Third Degree (23 page)

“I know.” I don’t know what else to say. I’ve never taken oral corticosteroids, but I do know the side effects can be very difficult. I comb my fingers through his hair and then lean down and plant a kiss on the side of his neck.

“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” he says. Then, after glancing at the digital clock on his desk, he adds, “Actually, in three hours.”

“I know that, too.” I read it in his medical file. It’s weird that we almost have the same birthday. If things hadn’t been so up and down with us over the past week, I would have suggested a joint party or something.

“I should be out legally purchasing alcohol and getting completely wasted like every other just-turned-twenty-one-year-old.”

“And I should be experiencing college for the first time and not the third. I should be struggling with calculus or biology, struggling to choose a major …” I continue moving my fingers through his hair and bend down again to kiss a part of his shoulder not yet affected by the rash. “But I guess we don’t get to be normal with everything.”

“True.” Marshall gives me that sexy half smile, then raises his head and opens the bottle of pills, popping two into his mouth and washing them down with blue Gatorade. “Happy birthday to me.”

“Wait, I have presents …” I head back over to his bed and dig through the bags, pulling out two items and displaying one in each hand. “Two-ply ultra-soft toilet paper and flushable personal wipes.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Old-people toilet paper and baby wipes. Thanks, Izzy.”

“I thought about Depends, but they weren’t on sale.”

He snatches the toilet paper from my hands and then winds up and throws it at me. “If I felt better, I’d seriously tackle you right now.”

“That could be fun.” I rip open the package of toilet paper and pull out a roll. “I’m totally stealing one of these for the girls’ bathroom. I’m tired of that crunchy generic one-ply shit.”

Marshall stands up, pain flitting across his face from the effort, and moves slowly around the room, gathering his “birthday presents” and clean clothes before heading into the bathroom for a shower. While he’s gone, I get everything unpacked and microwave some chicken noodle soup and set green, blue, and orange Jell-O cups onto the table next to his bed. My first-aid kit is spread across the bed when he returns.

He eyes the scattered medical supplies and freezes in the doorway. “Uh-oh, I sense some dorm room surgery about to happen, and since no one else is around, that must mean I’m the victim—I mean patient.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “You mean like the surgery we did earlier?”

Marshall laughs, a grin spreading across his face. “Okay,
that
wasn’t too bad.”

“I’m looking for topical steroids for your rash.”

“That’s not nearly as interesting.” He joins me on the bed and looks at the Jell-O cups but doesn’t touch them.

I hand him the container of soup and a plastic spoon. “It’s way more liquid than solid.”

He stares down at the bowl in a similar manner as he’d done with the bottle of pills. I finally locate the topical steroid cream and watch Marshall swirl the spoon around, never lifting it to his mouth.

I begin dotting the ointment over each red bump on his back while he continues not-eating. “Just try it. What’s the worst that could happen?”

With a heavy sigh, he lifts the spoon and eats. I feel an immediate rush of relief, seeing actual nourishment entering his body.

The relief lasts exactly one hour.

I think Marshall would have liked to have hidden the details from me, but with the dorm so quiet
tonight, there’s no mistaking the sound of gut-ripping vomiting. As soon as I hear it, I’m on my feet, hesitating at the door of the guy’s bathroom, before charging in. Fortunately, it’s much less disgusting in here than I’d imagined with eight college guys sharing a bathroom. Marshall looks about ten times sicker when he finally emerges from the stall and leans over the sink, splashing water on his face.

“Can you grab my toothbrush?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “Top shelf.”

I reach up and fumble around with the items on the highest of four shelves, feeling for a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. I hand it over and wait for him to finish, then hold his blue towel out for him.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “From now on, I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

“Somehow I doubt you’ll manage that.” He gives me a tiny pained smile, and then his arms are around me and he kisses the top of my head, making the guilt I feel double in size. “I’m not positive it was the soup that sent me in here for a barf fest. The antibiotics upset my stomach.”

We walk back to his room and I’m rolling around a suggestion in my head, the guilt helping to bring me closer to spilling my theory out loud. “Can I go off the record again?”

He rolls his eyes and climbs back into bed. “You’re always off the record with me. I wouldn’t even know the record if it was sitting right in front of me.”

“Okay, then. You don’t really need those antibiotics. Well, you can probably get by without them. There’s only a twelve percent chance of infection, but antibiotics are a standard done for a number of reasons, mostly relating to liability and worst-case-scenario-type things.”

Marshall’s face lights up. “Seriously?”

I nod, not wanting to use any more words to potentially jeopardize my medical reputation, but it’s all completely true. However, I’ve always followed the standard protocol. I never would have considered a patient feeling nauseous as a reason to stop part of the treatment. To me, seven days of feeling sick to your stomach was worth the infection prevention, but I can’t stand the thought of Marshall vomiting again with all that pain in his abdomen already.

He rolls on his side, shivering and pulling the covers all the way up to his neck. “I think if you come over here and lie down with me—preferably after discarding your shirt and pants—I’ll feel way better.”

I burst out laughing but reach down to pull my shirt over my head. “What are you doing to me? I feel like I’m being brainwashed. Is this what you do to girls, Marshall Collins? Some kind of psychological method that induces the urge to do everything you say?”

