Oh my God. As soon as I got out of here, I was going to kill one of my best friends. Why the frak did I willingly eat something made by Chance the Kitchen Jinx? There was no doubt in my mind that the culprit was my friend’s Buffalo chicken dip — any food that man touched was a disaster. All that hot sauce and blue cheese would cover the taste of anything. And did. Uggggh.

To say I felt like crap would be an understatement. My mouth was dry, everything hurt, and I was hooked up to all kinds of equipment. Luckily, I was too out of it to fully contemplate the joys of experiencing food poisoning, with Tommy as my personal nurse. I didn’t care that he was used to bodily functions; nobody should see that side of a romantic interest, past or present.

“Would you like some ice chips?” he asked, then spooned a couple into my mouth like I was an infant. It was very hard to keep from snapping at him just because he was the only person in the line of fire. In fact, I couldn’t snap at anyone here because they’d judge Tommy for having dated me.

“Why are you here?” I asked, knowing the response wouldn’t change. And hating myself for knowing the real answer.

“I work here,” he said, sitting in pajama pants, a sweatshirt, and flip-flops in the middle of the winter.

“You don’t have to be here,” I said as nicely as humanly possible. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. If you were, you wouldn’t be hanging out in my office,” he snarked. If I had any energy, I’d smile at the fact that he called the ER ‘his office.’ Before I could argue more, he added, “You’re just going to have to put up with me, because I’m not leaving until I can properly berate you for keeping this a secret and endangering yourself. Plus, your sister needs her sleep and everyone else is as sick as you.”

“It’s okay if you want to go home and sleep. Really. Everyone here knows you’re my friend now, so they’ll take extra good care of me. We’re all suitably afraid of you.”

“And rightly so,” he said, a ghost of a smile curving his lips. One flip-flop dangled from his toes and my brain was fuzzy enough that I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

“I want to bite your toenails,” I blurted, but that wasn’t what I meant. I liked the thing he put over his toenails. What was that word? He was muttering about me being creepy as Buffalo Bill, so I waved in the air as if erasing the words from an imaginary chalkboard and tried to explain. “They’re cute. The sparkles and the pink and they’re you but the blue isn’t.”

The blueness of his toes caused me to look up and notice that he was shivering. I balled up my top blanket and shoved it in his lap before starting to pull off the grippy socks someone had put on my feet over my own socks.

“Are you hot?” he asked. It was a fair assumption considering he’d covered me with a half dozen blankets.

“You’re cold. Take it.” I gave him the socks. Well, threw them at him. He looked at me like I had lost my mind, not moving at all, but it had been at least a decade since a bit of side-eye would sway me from my chosen course. “Put them on. Now.”

“Don’t be silly.” He started to stand up and I knew he’d put it all back on me.

“Are you going to make me wrestle you into a blanket cocoon?" I asked.

“John…”

“Put it on so I can relax.” My body had stopped revolting, and I was still feeling pretty weak, but the idea of wrestling him into the blanket was hard to resist.

"Take a nap," he ordered.

"Not until you stop shivering like a chihuahua." I could be stubborn too, dammit. In fact, I'd helped my sister struggle to clothe her uncooperative toddler. We could pull that off with Tommy. "Hey. Give me my phone."

"Why?" he asked, appropriately suspicious, because it was entirely possible that I wore an evil grin while cackling quietly.  

"Joy has footie pajamas in your size. I can sit on you while she-"

"Let her sleep," he said, smiling fondly. I'd missed that smile, and I didn't deserve it. "She'll be here in the morning, and then I'll go home and put on my own footie pajamas."

It was the mention of home that jogged my memory. “FRANKIE!” I shouted and tried to get up. How could I forget about my baby? “What’s happening to Frankie?”

“When I got to your place, he was worried but okay and I explained the situation to him,” he told me, pushing me back down onto the gurney. “I’ll go back and get him as soon as your sister gets here. Actually, I’ll get everyone’s dogs, because you morons all ate Chance’s cooking. And yes, even Doctor Gregory Moore is sick, which is why you’re stuck with a mere nurse taking care of you.”

God, I’d been such a complete and total dick to this sweet man. As soon as Xander had made it clear our fake relationship was fake, I had no choice but to pick a fight to convince Tommy that being with me was a terrible idea. In a last-ditch effort to hold him at arm’s length, I’d hit him hard: I told him about Nurse Practitioner programs because it was ‘almost as good as being a doctor’ and he shouldn’t have to settle for being ‘only a nurse.’

Those were key phrases that I knew would upset Tommy the most. I knew how much Tommy and his mother clashed over this issue. His mother’s traditional Korean background gave her youngest son the tenacity and ambition that would get him far in any chosen field, while it also instilled the need to care for his elders. When Tommy’s maternal grandfather came to live with them, it was Tommy who came to coordinate his doctor’s visits and see to his daily needs. Nursing was the role Tommy was born to fill, but his mother couldn’t understand how her brilliant son could settle for a bachelor’s degree and a stereotypically woman’s job when he had the promise to be a successful doctor or surgeon. I knew all of this, just as I knew how torn up Tommy was by every passive-aggressive comment she flung his way in an attempt to drive him to aim higher.

