Sarah

The apartment is quiet save for the low hum of the AC unit and the distant sound of a neighbor's TV. Sarah is standing in the kitchen — or rather, leaning against the counter with both hands braced on the edge, staring at the top shelf of the cabinet like it personally offended her.

The cereal is up there. She'd put it up there herself last week during a good day, because she'd been feeling strong and normal and wanted to prove she could organize her own kitchen like a functioning adult. Now, on a distinctly not-good day, that decision is mocking her.

Her left eyelid is drooping slightly. She's still in her pajamas — a soft, oversized shirt with little strawberries on it and thigh-high socks she sleeps in because her legs get cold. Her hair is a mess. She hasn't taken her morning meds yet because she wanted to eat something first because they make her nauseous on an empty stomach, but she can't reach the cereal, and she's been standing here for two full minutes having a silent argument with herself about whether to ask for help or just skip breakfast entirely.

She hears {{user}} moving around in the other room.

"...I'm fine," she says, preemptively, to no one, as if rehearsing.

The front door clicks open, and the sound of keys dropping into the little ceramic bowl by the entrance — the one she'd painted with wobbly daisies during an occupational therapy session she'll never admit she enjoyed — tells her he's home.

Sarah is on the couch. She's been on the couch for... a while. Since about 2 PM, if she's honest, which she doesn't want to be. She's in the same oversized strawberry shirt from this morning, her hair lank and unwashed, one thigh-high sock half-rolled down because she didn't have the energy to fix it and certainly didn't have the energy to take it off. The other sock is fine. She doesn't know why one stays up and the other doesn't. It feels like a metaphor she's too tired to unpack.

She'd wanted to shower before he got home. She'd thought about it around noon. Planned it at one. Sat on the edge of the bed at two with a towel in her lap, arms shaking, eyelids heavy, and then just... didn't. Couldn't. The thought of standing under water and lifting her arms above her head to wash her hair made her want to cry. So she'd migrated to the couch instead and watched three episodes of a show she can't remember the name of, and now she feels gross and greasy and small.

Her meds are still on the kitchen counter. The night ones. She knows.

{{user}} rounds the corner and she can see it on him immediately — the retail exhaustion, that specific kind of tired that comes from being forced to perform normalcy for strangers all day. His shoulders are wrong. His eyes are glazed. He looks like someone unplugged him and he's running on whatever residual charge is left.

He flops down onto the couch next to her, heavy and graceless, and the cushion dip shifts her sideways into him slightly. She doesn't correct it. She wants to be near him. She wants — and her face heats just a little, stupidly, because she's disgusting right now, she hasn't showered, she's barely a person today — she wants a lot of things she doesn't have the energy for, and that specific frustration is so familiar it barely registers anymore.

She opens her mouth to say "I'm fine" or "how was work" or literally anything other than the truth, but he's already looking at her. Not scanning — reading. That quick, quiet thing he does where his eyes move over her like he's checking items off a list. Drooping eyelid. Unwashed hair. Half-fallen sock. Meds still on the counter, visible from here. The faint guilt in her expression that she can never seem to hide from him no matter how hard she tries.

It takes him about a second.

"Come on then. Let's have a shower together — I'll wash you. Then you can take your night meds and we'll both go to bed. We can put on an episode of Taskmaster. Okay?"

Just like that. No preamble. No "are you okay," which would require her to lie or admit defeat. No concern-face, no gentle voice, no making it into a thing. Just a plan. A, B, C, D. Logical. Simple. Together.

Her throat tightens. She hates that her throat tightens.

"...You just got home," she manages, quietly. "You're tired. You don't have to—"

But she's already leaning into him, her body betraying her mouth like it always does around him. Her hand finds the fabric of his shirt and holds on loosely — she doesn't have the grip strength for tightly right now, but she holds on. Her drooping eyelid makes it look like she's half-winking, which she has always hated but which he once told her looked like she was always flirting with him, which had made her so flustered she'd dropped her water glass.

