Hide N' Seek

Waking up, I squint and look at the alarm clock. It’s just past two in the morning, and I don’t have much time to lay and wonder what woke me up before I hear gagging from the bathroom down the hall.

Sighing, I kick the comforter off of my legs and sleepily make my way to said room. I lean against the doorway and squint at the sudden light, watching Jack’s form as it shakes over the toilet.

“You okay?” I ask, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

Jack nods miserably and sits back on his heels. A few tears had spilled down his cheeks before I walked in, and they’re almost enough to make me believe that he’s really sick with the stomach flu. Almost, but not quite.

It doesn’t make sense for him to be sick, considering he hasn’t left the apartment in almost four months. I’m the only one that could’ve brought germs into the house, and I haven’t been sick.

“Do you need me to call the doctor?” I ask.

He shakes his head and sticks his toothbrush under the water.

“Just the stomach flu,” he tells me for the fifth time, “I probably got it from you.”

“I haven’t been sick,” I point out.

He spits foam into the sink.

“You haven’t thrown up,” he agrees, “but you’re wearing long sleeves in the middle of July in an apartment with broken air conditioning. You must’ve caught a weaker version of it; there’s no way you could be cold in here any other way.”

Tensing, I cross my arms over my chest.

“Yeah,” I mutter, extremely uncomfortable now, “Yeah, okay. I’m going back to bed.”

He hums to let me know he heard, and I walk back into our room. I crawl into the bed and curl up on my side, pulling down my sleeves far over my wrists and balling it up in my fist. Letting out a shaky breath, I pull the comforter back over my body and hold my arms close to my chest.

About twenty minutes later, Jack joins me in bed again and slips his arms around my waist.

“Love you,” he murmurs.

“Mmm.”

-
I wake up the next morning – this time a normal hour – to find the bed empty. I furrow my brows and walk out into the hallway. My bare feet make soft padding noises as I walk into the kitchen.

Jack’s sitting in the living-room, curled up on the couch like always. I’m not sure why I bother getting worried anymore.

“I made you breakfast,” he says, sitting up.

He sits sideways so I have a clear view of his hopeful face, waiting for a praise, and I can’t not give it to him; he’s been in a depressive slump since both of his parents died in a car crash last Autumn, and this is the first sign of improvement he’s shown in nearly a year.

“Thanks, baby,” I say, eying the burnt toast that’s been slathered in butter on the kitchen counter, “but I’m supposed to be going out to eat breakfast with Rian before work.”

“Oh,” Jack mutters, visibly deflating.

He slumps back into the couch, and my chest tightens. The first sign of hope flickered in his eyes and I snuffed it out right as it came into existence.

I move to the living-room and kneel in front of him.

“Hey,” I say softly, taking his hands in mine, “really, thank you. If I didn’t already have plans, I would eat it, I promise.”

It’s a lie; the toast is burnt to the point where you can barely tell that it had ever been bread, but the lie is small enough that it can’t possibly take me anywhere past this one off thing.

It makes the hopeful look return to Jack’s face, and that makes the guilt of lying, even over something so small and even when I know I’ve lied about much worse, worth it.

“I did good, then?” he asks, voice almost sounding like his old self.

“’Course,” I murmur, “You always do good.”

He smiles and ducks his head, suddenly seeming shy.

“I love you,” he tells me.

“Thank you,” I answer, and the smile is gone.

I can lie to him about toast, and various other things, but I refuse to lie to him about this.

“Take care while I’m gone, yeah? I know you’re sick but at least try to eat some saltines while I’m out. Promise?” I ask.

His face becomes more miserable looking the more I talk, but he nods his promise. At least now I’m not the only one lying.

-
Rian and I meet at an Eat N’ Park just ten minutes from each of our apartments. We’re given a table in the corner of the restaurant that’s more or less isolated from the rest of the customers.

The booth’s seating is green with what looks like white crayon scratches over it, but enough picking at it will tell you that it’s just part of the design. The table has a stain of who knows what in the middle that someone has obviously spent some time trying to get rid of, but to no avail.

Rian and I are both dressed up a bit more than everyone else in the building, in our usual dress clothes for our work in the hospital, minus the sweatshirt I’m wearing that actually belongs to Jack. We both have hours to put in before we graduate, though we’re both going for very different things.

“How’s Jack been?” Rian asks, flipping through the menu.

I watch him flick through the colorful pages that we’ve both memorized by this point.

“I think he’s finally getting better,” I say, and Rian nods, “He tried to make me toast this morning.”

“Do I even need to ask how that went?”

“He burnt it.”

Rian snorts and flips the menu closed.

“How’s the eating thing going?” he asks, as the waitress comes over with our drinks.

His gives her a blinding smile as she places his ice tea in front of him, and chocolate milk in front of me. She returns it before asking us if we’re ready, and we both order before she’s grinning again and turning on her heel to return to the kitchen.

“It’s going… the same,” I say, deciding not to lie. “I made him his favorite dinner last night, but he threw it up while we were watching a movie. He didn’t even wait to make it to the bathroom this time.”

Rian nods and sticks his straw in his drink before taking a long pull from it.

“How long do you think it was after he ate when he threw up?” he asks.

He pulls the lemon off of the rim of the glass and hands it to me.

“’Dunno,” I say, “about two hours?”

I set the lemon on my bottom teeth and bite down on it. I make a face when the juice hits my tongue.

“Maybe he didn’t do it in the bathroom this time because he wants you to know that he’s struggling and wants you to take control of the situation,” he suggests.

I pick at the lemon and peel off a strip of it.

“Why would he do that?” I ask, “It’s not like I can fix him.”

“You are studying to be a psychologist,” Rian points out, “maybe he wants your help but he’s too scared to ask you the normal way. Or maybe he’s working on getting better himself. There are some cases of bulimia where there body grasps the whole ‘eat and then throw it up’ routine and they throw-up without prompting. Maybe he didn’t mean to do it.”

I nod slowly, considering it, and pop the lemon skin into my mouth. I use my front teeth to dig the seed out of it and spit it onto the napkin.

“Gross,” Rian complains, but I ignore him.

“Maybe,” I murmur, “I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on him and figure out what to do.”

He nods and takes a sip of his ice tea.

“You should probably try to figure it out fast, then,” he advises, “before Jack does some real damage to his insides. The way you talk about all this, without looking as concerned as you too, like all of this is normal, is not okay, Alex.”

I nod in agreement just as our food comes. We both say thanks and start digging into our food. The waitress walks away again, to another table.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t just stick him in therapy when you first found out he was doing all of this again,” Rian says.

“I tried,” I argue, “there was just too much crying and screaming and threatening… I was worried, I guess, that if I did he was going to kill himself.”

“Alex,” he says gently, “that’s exactly what Jack is doing now. At least if you tried to get him help he’d have a fighting chance.”

“I guess,” I mutter, guilt seeping into every inch of my bones.

Maybe I should’ve tried harder to keep him together. Maybe I’m just a bad boyfriend. Maybe it’s my fault he’s doing this again.

“You ready to go?” Rian asks, snapping me out of it.

I glance at the table and notice that we’d finished eating.

“Yeah,” I say, standing up.

Rian pays at the front desk and we leave for the hospital.