#ericaboyd

She can barely hear the groan that leaves her mouth as she struggles to sit up. Her phone’s alarm is trilling, and she absently thumbs it off before she brings a hand to her forehead. It feels a bit warm, and the rest of her body is covered in drying fever sweat. Even as she makes note of that fact, a shiver runs through her body, and she immediately collapses back against her pillows and pulls her blankets up to her chin.

She could probably make it through her three classes if she absolutely had to, but she hasn't missed a single class all semester, and she’s pretty sure it would be more beneficial to her and to her classmates if she stayed at home in bed and didn’t spread the germs any further.

Thankfully, the small bed on the other side of the room that belongs to her roommate Kira is already empty, the blankets balled up at the foot of the mattress. It’s a Tuesday, which means that she won’t be back until the afternoon, which means that Erica may be able to actually get some more sleep.

Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll be able to simply sleep the damn cold off in time to make it to her four o’clock class.

She drifts into a fitful doze, punctuated by alternating bouts of sweating and chills. During one of those bouts, the sound of her phone chiming manages to make its way through her blocked ears, and she gropes out for her phone, eyes half-closed.

She has a few missed emails and Facebook notifications, but she swipes all of them off the screen in favor of the single text waiting for her.

Boyd, 9:46 a.m: everything alright? I can’t remember the last time you skipped

Even though she feels about three times worse, since she now has a sore throat on top of everything else, Erica can’t help but smile. They’ve been best friends since freshman year of high school, when he was one of the only people who actually tried to help when she had a seizure, who glared down the other students whenever they made jokes in the hallway or muttered comments behind her back.

(He’d never said anything to them directly, but by sophomore year, Boyd had towered well over six feet and weighed over 200 pounds, most of it muscle, and one look, the threat implicit in his dark eyes, had been enough to shut most people up.

This was despite the fact that Boyd was one of the most gentle people Erica had ever encountered, would rather do just about anything than hurt someone willingly, but the rest of the school, the people who taunted her relentlessly, didn’t need to know that.)

Even though she just wants to shut her eyes again, she quickly sends a response; if she doesn’t, he’s bound to get worried and, quiet as he may be, as much as he may play his emotions close to his chest, when Boyd is worried about one of his friends, he hyper-focuses on it, to the point of it detracting from his own life. It’s just one of his many mannerisms that Erica cherishes, that prove just how much he cares about the people he lets in.

It’s one of the many reasons she has been in love with him for as long as she can remember.

Erica, 9:48 am: yeah, i’m okay. just sick. some kind of cold from hell.

She drops her phone onto her clammy chest and sighs, pushing loose strings of hair away from her face. She tries not to think about her feelings for Boyd often; she’s always been good at compartmentalizing, and she decided long ago that it was not worth losing his friendship to bring up the possibility of them dating, a possibility that he’s never broached either.

Some days, the feelings are harder to ignore than others. On most days, however, they simply simmer away quietly in the back of her mind, easily within reach, but also easy to shove away.

Boyd responds again before she can slip back into a nap.

Boyd, 9:52 a.m: it’s going around campus. be right there.

She only momentarily thinks about telling him not to bother, but she knows that it won’t do any good. So she simply fires back an acknowledgment, tosses her phone beside her, and closes her eyes once more, wincing when she swallows, the pain sharp as daggers.

If she ever finds out who exactly passed her the germs that made her sick, she is going to personally kill them.

She dreams briefly, vividly and incoherently, before the sound of a firm knock on the door rips her awake again. Although the door is no more than ten feet away, the distance might as well be the length of a football field, and Erica has to divide the journey into steps. She starts by summoning the energy to peel her blankets off and toss them towards the wall. Getting her feet onto the floor is a feat, and in order to cross the room to the door, she has to stop three times, holding onto various pieces of furniture so that she doesn’t slump to the ground. Once she does make it to the door, she flicks the lock and stumbles back to bed, yelling it’s open over her shoulder.

As Boyd shoulders the door open, she pulls herself back up on the mattress. She desperately wants to lay back down and fall asleep again, but doing that without so much as a hello seems super rude, so she stays sitting up while Boyd closes the door with his foot. There are two plastic bags hanging from the fingers of his right hand, while the left is wrapped around a take-away cup with steam pouring from a slot in the lid.

“Brought you tea,” he says, finding a space for the cup on her crowded bedside table. “You probably can’t smell it, can you?” Erica inhales as deeply as possible and smells absolutely nothing.

“No,” she sighs, shaking her head and coughing. “Can barely hear too.”

“You definitely have whatever is going around campus then,” Boyd says, and although Erica is sure his deep, rumbling voice is at normal conversational level, it sounds more like a murmur to her. He starts pulling items from his bags, piling them on Erica’s table and, when that runs out of space, placing them beside her on the bed; cough drops, a few tins of loose leaf tea, a brand new container of vapor rub, a bottle of red medicine that looks thick and syrupy, and a small bag of salt and vinegar chips. Erica picks up the last item and shakes it slightly, chips rattling inside the crinkly bag.