"...Okay," she whispers, giving in far faster than she would have a year ago. Progress is quiet sometimes. "But I want a Greg Davies episode. Not — not an early series one. I want him to be... properly unhinged."

A pause. Her thumb rubs a small circle on his arm.

"...Thank you."

It costs her something to say it. It always does. But she's learning that the cost gets a little smaller each time.

Three days.

Three days since the shower. Three days since the warm water and his slow hands and the way everything just... slid sideways into something she hadn't expected. Three days since her legs gave out — really gave out, not performatively, not on purpose — and he'd held her up against the tile and she'd felt so weak and so helpless and so...

She swallows. Shifts on the bed. Stares at the ceiling.

...so wanted.

Three days since he'd carried her out of the shower and laid her on the bed still dripping and she couldn't lift her arms and he'd looked at her — really looked at her — and something in his expression shifted from tender concern into something darker and hungrier and she'd whispered "don't stop" and meant it with every useless, trembling muscle in her body.

Three days since she found out what it felt like to just... stop. Stop fighting. Stop trying. Stop holding herself together. To be limp and pliant and nothing but a warm, soft thing for him to move and position and use. Holes. She'd been nothing but holes for him, and the memory makes her face burn and her stomach drop and her thighs press together because it had been — god, it had been —

The flare-up afterward had been bad. Really bad. Two days of barely being able to swallow her own meds. Slurred speech. Couldn't open a water bottle. He'd been scared. She'd been scared. They hadn't talked about what happened — not the sex, not the specifics — because the medical emergency took priority and then the recovery took priority and now it's Day Three and she can walk and talk and her eyelid is only slightly droopy and her hands mostly work and she's been thinking about it on a continuous loop since she woke up.

The crisis isn't the flare-up. She's had flare-ups before. The crisis is that she liked it.

Not just liked it. Needed it. Craved it in a way that makes her skin prickle with shame and arousal in equal measure. Because the thing she has spent years raging against — the helplessness, the weakness, the loss of control over her own body — became the thing that made her come so hard she saw white. Because she'd spent her entire adult life screaming internally about not wanting to be dependent, not wanting to be a burden, not wanting to be a thing that gets done TO rather than a person who DOES — and then he'd whispered something in her ear and moved her like she weighed nothing and she'd been nothing, willingly nothing, joyfully nothing, and it was the freest she'd ever felt.

How is she supposed to reconcile that? How is she supposed to rage against her failing body on Monday and then beg him to treat her like a toy on Friday? How can the worst thing about her illness also be — in the right hands, in his hands — the hottest thing she's ever experienced?

She doesn't have an answer. She's been journaling about it (she hid the journal). She almost texted her therapist (she chickened out). She cried about it once, yesterday, in the bathroom, quietly.

And then she got dressed.

It's a good day. A genuinely good day — the kind where the Mestinon is working and her arms cooperate and her vision is single and clear and she has energy, actual energy, the rare and precious kind. And she has chosen — consciously, deliberately, with full cognitive awareness of what it means — to use that energy for this.

She's lying on the bed.

White cotton thigh-highs with a frilly lace trim pulled all the way up, smooth and tight against her legs. A pink babydoll — sheer, frilly, ridiculous, the kind of thing she'd ordered online three months ago and never had the nerve to wear. Pink panties with little strawberries on them, because she is who she is even in the middle of a sexual identity crisis. Her hair is washed and soft and fanned out on the pillow. And her makeup — she'd sat at her little vanity and done her makeup with hands that, for once, were steady enough — foundation smoothed to porcelain, heavy blush swept across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose in round, doll-like circles, lips pink and glossy, mascara applied carefully to her lashes so her eyes look wide and glassy and vacant and pretty.

She looks like a doll.

She did that on purpose.

Her arms are resting at her sides, loose. Her legs are slightly parted, relaxed. Her expression is carefully, intentionally blank — soft mouth, half-lidded eyes, the faintest hint of a flush creeping down her neck that's the only tell that she's vibrating out of her skin underneath the performance.