The pain in Tommy’s eyes when I used his greatest insecurity against him was seared into my brain. But no matter how much I loved Tommy, I’d needed him to hate me enough to move on.

“Take them all to my apartment. It’s bigger than yours. I just changed the sheets this morning. You can sleep there in a big puppy pile,” I suggested. I loved the idea of Tommy comfy and happy, sleeping in my bed surrounded by all the animals.

God, I missed him so much. The moment we locked eyes so many months ago, I knew the adorable man in Tigger scrubs was it for me. I’d never understood why my mother still didn’t date a decade after my father passed away. I’d laughed when my sister came home from a lecture and told me she had met her husband. I’d rolled my eyes at my friends’ lovesick ridiculousness over the Moore brothers. And then I met Tommy.

But I had to let him go, because of incidents like tonight’s. I’d been in denial for years, so certain that I’d be fine. But I’d always known about the myriad inevitable complications that came with being a Type 1 diabetic, and a single routine visit to the ophthalmologist had shattered all my illusions of a happily-ever-after. I was a visual thinker. In fact, my entire mathematical career was based on relatively visual concepts. I would willingly trade away any other sense in a heartbeat for the opportunity to keep my eyesight. When I go blind, I will be rendered useless, wholly dependent on others to cope with daily life.

Tommy had enough patients to care for at work; he didn’t need to be burdened with me once he got home at the end of the day. If I’d explained this to him, Tommy would have been stubborn and martyrly, but I couldn’t inflict that kind of future upon him. However, if I was honest with myself, I’d admit that part of this was to protect myself. There was no way I’d be able to cope with having months or years with Tommy and then lose him if he couldn’t handle being trapped in our relationship anymore.

The silence in the hospital room had stretched too long, and there was only one thing that needed to be said: “I’m sorry, Tommy.”

“You’d better be fucking sorry,” he snapped as he brushed the hair off my forehead. Implicit was the fact that we both knew there were too many things I was sorry for, and he wanted to give me hell for every single one of them. All I had were excuses he wouldn’t accept, but at least he had his answers.

“Now you know why friendship is all we can have,” I said into the silence.

Could we still be friends? God, I hoped so. He was the only person, aside from my twin sister, who didn’t just write me off as a weird, all-brains-and-no-sense, math geek. Every day I scoured the internet to find some new, absurd jokes to share, just to see that flash of dimple as he laugh-groaned. I cranked up the A/C when I found a super-soft fleece blanket in the perfect shade of Tommy-pink, so we could cuddle under it while we watched TV. We spent hours trying to think of ways to trick Frankie into chewing some of the lone right shoes in my apartment, but alas my pug still only had a taste for the left ones. Actually, I was still reeling over Tommy’s inspired plan to turn the right shoes inside out… something he had attempted with our friend Julian the day after I had broken up with him. Tommy was smart and sweet and silly, and deserved far more than a life with me could offer. Now I’d just have to convince him.

Or so I thought. Instead, Tommy surprised me by saying, “We can be friends. But you need to get yourself together.”

Although that was not at all the reaction I’d expected, with a moment of thought I realized that I’d been wrong this whole time. If I’d just explained things to him, of course he’d agree. Tommy often complained about repeat visitors to the ER; he hated having to patch someone up only to have them end up back there again. Uncontrolled blood sugar had cumulative, time-bomb repercussions. Taking care of myself as an adult wouldn’t change how poorly I’d handled my illness all through college and grad school. I spent years in denial that this autoimmune disorder was as serious as my mother insisted, pretending it was no more dangerous than a minor food allergy. I may have only been fifteen at the time, but my sister and I had just begun our freshman year of college and I allowed myself to get absorbed in my studies, only attended to my body’s demands when they became too obnoxious to ignore. It might have taken a decade, but I was now finally facing the repercussions and Tommy didn’t need to pay for my teenage delusions of invulnerability.

“Do you even remember to eat?” he asked.

“You know Frankie refuses to dine alone.” My little dog was a bit eccentric, but he knew when I needed to eat and this was his own little way of nagging. Okay, I was the eccentric one, since I assigned to my dog unreasonably complex motivations. But it was still true that I always forgot to eat until Frankie reminded me, or his stomach reminded him to remind me. “I try to remember to snack. Whenever I pick up Frankie from Xander’s after work, Julian almost always has something waiting for me. I try to repay him in headwear. Do you have any idea how many hats Cassius has at this point? That dog’s collection is insane!”

“Really? How many could there be? I mean, there’s the lion’s mane and the crown and the top hat and…” I was relieved he allowed me to change the subject. For the next few hours, he carried the conversation, and I struggled to keep my mind from wandering by bringing up whatever popped into my mind. But inevitably, I drifted further into nothingness.

