“Mr Corvo, we have one last form for you to sign.”

The speaker was a young, pretty nurse with honey-coloured hair I hadn’t met before. She put a clipboard down on my lap and gave me a big, self-satisfied smile that seemed out of place.

“We’ll start the procedure as soon as Dr Petrovich comes in.”

I shimmied into a sitting position and turned to her. “Nurse, I don’t mean to be rude, or tell you how to do your job, but really?”

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

She looked at me with a puzzled smile. Like I just told a joke she is ready to laugh at as soon as she figures it out. She didn’t strike me as someone who won many medals figuring things out, though.

I’m pretty sure I knew that heavily medicated patients couldn’t legally sign any documentation before I was a teen. There is no way she wouldn’t be aware of this, right? My first impulse was to be condescending, but I reined it in. Being ditzy is no crime, and I’d have to be a proper jackass to start unloading my moroseness on innocent bystanders.

I decided to just explain myself in simple terms instead. “Ma’am, I’m drugged up to my gills. For this reason, I shouldn’t be signing anything. If you could pass the paper to my proxy, the dashing gentleman over there, that would be perfect.”

I weakly flopped one skeletally thin arm in the vague direction of my oldest friend. I looked back at the nurse and saw her staring at Grey, wide-eyed and blushing. Of course she would.

Mattias Grey, just “Grey” for friends and children, looked like some poorly documented Greek god of effortless good looks. Even as he sat in a corner of the hospital suite and read the back of a pill bottle, he managed to appear positively heroic. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a cascade of golden-blonde hair neatly brushed to one side. His jawline and high cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut glass. Despite the exhausted dark circles around his eyes, his coal-black eyes sparkled with mischief, as if making naughty promises all by themselves. It was as though he had inherited the best genes not just from his parents, but from 15 other couples too.

Seeing him struggle to keep his eyes open made me wince. He has spent every spare moment of his time in the hospital with me. Constantly keyed up, subsisting on uneasy naps, instead of getting any proper sleep. Though I knew that trying to drive him away would have been a fool’s effort.

The nurse opened her mouth to ask a question I already saw forming in her eyes. “Yes, Grey’s single,” I pre-empted. Her pink blush turned scarlet and spread to her neck.

Cute.

“You are joking, right?” my dashing proxy said. “With you going away for an extended nap, I am going to be so busy, I’ll have to micromanage even my bathroom breaks. I’d die if I tried to fit a relationship in there.” He got up and took the clipboard from the nurse, ignoring her hungry stare. He looked it over and signed.

That sounded…fishy. What he said about being busy was only partly true, and his explanation felt rehearsed.

I was still woozy from the drugs, but figuring people out was what I did for a living. Besides, this is Grey; we know each other to an almost unhealthy degree. Everything about him screamed that there was more to the story. Acting like a startled gazelle in front of a girl just isn’t in Grey’s blood. Women get fidgety or giggly around him, not the other way around.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I decided to shake his story a bit and see what fell out.

“Come on, Grey, you can’t be that busy. With me out of the picture, Mara is free to help with your own work. You can lean on her for whatever administrative work you need. With her juggling the papers, you’ll have all the time you need to live a little. She’s amazing at that stuff; the girl chews blank paper and spits out properly filed forms. In triplicate.”

He shrugged, but I could see the faintest twitch of unease creep into his eyes. “We can’t have Mara be our administrative assistant forever. She might decide to do her own thing for a change.”

Oof. That was a transparent bit of bullshit. It was so bad that I felt a bit insulted. Mara being our support is like her defining trait. She had all the opportunities in the world to break off from acting as my assistant and do things on her own. She not only refused to do so, but also made it clear why, and Grey knew that as well as I did. This would be a good time for me to stop poking. Not because I gave up on squeezing out whatever he was hiding, but because I think I got what it could be, and why he’s hiding it too.

I’ll do some more prodding when Mara comes in, just to be sure.

“You should listen to your friend, Grey. Live a little.” Said the nurse, who seemed to have spotted something she wanted and went for it full throttle. She stood uncomfortably close to Grey, her gaze lingering on him with an intensity that made even me start giving her odd looks.

“Was there anything else, Nurse Archer?” Grey frowned, taking a subtle step back.

“Um… N-no, I was just… Health is important, and… uh, living a little is very healthy.” She grew flustered, her eyes nervously darting around the room.

Immediately, she hurried towards the doors, her steps quick and awkward. “Thank you for the…” She began shouting unnecessarily loudly over her shoulder, then noticed her clipboard still in Grey’s hands. With a nervous laugh, she turned back and snatched her clipboard away from him.

Finally, she wrenched open the sliding doors with more force than necessary and sprinted away, as if someone was flatlining on the other side of the corridor.

We both burst into laughter. Well, Grey was the one laughing. I tried to, and just ended up dry coughing while wearing a weak grin. A burning sensation ran through my chest and my eyes teared up.

“She’s new?” I rasped, wiping at my teary eyes with the back of my hand. “I haven’t seen her around before. What happened to the loud one, Maria?”

“She got herself fired or transferred to Antarctica. Knowing Petrovich, it could be either, or both.” He walked to the sink and started pouring me a glass of water.

I raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “What happened?”

“Maria worked here for 30-something years, got way too comfortable walking around and beating everyone with her “mom-stick”, and otherwise being smothering. She tried it on Petrovich.” He nodded towards the doors. “It didn’t work out well for her. He hired this girl before the end of the day.”

“I hear he set her up with an obscene salary, but the stipulation is to just shut up, and do as she was told. I think he even wrote it into her contract somehow. Wonder what the wording for that would look like…” He mused while passing me the water.

“So, her not being the sharpest crayon in the box is by design.” I realised. “Hey Grey, we didn’t just bully the slow kid, did we?”

“No, no, she needed a brusque treatment. She’s been doing some creepy stuff recently, trying to get my attention.” He said, squinting at my face.

“Ryder, you have blue stains all over your face,” Grey remarked. He grabbed my hand and turned it over. “It’s on your hand too. Where did it all come from?”

Sure enough, I had azure-blue streaks all over the back of my hand. Tear stains from rubbing at my eyes earlier, I concluded. Well, damn, this one is new. With all the failed treatments I had, I’d occasionally sprout a new symptom. Often, these were due to different meds interacting with each other weirdly, rather than having anything to do with whatever was originally wrong with me.

“Tear stains. I teared up while coughing earlier,” I said.

“You don’t look very bothered,” he observed with a frown. He pulled out a paper wipe from the package sitting on my nightstand, dipped it into the cup I was still holding, and proceeded to wipe the stains off. They seemed to go down easily enough, but oddly, the wipes looked clean when he was done. Whatever this was stained my skin, but not the paper.

“I’m tired of worrying about each of these weird things that pop up individually,” I said. “Worrying about the big picture keeps me busy enough. A few weeks ago, they adjusted therapy a bit, and my urine turned purple. I’ll just let Petrovich know about it when he pops in and let him do the worrying.”

I don’t remember seeing Grey cry in all the years we’ve been friends, but watching me sink while sprouting new leaks can’t have been easy for him. He didn’t look happy with me dismissing what looked like a new symptom, but what was he going to do? Yell at me to worry more?

“Hey, when is Mara supposed to show up? I don’t think it’ll be much longer before the doctors come in to knock me out.” I changed the subject, trying to distract him.

Grey grew visibly uncomfortable.