Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

Nathan was crosser than I’d ever seen him. He was no longer really even
talking to me.
I ran for the fan.
It took almost forty minutes for Will’s temperature to return to an acceptable
level. While we waited for the extra-strong fever medication to take effect, I
placed a towel over his forehead and another around his neck, as Nathan
instructed. We stripped him down, covered his chest with a fine cotton sheet, and
set the fan to play over it. Without sleeves, the scars on his arms were clearly
exposed. We all pretended I couldn’t see them.
Will endured all this attention in near silence, answering Nathan’s questions
with a yes or no, so indistinct sometimes that I wasn’t sure if he knew what he
was saying. I realized, now I could see him in the light, that he looked really,
properly ill and I felt terrible for having failed to grasp it. I said sorry until
Nathan told me it had become irritating.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You need to watch what I’m doing. It’s possible you may
need to do this alone later.’
I didn’t feel I could protest. But I found it hard not to feel squeamish as
Nathan peeled down the waist of Will’s pyjama bottoms, revealing a pale strip of
bare stomach, and carefully removed the gauze dressing around the little tube in
his abdomen, cleaning it gently and replacing the dressing. He showed me how
to change the bag on the bed, explained why it must always be lower than Will’s
body, and I was surprised at how matter-of-fact I was about walking out of the
room with the pouch of warm fluid. I was glad that Will wasn’t really watching
me – not just because he would have made some sharp comment, but because I
felt that me witnessing some part of this intimate routine would in some way
have embarrassed him too.
‘And that’s it,’ Nathan said. Finally, an hour later, Will lay dozing, lying on
fresh cotton sheets and looking, if not exactly well, then not scarily ill.
‘Let him sleep. But wake him after a couple of hours and make sure you get
the best part of a beaker of fluids into him. More fever meds at five, okay? His
temperature will probably shoot up again in the last hour, but nothing more
before five.’
I scribbled everything down on a notepad. I was afraid of getting anything
wrong.