Teach Me How To Love [mxmxm]

XXV

[Third Person]

Jae couldn't think of a worse week than the one he had just gone through for his drug detox at the hospital. The simple fact was that he was in discomfort the entire time. The open wounds of the lashings were wrapped in bandages all around his torso, leaving him to lay face down in his bed if he weren't sitting. To make it all worse, there were no proper showers, just being washed down with a sponge.

The first night, Jae woke to cold sweats and nightmares that mixed his memories with the dark subconscious of his brain, unable to go back to sleep. He found himself covered in cold sweats the entire day, hands trembling, eyes unable to stop flitting between the closed hospital room door and the large glass window beside him as if guarding them himself.

The night nurse came in to close her shift to find her patient sitting up pin straight in bed, eyes positioned on the door when she walked in, fists gripping the sheets until they wrinkled and crumpled underneath the pressure.

The second day, unbearable nausea overtook Jae. What felt like every other hour had him vomiting. The simple smell of the food that Yun noona brought to his room entertained the dry heaves that tried to empty the contents of his stomach onto the sheets. That day was almost the shittiest. Unable to push down any food for fear that it would come back up after it happened the first time, Jae stuck to drinking liquids instead of eating. Instead of feeling any better, migraines overtook his head and the constant throbbing in his head made for a short fuse and unbearing demands to just give him the drug again to make it all go away when he had finally reached desperation's short rope.

Unwelcoming and unhealthy, anyone who crossed paths that day with Jae regretted it.

The next couple of days, the vomiting lessened gradually but the consistent tremors that racked his body never stopped. The long nights filled with attempts to sleep only to be thwarted by nightmares and harsh awakenings left deep bags under Jae's eyes.

His head pounded from a lack of food, and his body felt the heaviest it had ever been, like he had lead limbs weighing in at a ton each, his eyes were dry as he tried to keep awake, and in some strange manner, it felt like he could hear his heart pounding rapidly without control in his brain while it felt like it would leap right out of his chest.

Reintroduced to soups while he neared the end of his week's stay, the nausea slowly went away, the tremors—in his imagination—improved just the slightest, but the waves of cold sweat and burning never stopped once. Finally, the headaches went away once he began to eat again.

"Are you excited to be discharged?" Miyeon, the night nurse who had been assigned to him, asked him excitedly as she finished washing him down for the last time.

Jae followed her lead obediently while she sat him up to change bandages. "Well, I won't have you to wash me down anymore. I don't know what I'll do."

Miyeon laughed and began to disinfect the many open wounds on my back. It had already been a week, but the withdrawal and the size of the wounds left Jae's body slow to recover. She watched Jae's body language closely for any sign that she was hurting him or for any sign to take a break from disinfecting the large wound that spanned nearly the entirety of his back, but as she learned the first time she had changed his bandages, Jae's tolerance for pain allowed no slip in his expression for the signs of pain and discomfort to come through.

Miyeon was always curious about a boy so young coming in with drug withdrawals, wounds large enough to make grown men cry out in agony, and a large company CEO taking charge of his bills.

But she never once inquired about it.

If the last week of her night shifts had said anything about the boy, it was that his past was nothing easy. She remembered every night, without fail, that he would watch her as she walked through the door to check his vitals, watching as if guarding himself from anyone who came into the room. She recognized the dark circles underneath his red-lined eyes, an indication of his restless nights.