How to Love

Sunday passed uneventfully, but as predicted, I woke up on Monday morning feeling awful. I had a pounding headache and my stomach felt like it was a burning mixture of nausea and discomfort. I was pretty sure I was running a bit of a fever as well, but I didn’t bother to find out. When I came out of my room for a glass of water that morning, my dad frowned when he saw me.

“You look like shit.”

“Thanks so much,” I said sarcastically, reaching into one of the cupboards for a glass.

“No, I’m not kidding,” Dad insisted, getting up from the table to feel my forehead. “Your forehead’s burning.”

“That’s what I figured,” I sighed. My spring break illness went the same way every year. It’d start with a headache and stomachache, and then progress to a fever, and then I’d normally spend half the day hugging the toilet bowl and praying to the porcelain god. It was pretty much the equivalent of a hangover except that it didn’t get magically cured in twenty-four hours. Plus I’d usually walk away with a stuffy nose for the next month and then a minor relapse in my addiction to nasal spray, but so far I hadn’t gotten that yet.

“You need to get back in the bed,” he told me and started guiding me back out of the kitchen.

“No, really, I’m fine,” I insisted, though I felt quite the opposite. I had a lot that I needed to get done unfortunately, and sick or not, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to finish it up. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“The only stuff that you have to do is go back in your room and lie down,” Dad rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry about the paperwork; I can do it.”

“But-” I tried to protest. Dad shushed me immediately and continued walking me back to my room. “Am I even allowed to get water before you banish me to my bedroom?”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize that that was what you were trying to do,” Dad apologized slightly sheepishly. “Yeah, go do that. But then I think you should go back to sleep.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said and headed back into the kitchen to get my water. I came back and found my dad sitting in the office at the desk I usually sat at, getting started on the paperwork. He already looked confused. “You’re sure you don’t want me to do that?”

“Positive.” He nodded, furrowing his eyebrows at some piece of scrap paper. “Is my hand-writing really this illegible?”

“Hate to break it to you, but yeah, it sucks,” I confirmed. He continued glancing at papers and shifting them around, making angry faces. I tried to reach towards some of the papers to begin explaining to help him out, but he swatted my hand away.

“I can do it,” he snapped, and then sighed. “I appreciate your help, but I need you to be elsewhere, like not hovering over my shoulder. You’re making me anxious.”

“Sorry,” I apologized. “You just looked confused, that’s all.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve had to do any of my own paperwork,” he admitted, sounding slightly embarrassed. “I’ll get the hang of it again, though. Just go ahead a lie down.”

I agreed and went back into my bedroom, thankful for a chance to lie down but annoyed at the prospect of not getting anything done. I tried to push that from my mind as I wrapped myself up in my new satin lilac robe, figuring that if its purpose was to laze around in all day, this would be an excellent time to break it in. I slipped under the covers and went back to sleep almost instantly, which was a nice little relief from my pounding head. I woke up again about two hours later around ten, and unfortunately, my head felt even worse. I went into the bathroom and took a handful of ibuprofen, going back to my room to lie down again. Luckily my stomach seemed to settle down a little bit and I didn’t feel as nauseous as I had before. I couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I turned my TV on in hopes of finding some background noise to drift off to. Instead, I was up for another two hours, engrossed in some Lifetime movie marathon.

Around twelve-thirty, I heard the accordion doors fold open, though I didn’t pay much mind to it since I figured that my dad went out to run an errand or something. Instead, I started to hear movement in the kitchen, which was not what I had been expecting. I sat up to try to listen a little better, but there was almost no noise now except for some dishes clattering around and then the microwave beeping. I came to the conclusion that Dad had stopped to get himself lunch and I’d never heard him leave, only come back, so I ignored any sounds coming from the kitchen after that point. A few seconds after I made that decision however, there was a knock on my door, and then someone came in.

“Hey,” Jake’s voice greeted. I glanced over to the door, slightly embarrassed that he was seeing me pale and un-showered in my bed. He sat down on the bed next to me and put a hand to my head, frowning slightly. “Not feeling so hot, huh?”

“I don’t know why the image of me sitting in my bathrobe without having recently showered would make you arrive at any other conclusion,” I replied. I didn’t mean that out of annoyance, but mostly as an attempt at sarcasm.

“Well, you must not be feeling too bad if you’ve got enough energy to give me a hard time,” he chuckled, and then shrugged a little. “Not that I’d have it any other way, though.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I would have mostly preferred to be by myself for the day since the mysterious spring break illness had a tendency to really fuck with my stomach, and that usually made me cranky after a while, but at least for now it was under control.