“What’s with the chips?” Boyd’s broad shoulders raise in a shrug as he drops a small stack of DVDs beside her.

“My mom swears by them. Says the salt helps your sore throat. If you don’t wanna eat them, I will.” The last item he pulls from his bag is a bottle of water, and he twists the cap off before handing it to her. It feels like she’s swallowing around razor blades, but being dehydrated is only going to make her feel more like crap, so she winces her way through half the bottle before she swaps it out for her tea.

When she presses her nose right against the hole in the cup, she can just barely smell peppermint.

“You don’t have to stay, you know,” she says, carefully drawing her legs up into bed so that she doesn’t knock anything to the floor. “I don’t want to pass this to you.”

“I have the immune system of an ox,” Boyd says solemnly. His face remains straight for less than five seconds before it cracks into a smile; not the closed-mouth one he usually shows to people, but a wide one, showing his teeth, the one he reserves for his closest friends, for her. “It’s fine. Half my chem class is already sick, and Liam and Isaac have gone through it. It’s only a matter of time at this point.” He shrugs again before he crosses the room and grabs her laptop from her desk. “What do you wanna watch first?”

She sifts through the pile and hands him a comedy that she’s seen more times than she can count, something that will be easy enough to fall asleep to. While he sets it up, she rearranges his supplies into a pile at the end of the bed and pops back two lemon cough drops, nudges them into her cheek. She keeps one hand wrapped around her tea, although it’s still so hot that she suspects it’ll be awhile before she can actually drink it.

The bed is narrow, and in order for them to fit, Erica has to roll onto her side and tuck herself against Boyd, who drapes one heavy arm around her shoulders. It feels like curling up beside a warm fire, although she’s sure that as soon as the fever spikes again, it’s going to feel like lying on simmering coals.

“Thanks for coming over,” she mumbles around the melting cough drops, dropping her head down against his chest. “You’re the best. You know that, right?”

“You’ve said that before,” he replies, a laugh huffing from between his lips. “But I don’t mind. This is what you do for people you love. You look after them when they need it.” It’s far from the first time he’s said I love you, and Erica stopped hoping that it meant more a long time ago, but part of her, the part that she’s never been to completely cut out despite the confident exterior she shows the world, still twinges in pain.

“Love you too,” she answers, passing him her tea so that he can put it aside for the time being, laptop swaying where it’s balanced across their thighs. “I honestly don’t know what I would do without you.” She expects him to mumble something self-deprecating, or maybe just huff again and go back to watching the movie. Instead, he suddenly goes tense, and Erica’s stomach, one of the few parts of her that actually doesn’t feel gross or in pain, drops.

Before she can ask if she said something wrong, Boyd leans up, sets the laptop on the floor with the movie still playing, and rolls over, until he’s on his side facing her, dark eyes impossible to read.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks, hands drawn up close to his chest.

Erica’s stomach drops again, and she nods, tilting her head down slightly so that she isn’t breathing her germs directly onto his face.

“Yeah. Of course.” For a long time, he stays quiet, just keeps looking at her as the movie drones in the background. He only moves to carefully brush a lank piece of hair away from her forehead.

“I love you,” he says again, but his voice is different this time, deeper and quieter, the distinctive tone of a secret being confessed, brought into the light. “Have since high school. I’ve almost told you more times than I count, but I didn’t want to change things between us. And if you don’t feel the same way, things don’t have to change. You are my friend first, and that matters more to me. Okay?”

It’s the longest Erica has heard him say in one go in a very long time. Possibly ever. But it’s still short and succinct, doesn’t ramble on like some of the love confessions she has overheard, and if it were under any other circumstances, if she wasn’t sick and exhausted and gross, she would simply close the space between them and kiss him.

Instead, she simply laughs quietly, slides closer and asks, “We're not even dating, and this is the moment you use to tell me that you're in love with me? When I can barely breathe and look like roadkill or something?"

“You don’t look like roadkill,” Boyd says, pushing more hair away from her face, sounding genuinely confused. “And honestly? It just felt like the right time. I don’t know. That’s all I’ve got.” Erica laughs again and shuffles even closer, until her head is tucked underneath Boyd’s chin and her face is pressed into the solid strength of his chest.

“I’ll take it,” she says, letting one arm fall around his waist. “I love you too.” She lets her eyes fall closed, and his head moves, the edge of his chin replaced with the softness of his mouth on top of her head. “Can I kiss you when I’m no longer a plague carrier?”

Boyd snorts and presses a kiss to her temple.

“Yes. Get some rest. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

Erica doesn’t need to be told twice. She’s asleep within minutes, and this time, she actually stays asleep for a long period of time. When she awakes again, shivering slightly, Boyd is right beside her, holding a book in one hand, arm still wrapped around her shoulders.