22. Nathan

Igot sick.

One would’ve thought I was Easton when I woke up sick to my stomach in the middle of the night. The flu from hell had finally hit me, and I spent a good portion of my night throwing up my insides as I hugged the toilet seat. My whole body shook with chills as sweat dripped all over me. After only a few hours of sleep that morning, I woke up and found my way back to the bathroom to finish throwing up even more. The bathroom floor was ice cold, a stark contrast to the ravishing fever burning its way through my whole body.

Maybe Easton wasn’t being too dramatic. Whatever this bug had been, it was trying to take us out.

As I was expelling every single drop of dignity from my body, there was a knock on my bathroom door.

“Nathan? Are you all right?” Avery asked from outside the door.

I cleared my throat and grabbed the rag from the sink as I sat on the floor. I wiped it over my mouth. “Yeah, I’m fin?—”

Before I could finish, I started violently throwing up again.

The door to my bathroom slowly opened, and Avery’s soft footsteps echoed against the tile. I glanced up for a moment to see her standing there, fully dressed and ready to head over to the high school for her job. And there I sat. Like a pathetic toad on the bathroom floor.

A flood of embarrassment enveloped me as I stayed plastered to the toilet seat. I knew I wanted Avery to take notice of me more, but not like that. Not as my insides tried their damnedest to exit stage right. This was not how I wanted her to see me—broken down and vulnerable.

“Hey,” she whispered.

I tried my best to muster the energy to respond, but words seemed too much of a struggle to release. My mind spun as my fever grew, moistness soaking every inch of me. The only thing that I could release from my lips was a grunt.

Avery bent down beside me and placed the back of her hand to my forehead. “You’re burning up,” she said before grabbing another towel from my closet. She ran it under cold water for a moment before she wrung it out and placed it against my forehead. I leaned back against the sink cabinet, exhausted. My knees bent, and I rested my arms against my kneecaps as I closed my eyes.

The coolness of the cloth made it a little easier to breathe. Avery patted it gently all over my face and neck. She smoothed it slightly over my exposed chest. My breaths were uneven as I kept my eyes closed. Every time I tried to open them, the room began to spin all around me, so shut eyes were better.

“I’m okay,” I muttered, hating that she saw me in the shape I’d been in.

“No. You’re not,” she replied as she gently placed her hand against my forehead again. The tenderness of her touch was a bit of a surprise to me. For the past few weeks, Avery had been very standoffish toward me. At that moment, it was as if her walls were coming down.

I leaned into her touch as her warmth seeped into me. “You should not be this close to me. I don’t want you to get sick. Plus, you should get to work and?—”

“Nathan.” She locked her eyes with mine, and her lips turned up slightly. “Let me take care of you.”

I didn’t know how much I wanted and needed to hear those words that morning. I wasn’t used to people taking care of me. I was normally the one dishing out the care. A part of me wanted to argue with her offer, but a bigger part of me wanted to curl into a ball and have her hold me and tell me I would be all right.

Easton might’ve been onto something.

“Let’s get you back to your bed,” she said. She wrapped an arm around my body and lifted me as if I were as light as a feather. Clearly, Avery had taken advantage of the weight lifting facility at the high school.

She led me to my bed and pulled back my comforter. I sat on the edge of the bed, still shivering from chills, as she lifted my legs up into the bed. She covered me up, tucking me in, and then told me she’d be right back.

When she returned, she had a tray filled with goodies. Electrolytes, crackers, and an array of medicine. She set the tray on my nightstand and began collecting pills for me to take. “Now, I know you’re probably not hungry at all, but you need to eat a few crackers in order to take the medicine,” she ordered.

I grumbled and slightly pushed her approaching hand away.

She arched an eyebrow. “Nathaniel Grayson Pierce, open your mouth right now.”

I shook my head.

She arched her other brow. “Now,” she ordered.

I parted my lips slightly.

She shook her head. “No. More. Like this.” She unlocked her jaw and opened wide. “Aah!”

If I were feeling more alive, I would’ve probably made an inappropriate joke about stuffing her mouth with something tasty. Instead, I groaned like a sad puppy as I opened my jaw.

She placed the pills in my mouth and then fed me a sip of water. “Good job,” she whispered, wiping her finger right below my lip where a drip of water was falling. “Now, eat one cracker.”

“I can’t, Coach,” I muttered, shutting my eyes once more.

“Now,” she ordered once more.

Something about her orders made me obey right away. I didn’t know if it was her tone or the act of control that she had over me, but I opened my mouth once more and allowed her to feed me a few crackers.

“Good boy. I’m proud of you,” she said as she gently rubbed her hand over my head. It turned out I didn’t only have a shame kink but a praise one, too. “Now, rest,” she told me. “I’ll be back in a few to check on you.”

“Don’t you have to get to work?” I asked.

“I called in earlier when I heard you were sick. I notified the guys we wouldn’t have practice tonight, either.”

“What? No. They need?—”

“Nathan. Everything’s under control. You just rest.”

I wanted to argue, but the heaviness of my eyelids told me not to do so. I shut my eyes and fell asleep, feeling a bit of comfort knowing that Avery was there to take care of me.

I sleptfor over nine hours, only waking when Avery would come to give me vitamins and medicine, along with a few bites of bread. When I was fully awake, she came back and smiled my way. She held sheets in her hands.

“I think it’s about time I switched out your sheets, seeing how you probably soaked your way through them,” she said. “If you can sit in your chair in the corner, that is.”

With a few grumbles, I pulled myself up from the bed and moved over to the chair. I plopped down and sighed, feeling beyond exhausted from the few steps that I’d taken.