“I called your dad and asked how you were feeling since if you were sick, I didn’t want to wake you up,” Jake started to explain. “Obviously, that was the correct decision since you look like you feel like ass, which is basically what he told me. But he asked me if I’d come over and keep an eye on you.”

“I’m not five, and I’m not on my deathbed,” I scoffed. Dad was a little over reactionary when it came to anyone getting sick since Mom died, though he wasn’t particularly interested in actually nursing anyone back to health. “I don’t need anyone to keep an eye on me. He doesn’t offer to do that when I have a hangover.”

“That’s because that’s your own fault,” he said. “If it helps any, I made chicken noodle soup for you.”

“So that’s what I heard going on in the kitchen,” I said, smiling a little. The chicken soup was a nice little surprise, and definitely thoughtful on his part.

“Sorry, I was trying to be quiet,” he apologized. “I don’t know where anything in your kitchen is, so I had to move stuff around to find what I needed. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I told him. “I appreciate it, actually.”

“It’s sitting on the stove,” he said. “Do you want it now?” He attempted to wink, but did this unsuccessfully since he partially closed the other eye, which made me laugh. “I’ll feed it to you.”

“I don’t need to be fed like a baby.” I rolled my eyes. That was a gesture I’d always hated and could never understand why anyone would actually like. “I’m sick, not dependent.”

“Just thought I’d offer.” Jake shrugged, giving me a characteristically joking smile.

“If you want to be really helpful, you could set up the TV tray at the end of the bed and bring the soup in,” I replied.

“That I can do,” he agreed, returning a few minutes later with the soup and the TV tray, which he set up at the edge of the bed as I had requested. I thanked him and scooted to the end of the bed to eat, and also so I could be a little bit closer to my TV.

“What are you watching?” Jake asked, leaning at the other end of the bed against my headboard, making himself comfortable.

“Not sure yet,” I said. “The movie I was watching just ended. I’m in the middle of a Lifetime movie marathon though, so hopefully the next one will be good.”

“Lifetime? Seriously?” he groaned. “You realize that those are movies for bored housewives and divorcees, right?”

“And also for sick teenage girls who have nothing better to do but lie around in bed all day,” I added, and turned my attention back to the TV. The commercials finally ended and the next movie started playing. I recognized it immediately.

“Can I please change the channel?” Jake complained.

“No,” I replied. “This was my mom’s favorite movie.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t know that. Never mind then. What’s it called?”

“It’s called Waitress,” I answered. “It’s about this small-town waitress who’s stuck in a loveless marriage with her husband, and then he gets her pregnant and she ends up having an affair with her doctor. She doesn’t really want the kid, though, she just wants to bake pies and leave her husband.” All he did in response was stare at me. “I know it doesn’t sound that great, but it’s actually really good, and my summary can’t do it justice.”

He nodded. “We’ll give it a shot. Did you try the soup yet?”

“I will right now.” I stirred it up a little bit and spooned some out, placing it in my mouth. It was still pretty hot, but it tasted awesome, much better than my dad’s soup which had previously been my favorite. I nodded in approval. “This is great. Did you make it from scratch?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I made it at my place and heated it up here. The timer on your stove is broken though, so I used the one on the microwave instead.”

“It’s really, really good,” I told him, continuing to eat it, albeit slowly since I didn’t want to push things with my stomach, and it was also ridiculously warm.

“Thanks.” Jake smiled. “I’m glad you like it.” He sat back a little more on the bed, taking a deep breath. “So I have some news.”

“Good or bad?” I asked him, turning to look at him better. The movie had already gone to commercial – one of the things I hated most about watching movies on TV – so I wasn’t missing anything.

“Depends on how you look at it,” Jake said with a shrug. “I’m not coming back to Tri-C next semester, I decided.”

“Why?” I asked him, a little shocked. That had completely come out nowhere.

“Because I actually finally figured out what I want to do with my life, and Tri-C doesn’t have anything there to help me succeed any further, so it’d be pointless for me to keep going,” he explained calmly.

“What is it that you want to do?” I questioned, and then added, “Please don’t say that you’re starting a cardboard box company.”

“I still stand by that being a good idea, but no,” he chuckled, shaking his head a little. “I was watching the Food Network with my grandma all day yesterday, and I realized that being a chef would actually be a really interesting career choice and I could see myself enjoying it. Plus, I really do actually like cooking and I seem to be pretty good at it from what everyone has told me, so it makes sense.”

I nodded at him. “Yeah, actually that really does. So what are you going to do, go to culinary school?”

“Possibly,” he said. “I was talking to my grandma about it yesterday, and she thinks the whole chef thing is a good idea, but as long as you have a good understanding of food and all the things you can do with it, you don’t need to actually go. Quite a few of the people on Chopped have never had any formal culinary training.”