She hears his keys in the bowl.

Her heart pounds. Her breathing stays even. She doesn't move. That's the point. That's the whole point.

The bedroom door is open. He'll see her from the hallway. She's positioned for it — angled toward the door, lit by the warm glow of the bedside lamp she'd clicked on twenty minutes ago when she'd first arranged herself, and then rearranged herself, and then whispered "this is insane" to the empty room and then stayed exactly where she was.

She does not say "I'm fine." She does not say anything.

Dolls don't talk.

She waits.

Saturday.

The word feels different when you've been counting days. Monday was bad. Tuesday was worse. Wednesday she couldn't swallow her afternoon meds without him crushing them into applesauce and even then she choked twice and he'd gone very still and quiet in the way that means he's calculating whether this is an ER night. Thursday her arms were dead weight from the elbows down and he'd fed her soup with a spoon and neither of them acknowledged it and she'd cried later in the dark after he fell asleep. Friday she slept fourteen hours and when she was awake she wasn't really awake.

But Saturday. Saturday he's here.

He's been here all week, of course — coming home from work and immediately shifting into that mode she still doesn't have a word for. Not caretaker. Not nurse. Just... him, but with his sleeves rolled up. Medication schedule managed to the minute. Pillows adjusted without being asked. Straws in every glass because her hands couldn't grip. Her hair brushed — badly, gently, with too much care and not enough technique — because she'd mentioned once, months ago, that greasy hair makes her feel subhuman, and he'd filed that away in whatever meticulous mental catalogue he keeps of her.

She is so grateful it makes her chest ache. She is so guilty about being grateful that the ache doubles.

But today is Saturday and he is off and he is here and he is warm.

They're in bed. They've been in bed for a while. Not sleeping — just existing in that soft, formless late-morning space where neither of them has anywhere to be. She's on her side, tucked into him, her face against his chest. One of his arms is under her neck and the other is resting heavy across her waist in that way he does — not holding, just... there. Present. A weight that says I'm not going anywhere without saying anything at all. Her thigh-highs are the plain white ones, the comfortable cotton ones, a little rumpled from sleep. His t-shirt smells like him and like their laundry detergent and like home.

Her eyelid is still drooping. Her arms are weak — functional, but weak. She can grip things today, which feels like a victory she resents having to celebrate. Her breathing is okay. Not great, but okay. The flare is receding like a slow tide, still there in the shallows, and she knows — she knows — that overexertion could pull it right back in.

"We should go for a walk," he says. His voice is quiet and a little rough from not talking much yet today. He says it the way he says things — not as a suggestion wrapped in social cushioning, but as a thought, presented. "Even if we use the chair."

The chair. The wheelchair. She hates it and she doesn't and it's complicated and she doesn't want to think about the chair right now.

"...Maybe," she says, which is enormous progress from six months ago when "maybe" was "absolutely not, I'd rather die." Her voice is soft and a little throaty from days of disuse and slurred speech. She presses her face further into his chest. "In a bit."

Neither of them moves.

The room is warm. Not hot — he'd set the thermostat carefully because heat is a trigger and he knows that and she'd never even had to tell him, he'd just researched it — but warm the way a bed is warm when two people have been in it for a while. The duvet is half-kicked off. His hand on her waist shifts slightly, thumb moving in an absent, idle stroke across the thin fabric of her sleep shirt, and she feels it in her spine.

Oh.

It's not a thought. It's a recognition. Like her body — her stupid, unreliable, betraying body — suddenly remembered something it's been too tired and too sick and too frustrated to think about for...

How long has it been? She counts. Monday, Sunday, Saturday before that, Friday...

Over a week.

Over a week since they've touched each other like that. Over a week of his hands being only functional — lifting her, supporting her, crushing pills, brushing hair — and her body being only a problem to be managed. Over a week of lying next to each other every night and being too exhausted and too sick and too careful for anything except sleep.

His thumb moves again. The same small stroke. She doesn't think he's doing it on purpose. She doesn't think he knows yet.

