I fell into a sex coma around three in the morning and began to consider waking up sometime mid-morning. A little early for my usual schedule and late for John’s, but a decent compromise — we should do this on my days off, now that spring semester finally ended and the kitten could sleep through the night. Or at least, we should try to time things like this, but hopefully John would sleep. There was no warm body pressed against mine, and the faint clickity-clack of keys could barely be heard from the next room.

If he hadn’t been so attentive last night, I probably wouldn’t have slept much either. I didn’t really know where we went from here. I had overheard John talking to Xander, and was unfairly relieved that I didn’t have to talk more about my insecurity and the month long relationship I’d attempted while we were apart.

I wandered into the bathroom, but quickly realized there was a far more immediate issue at hand. So I tiptoed into the living room where John was tapping away on his laptop in a cushy leather armchair, and wrapped my arms around him from behind.

“Good morning!” I sang. He screeched like a little girl and snapped his laptop closed, and I giggled into his neck. “It’s okay, I don’t have my contacts in yet. Can I borrow some toothpaste? Mine disappeared.”

“Of course. In fact, I love you so much that you can keep whatever toothpaste you use. I’m just that generous,” he teased. He said the same thing whenever I asked to ‘borrow a tissue,’ and yet I always asked to borrow things anyway. I let him go but he grabbed my arm before I took more than half a step. “Wait!”

“Yeah?”

“What I was doing on my computer wasn’t a secret, just disorganized. I’ve been strategizing, figuring out how to tell you everything. I think maybe it would be best to do it in Madame Pompadour’s tearoom? It might look suspicious if we go in and say we talked things out on our own…” Madame Pompadour’s tearoom? John’s pride in learning nobody’s names got a little ridiculous sometimes, even if it did take the embarrassment out of truly forgetting a name here and there.

“Talking things out in therapy works for me. But I don’t want to push you too far,” I assured him. “We don’t need to bring a third party into this if you’re not comfortable with that.”

“Stop being so understanding!” he snapped. Whoa. Was it lack of sleep? Was his blood sugar off? Or was he just frustrated and stressed? In a calmer voice, he said, “Tommy, it was my idea, remember? I should have told you weeks ago. Or months. I should have respected you enough to make your own decision, even if I thought you were —are— being a martyr. And I need you to feel comfortable asking questions.”

Keeping everything in was a little passive-aggressive of me — I knew that he’d truly believed his proposal-apology had negated every hurtful aspect of our breakup. Meanwhile I grew more anxious with each passing day, just waiting for the carpet to get yanked out from under me again.

“O– okay.” I had no idea how to respond to this sudden 180, but I wasn’t about to argue — he’d just have to tell me if the questions got to be too much. He tugged on my arm and, taken off balance, I fell into his lap. John kissed me and held me close. The dark rings under his eyes made me wonder if he’d slept at all. “You look exhausted. Did you get any sleep? Because it would be just our luck if you started sleeping days and I started sleeping nights.”

“I took a nap, but had a stupid nightmare,” he admitted, blushing. I didn’t think he’d say more than that, but he held me closer and nuzzled my neck, so I stayed put even though nature was shouting at me to visit the restroom. Into my shoulder he said, “We were here, but you’d packed your stuff and left me. And then Frankie called me on the phone and said he and the kitten were moving to New Zealand to live with you and some hobbits.”

“Now that would never happen. Hobbits aren’t real.” I had no interest in moving or leaving the man I loved, and he was our pug’s favoritest person in the whole entire world. I tilted his head back and kissed him lightly. He tasted a little nutty, as though he’d snacked since waking up, but that left me feeling a little nutty. “What did Frankie’s voice sound like?”

“Same as always. Tenor with a touch of an upper-crust British accent, and very formal.” John’s impression of Frankie’s imaginary voice always sent me into peals of laughter, especially when accompanied by his ‘Frankie face.’ He never did it in front of the pug, so I hadn’t heard it in a while. When my laughter subsided, he asked, “Want me to order room service? I figure we can take a nice long shower. Then once food gets here, we can plan our day, maybe explore the resort with the dildo-device. Toothpaste is in my dopp kit, but you might need to root around in there.”

