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My heart expands. Not at what he says, but how easily he says it. About himself, about me, and with the same grace and poise he seems to carry everything else.

I take a breath, maybe to tell him so. Or to kiss him. Or to spill something else. I’ll never know, and neither will he. Because in the few thudding heartbeats it takes me to claim that slow inhale, Oscar falls asleep.

12 OSCAR

I wake up in Poet’s bed, but before I can make sense of being naked beneath a blanket I have not seen before, or that he’s wide awake next to me, I realise I’m low. A split second later, rhythm pulses at my wrist, an audible alarm breaking the quiet.

Slowly, I turn my head to face the warning on my watch and the numbers are…not good. My body feels wrong. Heavy and hollow, my thoughts sluggish, hands unsteady, discomfort clawing at my stomach. I need⁠—

“Here.” Poet presses a glass bottle into my shaky hand. “Drink this.”

Apple juice. From Moondust Farm. Distantly, I recognise the label from the gin Poet and I drank the night we met. But the thought fades, gone before I can make much sense of it. And I can’t get the cap off the bottle.

Poet intervenes.

Helps me drink.

Brushes my hair back from my face and wipes my brow with something cool. The room is so dark I can barely make out the shape of him, but I feel his intense focus on every inch of my exposed skin, and I don’t dislike it.

The fog begins to lift. My hands stop shaking and my cognitive function sharpens. The distorted trembling under my skin fades and I’m back in the room.

Poet’s room.

I’m in his bed.

He’s not, but he is at least as naked as I am.

I reach for him.

He takes my hand. “You’re back.”

“I was not gone.”

He doesn’t argue. Just tells me everything I need is on the bedside table. My phone, my insulin kit. More apple juice and snacks.

I let him go only to cement the work the apple juice has already done. The numbers on my watch stabilise, another hypo vanquished swiftly enough that Sol and River won’t worry if they are awake to see the alert. But I’m still annoyed it happened. That I forgot the combined effects sex and summer heat can have on my body.

We didn’t have sex.

I shift on Poet’s bed. I feel like we did, but I don’t have the words for the intimacy he gave me tonight beyond that I’m forever changed by it.

“Does your stomach hurt?”

The question startles me and I realise my free hand has drifted to my abdomen. “Not really.”

Poet leans closer. In the dark, he hasn’t caught my answer.

I repeat it and he waits for me to elaborate.

We’re holding hands again and nothing about the charged companionship we’ve fallen into tonight feels casual. It feels like belonging, and perhaps that’s why I give him another piece of myself I’ve never shared with anyone. “When I was in the hospital, of all that was happening to my body, my stomach hurt more than anything else. For a while, it was the only thing I could feel, so at least I knew I was alive, but the pain…” A shiver rolls through me. “It was so terrible it’s haunted me ever since. High or low, it doesn’t seem to matter, I get this…fear, even though I haven’t felt such pain since, and I do not know how to stop it.”

Poet squeezes my hand. But he is quiet so long I wonder if he’s drifted into his own thoughts. Then he speaks. “I had meningitis when I was fifteen. I don’t remember much about it except music and pain.”

“Music?”

“In the ambulance, maybe.” Poet’s gaze clouds over. “Or the hospital, I don’t know. Just that everything was this discordant, crunching noise, until I realised it was coming from my own skull.”

“Your head?”