He reaches for my hand, tugging me down beside him. “Yes, exactly. But usually I’m healthy and can use feelings other than pity to get my way.”

I slip under the covers, bringing myself as close as possible, my leg sliding between his. I
rest a hand on his cheek. “Pity is not something I’ve ever felt before. Including right now.”

“I know I already said this, but I really am glad you’re here.” He closes the gap between our mouths and kisses me, his lips lingering against mine for a few seconds before pulling away. “And I thought you were pretty before, but now that I’ve seen all of you, I’m so turned on right now, I’m gonna be forced into dream sex all night. Not that you need to hear that—I’m sure you know what you look like, Izzy—but I want to make sure it’s me saying it that stands out in your mind and not—”

“Yoshi,” I tease. “Or your brother?”

He laughs. “Jesse would never touch you. He was just testing me last weekend, seeing if I liked you more than I was telling him. He has gifted intuition. Unfortunately.”

I start to work my hands over all the tense muscles in his back. “Go to sleep before you give me more compliments that I can’t handle. I’m really bad with compliments.”

“Hmm,” he says, eyes closing. “Maybe we should add that to Izzy’s Educational To-Do List.”

I wake up in the middle of the night, opening my eyes and staring at Marshall’s bare chest. But it’s the feel of his fingers combing through my hair that truly breaks me from sleep. He’s propped up on his elbow, wide awake and watching me, the glow of the muted TV his only light.

“You talk in your sleep,” he says.

“What did I say?”

He leans down and brushes his mouth across my cheek. “I don’t know. Most of it wasn’t in English.”

“Latin?” That’s the only language besides English that I learned before age ten, so it’s one that I occasionally dream in.

“Maybe,” he says. “It reminded me of your mom in biology. One time we did this assignment where we had to make up our own Latin-sounding creature or combine two species and make a scientific name for it.”

“That sounds like a pointless assignment,” I say laughing.

“It was fun. We were allowed to draw pictures, and it was the only A I got all semester.”

I roll onto my back and look up at his face. “That’s because you’re creative, not scientific.”

“There’s something else I remembered from that lesson.” His face turns more serious. “We were talking about genetic links and which animals were closely related to humans, and
somehow your mom mentioned you being adopted. I seriously didn’t think of this until like an hour ago. The conversation had to do with adapting to your environment, and a bunch of people in my class said that a species couldn’t be moved. And then your mom told us that you lived in Florida and weren’t adopted until you were five, but you adapted to the colder climate easily.”

I give him a strange look, but I can’t help smiling. He’s adorable when he tries to be serious. “She must have forgotten the fact that I had access to things like coats and hats and gloves and indoor heating. So my ability to adapt was dependent on those additional outside factors.”

“You were five when you were adopted,” Marshall repeats, putting extra emphasis on the word five. “All this time, I’d pictured an infant being handed over to a couple wanting a baby. But five? Where were you before that, Izzy?”

The concern in his voice melts my insides. But I have to look away from his face. “Foster care.”

He draws in a breath holding it there for a few seconds. “So your birth mother died, you were sent to a foster home at three months of age, and you stayed there five years?”

“It was a few homes,” I admit. “Eight.”

“Eight homes …” He closes his eyes briefly before reopening them. “Then you were sent to college at twelve, where you had no friends and you hooked up with a professor. Your medical career went all unstable, you come here and it’s hard, your parents decide to get divorced without telling you, and then you find out your birth mother had a history of mental illness and committed suicide.”

“That about sums it up.” My voice shakes, but I hold back the tears. “Thanks for the recap.”

Marshall feels around for my hand and laces his fingers through mine. His mouth finds mine, touching my lips so gently it causes a single tear to slip from my eye. “Why are you so hard on yourself? I can’t believe you’re even as normal as you are, Izzy. What you’re dealing with sucks, and I can’t even imagine what that would be like. I don’t see any reason to blame genetics when you have all these outside factors to explain how you’re feeling.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, allowing a few more tears to leak out. These are tears of relief. It’s the most logical thing Marshall Collins has ever said to me. I don’t think in those patterns. I think in pathological patterns—symptoms plus patient history plus family history equals diagnosis. But this … 
this
makes sense. I swallow the lump in my throat and whisper, “Thank you.”

His lips touch mine again, then a third time, pressing more firmly until he cups the back of my neck with one hand and deepens the kiss. His other hand trails down my stomach and over my panties. I sigh, enjoying it too much, then I reach for his fingers to stop them. “No … let’s
not break you any more than we already have, okay?”

He laughs, but shakes off my grip. “No overexertion. I’m just going to touch you like I’ve been doing for the last hour.”

Has he been watching me sleep and touching my hair for an hour? “Uh-oh, you’re like that stalker vampire dude. I’m not the type to swoon over those behaviors.”

Marshall laughs, his breath tickling my neck, his fingers sliding between my legs. “I couldn’t sleep. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Edward couldn’t sleep, either,” I say, but the words leave my mouth as a gasp. His hands are magical and I don’t even believe in magic. “Those steroids work really fast, don’t they?”

“Yeah, they do,” he admits with a sigh, like those pills are the enemy he’s been forced to become temporary allies with. He kisses up and down my neck. “You smell really good.”