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The worst evil of cystic fibrosis is not the mucus or medicine, or feeding tubes or oxygen tanks or hospital visits, but the resulting exhaustion. It creeps up on you. You start out able to manage and therefore naive to the potential that things might deteriorate. And all of the sudden you're taking sick weeks and waiting on a call for the lung transplant you vowed never to get. To be so full with inspiration yet too tired to tap into it, to waste away while the fruits of your mind overflow; It's the exhaustion that hurts. A shortened life Emma can deal with, but one reduced to lethargy? What quality does a life in stasis have?
Caged within her room, she has to live vicariously through her own ingenuity. She reads and listens to old records, cultures herself to keep from feeling stagnant, and has checker-blanket picnics with herself on the bed - with sharp cheeses and finger sandwiches and local wine, and which she has to ingest several enzyme supplements before tucking into. She takes the empty wine bottles and stuffs them with fairy lights so that when she shelves them they look like glassy galaxies. Her room is cached with these kinds of projects - things that make her look artsy and sophisticated, as if she has traveled and experienced more than is the case.
She takes up knitting and crocheting and baking. She learns as many handcrafts as she can access tutorials for on her computer. She updates her blog, although there isn't much to update, and tries to keep up with the few friends she has - Norman and Dylan mostly. Dylan - he's a blessing she isn't sure how came to fruition. Norman and Gunnar had always been enough. She hadn't entertained the possibility of someone like Dylan being interested. With his leather jackets and motorcycle, his big heart and puppy dog face beneath the scruff - he's a god damn treasure. She daydreams about him whisking her away on the back of his bike, about fucking each other on ocean beaches and having pancakes for dinner at all day breakfast diners. With him she's able to do all the things her CF won't realistically allow.
They text a lot. She wonders about what they are - dating? He hasn't asked her. Is it fair to call him her guy? She thinks about wearing his jacket and kissing in the motel office. Yeah, she likes that visual. She decides that maybe they're courting, and that it would be cute to entice him with baking maybe. She wheels her oxygen to the kitchen and pulls mixing bowls and measuring spoons and flour from the cupboards. Growing up without a mom has its drawbacks - mostly she and her dad live off takeout (which is actually better for her considering she needs twice as many calories as a normal woman.) But she watches a lot of cooking shows between YouTube and the Food Network. She mixes a reverse chocolate chip base, because she thinks it looks different and chic, and balls it apart with her hands, which feels decadent and deeply satisfying. The kitchen fills with sweet smelling air that perfumes her hair and clothes. She wishes Dylan could smell her like this. She sneaks out when her dad is engrossed in taxidermy and when she knows Dylan won't be home, and leaves a cookied tupperware on his porch, Sharpied with her name and a three-bracketed smiley face. It feels good to escape the confines of her room, if only for half an hour.
She likens herself to Rapunzel, only instead of spiriting away in a romantic stony tower she languishes on the second floor of a fuggy antique shop. She looks around her room for something to lower should a cavalier pursue. Curtains? Bed sheets? Thoughts of a massive i-cord take root. She takes her double-pointed needles, which are pinned haphazardly into her bun, and casts on forty bright red stitches, bunched together so they don't slip off the ends. Ten rows in it begins to look sort of squashed. With all the rotundity of a flattened snake, the rope effect is more or less lost. But it looks sturdy enough for suspension.
She knits in mindless lapses, yarn flying, the cord elongating and pulling away from her along with the present tense. By the time her reverie breaks, it has pooled at her feet in long, folding waves, like a fabric rendition of red tides. Dark creeps through her window and impregnates the room. How many hours has she woven into this? Four? Five? On a pilling, woolly tube? Lengthwise it's impressive, but where it had been conceived as a worthwhile project it's since lost its luster, and Emma can't help but feel she's wasted another night of which she doesn't have a replenishing supply. Disillusioned, she shoves the lumpy yarn away, and it flops pitifully to the floor.
These days even something as underwhelming as knitting seems to exhaust her to a point. She slumps against her bed, body aching for sleep, and laments (not for the first time) her impending nightly regimen. It's nights like these that she resents the healthy people - those who are free to doze where and when they drop, who can drink themselves unconscious and not have to worry about choking in their sleep. Forgoing even one night would hurt her in the long-term. It starts with tablets - urso for her liver, ranitidine for the acid reflux, three different antibiotics to keep her atypical mycobacterium infection at bay. She keeps them all in a weekly pill organizer, which she refills every Sunday. Then are the inhalers - salbutamol to reduce the swelling in her lungs (which she has to breathe through a volumatic to avoid irritating the back of her throat), Seretide to open up her smaller, harder to reach airways, and DNase, which she inhales through a nebulizer, to thin the mucus.
