Page 34 of Fluffed and Folded

“You showed up in my bedroom again,” he started.

Slowly, her eyes traveled around the room, taking in her surroundings. “Your bedroom is a hospital now?”

“I’ve been doing some decorating,” he said. He realized it was probably the wrong time for humor, but it had been his go-to defense mechanism so long he didn’t know how to survive without it. And he was relieved to see Darby’s shoulders relax slightly as a smile tugged the edge of her lips.

“It’s less sterile than it was before,” she said, smiling wider when he snorted a laugh.

“Ouch. Just for that, I’m stealing the pudding off your tray, as soon as it gets here,” he threatened before leaning forward to rest his fingers on her forearm. “You collapsed.”

Her brows rose, confused all over again.

“You showed up in my room and collapsed. It was very traumatizing for me. In the future, please refrain from causing me so much worry.” His fingers rubbed a soothing little trailon her forearm. “The good news is that they figured out what’s going on with you, what’s been causing all your confusion and blackouts.”

Her wide eyes widened impossibly farther. “How did they diagnose my crazy while I was unconscious?”

“It’s a really good hospital,” Eli said. He took a breath. “Do you want to wait for the doctor to explain it, or do you want me to mansplain, cobbling together a dumbed down version of what I was able to understand?”

She rested her hand on his. “Obviously I want you to mansplain it. Bonus points if you’re condescending and abrupt.”

He latched his thumb over her hand and gave it a squeeze. “You have this weird kind of tumor on your ovary. Sort of an alien thing, it’s been secretly communicating with your brain and telling it to do crazy things. They don’t think it’s cancerous, they’re going to have to operate, they’ll take an ovary and a fallopian tube. If my knowledge of female anatomy is correct, you’ll either regrow some new ones or you have more than one.”

Her lashes fluttered and she swallowed hard, but she didn’t look panicked. “So…so there might be a physical reason I’ve been acting weird? I’m not crazy?”

“Not any more than the other people we know,” he assured her. “Maybe less than Mack, who tried to snap secret photos of my teeth when I wasn’t looking.”

She laughed and groaned, pressing a hand to her midsection.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, concerned.

“I’m not sure if it hurts or if the alien tumor is tricking my brain into believing it hurts,” she said.

“Heads up, I think your doctor has a diagnosis crush on you. Whatever this is called, it seems pretty rare. He’s probably holed away somewhere, practicing his weird disease of the year acceptance speech.”

“If he doesn’t thank my weird tumor by name, I will be personally offended,” she said.

“You should sue,” he said.

She nodded her agreement, then paused. “Maybe I’d better wait until they operate, so they don’t mess it up on purpose to punish me for being litigious.”

The moment of levity faded when she took a deep breath and faced him. “I’m so sorry that I apparently showed up in your room again. At least now I can say the tumor made me do it.”

“If I had a nickel for every time a woman used a tumor as an excuse to sneak into my room in the middle of the night,” he said.

She gave a soft little laugh that faded. “Seriously, though. You don’t have to stay here. This is…” she motioned to the room around them, the one she’d been transferred to at some point in the night. “This is too much, especially given our lack of…knowledge of each other?”

“It’s okay, and I have nowhere else to be,” he said.

“Work?”

“I quit. I’m a fulltime weird tumor wrangler now.”

She laughed and groaned. “Stop it. There is no way you can stay here.Idon’t even want to stay here.” Her eyes drifted around the tiny room and the lostness and fear he saw there pummeled his heart to smithereens.

“Darby, hey, it’s fine. I’m here, let’s work with it.”

She let out a breath and sagged into the bed, a strange mix of relief and mortification. “This is…”

He understood all she left unspoken. This was weird and awkward and embarrassing, but also necessary and right somehow. Someone needed to be there for her, to take care of her. Why not him? At the very least he was her neighbor, and this was the sort of thing neighbors did for each other. “If itmakes you feel better, I’ll let you get my mail the next time I go out of town,” he said.

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