To Say I Love You

by Anna Martin

  So when I got back to the house, sweaty and out of breath, and the curtains were still drawn, I was worried.

  I went straight to the bedroom without showering.

  “Hey,” I said softly, sitting on his side of the bed.

  Will took a deep, rattling breath.

  “Oh, baby,” I said and pushed his hair back from his face. “You’re sick.”

  “Not sick,” he mumbled, protesting weakly. “Just… tired.”

  “I’ll have a shower, then I’ll make you some tea.”

  “Not sick.”

  “Mm.”

  It didn’t take long for me to get clean and changed. I always felt so much better for having a cool shower after a run. I had a bunch of herbal teas in the cupboard and made Will a mug of peppermint. Since I wasn’t sick, I got coffee.

  “Do you need me to cancel any of your appointments?” I asked Will as I set his tea on the nightstand.

  “I’ll be fine in a minute,” he said, trying to sit up in bed. “I can do the meeting.”

  “No, you can’t,” I said gently, pressing him back into the pillows. “Who do I need to call?”

  He gave a harsh, hacking cough.

  “The doctor, apparently,” I answered myself.

  “I don’t need a doctor,” he said. The exertion made him cough again.

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  “I’ll be fine. There’s some Tylenol in the bathroom,” he wheezed.

  “Sure. That’s a great place to start. I’ll call the doctor while you take those.”

  Neither of us had been to the doctor here before, so it took a while to make the arrangements for him to be seen. We had insurance—that wasn’t the problem—it was more dragging my stubborn-ass boyfriend to the doctor in the first place. In the end, I threatened him with shots if he didn’t get proper medicine quickly. It was the very last weapon in my arsenal.

  “Bronchitis. With a throat infection too,” the doctor said, setting down the light she’d been using to look into his throat. “Congratulations, Mr. Anderson, that’s quite an achievement.”

  “He needs to rest now, right?” I said.

  “For a few days, yes,” she said with a smile. “I’ll give you some antibiotics. It should clear up in a week. You can go back to work when you’re feeling strong enough. I wouldn’t rush back, though. It won’t do you any favors in the long run.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” I said as Will protested weakly about his workload. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  We had to go to the pharmacy to pick up his medicine before going home, and I was tempted to leave him in the car. Will was still insisting he was fine, though, so I let him come with me and got plenty of dirty looks from the other people in the store for putting his snotty, wheezy self around healthy folks.

  “Still tired?” I asked when we got home.

  “Mm.”

  “Okay. I’ll change the sheets later if you want to sleep now.”

  He went to kiss me but I didn’t want what he had, so he pressed his dry lips to my neck instead. I brushed my hand over the top of his head, smoothing out the kinks in his hair, then let him go off to bed.

  There was something gnawing at my stomach but I forced it out of my mind, not wanting to do any self-evaluation at the moment. With nothing better to do, I took a slow loop around the house, putting anything out of place where it belonged, setting the blanket straight over the back of the couch, emptying the trash.

  Now that the house was finished, or at least done as far as we wanted it, there were less things for me to spend my time doing. I could have pulled up my laptop and started some more research for the museum, but I had a feeling my concentration for that sort of work wouldn’t last long.

  I had equipment and ingredients in the kitchen to bake. I wasn’t the sort of person to store recipes in my head, though, so I wasn’t really sure what to do with them.

  The thought came to me lightning-quick—Mama’s book. Of my mother’s possessions, I’d only taken a few things. She hadn’t left a will, so my dad inherited everything, not that there was much they hadn’t shared. Jennifer got her jewelry, saying if I ever had daughters she would pass it on. Dad had given me her books.

  I was sure that among them was her old recipe book.

  For most of my childhood, I’d seen Mama make things from one book she’d started writing in when she was a teenager. It had traveled with her through her life, and she’d been adding to it up until she died.

  I’d never consciously collected books; they seemed to gravitate to me. After working in a bookshop for a few years, the habit of picking up a few a week had stuck with me, even when I left that job. Not just novels; I often read history books, biographies, collections of short stories. So when I was decorating our yellow house, putting in a bookshelf made sense. Even if I hadn’t brought any of my books with me.

  That proved to be a good idea. The top two shelves were almost full of Mama’s old books. I sat down in front of the shelf and ran my fingers along the spines.

  There was a lot of romance: Jilly Cooper, Nora Roberts, Harlequin titles I wasn’t going to read.

  Nestled among them was her leather-bound recipe book.

  I smiled as I pulled it from the shelf, carefully opening it and setting it on my knees. Old paper had a specific sort of smell to it, warm and musty at the same time, and something tugged at my heart as I flicked through the pages.

  My mama’s handwriting was both neat and elegant. She gave measurements in cups and ounces in smooth ink on rough paper. When I held the spine of the book between my palms, the pages fell open at one of the most frequently used recipes.

  Brownies.

  Of course. Mama made them at least once a week when Jennifer and I were kids.

  We definitely had the ingredients to make them too. I took the book back to the kitchen and set it on the counter, where it remained open on the right page without any need to weigh it down.