“Thanks. A nice, quiet morning spying on our spies sounds perfect,” I told him and wandered back to the bathroom. I did have to root around and, without my glasses, I wound up taking out every white, semi-cylindrical item in there before finally finding the toothpaste. As I brushed my teeth, I squinted at the other white things. Two looked like eye drops and at least one was probably a prescription — I had a feeling he hid my toothpaste in a sideways attempt to prepare me before we walked into counseling. It was a nice way to do it, even if it was inside-out and backwards and made me want to demand why he claimed he didn’t take medication.

So I calmed down by focusing on the third object. Eye cream. And just then, John walked in all handsome and naked and I both needed to climb him like a tree and to clear that wary look from his face. “Dammit, John! How dare you!”

He flinched, glanced at the counter for confirmation, and his shoulders bowed. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’d better be!” I shouted. “You’re two years younger than me! How dare you sneak behind my back and avoid crinkles in the corner of your eyes and just– just– let me show my age! It’s not right! Are you getting Botox behind my back too?! Because we’re way too young for Botox and I like it when your face moves when you laugh.”

“No Botox. For either of us. And you’re right, it was very rude of me. But your skin’s so smooth and I saw your mom and I wanted to make sure I always look as young as you,” he confessed, genuinely smiling for the first time this morning. I made a mental note to call my mom for cream recommendations. “I’ll be sure to keep you informed of any changes to my beauty regimen.”

“Hmph. Alright, then. Now get that sexy ass in the shower!”

We had a small breakfast and then strolled the grounds at a leisurely place, enjoying the quiet and the company, each caught up in our own thoughts. Other people were out and about, but didn’t enter our quiet little bubble. The man from Boston paced the hallway outside our door shouting into his cell phone about things that were supposedly entirely the other person’s fault. The Texan man sunbathed by the pool in a tiny speedo that didn’t quite contain his equipment. He winked when he noticed me noticing. A woman sat under a tree completely absorbed in her book, while a chipmunk sat a few inches from her elbow, staring at her pensively as he nibbled on a flower.

John took the helm of the dildometer and we returned to the sites where today’s activities would be held, scouring every square inch, but we only got a few blips near TVs and computers. There were a few areas with visible security cameras which we used to prove the device was functioning properly. Before long, it was time for our counseling sessions.

“Do you think we’re missing something?” John asked, forlorn. “Or perhaps the recording devices are portable, or they set them up quickly before everyone arrives?”

“The other option is that there aren’t any devices and they’re not recording us,” I pointed out. We’d both been avoiding saying that because it was a lot of fun looking around each room and coming up with weird, creative ways that devices might be hidden. “Maybe they’re blackmailing people with something more tangible?”

Or maybe there was no blackmailer. I’d briefly wondered whether all our friends got together and came up with an elaborate, expensive ruse to force us into working out our problems before our relationship imploded. But that was ridiculous. Buzzard’s involvement was proof — the retired soldier was too much of a dick to get involved in a Julian-esque scheme. I just had a weird paranoid voice in my head that occasionally did things like warn me a guy I just started dating might have a secret life I knew nothing about. Of course, that voice had been right twice — one guy actually did have a wife and kids stashed in another state, and another guy was operating a meth lab in his pool house.

John’s voice penetrated my weirdo thoughts. “Maybe we should take advantage of the couple’s massage package and search the spa more thoroughly. If you’re comfortable with my monitor and pump, I shouldn’t care whether other people see them.”

The thing was, he did care. And there was no point in getting a massage if it just made him more tense. So I admitted one of my deepest darkest secrets. “Honestly, I don’t like massages. I like the occasional foot or shoulder rub, but prolonged professional massages and getting knots dug out and being naked. And what if they offered a happy ending?”

I shivered, creeped out by the thought. Sure, I’d hooked up with relative strangers in the past, but I talked to them and chose to go home with them. I wasn’t anonymously penciled into their schedule.

