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“Okay, Mom.”

She kissed my head again, smiled affectionately at me, and then left me there, Dad in tow.

I’d closed my eyes to wait for Elliot and Taavi to finish the dishes, but I must have fallen asleep again, because when I opened them, Elliot and Taavi were in the middle of a game of chess on the floor. I made the stupid mistake of trying to turn over to watch, ended up not turning, and also made a rather pathetic groan.

“Did you just try to roll over, dumbass?” Elliot asked me.

“Shuddup,” I grumbled back at him.

Taavi was already on his feet, graceful and smooth. “Did you need help?”

“No,” I muttered, annoyed at myself more than I was at Elliot. “I just forgot.” I was awake now, though. Really fucking awake. Stabbing pain in your side will do that.

Taavi crouched down next to the couch, gently pressing the backs of his fingers to my forehead. I batted his hand away.

“I’m not sick,” I grumbled.

Taavi frowned. “You’re warm,” he replied.

“Your hands are just cold.”

“My hands aren’t cold,” Taavi replied.

“Does Val have a fever?” Oh good, now Elliot was involved in this conversation.

“Yes,” Taavi answered.

“No, I don’t,” I put in.

And then Elliot’s fingers—slightly cool—were also on my head. “Yes, you do, dumbass. Shit.”

And that is how I ended up being loaded into Elliot’s truck on my way to Urgent Care on Christmas Eve while my parents—their phones off like good Christians—went to church.

Elliot left them a note on the door.

Fortunately, we made it back first, because there were only a couple other people at the Urgent Care—somebody who’d fallen on the ice and broken an arm and somebody else who’d had an anaphylactic reaction to something in the family potluck. Been there, done that. Hopefully I wouldn’t be back here tomorrow.

And inspection of my stitches led the Urgent Care doctor to pronounce it mildly infected, but nothing a week of antibiotics wouldn’t solve.

“It’s good you came in right away,” he told me, which garnered a soft snort from Taavi. “You’ll be just fine, but a few more days of this spreading, and it could have been a lot worse.”

Then he looked away from me to Taavi, studying my slightly self-righteous boyfriend over the tops of a pair of reading glasses. “You’re to thank for him coming in?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Keep an eye on it—check the wound every morning and night, make sure he takes the antibiotics three times a day, and keep an eye on his fever. If there’s more redness, puss, or swelling, we need to see him back. If the fever doesn’t at least start to go down within 24 hours, bring him back. And if both aren’t cleared up in five days, bring him back. Got it?”

“Yes.”

I sighed. “Can we not tell Mom?” I asked, as Taavi walked with me back to the lobby where Elliot was waiting.

“Will she be home yet?” he asked me.

I looked at my watch. “Probably not.”

“Then I leave that decision to you.” He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t going to argue with me about it.

“What are we leaving to him?” Elliot asked, standing up to head back out to his truck with us.