In Sickness

By Katie Fitzgerald... (EIC scheduled this story earlier without bio/pic and a glaring typo... This is the corrected version ...)

Two weeks into married life, Dave caught a killer cold, and he couldn’t stop apologizing to Fern. He sneezed during Law & Order, and before Fern could say, “Bless you,” he was saying, “Sorry about that.” At the dinner table, over the chicken soup Fern made especially for him, he had a coughing fit, then finished it up by croaking, “Oops, sorry.” At bedtime, he struggled to get his pillows into a position that didn’t worsen his symptoms and he actually said, “Whoops, pardon me.” He hated that it had only taken a week for him to stop being fun and start being a liability. He had hoped the honeymoon period would last at least a little bit beyond the actual honeymoon.

Pushing back her own covers, Fern propped her head up on one hand. She was staring at him. “What?” He blinked innocently.

“Why are you apologizing for being sick?” she asked gently. Busted. He should have guessed she’d call him out. They had only been romantically involved for a little over a year, but they had been best friends for far longer before admitting their feelings. She literally knew him better than he knew himself.

He shrugged one shoulder. “Because it’s annoying,” he confessed. “We’re newlyweds. We’re supposed to be making out in every room and doing romantic stuff together, and I’m ruining it.”

Fern laughed softly, shaking her head. “Only you would think that the sniffles could ruin a marriage.” She reached for his hand with her free one, tangling their fingers together. “That whole sickness and health thing. Do you think I didn’t mean that?”

Dave scoffed. “That just means, like, you won’t leave me if I get some terrible disease or something.”

“But if you sneeze too much during primetime, I’m outta here!” Fern rolled her eyes.

“You still don’t get it.” She sounded surprised.

Dave piled up the pillows again and laid down on his side, propping his head as best he could and looking into his wife’s face. “Get what?”

Fern slid closer to him. “I love you,” she said, and Dave smiled involuntarily. The years he had spent dreaming of the day she might say those words made that the single most powerful sentence in the English language. “You’re not an inconvenience, or an annoyance, or whatever else goes through your brain.” She kissed his feverish forehead, her lips soothingly cool against his skin. “I love you, boogers and all.”

Dave laughed out loud, stopping only when a cough threatened. “I want to kiss you so badly,” he said in a low voice. “But I don’t want to get you sick.”

Fern smiled, already leaning in toward his lips. “I’ll risk it,” she said. “We are newlyweds after all.”

Her kiss was better than medicine. Hands holding her face, losing himself in her touch, Dave forgot to be sorry about the germs. Later, he shoved the pillows aside, resting his head against her shoulder as he should have all the time.

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Katie Fitzgerald is the author of Library Lovebirds, an ebook collection of bookish romances, and a novel in flash, The Bennetts Bloom. Her short stories and flash fiction appear online at Spark Flash Fiction and Micromance Magazine, as well as in various anthologies. She is a 2024 Sparkie Award recipient for Best Romantic Suspense and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and the Cupid Prize. A graduate of Vassar College and a trained librarian, Katie resides in Maryland with her husband and five kids.