“Okay, so it’s settled. No massages and neither of us has to worry that they’re depriving the other,” he said with a smile. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled and ears open for any and all suspicious behavior.”

Eventually my phone alerted me that it was my turn with the therapist,

John dropped me off at the office of that French therapist whose name I totally remembered. Really. Dammit, she was wearing pink today and had a tea tray and cat pictures on her desk and really was making it difficult to think of her as anyone other than Dolores Umbridge. Even though she was really nice and helpful.

Or so I thought.

By the end of the hour, I was frustrated and cranky. We dissected all my past relationships, looking for unhealthy behavior or whatever. Every relationship was different, and I cared for each man for different reasons. I helped one guy come out, helped another move out of his parents’ basement, and helped the third find a new career path. The therapist saw a definite pattern: I only dated fixer-uppers and moved on once they had themselves together. It was like flipping houses, only with people.

“Will you be ready to move on once John opens up and learns to depend on his friends?” she asked.

“John is not a fixer-upper!” I eventually shouted at her.

“Are you sure? Because you have talked a great deal about getting John to open up and depend on his friends,” she countered calmly.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. But John isn’t broken or incomplete. One thing I love the most about John is that he is a fully-functional, independent adult. He has his life together. He knows who he is and what he loves.” I took another breath and tried to calm myself further. “And it would be nice if he opened up to his friends, but I’m more focused on how he and I communicate. Life will throw obstacles in our paths from time to time, but he needs to be willing to depend on me.”

“Good. That is a very healthy approach, and I think you will get there in time.” The therapist beamed at me as though I was a kid that aced my first spelling test.

This was pure torture, but at least there were cookies.

I spent the last two minutes stuffing my face until John rescued me, right on time. I kissed him quickly, wished him luck, and bolted out of there. He brought his laptop with him, and I wondered briefly whether I would be treated to a PowerPoint presentation.

Embarrassingly enough, I had no sense of direction and wasn’t sure how to get back here. It didn’t matter — I was exhausted and as much as I was a people-person, I decided to skip the spa. I needed some alone-time to think and recharge. So I just sat down on the floor outside the door and set my alarm to go off two minutes before John’s time was up.

Regardless of my curiosity, I intentionally avoided reading the labels of his eye drops once my contacts were in. If I had, I would have spent this hour searching the internet. But John needed to tell me himself — this passive letting-me-find-out crap was for the birds.

For the birds. Hmmm. I opened my phone’s browser, typed ‘origin of for the birds,’ and dove into the internet rabbit hole for the next hour. All my life, my mom had gotten English idioms slightly wrong, or used ones nobody under the age of eighty had ever heard. She worked so hard at learning new idioms, so I had worked on it with her. Words were almost as weird as the people who put them together in nonsensical ways.

Eventually, my phone chimed and I knocked on the door. John was red-faced and couldn’t meet my eyes, and I wondered what had happened. Before he could stand, I ran over and kissed him tenderly. “I love you. Now stop hogging all her attention.”

“That’s okay. I don’t mind sharing.” His wavering smile hurt my heart and I leaned forward to kiss him again, but he pushed me away before I could get in more than a peck and handed me a piece of paper.  

“On that paper are all my logins and passwords, including the ones for MyChart so you can review my latest health information or contact my doctors whenever you want, and access the graphs from my glucose monitoring app,” he told me.

“That is so sweet, but you really don’t need to do that. I trust you to take care of yourself, and I don’t want to have to check up on you. I want you to talk to me yourself,” I said. I was touched, but this wasn’t a suitable replacement for discussing his health.

“This is in addition to talking. Usually test results come in long before my next appointment, and discussing it all with you would be more helpful than talking with my sister and we could form a plan together.” John’s eyes were full of sincerity and hope and I was touched that he truly believed that I could be more useful than his genius biochemist sister. They had both earned their doctorates a year after I finished college, several years before other students their age.

Touched, we briefly looked things over together. MyChart was relatively easy to navigate. The blood glucose graphs were really cool, and extremely helpful. He’d spent the past month sticking himself every hour on the hour to calibrate it properly, and his blood sugar was still pretty wonky at times. We could see how different meals, activities, and incidents affected him.

