Always Only You by Chloe Liese (z-lib.org).epub

He’s like a kid right now. Wide-eyed and deeply sincere. I let myself stare at
his features, knowing he probably won’t remember. His hand holding mine feels
oddly familiar. It’s warm and heavy, the scrape of his callouses soothing my
skin.
“You need a masky thing-a-ma-bob. I have a fever. And I keep touching you.
And breathing near you. Dr. Amy!” he hollers.
“Ren.” She laughs. “Right here, buddy. What’s up?”
“This here Francesca is…” He frowns. “Ah, I can’t think of the word right
now. But it means her medicine makes her body very friendly towards the
germs. She needs something so she’s safe from my plague.”
Amy grins at me, then directs herself to Ren. “While that’s very considerate
of you, I’m confident your fever isn’t due to anything plague related. When I
was assessing you, I noticed signs of a sinus infection. Remember, I told you I
was going to give you some antibiotics?”
He stares at her. “I do not remember that.”
She pats his good arm. “That’s because you got your head knocked nicely.
You told me you’d had a cold recently, and I told you it seems like you
developed a secondary bacterial infection in your sinus cavity from it. That’s
why you’re fevered.”
He squints at her one-eyed. “Can you maybe condense that to smaller words?
I’m not following.”
“What I mean to say is,” she says gently, “that you aren’t contagious. You
won’t get Frankie sick.”
“Oh, good.” Ren sighs and lets his eyes fall shut. “So, she can keep holding
my hand, then, and I won’t give her the plague.”
“I should go anyway,” I tell him. “Time for you to sleep, Zenzero.” Slowly, I
start to pull my hand away, but Ren clamps down on it, and his eyes pop open.
“That’s it. That’s what I wanted to ask you.” He tries to sit up and falls back,
grimacing. “Forgot about that,” he groans.
“Easy. You know I’m always around. We can talk tomorrow.”
“No.” He stares at me seriously. “I need to know this. What does zenzero
mean?”
A hot blush floods my cheeks. I clear my throat self-consciously. Amy’s
loitering near the door on her phone, and she’s entirely within earshot. The last
thing I need is her giving me shit for this. “Well, it’s silly,” I say, lowering my
voice. “It’s just Italian nonsense.”
“Nonsense.” He frowns. “You call me nonsense?”
“Dammit, Bergman. No,” I whisper. “It means ginger, okay? Because
you’re…” I wave my hand in the general vicinity of his face. “You’re a ginger.