“Remind of which show that is again?” My dad used to spend a lot of time watching the Food Network, which had convinced him that he knew how to cook, until one night he tried to get fancy with his parsley potatoes and ended up starting a small fire in the kitchen. Mostly I was relieved that I didn’t end up having to eat the potatoes since I really hadn’t wanted them anyway.

“That’s the show that’s got the four different contestants and they have a mystery basket full of food and they have to use all the ingredients to make an appetizer, and then a new basket for dinner, and another for dessert, and in between all the courses, someone gets eliminated after the judges have sampled all the food,” Jake told me. “I like that one a lot. Although I admittedly wouldn’t know what to do with half of that shit, but if you study under somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing, you eventually learn.”

I smiled at him. “I could see you being a chef and maybe having your own restaurant or something. Did you say anything to your parents?”

“Yeah, and of course, they think it’s stupid,” he said, shrugging as if it didn’t bother him. I had a feeling that it probably did, though. “We can’t all be doctors and lawyers, though, and they fail to realize that when they go to their fancy restaurants, someone actually has to make their food for them.”

I shook my head. “Screw ‘em. If it makes you happy, go for it. I think it’s a good idea.”

“That’s pretty much my sentiments about it exactly, and thank you,” Jake said. He nodded towards the television and for me to turn back around. “Your movie’s back on.”

We watched a majority of the movie in silence, minus my spoon clinking around the soup bowl as I finished it off and Jake making comments about what a dick the husband was, which was definitely not untrue. When I was done eating, I pushed my tray off to the side to take care of it later and leaned back against the headboard with Jake, resting my head on his shoulder. He put an arm around me and kissed the top of my head, rubbing my shoulder simultaneously. We stayed like that for a while as we watched until I eventually started getting drowsy again towards the end of the movie and laid my head on his chest.

We were getting to my mom’s favorite part of the movie where the doctor of the waitress, Jenna, comes over to see her at her house while her husband is at work and she teaches him how to bake pies. When he first gets there, though, she’s upset, so he just holds onto her, and during her narration, she says, “Dear Baby, I hope someday somebody wants to hold you for twenty minutes straight and that's all they do. They don't pull away. They don't look at your face. They don't try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight, without an ounce of selfishness to it.” Mom had always liked that line, and it was the last thing I heard before falling asleep for the next hour or so.

When I woke up, I found that I was in the same position, with my head still on Jake’s chest, and he was still watching my TV, though by the time I woke up, Waitress was over. I didn’t say anything for a little while, and he didn’t seem to notice that I was awake. Instead, I thought about that line in the movie that I’d fallen asleep to.

When I’d first watched that movie with my mom a few years prior and we’d heard that line, she’d loved it and I’d thought it was bullshit. I’d always been a bit of a cynic when it came to relationships, though admittedly I had no idea why. I grew up in a normal family, I didn’t have a traumatic childhood, and my parents almost never fought and were about as in love as you could be. But there was always something that lingered in the back of my mind that told me that relationships – most relationships – weren’t built to last, so don’t get too attached to anyone and don’t believe the always and forever that came with the declaration of love. In my mind, my parents were an improbable relationship, because it wasn’t too often that you heard about people meeting in their high school English classes at sixteen years old, getting married at eighteen, popping out three kids and being married for twenty-three years before one of them died. To me, that sounded more like a Nicholas Sparks novel and less like real life. I’d gone on to explain that to Matt once, and he simply stared at me and blamed my doubtful thought process on early exposure to cable, and then asked himself why he’d ever let me stay up late to watch TV with him when I was four.

But lying in that bed with Jake, my head on his chest and his arms wrapped around me, I rethought that quote from the movie, and finally began to understand it. It was a beautiful and rare thing to find that anyone, let alone a romantic partner, would simply want to hold you because, well, they could. And they cared about you enough to want to, without expecting anything in return or being selfish about the whole thing. So the more I came to understand that quote, the more I began to realize what it meant to love someone, which made me think of another quote.

Last summer, Liz had begged me to read this book by John Green entitled The Fault in Our Stars, which is essentially about a girl with terminal cancer who falls in love with a boy in remission after a battle with osteosarcoma. Without giving anything away, it had a terribly sad ending that made me cry and hate Liz for a few days for forcing me to read it. But there were also a lot of beautiful lines in the book as well, and the one that struck me the most when reading had been the part when the girl realizes that she is in love with the guy, and John Green writes, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep – slowly and then all at once.”

I couldn’t think of a better quote to apply to my situation, and I contemplated telling Jake. But for now, what I really wanted was to laze around in my bed all day with him and watch bad Lifetime movies while keeping my little declaration of love to myself, since it’s impossible to break the promise of ‘forever and always’ that way.