Six Letter Word [Kaylor]

October 2016 (Part 2)

Recovering from surgery was really, really boring. We watched so many movies and television shows, I thought I would lose whatever brain cells remained after days of narcotics. After about the fourth day, I actually started annoying myself, so I can't imagine how Karlie stood it. The thing was, I did still get tired really quickly, so anytime I tried to do anything, it was like I'd run a marathon instead of washing one load of laundry. I found myself trying to clean the house, but vacuuming one corner of the room and then needing a two hour nap to recover. Karls was still working as I recovered, so Mom would come over and try to entertain me, but she didn't get very far either. I had some success for a day or so painting, since I could do it sitting down, and it was outside of my daily routine. I knitted three scarves, one I even did a cable pattern, just for kicks. I was starting to learn complex origami and had covered the house in folded paper animals one day when Karlie came home from a shoot. She found Meredith lying on her back playing with a folded paper frog, and me, sound asleep with my head on the craft table. She snapped a pic of that and put it on Instagram, part of our collective effort to keep fans in the loop without oversharing.

After my video made the rounds on the internet and the gossip shows, coupled with the candid shots of Karlie and I leaving breakfast, there was a lot of speculation about my diagnosis. We weren't confirming or denying anything, but the general consensus seemed to be that I had either thyroid cancer or some type of lymphoma. A few had guessed some other kind of neck or throat cancer, but because most of those only happen in really old people who've smoked for years, those were pretty quickly shot down by the medical experts of tumblr. I was still mostly staying off the internet and social media other than to toss out some quick posts to show I was alive but still recovering, but people from my team were monitoring, of course, which is how I knew what they were thinking. They said people were handling the Formula 1 cancellation pretty well. Most of the fans who would have made the effort to go there were pretty hardcore, which meant I'd been most afraid of disappointing them, but that also meant that a lot of them were among the most supportive. It was nice to know there was a lot of support out there. I'd hoped there would be, but fans can be fickle. I'd lost a few by coming out, but the ones who stayed were just as fiercely loyal as ever.

She shook my shoulder gently, then laughed at me as I sat up with an origami crane stuck to my cheek. "Morning, Princess Aurora," she joked, as I peeled the crane off and set it on the table.

"What time is it?" I croaked. My voice had improved a little, but it was still prone to cracking and fading first thing after I woke up, and at the end of a long day. This somewhat qualified as both.

She told me it was nearly six, she'd turned in a paper for Aesthetic Justice after a shoot for Swarovski, and she was hungry. To prove the point, her stomach let out a monster growl which made me laugh, then cough, enough that she started pounding my back to try to help me stop. We hadn't been out since our walk to the café days earlier, and she thought the perfect way to break up the boredom would be a nice dinner out. She'd even brought home a new dress for me, with a clutch to match, and although I suspected she'd gotten it from the set, it was sweet that she'd tried to plan something romantic. The dress was a simple wine colored sleeveless sheath dress with a high neck in front but a slit nearly to my belly button, so the neckline would cover the still-intact steri-strips, yet let me feel sexy too. She's pretty awesome like that, always thinking about how I'd feel. I knew we would barely make it through dinner before I got tired, but I really wanted to try for her.

I hadn't worn makeup in days, so I actually kind of enjoyed putting on eyeliner and lipstick, and I pinned my hair into a sort of an up-do to match the sleek style of the dress. Of course, by then I was already pretty tired, just from the effort of getting ready, but I still slipped on a pair of heels for the first time since our wedding weekend and smiled brightly at the gorgeous woman standing in front of me. Her dress was black, tight-fitted on top but flaring from the hip, just the right amount of flirty. Her hair was down and loose around her shoulders, and she looked so incredibly sexy, I was tempted to suggest we skip dinner, until I remembered we still couldn't have sex until after my post-op appointment. I would have to settle for ogling the eye candy for another couple of days. She took my hand and raised it over my head to twirl me around, then pulled me in for a kiss.