So this has to be carefully timed.

I just need a little help showing her how I feel. The emotions, the need, the drive, is all there. It’s real, more powerful than ever. I just need a little help forcing my body to match my mind, my heart. My body is the weak thing, the failing thing. And I’ll be damned and double damned if I’ll let it slow me down, if I’ll let it stop me from showing my beloved, beautiful wife how much I love her, how much I missed her, how much I need her and want her.

Nope, nope, nope.

So, I take a little blue pill, since I’m only a few minutes from home, and they take a few minutes to kick in.

I’m on our street when I call her. It rings exactly once.

“Hi,” she breathes. “Where are you?”

“Passing the Johnstone’s house.”

She inhales sharply, and there’s a smile in the sound. Not a grin, not a smirk, but that secret smile only I know. A half-curve of the right side of her mouth, eyes narrowing, jade-green eyes luminous and hot. It’s a secret smile just for me that says you have no idea what you’re in for, buddy.

“I just got home from work,” she says.

“Have you showered yet?”

“Getting in right now.”

“Don’t.”

“I smell like—”

“Nadia.” I wait, and she’s quiet; I’m pulling into our driveway. “Just stay where you are, like you are.”

“I have to get work off of me.”

“I’ll do it for you.”

“I don’t want work on you.”

The smell of sickness, she means. The indefinable scent of possible, potentially imminent death. The scent of sorrow, the tang of fear. It’s palpable to her, and it’s why she’s such a fierce zealot about showering the moment she gets home. Protecting me, and our home, from all of it.

“Nadia.”

A sigh. “Okay.”

I feel a desperation right now. I haven’t seen her, or touched her in over a week, and for us, it’s an eternity.

But it’s a desperation borne of…something more. Something else.

Something I dare not, cannot even give name to in the deepest, hidden sanctum of my own mind.

I leave my bags in the car. Bring only one thing: a small velvet box, in my hip pocket. I pinch my cheeks and slap them on the way up the stairs, to put color in them.

I feel the little blue pill working. It’s me, too, though. It’s not that I can’t get hard, it’s that it can be difficult to stay that way, to keep from blowing too soon. The pill just restores some of my former stamina.

Our bedroom door is closed. I smell her: she’s put on perfume. Chanel. A gift for our fifth anniversary.