Page 39 of Lift Me Up

“Coming,” I tell him, looking in the reflection one more time.

My dark hair is brushed and slicked back, just touching my shoulders from the grow-out from the pixie cut I had a few years ago. My face is make-up free; my eyes are wide with fear but lack the bags under them for the first time in days. Everything about me looks normal until you look underneath all the facade, the clothes. I look down at myself in my oversized beach towel. It hugs my curves but is certainly enough coverage. Fuck it, if I am about to tell him, I might as well show him. Before I lose the nerve again, I hold tight to the knot of my towel, and I go to find Noah.

I find him at my wall unit looking at my vinyl collection—no. He’s reorganizing them. In fact, my living room looks, even smells way better than it did before. Everything is tidy in its place and looks nicer than it ever has.

“Hey, so I’m just wondering what sort of system you used to organize these because it was something out of—oh.” Noah’s reaction is instantaneous; his hands stop flipping and moving around the records, his eyes widen, his lips part, and he gawks. I want to take that as a good sign, but the clutch on my towel is white-knuckled.

“Hi.” I let out in a breathless voice, the smile tugging at my lips.

“Shit, Georgie. You’re gorgeous… and very underdressed.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I say, taking a step closer to him. I see him shift in his crouched position, adjusting the weight on each leg and swallowing hard enough to see his Adam’s apple bob.

“No. Not at all.” He says, voice deep, raspier than before. Breaking his composure.

I take another step forward, this time standing with my knee bent so he sees more thigh, just a peek. I watch his eyes flicker down, then back to my eyes. He licks his lips, swallowing again. His cheeks have gone a delicious shade of pink. “Did you clean my house?”

“I—” He looks around, his cheeks turning darker, a whole new shade of embarrassment. He scratches the back of his head, rubs the back of his neck, “I um… I sort of clean when I sit still for too long… I’m sorry I should have asked, but I knew where everything was, and I didn’t change anything except the records because the order was a disaster⁠—”

“If you’d like to know,” I step closer, “I had it organized by my favourites.”

“Shit, and I just put them all by artist, I’m sorry⁠—”

I kiss him to shut him up, cupping his cheeks in my hand, relishing in the sweet sigh he releases as he melts into my touch, lets me hold him where I want him, lets me kiss him how I want to kiss him. He’s tall, yet he is the perfect height to kiss. I feel myself going to tiptoes, but I feel as if I’m flying. His lips are soft, his mouth inviting, and it would be so easy to let myself lose the nerve again just by kissing him until I can’t breathe. But I have to pull away, keep composure. Tell him everything and see how it all turns out.

“Can we talk?” I murmur softly, feeling his back go ramrod straight. He pulls back, lips still pink from our kiss, eyes searching for answers he won’t find unless he talks to me.

“This isn’t one of those ‘break my heart’ kind of talks, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, tilting my head toward the couch. “Sit with me?”

He nods, rising from his crouch and holding my hand until we settle. He twists his fingers around mine nervously, as if he’s expecting me to tell him something he won’t want to hear. Maybe he won't want to hear this, but he needs to. It’s eating away at me, and he has to know all of me if he really wants this to work. Just like I need to learn everything about him.

“I want to reopen the conversation we tucked away last night,” I tell him, and he visibly relaxes.

“Oh my God,” he clutches his stomach with the hand that’s not in mine. His face is pale in comparison to earlier, and I realize just how nervous he was. We really need to work on communication. “I thought⁠—”

“You thought the worst, I know. Jumping to the most awful conclusion right off the bat is my go-to too. I’m sorry, I should have worded it better.”

He lets out a breath, “I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“I am. Mostly, but I do have something I need to tell you, because it’s a big part of my life and I can’t lie about it forever, especially if we want to continue this,” I gesture between us.

He smiles, “I absolutely do.”

“Okay, then I am going to reiterate what I said last night. No holding back. Full transparency. No judgement. Questions are encouraged and not dumb, even if you think they are. You tell me what you’re thinking, regardless of if you think it will hurt my feelings. Yes?”

He squeezes my hand in reassurance, and it’s then I realize I’m shaking slightly. He nods. “Yes.”

This is it. I suck in a large breath, nodding to myself, and then I let it go. I tell him everything. How when I was younger, I had a spot appear under my right arm in my armpit. How the spot turned into a bump, and the bump hurt. A lot. Like the worst pain of my life. It looked like a pimple but felt like a hot poker inside. I told him how my mom had no idea what it was, how she was concerned when another one came up beside the first.

In the beginning, they never did anything but appear as angry, red bumps that hurt for days and went away and then came back two-fold, much worse, much bigger. She thought maybe they were boils, something that typically came out in the summer and a common problem that ran in the women of the family. She took me to doctors when the spots started coming out on my back as well, and they just told her it was bad acne brought on by puberty. I was eight years old and had only had my period twice at that point because we were all early bloomers. But the fact that I was getting bad acne in a place that wasn’t a typical acne-ridden area for someone so young? My mom refused to stop, she kept fighting for me.

She took me to countless doctors over the next two years, pleading with them to help me. But no one knew what to do. Slews of antibiotics, hormone-altering medications, creams, ointments, trying to lose weight even though at the time I was fairly thin for my age. You name it, I tried it and saw no progression. It wasn’t until I was referred to a dermatologist at ten years old that I was diagnosed with HS. I sound it out phonetically for him because his eyes widen in confusion at the first mention of it.

Hi-drad-uh-NIE-tis soo-pur-ah-TEE-vah. Try and say that five times fast.

I try to tell him everything I can about the illness without overwhelming him. But how can you not be? I tell him that I have been chronically ill for longer in my life than I’ve been healthy. That I missed out on a social life at school due to treatments that required me to drive hours away from home every few weeks, requiring needles. Lots of needles. IVs, injections in my stomach every week, every month. These treatments caused me to gain weight that I couldn’t get rid of, weight that people blamed on eating, though I wasn’t eating like they thought I was and fuck them for thinking that in the first place. They didn’t know anything I tried, everything that failed. That I had had more surgeries than I could count at this point. The hospital stays when flares like the one he just witnessed didn’t go away on their own.