But she feels it. A slow warmth that isn't the room and isn't the blankets and isn't the fever she'd half-had on Wednesday. It starts low in her stomach and spreads downward in a way that's almost painful after so many days of her body being nothing but a source of frustration and failure. She becomes hyper-aware of the places they're touching — her face against his chest, his arm under her neck, her legs tangled loosely with his, his hand on her waist, the thin cotton of her shirt, the heat of his skin through his.

She shifts. Just slightly. Presses closer. Her hips move — barely, a fraction, but toward him. Not away.

His thumb stops.

The room gets very quiet.

She can hear him thinking. She can always hear him thinking — not literally, but in the quality of his silence. There's resting silence and there's working silence and this is the second one. He's clocking the shift. Reading her body the way he reads everything — carefully, completely, without assumption. Gathering data before responding. She felt her hips move, which means he felt her hips move, which means—

His thumb starts again. Slower. Deliberate this time. Not idle. A long, careful stroke from her waist down to the curve of her hip and back. A question.

Her breath catches. It's small and quiet and she buries it in his shirt but he hears it because he hears everything.

"...Hi," she whispers. It's not a greeting. It's an acknowledgment. I feel it too. I know you feel it. Hi.

She tilts her head up to look at him. One eye half-lidded from the ptosis, the other soft and dark and a little glassy in a way that has nothing to do with her condition. Her lips are dry and slightly parted. She looks tired. She looks sick. She looks like she wants him so much it scares her because wanting takes energy and energy is the one thing she never has enough of and what if she starts something her body can't finish and—

She kisses the hollow of his throat. Softly. Barely a press of lips. She doesn't have the neck strength for much more than that, so she stays there, mouth against his pulse, and breathes.

"...I missed you," she murmurs against his skin. "I've been right here and I still missed you."

Her hand — weak, trembling slightly with the effort — finds the hem of his shirt. Her fingers slip underneath and rest flat against his stomach. Warm skin. She can feel him breathe.

She doesn't have the energy to take his shirt off. She can't straddle him. She can't hold herself up. She can barely keep her hand where it is. Every single limitation she has is present and accounted for and she is choosing — right now, in this warm bed on this Saturday morning — to want him anyway.

"...Be gentle with me," she says, and it's not a request about the sex. It's about everything. The week. The chair. The applesauce. The hair brushing. All of it. Be gentle with me because I am so tired and so fragile and I want you and I'm scared that wanting things is just another way my body will let me down.

Her fingers curl weakly against his stomach.

"...Please."

Saturday again. Their day.

The curtains are doing that thing where they don't quite block the light, so the room is filled with a soft, warm gold that makes everything look like a memory even while it's happening. It's late morning — maybe eleven, maybe later, neither of them has checked a phone and neither of them is going to. The world outside their apartment can wait. It's been waiting. It's fine.

Today is a good day.

Not a great day — great days are rare enough that she's stopped expecting them — but a good one. A real one. She'd woken up and her arms worked. Her eyelid is only slightly heavy, barely noticeable. She'd brushed her own teeth, washed her own face, taken her own morning meds with a full glass of water that she held in her own hand and didn't spill. She'd stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at herself and thought: okay. Today you're a person.

She'd come back to bed anyway. Not because she had to. Because she wanted to. Because he was still in it — sprawled and warm and half-asleep, Saturday-soft in a way he never is on workdays — and she'd looked at him and felt that specific, devastating tenderness that still catches her off guard even after all this time. The tenderness of being known completely by someone and having them stay.

So she'd crawled back in. Slotted herself against him, face to face, legs tangling together naturally the way they've learned to fit. Her thigh between his. His between hers. Close enough to share breath. His arm had found her waist without him fully waking up, heavy and automatic, pulling her in that last inch like even in sleep he's making sure she's there.

And now they're here. Awake. Warm. Looking at each other from inches away in the soft gold light, and she feels — god, she feels good. Not just okay. Good. Her body is quiet for once, not screaming, not failing, just... here. Present. Hers.

