Healing Gabriel (BoyxBoy)

✠ Chapter Thirty-Eight ✠

Healing Gabriel: Chapter Thirty-Eight

                                                    〒|〒Evan's POV〒|〒

      I was dying.

      Well, not exactly; it just felt like I was. The ache in my throat had refocussed its force somewhere deep in my chest, making it increasingly difficult to breathe whenever I lied down or when my mom forced me to eat or drink something. I hadn't been able to find my appetite, though, so I rarely had to deal with the burden of eating. I barely noticed the ache in my stomach anymore, too preoccupied with the nearly suffocating breathlessness I was overcome with whenever I moved my torso the wrong way. It was like I had forgotten how to breathe, or maybe my body just didn't want me to. I didn't know.

      The only thing I did know was that I didn't have much time left.

      Okay, that was a lie. I didn't know anything that was going on with me, actually. I just couldn't help but get a little melodramatic due to the extreme boredom I was engulfed in, as my mother has refused to let me leave my bedroom unless I had to pee. I was surprised she even allowed me to go to the bathroom by myself and didn't force me to use empty soda bottles.

      Sleep was impossible; anytime I succeeded in finally drifting off, it was only for a couple minutes or so before I would be jerked back to consciousness by the intensely breathless feeling I could only get rid of by sitting up. By the end of the week, I was exhausted with fatigue, smelly from random spells of excessive sweating, and my coughs had turned into lethal wheezes. It was all kind of terrifying, and enervating, and I missed the outside world so much, I missed Gabriel so much, it hurt nearly just as much as the occasional coughs that rattled throughout my chest and produced nasty, frothy sputum.

      Speaking of sputum, that was actually what I was in the middle of hacking up at that very moment. Lots of it, might I add. I heard footsteps from down the hall coming towards my bedroom, and I knew it was my mom. I also knew that if she saw the frothy, mucus-like drips of gooey nastiness coming from my throat, she'd freak out. Especially if she saw the slight red hue of the substance, most likely blood, I noted, as I examined the small blob being cradled in the tissue I held in my hand.

      "Evan, baby, are you alright?" Mom asked, barging into my room and nearly tripping over the many piles of old clothes and wadded up, sputum-holding tissues strewn all over my bedroom floor.

      "Huh?" was all I could muster out, quickly balling up the tissue before she could catch sight of its contents. I tossed the wad at the garbage can across my room, but it missed, just like all the other times.

      "Is your fever coming back?" she asked, taking note of my flushed face. She briefly pressed the back of her hand against my forehead. "You're burning up. I think it's getting worse."

      "I'm fine," I told her, but it came out more like, " 'M f'nn." I reached over for the glass of water she'd left on my nightstand a couple hours earlier and took a sip of it. It was even harder to breathe than before, but I needed something to take the burning sensation away from my throat.

      "Here," she said, grabbing the thermometer from next to where the glass of water had previously been sitting. "Let me take your temperature."

      "No," I whined through tightly sealed lips, tired of the nearly permanent taste of metal in my mouth. She'd taken my temperature at least thirty times in the past two hours.

      "Oh, stop being such a baby and open your mouth, Evan!" she scolded when I began turning my head left to right, right to left, and left to right again and again in order avoid the stick that determined my fate as to whether or not I'd be allowed to go downstairs and watch television or had to stay in bed for another five hours.