Avery went to work to change out all my sheets. She removed the dirty ones, along with my comforter, and replaced them with new ones. She even changed out the pillowcases. I didn’t even know that I had extra pillowcases.

“Okay. You can come back. Unless you feel as if you can shower,” she said.

I shook my head. There was no way I could stand up in a shower.

She walked over to me and offered her hand to help me. I took it for two reasons. One—I needed her help. Two—I always wanted to hold her hand.

“Thanks,” I muttered as she led me back to the bed, only to tuck me in again.

She left the room for a second, getting rid of the sheets, and when she came back, she had a big bowl of soup in her hands.

I sat up on my bed with my back against the headboard. I could only breathe through my mouth, seeing how my nose was stuffed up. I closed my eyes as my breaths weaved in and out of my mouth.

“Why are you being so helpful?” I muttered, feeling the need to fall back to sleep.

“Because you deserve it. Open,” she ordered.

I parted my lips more, she put a spoonful of soup into my mouth, and I swallowed it. The warmth felt good as it glided down my throat.

“I owe you an apology, Nathan.”

That was enough to make me open my eyes again. “What do you mean?”

“Ever since you’ve come to coach, I’ve been a bit of a jerk to you. I’m sorry for that. You’ve been an amazing addition to the team, and I’m lucky to have you as a coach.”

“I must look pretty bad, huh?” I let out a slight chuckle. “If I’m on my deathbed, just tell me now, Avery.”

A gentle snicker fell from her lips, and even though I felt like shit, I loved the sound of that. Avery did not laugh a lot, so whenever one fell from her, I always tried to hold on to the sound as long as possible.

“You’re not on your deathbed,” she swore. “I just realized how much of a dick I’ve been toward you, and I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it.” She fed me more soup.

“I’m sure parts of me deserved it.”

“No,” she disagreed. “None of you did. We aren’t who we were when we were younger, and it was unfair of me to treat you as if you were the same boy who left all those years before.”

“Just so you know, Avery, I hated that I left.”

In her subtle reaction, I felt the weight of her pain. Or maybe it was my pain I was feeling. Maybe our hurts from the past we shared mirrored one another and sat packed with a quiet torment that we both carried. It just seemed that she hid hers better than I had.

She looked away for a moment and said so softly, “I hated it, too.” Her voice was so low that I wasn’t certain she’d actually said the words or if my fever-stricken mind imagined it.

“We don’t have to talk about us,” she said as she turned back to feed me more soup. The heaviness still stayed laced in her words. “You just need to get better.”

I wanted to keep the conversation going, but the exhaustion set in again as I struggled with my heavy breaths. She smiled gently as she placed the bowl of soup down on the nightstand before she made me take a few more sips of water. When she finished, she stood to leave.

“Avery?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

She smiled again, and within seconds, my eyes faded shut, and I went back to sleep.

It tookme a week to recover, but Avery took care of me every step of the way. I did not know if she knew it, but she was making it next to impossible for me not to find myself falling for her with every second that passed by.

After my first day back coaching the third week of April, I approached Avery under the fading sunlight. She was busy organizing the equipment on the field, completely wrapped up in her task.

I leaned against the fence in front of her, taking her in for a moment. “Hey,” I said, breaking the silence.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask… How did you manage not to get sick after taking care of me for a week straight? What kind of superhero immune system do you have?” She went to grab the bag of baseballs, but I hurried over and lifted it for her, tossing it over my shoulder.

A mischievous smirk lit her face up. “Well, I figured one of us needed to suck it up. We couldn’t both be little punks,” she said, her voice dripping with a teasing tone. “Unlike some people, I can’t afford to be a baby about it. I had a team to coach and couldn’t afford to be sick.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “A little punk, huh? Is that how you see me?”

“You cried for five days straight, tossing and turning, telling me to take you out.”

I feigned a wounded expression, rubbing at my chest as if her words physically hit me. “For the record, I don’t think I had a normal flu. I think I had a newfound plague of some sort.”

“Sure, sure,” she cooed, stepping a tad closer. As the distance between us shrank, my heart beat a little faster. “But you’re lucky you had a solid nurse like me to look after you. You might’ve actually died if it wasn’t for me.”

“You don’t have to prove that point to me, Coach. I already know I would’ve been fucked without you.”

“Well, as long as you’re aware of how good you had it.”

“I am, which is why I want to make you dinner tonight as a thank-you for taking care of my punk ass.”

The warmth that bloomed across her lips made me echo her smile. “You cook?”

“For you, yes.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What are you going to make?”

“Baked ziti and garlic bread.”

“Mmm,” she moaned. The sound was enough to make me want to start humping her leg like the needy dog I’d turned into whenever she was near. She could’ve put a collar on me, and I would’ve allowed her to dog-walk me all around town with a smile on my face. “That sounds like a perfect Thursday night dinner. But”—she pointed a stern finger at me—“if I hear one sneeze from you, I’m calling you a punk for the rest of your life.”

I laughed. “Deal.”

“And don’t read too much into this, Nathan. I still don’t like you,” she expressed as she started to walk off with that playful grin still on her face. “So don’t you think for a second we’re becoming friends.”

I shook my head in complete awe of her stubbornness and inability to express that she and I were slowly but surely getting on better terms with one another. “Whatever you say, Avery. Whatever you say.”

I liked her stubbornness.

I craved her stubbornness. Avery’s attitude was one of the things I found most attractive. I didn’t know if that meant I was mentally unwell, but that was where my state of affairs had been. The flu couldn’t take me out, but my damn crush on Avery Kingsley might’ve been the thing to do me in.