Physiotherapy is the part she holds special contempt for - partly because it takes an hour, but more so for the painful coughing fits it provokes. Then again, she thinks, that's kind of the point. Every day, twice a day, she alternates sitting, to lying on her back, to her stomach, to her sides, and violently hacks while her dad thumps the mucus from her lungs and liver. Usually they'll watch a movie to pass the time, but between bouts of coughing she misses plot developments and winds up ignorant to the intended effect. She's making to retrieve him from the workshop when her phone cuts the dark in a luminescent blue. Nurse Dylan, it says.
(Fri 10:02pm)
What light through yonder window breaks? ... :)
Her heart flutters beneath a cocoon of sticky phlegm. She squints past the lamplight glare on her window and sees a shadowy something leaning coolly into a motorbike. It waves at her, and she hitches up the window.
"Dylan?"
"Hi," it whisper-yells. "Can I come up?"
She considers the i-cord. It's not half as long as it needs to be.
"I can scale the drain pipe."
Oh. Duh. "You don't need me to let down my hair or anything?"
She can make out a smile. "I was aiming more for Shakespearean than fairytale."
She watches with equal parts envy and admiration while he conquers the siding of her house. Packs of muscle shift beneath his leather jacket, and he grunts as he reaches the pipe's summit. She vacates the window to let him in.
He regards her with wistful eyes and a handsome scruff. "Hi."
"Hi yourself." She can't keep from grinning back at him. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to see you."
"Uh huh. Why though?"
"...What love can do, that dares love attempt?"
Probably for the first time she's glad to be wearing oxygen. Otherwise she might swoon. "I really hadn't pegged you for a lit nerd."
"I'm not really. The truth is I'm trying to seem impressive."
"You want to impress me?"
"Is it working?"
She flushes. "You don't really have to try."
He looks bashful but proud all the same. "Thanks for the cookies."
"Ah, you're welcome. I've had a lot of time to fill lately so I thought. You know."
"You thought you'd do something sweet for the guy who's sweet on you?"
"I guess that's kind of the gist of it," she admits.
He crowds up to her, smiling down, fingering her hair so it's fixed behind her ear.
"While I'm really very tempted to kiss you, I'm sure my mouth tastes like inhalers right now."
"Does it?"
"I was actually on the way to get my dad when you texted. He helps me with PT every night."
He frowns. "Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't realize. Do you want me to leave?"
"I want pretty much the opposite of that," she sighs. "But I do need to get this in before the inhalers wear off, and I doubt you wanna hang around on the drainpipe for an hour."
"Probably not. What if I did it for you?"
"The physio? Are you sure?"
"Yeah. That's pretty much what I did before isn't it?"
"Sort of. This would take a lot longer."
"I don't mind if you don't."
"I don't." She takes his hand, "Come on, let's do it on the bed." She perches on the edge. "Want to listen to something to pass the time?"
"Yeah."
She slots a CD into her laptop - The Very Best Of Bobby Darin, which Norman had lent her months before and forgotten about. "Okay. First you need to do percussion on my back, so sit behind me."
He does, with his legs on either side of hers. "Just like last time?"
"Mhm. I'll tell you when to stop."
He pounds on her back in cadenced thumps that disjoint the music. She raises the volume. Estranged from the record, she has time to think. What she thinks of are the many other ways she could be spending this time with the guy of her affections, all of which would be an improvement. But she guesses there's nothing more romantic than someone beating the literal snot out of you. She holds a hand up.
"Okay, my chest now."
He whacks her as if she's a feather pillow he's reshaping - chest to upper left side to lower left side to upper right side and so on, for the entirety of an hour. She spends the next few minutes coughing up her stuffing into a wastebasket. Everything inside - crumpled paper, oddments of yarn, a receipt from The Laughing Whale Diner - becomes coated with tacky green slime. She doesn't look up to see if Dylan's watching her. By the end of it she feels lighter and exhausted, and falls hard against the pillows to catch her breath.
"Are you all right?" He looks sad and concerned, but not apparently put off. She counts it as a blessing.
"I'm okay." She smiles. "Thanks for that. You didn't have to."
"I wanted to. I don't want you to feel like you have to hide this stuff from me."
"I don't."
He gently pushes her bangs away and leans down to kiss her forehead. "Good."
It's the first really real non-platonic moment they've had, and it's reassuring, even if it was born of the revolting aftermath of cystic fibrosis. She feels sweaty, and the room smells of sickness. She can't really imagine a less romantic setting. Dylan doesn't seem as fazed.