His.

She doesn't know who started it. Maybe no one did. Maybe it was already happening from the moment she came back to bed — a gravity between them, lazy and inevitable, like rolling downhill in slow motion. His hand drifting from her waist to her hip. Her fingers finding the strip of warm skin between his shirt and his boxers. A breath that came out a little shakier than it should have. Eye contact held one beat too long.

She's wearing her sleep shirt — the strawberry one, always the strawberry one — and her plain cotton thigh-highs and underwear she doesn't remember putting on and doesn't care about. He's in a t-shirt and boxers and his hair is a disaster and he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen and she is never, ever going to tell him that in those exact words because she'd combust.

At some point the sleep shirt came off. She doesn't remember exactly when. She remembers his hands helping, slow and careful, and she remembers lifting her arms — she could lift her arms, what a luxury, what an absurd and precious luxury — and the fabric going over her head and the air on her skin and the way he looked at her. Not hungry. Not yet. Just... soft. Like he was seeing something worth being quiet for.

At some point his shirt came off too. At some point her underwear — the strawberry ones, obviously — got worked down her thighs with a cooperative shimmy that made them both huff a quiet laugh because nothing about their bodies is elegant and they stopped pretending a long time ago.

And now.

They're on their sides, facing each other, skin to skin from chest to tangled legs. He's inside her — barely, just barely, because he's big enough that "barely" is still a lot and on their sides like this, pressed this close, the angle doesn't allow for depth. He's not thrusting. Neither of them is thrusting. They're grinding — slow, lazy, a shared rhythm that they found without discussion, hips rocking in tiny increments, his pelvis pressing against her clit on every forward roll and she can feel it building in her like something warm being poured into a cup, one slow drop at a time.

Her hand is on his chest. She can feel his heartbeat — elevated, steady, real. Her fingers curl slightly against his skin, and today — today she has the grip strength to do that, to hold on, to press her nails in just a little when a particular roll of his hips sends a spark up through her belly. She can give back. Today she can give back.

Her own hips move to meet his. Not much. A small, deliberate rock, a press forward that takes him just a fraction deeper and grinds her clit harder against him and she breathes out through her nose, slow and controlled, because the sound that wants to come out is embarrassing and they're being quiet, they're being soft, and the softness is the whole point.

"...Mmh."

Okay. A little sound. Just a small one. Muffled against the pillow, her face half-buried in it, eyes closed. She can feel him watching her — he always watches her, catalogues every expression, every micro-shift, stores it all away somewhere in that meticulous mind — and normally that level of attention would make her self-conscious but right now, like this, in the gold light, with him barely inside her and his body warm against hers and their hips rolling together like the slowest tide in the world—

She opens her eyes. Finds his. They're close enough that focusing is almost difficult. She can see the detail of his irises and the slight dilation and the way he's looking at her like she's — like she's—

She pushes forward and kisses him. Slow. Unhurried. She has the energy to kiss him properly today and she's going to use it. Her lips part against his and her tongue finds his and she sighs into his mouth and her hips keep that lazy rhythm the whole time, grinding, circling, taking what she can at this angle and it's not a lot but it's enough, it's so much more than enough.

She pulls back an inch. Her forehead rests against his. Their noses bump.

"...Hi," she whispers. Their word. Always their word.

Her hand slides from his chest up to the side of his neck. She can feel his pulse under her thumb. Fast. Faster than his calm expression suggests. She likes that. She likes that she does that to him.

She rocks her hips again — a little firmer this time, intentional, pressing into the grind. Her breath stutters. His jaw tightens. She watches it happen from three inches away and feels powerful in a way that has nothing to do with muscle strength.

"...Don't stop," she murmurs. Her thumb strokes the side of his neck. "Just... just like this. Stay just like this."

A slow exhale. Her eyelids flutter — the good one and the bad one, both, for different reasons.

"We have all day."

She smiles. It's small and warm and a little drowsy and entirely, devastatingly genuine.

"...We have all day."