  I hadn’t made this particular recipe before and was determined to follow it to the letter to make sure I came out with the same result my mama had. It was therapeutic, humming to myself as I made a mess of the kitchen, mixing up the batter, then pouring the gloopy liquid into a pan.

  When it was in the oven baking, I cleaned up and justified to myself why I hadn’t told Will I’d met up with Ben. Again. He was sick—I didn’t want to upset him. He wasn’t feeling well, so he was probably feeling crappy about himself and might take what was totally innocent the wrong way.

  The timer beeped, pulling me out of my thoughts. I took the pan from the oven and, unable to wait, pulled off a piece of crust.

  For one moment, my expectations hovered, then shattered. It tasted nothing like my Mama’s brownies. It was decidedly average. Just another chocolate brownie.

  Feeling like I wanted to cry, I went to our room and curled up in the bed next to Will. After a few moments, he rolled over and wrapped his arms around me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, taking my hand and threading our fingers together.

  “Nothing.” I tried to shrug him off but he held on tight.

  “Jesse.”

  “I don’t like seeing you sick, is all.” That confession cost me a lot.

  “Oh, baby.”

  He pulled me closer. I didn’t want to put any extra pressure on his chest since his breathing was already bad. He couldn’t lay flat because of the coughing. I had him propped up on a whole pile of pillows to try and keep his lungs clear.

  “It’s just an infection, Jess. I’m okay.”

  “I know that,” I said, irrationally annoyed with him. “Not liking it when you’re sick doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  “No. It makes you an exceptionally amazing one.”

  I couldn’t tell him about the brownies. Now that it was all done, I felt stupid.

  Will shuffled down on the bed and kissed my cheek.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked, a barely there whisper against my neck. I smiled and tightened my
hold on him.

  “Yes. Still yes.”

  “Good.”

  I was losing track of the number of times we’d proposed to each other. Will had started it. He’d asked the first time at New Year’s when we were watching the fireworks. I asked him back on Valentine’s Day, when we’d spent the night at home alone, locked in against the snow-laced rain that was battering the Northwest.

  We held on to each other for a few more minutes, until Will started coughing again and needed to lean forward to catch his breath. I rubbed his back for a moment, then went to make him a mug of hot tea.

  Will was not a good patient.

  I’d let him have access to his laptop once he got past the splitting headaches that plagued him the first couple of days until the medicine kicked in. He still wasn’t well, but I knew from past experience he would insist on catching up with his work, no matter what his physical state.

  He didn’t need looking after. It was surely the same things driving me to run around after him that were keeping us in the South in the first place, so I could be close to and watch out for my dad and sister. They were doing okay too. My aunt, Mama’s sister, heard Will got sick and brought round some homemade chicken soup and a pie.

  I stuck the pie in the fridge and told Will he wasn’t getting any until he’d eaten his soup, much to Aunt Kelly’s amusement and Will’s disappointment.

  I promised him grilled cheese sandwiches to go with the soup, which went some way toward making it up to him.

  “You love him very much,” Kelly said as I walked her back to her car.

  “Yeah. Is it obvious?”

  “In the little ways,” she said, squeezing my hand gently. “Get him to eat that soup. But let him have some pie after.”

  She winked at me before driving away.

  “I like your Aunt Kelly,” Will called to me as I crossed the house to the kitchen.

  “Me too.”

  I heard him struggling out of bed and decided not to stop him. He was wearing loose pajama pants and nothing else, and I instinctively brushed my hands over his waist as he passed me.

  “Do we have soda?”

  “There should be some Cokes in the fridge.”

  While I sliced cheese and made the sandwiches, then set them in the skillet to toast, Will leaned against the counter and offered a combination of advice and criticism.

  “Don’t let the edges burn.”

  “I’ll burn you in a minute,” I muttered.

  “Jesse?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry I’m such a sucky patient.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You are that. I don’t mind.”

  He leaned over and kissed my cheek, letting his lips linger for a moment. I smiled and he pressed his lips into my dimple.

  “Ben called me,” I said, letting the words loose before I lost the guts it took to say them.

  “Oh?” He didn’t sound too bothered.

  “Yeah. We went out for a drink.”

  I chanced looking over. Will was frowning.

  “I was going to tell you about it before,” I said quickly, “then you got home the other night and, well, we got distracted. Then you got sick, and I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset,” he said carefully.

  “I said no at first. He knows there’s no chance we’re going to hook up again. He said he just wanted to hang out. You know, as friends.”

  Will smiled and touched my arm. “You can have friends, baby. God. That’s a good thing.”

  “You’re not mad?” I asked, turning back to the skillet and flipping the sandwiches. The first side was a crisp golden-brown.

  “I wish you’d told me sooner, but I know why you didn’t, and no, I’m not mad.”

  “Okay.”

  We dropped the subject, and the next time I went out with Ben, I texted Will first to let him know where I was, and that I loved him. He sent me a smiley face and some kisses back.

  Going to bars all the time wasn’t my scene, not that there was much in the way to do around here that didn’t involve eating or drinking something. Ben invited me to a movie, then to the basketball courts, then to the mall where there was a great bookshop with a Starbucks inside.

