter 196 Read slower
You would eventually develop a bloodstream infection. And after that, a fever wouldn't just be a fever anymore. It would be a number.
A number I would stare at until my eyes hurt, waiting for it to move in either direction.
I would become terrified of thermometers. You would joke about it at first.
“Congratulations,” you'd mutter whenever I'd take your temperature. “You've officially become the world's least fun weatherman.”
I'd laugh because you were trying to make me laugh. Eventually, you would stop. The hospital would start becoming a second home. Then, slowly, it would become the place where you spent most of your time.
The admissions would get longer. Two nights at first, then four. Then a week. Eventually, there would be fewer stretches of time where you were actually home than there were stretches where you weren't.
I'd start bringing pieces of the apartment with me. Your blue blanket, the one Chloe had made. Your books. Your camera. Fresh clothes. Little things that had no medical purpose whatsoever but made the room look slightly less like somewhere people came to be treated and slightly more like somewhere you might actually live. At some point, I would stop packing your hospital bag as though we were going somewhere temporarily. I'd start packing it as though we were going home.
I remember one night in particular.
You were disoriented. The chills had gotten bad, and your whole body was shaking beneath the blankets despite how many layers they'd put over you. Your parents were there but at some point, they'd gone down to the cafeteria. I knew they weren't hungry. I knew they'd gone somewhere private to fall apart where you couldn't see them.
I was sitting beside your bed with your worn copy of ‘A Body Made of Quiet Things’ in my hands, trying to finish it. I only had one chapter left. One patient. I was so close. And I still couldn't do it. I stared at the same page for what felt like forever before I finally closed the book.
“I hate the last thirty pages of a novel,” I told you.
I hadn't expected you to answer. You barely seemed aware of where you were. But after a moment, your voice came quietly through the fog.
“Why?” I looked over and you were still shivering. “That's where everything resolves.”
I glanced down at the book, at the blurred cover and Elena Marlowe's name beneath my thumb. “Because you can feel the weight of the remaining paper getting thinner in your hand,” I said. “You know it's ending, even if the story isn't ready to.”
You were quiet for a while. Then you turned your head toward me. You looked like a ghost of yourself. And somehow, you still managed to speak.
“Then read slower.”
It was such a Ryan thing to say that I think it shattered whatever was left of my heart.
Except it didn't, not then. That came later.
I opened the book again and found the chapter I'd stopped at. And I started reading slowly. Much slower than I'd ever read anything in my life. Not because I'd suddenly learned how to savour the ending. Because I could barely see the words. My tears kept falling onto the pages, darkening the paper in small, uneven spots. I'd wipe them away with the heel of my hand and try again, only to lose the sentence a few lines later.
So I read even slower, because you'd asked me to. Because before you, there was no me.
Not really.
There was a version of me moving through the world, working, eating, sleeping and making plans. A person who existed perfectly well without ever realizing there was something missing. Then, on a cold Wednesday night, in a crammed elevator, I found myself. And it felt like finding treasure I hadn't known I'd lost. Like discovering something extraordinary I hadn't even been looking for.
And somehow, from that moment on, my life began rearranging itself around you. My love for you was loud. It screamed in my chest. It pounded behind my eyes until sometimes I felt like there was no room left inside me for anything else. There was so much of you in me that, some days, I couldn't tell where you ended and I began.
I had found myself in a doomed soul, and I'd dived in anyway.
Maybe that's what love does. It lures you closer with its warmth and its impossible little promises. It fills your head with bright futures. It makes you believe you've finally found the thing you were missing without ever knowing you were missing it. And then, if you're unlucky, it takes. It takes pieces of you. It takes your certainty. Your sleep. Your appetite. Your ability to imagine tomorrow without fear. It keeps taking until you're hollowed out.
Until you're nothing.
Until you're less than nothing.
And the cruelest part was that even knowing all of that, I still couldn't bring myself to regret finding you. That was the part that made me feel insane. Because if someone had given me the choice...knowing every hospital room, every bad result, every night I'd spend listening to your breathing and wondering whether it would still be there in the morning, I would still have walked into that elevator.
I would still have looked at you. I would still have fallen. Every single time.