He leans forward again but dips down further to her mouth.
"Mm," she puts a hand on his chest. "Hey, hi."
"Hey buddy."
"I just uh. I vomited a bunch of lung sputum. Maybe let me swish some mouthwash first."
"You're not gross." He eyes her meaningfully. "None of this is gross."
"It kind of is though. It makes me queasy."
"I've got a strong stomach." He kisses her again, in long, implicit mouth cajoles.
It isn't like she hadn't tried to stop him. Her conscience is clear, she guesses. She fingers his hair, and they do the customary groping thing - his hand petting up her leg and back again, her own gripping the t-shirt beneath his jacket. He shrugs the coat off and climbs over her, between her thighs, separating their mouths to nose and kiss her breast line. His beard is scratchy, like a kitchen scrubber, but so quintessentially man that it's more hot than hindrance. She revels in masculinity - angular bodies, rough hands that don't realize their own strength. And the largeness. The physique that is bigger than a woman in every way, so that she could be easily manhandled should he ever have the impulse. It's sexy, in a primitive sort of way, but lust knows no etiquette. Simultaneously he takes off his shirt, and she takes out her cannula.
"Is this okay?" he says with a voice both tentative and husky. "After physio?"
"Yeah, yes. I'm not going to croak."
She's cutely impatient. They shed one another's clothes till they're both underwear-clad, and then rut against each other a bit. She's less modest underneath the sixties getups - all black and lace. And he's every bit the lean-mean-washboard-machine she imagined he was. It's a queer mix, his sinewy flesh pressed against her softness. She's soft in so many ways - unathletically so, but also healthwise. Without the aid of ten different medications and someone to thump on her chest, she wouldn't exist. Fleetingly she feels the dispiriting pull of self consciousness, but in the interest of carpe diem she realizes there isn't time for that. She pulls at his boxer-briefs and he sheds them, along with the last of her own clothes.
His cock is about as hard as his abdomen. It is large and circumcised, and leaking precum at the slit.
"You wouldn't happen to have condoms somewhere," he half whines. "This hadn't really been part of my plan coming over here."
"I'm trying to make a joke at the expense of my sex life, but my thoughts are all convoluted by hormones. The short answer is no, obviously not."
He ruts against her stomach, and seems in pain. "What do we do?"
"I don't care," she decides, "if we're unprotected. I'm clean and not in a position where I have time to pass things like this up." She doesn't elaborate, because mortality is kind of a boner killer. "Let's go let's do it, please."
He smears it along her cunt, which is flowerlike and naked. With a disposition like hers being prepared is of the essence, because who knows when opportunities will come and disappear. He stabs deeply into her, as if fucking into a foxglove. She likes the image - petals torn apart, falling from their sepals, beading with cummy dew. Probably cum turns her on more than it should. He holds her aggressively by the hip, pressing down on it to steady himself, and grips the opposite leg at the junction of ass and thigh. Her own hands feel more or less in the way, and she alternates resting them in his hair or on his neck or back. She's never been as wet before, even with Gunnar. Fucking Dylan is like gorging on an empty stomach - savage, hungry, and intensely gratifying. And hell if Emma isn't gluttonous.
He spreads her legs wider and presses down on her thighs to keep them like that. They burn in this position, but it's more like an intriguing smoulder. Is it wrong to like feeling used? She doesn't have time to care. He tilts her hips higher, so that he's fucking down into her, and at this angle every stab radiates. She peaks in warm, pooling waves, so that when she finishes crying out she has to check the sheets for pee. As was already implied by his physique, his stamina surpasses hers. Post coital she is sensitive and bored, and not as keen on being touched. She tries politely to seem enthusiastic, but in her head she's thinking about flowers again. She looks at the i-cord forgotten beneath their clothes, and imagines it as a giant woolly condom. But underneath the disinterest she's rich with satiety, and buoyant with love.
Dylan cums over her stomach in pearl ropes, one hand groping her tit, and helps her tissue it away. She replaces her cannula, and he his boxers.
"You look beautiful like that."
She snorts. "With a tube up my nose?"
"Naked," he clarifies. "And fucked sleepy."
"Hm." She begins to want to be touched again and kisses him deeply. "I need to go explain physio to my dad."
"Do you want me to leave?"
"Not really. I'm going to gauge his reaction and we'll go from there."
He kisses her shoulders while she dresses, tucks and re-tucks her sweaty hair behind her ear. "Will you date me?"
She beams and kisses him lazily, bra-clad and content to take her time. "Yeah."