Winners Don't Have Bad Days (Watty 2020 Winner, Romance)

39. #HeartRising, January 2019

Daya's room had everything a decent hotel room should offer. There was a king-sized bed, a TV mounted on the wall next to the piece of a local art, and a fridge. Stuffy curtains blocked out Saint John, New Brunswick, the host city of the Canadian Nationals. The radiator purred, filling the air with the smell of burning dust.

She wished she could have spent more time with Shanti, but her sister was in a hurry to wrestle the twins to bed. The kids were overflowing with the excitement of traveling by an airplane for the first time, and Daya could see the melt-down incoming. She felt a bit guilty for not being on hand for it, but a bit relieved too.

Stretch, meditate, and sleep, Daya ordered herself. Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at one's shaking hands didn't count as prep for competitions.

Just then someone knocked at her door, not loudly, but not uncertainly either. Whoever it was, they wanted to see her. Insisted on it.

Her first thought after she peeked through the tiny spy window in the door was, That's why Shanti was in such a rush. Only Shanti could have given him her room number.

"Mike!" 

The lock was standard, but it gave her trembling fingers some trouble. She buried her face in his chest before he could finish a single step, but somehow they stumbled inside and shut the door.  He leaned against it, letting her wrap her arms around his waist. His heart reverberated in her ears.

"Mike..."

She could feel his lips tracing her hair and forehead. It was heavenly. Finally, she tore her face away from the soft wool with the familiar smell of soap, preparing to kiss the hell out of him. But before that divine clash could take place, she actually saw him, and every suppressed worry flooded back in.

"Oh, gods, it wasn't just a food poisoning, was it?" she gasped. At a guess, he'd lost over fifty pounds. Maybe if she did not know him when he was soft-chinned and pink-cheeked, she wouldn't have noticed how strangely elongated his face became, how his cheekbones protruded, and how the shadows around his eyes and his nose sharpened. It was like someone increased contrast on a photo.  

The incurable diseases crowded one another out of her brain in a flash.

"Mike, what's wrong with you, and why didn't you tell me?"

He collected her to his chest again with a content sigh, driving her anxiety through the roof. 

But before she broke into tears and started shaking the truth out of him, he spoke softly, "What floored me first, back in Edmonton, was a norovirus. Then, because of me going off my rocker and binging just before I got ill, I plunged down the hellhole of throwing up whenever I ate more than a few bites. At first, I thought the virus was keeping me sick, or that my gag reflex was out of whack."

Daya walked her fingers to his jaw and caressed his face. She was trying to put everything she had felt in the last year in this one light touch.

"Then I caught myself shaking when I watched someone eat, both hungry and terrified to touch food. I took myself to see a counselor... I'm recovering, but my eating issues will not go away completely. I might regain every ounce I'd lost, I might relapse into bulimia, there's no telling. It's a day by day thing."

Daya whimpered with relief: her fears were getting the best of her. Mike's health was something to fight for, and she could do that all life long. "Why, oh why didn't you call?"

"At first I didn't feel that baby, I'd been puking a lot, wanna come nurse me?  was a terrific pickup line. Then I stopped caring how pathetic it would be, and all I wanted was for you to be with me."