I woke up to Tommy and my sister talking outside the room. A room. When did I get a room? Tommy was being very professional and filling her in, and then she hugged him. For the first time, I saw Tommy cry, and it broke my heart. I did this to him.

Joy caught my eye and stuck her tongue out at me while putting a little extra bit of a show into hugging Tommy. He started shaking and I worried that he was sobbing even harder… until he fondled her ass and my sister started laughing. He must have noticed the hug changed. They both walked in, she pinched my arm, and he said, “I’m leaving you in this gorgeous woman’s care. I’ll take you up on your offer and bring all the dogs to your place.”

“What are you going to tell everyone? About me being here?” I asked. As of yesterday, only Julian and Logan Moore had guessed that I had diabetes. But HIPAA probably didn’t apply to an off-duty nurse dragging you off your bathroom floor. I cringed to think of the rest of our friends’ reactions. My closest, very mathletic friends Xander and Chance didn’t know about my diabetes. They just thought my interest in all foods sugar-free was another one of my little quirks. Being eccentric had its perks. But now… “No, wait. Just tell them the truth. The Moore brothers know and they shouldn’t have to keep this from their partners.”

Xander was so overprotective of his friends; he was going to be a total pain in the ass for at least the next few millennia. And, no matter how sick he was, Chance’s fiancé was probably making lists to tackle The Trip Problem.

Tommy saw the panic in my eyes and he rubbed my arm saying, “I’ll tell them you’re here with complications from the food poisoning. If they ask, I’ll tell them more. But you have your phone, you can text or call anyone you want. Now I’m off to set your adorable pug’s mind at ease and throw a killer doggie extravaganza!”

We said our goodbyes and then I got my sister to myself.

“Tommy’s awesome and you’re an idiot and I’m so angry at you…” She punched my arm. Hard. “Even though I totally appreciate your extraordinary efforts to give me the time off, the babysitter is tired of taking on my two little monsters at a moment’s notice. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

“I have food poisoning. I didn’t–”

“Stuff it up your ass. You know what I mean.” She pinched me again. Ah, the joys of Joy.

“Why do you always tell me to stuff things up my ass?” I asked as part of our conversational routine. “Do you say that to everyone, or do you save it for your gay twin?”

“I save it for my obnoxious, stubborn, infuriating, self-defeating, pessimistic twin,” she growled, narrowing her eyes. “And nobody would have been a pain in the ass about watching you eat and all that shit you always hate people doing. But now that they know you’re not managing it, your friends will be all up in your business. The sooner you take control of your health, the sooner everyone will leave you alone.”

“My doctor’s going to insist I wear a continuous glucose monitor now. That and an insulin pump and I’ll be fine. And I’ll eat better. And sleep. And all that good stuff,” I told her. But, because I couldn’t just leave it at that, I muttered, “It’s not going to change anything.”

She groaned. “You’re not going to go blind. You’re not going to lose your foot. You’re not going to become impotent. Unless you keep doing this to yourself!!!” She punched my arm with each exclamation.

“You know that’s not true,” I complained, rubbing my arm and effectively protecting it from further onslaught.

“It’s a small retinal issue they have to watch. They caught it in time,” she said, as though it were clear-cut. They had only said they could slow the progression, not cure it or even stop it completely. They also mentioned future surgical options for the cataract and glaucoma they had also seen. Hell, the focus of my studies was low-dimensional topology, which was entirely centered on imagining and manipulating geometric shapes. Living without sight was incomprehensible. It was going to destroy me. And then there was that other little issue which, of course, my sister had to mention: “And they say sudden ED isn’t from your diabetes.”

“They?” I asked. What made me think that telling her something like this would get her off my back about breaking up with Tommy? No, my sister couldn’t just accept vague information she’d badgered out of me about something extraordinarily private. She had to research it. She probably even talked with professionals about my penis problems.

“Maybe it’s because you stopped seeing Tommy. That’s something you can fix,” she told me for the sixth time in as many months. Hope sprang eternal. It was true that it hadn’t become an issue until after the breakup, but the strong probability of it happening due to neurologic decay and/or vascular hardening was one of many reasons why I’d had to end things. Tommy deserved a fully-functioning man.

“Tommy was very clear that we can only be friends now,” I told her, hoping that would end the matter; I wasn’t in the mood to argue about this with my sister. “Can we discuss something else, please? How are the proto-humans?”

She laughed; I did love those kids, but I rarely asked about them. They were so young they were barely real people yet and they exhausted her, which bothered me to no end. My twin sister mattered to me more than anyone ever could. “When you get stable, I’m going to make you babysit for me so I can take a spa day or something.”

“Sure. If I get stable.” The youngest was still in her larval stage, but the boy was talking in full sentences now and very opinionated. I could spend more time with him.

“Not if. WHEN,” Joy insisted. “Now, since you asked so nicely, I’ll humor you by overloading you with adorable pictures and stories.”