  “The coffee’s better in Seattle,” I said with a sigh, after spending five minutes trying to explain to the barista how to make my drink.

  “I’m sure it is,” Ben said, clearly humoring me.

  “And they know how to make a Grande sugar-free vanilla breve latte.”

  “I’m sure it’s delicious.”

  “I don’t think she charged me enough,” I whispered, then slurped my drink. Ben laughed.

  In the past few weeks, we’d started getting to know each other better. Ben made fun of me a lot, not in a mean way, just messing about. I made fun of him right back when he ordered a black coffee with a completely straight face.

  It was nice to hang out with someone whose accent was stronger than mine, who knew what it felt like to sound out of place. It wasn’t as bad as moving up North with an accent like ours.

  Ben was polite to a fault and didn’t seem to be much of a rebel, little hangovers from his youth that hadn’t quite gone away. He always dressed a little bit too formal for every occasion; smart jeans, pressed shirts, compared to my cargo shorts and flip-flops.

  He wouldn’t let me set him up with anyone on a date, either, not that I knew anyone here other than him. Although Ben kept insisting he wasn’t interested in seeing anyone outside of his Internet hook-ups, I thought it was a front. We all had our coping mechanisms, and I’d come to appreciate how amazingly supportive my dad was, and how lucky I was to have had parents who accepted me. They embraced Will as part of the family too.

  “How’s work?” I asked Ben. He was a data analyst, which he enjoyed, but his passion was the little carpentry business he owned and made all the stock for. Quite often, when we met up, his hands would be covered in little nicks and scars. Side effects of the job.

  “Not bad. It’s slow at the moment. I don’t care. I finished up a side table last night.”

  “Oh?”

  Ben pulled his phone from his pocket and flicked through the photos.

  “Nice,” I said. It was. I’d been thinking about possibly buying some pieces from Ben for the house, not that we really needed any more furniture. I thought Will’s mom might like something from him for Christmas. Handmade stuff was expensive, though, so I was keeping quiet until I knew for sure.

  “How about you? Has Serena sent you any more work?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ah, that explains why you can get out in the middle of the day for lazy coffee breaks,” he said with a grin.

  “Fuck off,” I told him without venom.

  “Is Will better yet?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No. He shouldn’t be back at work, but he doesn’t listen to me. I know he’s got an important job, and it just got even more important, but he’s not the last person in the world. He doesn’t need to go to work when he’s sick.”

  “Does he do that a lot?”

  “He doesn’t get sick very often. But yeah, he’s terrible at just lying down and getting better. He broke his leg once….”

  I trailed off, not really sure I wanted to discuss the accident and its aftermath. But Ben had such an open expression, inviting me to spill.

  “We were driving back from snowboarding up in Canada, and we hit some ice. The car was totaled, and we both broke bones. Will smashed up his leg pretty bad, and I broke some ribs. After that, he worked from home for weeks until he was well enough to go into the office.”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  It had been. For those terrible few weeks, our relationship hung by a thread, neither of us knowing if we’d recover from the psychological trauma the accident had caused. Bones healed a lot better than minds.

  There was no way I could tell Ben that. I shrugged it off.

  “We’re both fine now.”
<
br />   “Good. I got thrown from a horse once,” he offered. “Stupid fucking rodeo. We weren’t even doing anything. The horse just spooked at something and threw me.”

  “Break anything?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “Yeah. Wrist, collarbone, hip. I landed sideways on a railing.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.” He laughed again. “I was only sixteen, though, so I healed up pretty good. My biggest problem was losing my jerking-off hand.”

  I snorted. “I can imagine.”

  “It was good in a way. I’m ambidextrous these days.”

  “You know what they say about silver linings.”

  He grinned and sipped his coffee. With his hand held up at that angle, I could see the crisscrossing of scars over his wrist—probably the result of his accident.

  I guessed Ben noticed my interest in his carpentry. A few days later, he invited me to his place to see it in person. I’d already told Will about it, about how I was thinking of buying a few pieces too. When we were lying in bed together, late at night, he told me to go and have a nice time.

  We kissed for a while, slow and easy, and I fell asleep with his arm around my waist.

  Chapter 19

  “IS IT done yet?” Jennifer asked, poking me in the ribs as I stirred a big pot of chili. “Is it done yet, Jesse? Is it done?”

  “Jesus, girl,” I said. “You’re annoying. Get that corn bread out of the oven and set the table. It’s nearly there.”

  She gave me a quick grin and kissed me on the cheek, then got to work. Baby begged around my ankles for scraps, not that she was getting any. Jen was in a good mood; work at her office was picking up, and they’d recently been awarded a local prize for animal protection. It was great publicity for someone so young and relatively inexperienced.

  Since I found it hard not to give in to the puppy, I abandoned the food for a moment and crouched down to give her a belly rub. Baby gave me licky kisses in return. It was only when I let her go I noticed my shoe just outside the kitchen.

  “Jennifer!” I yelled.