Gilded Gold ⚭ NH

18 | Worth Your Weight in Gold

113 Days Until

Lia found Mack's hospital room two days after Mack's surgery, an Arby's fast food bag in one hand and a milkshake in the other.

"Look what Chris brought back for me!" she told Mack when she entered, holding up the goodies. The bottom half of her face was covered with a paper mask. "It's been ages since I've had Arby's. Oh. This is for you." Lia handed over the milkshake.

Mack took it questionably. "Is it?"

"Yeah. I asked Chris to get you something sweet," she smiled with a quick wink. "He told me to tell you that if you don't like it, that he would be happy to take it off your hands." She then peered near the back of the room where Jade sat in her wheelchair quietly reading a book. "Oh. I didn't know you had someone here with you. I can-"

Lia started to leave, but Mack stopped her. "You don't have to go. Jade claims to be here for me, but she's really here to see someone else."

"Hey!" Jade protested, but otherwise did not deny it.

Between the two weeks Mack had to spend in the hospital, she had gotten to know Chris pretty well. Not as much as Lia, but enough to maybe, perhaps, consider him loosely as a friend. In fact, during these times spent in the hospital, Jade had been showing up more and more to "visit", but Mack knew better than that. She always came at around seven in the evening when the night people started their shift, which just so happens to be when Chris starts work.

When Mack called her out on it, she confessed.

"He's cute and he treats me nicely," she had told Mack way back when she was first in the hospital. "So I come to see you, but won't shy away to see him."

Mack thought she was aiming pretty low in a relationship if all she was looking for was someone to treat her nicely, but Mack wasn't complaining. Chris seemed to be a good guy.

"So, why are you in here this time?" Mack asked Lia as she took a sip of the milkshake. Nothing came up through the straw except for air and she had to fight a cough that tickled her throat.

"The plague," Lia said easily.

"I want to say that you're joking, but given the world that we live in where vaccines are optional, I just can't be sure."

Lia laughed and adjusted the paper mask over her mouth. "Nah, I have mono this time."

This time Mack laughed. "Who've you been kissing?"

"No one, unfortunately. Just the luck of the draw and these dang white blood cells. Or lack thereof." Then she looked Jade up and down. "What about you? What do you have?"

For as long as Mack knew Jade, no one has flat out asked her why she was in a wheelchair before. People either skirted around saying the actual words, or just didn't ask at all and kept to their assumptions. Mack figured Lia didn't beat around the bush because she more than likely had every illness known to man. At least twice. Lia probably preferred bluntness over speculation.

Jade didn't seem taken back by her bold choice of words, and only smiled at her. "I have limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. My muscles in my thighs are weakened and it makes it hard for me to walk."

"I like your wheelchair," Lia replied, stepping closer to get a better look. "It's tricked out."

And it was. This time instead of flowers, she had gotten creative and weaved pink, purple, and yellow yarn through the wheels in a circular floral pattern that wound up over the handles. And because Jade liked to keep thinks consistent, she also had the same colored ribbons weaved in her braided blonde hair.