I noticed that yesterday’s session spiked his blood sugar, and I eyed the cookies and counselor suspiciously. Could they be trying to hurt John to distract us from Operation Butt-Bandits, or make him more likely to share information? Was it an honest mistake? Or were the cookies fine, and the spike due to the stress of talking things out with a stranger?

Seeing my distraction, the counselor spoke up. “You can look at all of that later. There is more to discuss.” She gave John a look that could have been warning, encouragement, or both and he closed his laptop and set it aside.

John took my hands in his and said, “I’m going blind.”

That was it. It was written all over his face that this was the gigantic, earth-shattering truth that destroyed his life and supposedly doomed his partner to a life of eternal nursing servitude. He waited for my reaction.

“Okay.” I squeezed his hands. “We can tackle this together. What’s your specific diagnosis? What’s the prognosis?”

“There are, um… three diagnoses.”

“And you got them all at once?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“In October?” His annual checkups had been the day before we broke up.

“Yes,” he admitted. His hands crushed mine as if he could will me to understand. And I did. After all my research and sleepless nights and mental gymnastics, I’d had a feeling that this was the likely thing that would cause his panic. At least, I’d hoped it was. Did that make me a terrible person? But my heart needed it to be something big and difficult to treat, yet not terminal. After all, John had thrown away everything we could be over this.

I kissed his hands and the insides of his wrists. “Tell me more about it. I’m hoping you’ll feel better once you’ve gotten it all out into the open, and then I’ll know what we’re facing.”

So he told me all about it. Mild glaucoma in both eyes and a cataract forming in his left eye, both of which could be treated with laser surgery. Diabetic retinopathy was still in the early stages, no macular edema (yet). That couldn’t be fixed, but its progress could be slowed.

“As terrible news goes, this is relatively good,” I tried to reassure him, but I realized how insensitive it might sound. “You have years. Maybe a decade.”

“Good?” he asked bitterly, finally meeting my eyes. I could see the anger building. Anger was an active emotion, far better than the resigned hopelessness that he’d had a few minutes ago.

“Yes, good.” How could I explain? I wracked my brain while he stared daggers at me.

The counselor attempted to intervene. “Tommy, it’s important that you–”

“Your fears are real and valid, John. Going blind is frightening and overwhelming and a huge deal. It will be very hard and it will change your life. Both of our lives, because I’m in this with you. But you will live, and that’s what matters most.” I squeezed his hands tightly. I wanted to close the distance between us, to crawl into his lap and hold him close. But I could tell he had more to say. “We have years to puzzle over accommodations and figure out what’s best for you. You’re brilliant. You found ways for your pug to mother his kitten within hours of adopting her. We can do this, together.”

“I’m a visual thinker. Without vision, I’ll be useless,” he spit out.

“You won’t be useless,” I countered. Could I believe this strongly enough for both of us? “You can already build mental maps of everywhere we go. That’s something most people can’t do very well. Yes, mathematics is a very visual field. But you can’t technically see more than three dimensions, and yet you mentally picture it all the time. You’ll have to learn to mentally draw the world using motion, touch, hearing, descriptions. It won’t be the same, and it might mean you won’t be able to do everything you do now, but the change will be gradual.”

“Tommy, you have to look at the big picture. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I can’t pretend anymore that everything will be fine and normal. I can’t undo all the damage that was done when my blood sugar was out of whack in the past, let alone what’s going on right now. Nerve damage, hardening of my blood vessels, tissue and organ damage… You’re giving up your happily ever after to be with me.”

I couldn’t help it — I began to cry. He was in so much pain and so scared and the ass had been going through all this alone. At least he had his sister. And Frankie. But it wasn’t something I could fix. Even though I knew there was more that he was holding back, his silence had been broken and I knew that I could talk to him openly and that made all the difference in the world. As soon as he saw the first tear fall, John opened his arms and I flung myself across the loveseat.

“No matter what the future holds, I’m not giving up anything,” I whispered. “A life with you is my happily ever after.”