Theodore decker x Boris pavlikovsky OneShots

🌈Boreo🌈Oh, Sweet Nuthin' by ninety6tears

Familial connections notwithstanding, in my mind she was still just Mrs. Barbour; too late to go back on old habits. Too late for any of us. Those final months I associated her skin with something paper-white as the sea of her breathing got more and more fragile, when it felt like I'd been holding her hand for months as it thinned and thinned down to the pronounced bone.

I was reading to her from one of her favorite novels-or I think it was one of her husband's favorites, something that eased her into that final paragraph with a refrain from the past-on the night that one of the hospice nurses advised we start upping her doses. One night after she'd gone far asleep I caught the nurse out on the balcony smelling like weed and asked him for a bit of a share. He could hardly say no after being caught out by one of his employers; we made a strange sort of small talk about where he'd gotten it, how cold it was, and inevitably, how she was doing.

"When this is over," Kitsey said later, her purse folded in her lap while I changed the channels on the living room television, "I'm going to need a break."

She was wearing white cashmere that whispered along your fingers and I kept brushing my hand at the edge of the long scarf without really thinking about it. When this is over. Her living and breathing of euphemisms would have been an obscenity if my pain was supposed to be anything compared to hers.

"I'm thinking the French countryside. At least a couple weeks." When I didn't say anything, she said, "I figured you'd have your own things to do."

I took a second to organize my tone. "What's his name?"

She was tense but not exactly high-wire giving a shit, not caught-out. Her pout seemed imploring to someone or something other than me. "Why do you have to ask that?"

I didn't quite shrug, just shook my head and went softer, even though something inside of me had felt hard as tin all day long. "I like this," I said, mock-conversational.

It took her a second, because she hadn't even noticed me touching her clothes. "Stop." I'd been winding it around my hand a couple times, and she was pulling it back, irritated. She looked down and a moment passed through us in freeze frame: the only movement was the tinsel catch of light from her mother's little Christmas tree twinkling against the loose helix of her carefully waved hair. There was some gray in it, premature for her years; I sometimes pinched them up as carefully as you'd lift a needle when she was sleeping next to me in the morning, but other than that the porcelain picture of her barely seemed to have aged much within the past ten or so years. Something about the clarity of her features made for the effect of being smudged instead of pronounced, like her appearance had the effect of a blinding headlight. I didn't understand how I had come to find her beauty, of all the problems I could have had about her, one of the most unnerving things of all.

Then she moved up, brisk and forgetful. I knew she'd take the cab to our apartment, get a few hours of sleep, and come right back around lunch the next day. She seemed to only spend the night here when I was already home. I said I'd see her then, stretching out on the couch. With her eyes still glassy with other thoughts, I was relieved of her annoyance enough for her to give me the briefest peck on her way out.

The nurse jumped me awake in the middle of the night when he dropped something in the bathroom. Briefly I got up: sleepwalker's urgent daze, somewhere I had to be, and then only seconds later I was lucid enough to not want to be and dropped down on the couch, shivering a little but too tired to get up to do anything about it.