She nods and I reach down, lifting her up with one arm around her back and the other under her knees. I carry her into the steamy bathroom and kick the door shut behind us, sitting down in the chair I set up and situating Jo on my lap. She curls against me and lays her head on my shoulder, wrapping her arms around my torso.
She breathes in the humid air deeply and lets it out with a little sigh, like it feels good to breathe in the steam.
“You carried me to the bathroom,” Jo mumbles, her warm breath fluttering over my skin.
I slide an arm around her waist and stroke her hair with my other hand. “I did.”
“And you came over and got me all the medicine and stuff and let me sleep on you, and now you’re letting me drape myself all over you even though this bathroom is four hundred degrees and you’re probably really hot and uncomfortable.” I hear the wondering in her statement. The questions she doesn’t ask.
Why?
What’s happening?
What is this?
What could it be?
I know because they’re the same ones I have too. I don’t have all the answers, but looking down into Jo’s face, she’s so beautiful it makes my chest ache, and I know one thing with absolute certainty, and that knowing settles me right down to my bones.
“Hurricane, there is literally nowhere in the entire world I would rather be right now than right here with you.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
JO
“Jordan,” I groan from my perch on the kitchen counter, my tone of voice perilously close to a whine. “Please, please, please, can we go to fireworks?”
Jordan turns from the sink where he’s doing dinner dishes and studies me. He’s got his doctor face on, which doesn’t bode well for the jail break I’m planning. “Did you take your temperature?”
“I promise I did. It was normal. Like it has been for the last entire day,” I mutter moodily.
“Did you take it before or after you got out of the shower? You like your showers weirdly cold, and that brings down your body temperature. It can make it seem like you don’t have a fever when you still do.”
I drop my head back against the cabinets, just barely resisting the urge to scream because I’ve been cooped up in this apartment for a week. One whole fucking week with nothing to do. And okay, I was, like, deathly ill for the first four days, and my fever didn’t break until last night, the night of day six. I’m still not feeling totally back to normal, but I haven’t had a fever for twenty-four hours, and that’s cured enough for me.
I eye Jordan consideringly, swinging my legs where they hang off the counter. “I took it before my shower like a good girl.”
Jordan’s doctor eyes disappear in an instant, and those deep pools of blue heat in a way that has a shiver running down my spine, even as everything inside me glows neon at his reaction.
It’s been like this for the last couple of days. My feelings for Jordan are alive and have been for weeks. And it seems like maybe, just maybe, he might feel the same for me too. I never, ever thought that would happen, and I was fine with just being his friend because Jordan Wyles is my favorite person, and any way I can have him in my life is better than no way at all. But now I want to scream into a pillow at the excitement and anticipation of it all.
Since the day I first got sick, Jordan has barely left my apartment. He switched his shifts at the hospital around and ran home a couple of times to grab clothes and assorted other things, but other than that, it’s been us and these four walls.
The first couple days, I could barely stay awake, and when I was awake, I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. Jordan did everything for me. He made sure I was hydrated and fed when I could eat, which wasn’t often. He doled out medicine, listened to my lungs, and made me wear that pulse ox thing like three times a day. He held me on his lap in the steamy bathroom when my coughing got bad, sat on my bed while I took a shower in case I needed help, and brushed my hair for me when I was too tired to do it myself. He read me a book when my head hurt too much for TV, built a blanket fort on the living room floor when I got tired of lying in bed, and did my laundry for me when I ran out of pajamas.
He literally washed my underwear. Jesus Christ.
And every night, he laid down with me in my bed, my head on his shoulder and his strong arm around my back, anchoring me to him. I’ve never slept better in my life, and I’m not naïve enough to think the flu is the only reason why.
It feels like everything is shifting.
In the past twenty-four hours since my fever broke, we’ve been circling each other like a predator and its prey. I don’t know which of those I am, but honestly, either way is fine with me.
It’s his hand on my hip as he passes me in the kitchen, and no space between us while we sit on the couch. His lingering gaze when I picked my skimpiest pajamas to wear to bed last night (on purpose, of course), and me almost swallowing my tongue when Jordan strolled out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam wearing a smirk and a towel, water droplets rolling down his extremely well-defined abs and disappearing into terrycloth. I deserve a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for the restraint I showed in not just jumping him on the spot.
The change is palpable. The tension delicious.
“Like a good girl, huh?” Jordan says, a smirk on his face as he takes a step towards me, situating himself between my legs. Too close to be entirely friendly, but not nearly close enough.
