They share morning coffees on speakerphone during their morning commute, until Alex and Thomas realize they have no reason to wait around anymore. Finances aren't an issue and they are already committed to be in one another's lives. They find a big apartment at the end of 2019, just over nine months since Thomas's Urgent Care visit when they first met. They start a Sunday morning tradition of making French toast with vanilla mixed in the egg dip. They take winter walks along Bryant Park for the pop-up holiday shops. They share the hushed awe of a first Christmas Eve, which both agree is much more magical now that they are grown-up kids.
Their first New Year's Eve is when Alex notices a viral video from China of people collapsing with crowds gathering to watch. Thomas dismisses it as a prank to mock the strict media laws and pours Alex another glass of champagne to top their Kir Royales. In just 17 more minutes, it will be 2020, and Thomas wants to taste the fizzy bubbles on Alex's tongue for their midnight kiss.
"How was your day?" Thomas always asks when they're cooking dinner together.
"Listen to how this idiot got himself a sex injury!" Alex howls with laughter before launching into the story. He's usually making them a salad and Thomas always worries he'll slice off a finger with how he waves that chef's knife around like that. Things are good when Alex finds joy in his work, pride in his status, and selflessness in his helping others as an Emergency Room doctor.
Things change. Work becomes more stressful and they both feel burned out, both too overworked. They skip over Valentine's Day entirely, promising they would be more in the mood once work calms back down to a normal pace, once they can catch up on sleep. Conversations eventually devolve into Alex's complaints of exhaustion. He doesn't see the bright spots in his days anymore. They go right to sleep instead of going to bed.
Thomas finally realizes what they're in for in the middle of March. For the first time, he refers to it as a pandemic. He cannot be blind to their reality anymore, even if it was always for Alex's sake. His darling Alex who needed an escape from his all-too-real reality: facing the front lines of being exposed to countless carriers of the virus! Thomas tries so hard to blind Alex to that reality, but he can't ignore it anymore when it's right in his face, right alongside Alex's. Their plans to visit his family in Virginia for Easter are already cancelled, because everything is cancelled.
Alex always took patient deaths personally, so he's quietly crying when fathers die alone, without their children allowed or able to say goodbye. It doesn't matter that the children are grown adults, it's still massively unfair to be forced to grieve like that. He's sobbing when he can't save patients young as ten years old, then young as four just a few days later. They were told children and animals had next to no risk at all of contracting. Alex is inconsolable when friends who are nurses stay home sick but swear they'll be fever-free by the next morning. His colleagues, fellow doctors, test positive for the virus.
Alex insists he cannot be touched. At first, just when he arrives home from work until he's clean enough: clothes bagged for the wash he will start after he runs inside completely naked just to shower. Thomas tries to joke about his naked butt being so irresistible, pumpkin. Alex is too preoccupied for flirting. Soon Alex decides he cannot be touched at all, at any time. It's always too risky. "You can feel fine and actually be sick and then spread it unknowingly because I'm always being exposed, Thomas, always!" Thomas hears the desperate plea for just one hug to make it all better, but Alex stands in his own way of that in the name of keeping Thomas safe and healthy. Both of them are already being exposed daily by being deemed "essential workers," Alex a doctor and Thomas a delivery driver (for pharmacies, ironically, so at least they're both staying employed).
They even sleep on opposite edges of the bed. Thomas did not allow Alex's panic to separate them there. Absolutely not. Their sex life could be non-existent under current circumstances, but not their intimacy. And Thomas explains this through Alex's anger, then tears, and Thomas finally hugs him for no longer than five whole seconds. It is all Alex will allow.
Thankfully, Thomas talks Alex out of building a barrier of all their pillows stacked between them in bed. "Opposite sides are more than enough, Alex. We can just have our feet touch." Logic soothes Alex in these times, and Thomas reassures that respiratory infections don't spread through soles of feet where there's no pulmonary anything that low in the body.
"Pulmonary!? Wow! You've been learning all my words." Alex teases. Thomas breathes a sigh of relief. It's the most back-to-himself Alex has sounded in all this mess.
"I'm a pharma driver, you ass." Thomas smirks. "Time for bed because we are both still working."
Quietly, after a long enough time that Thomas assumes he's already asleep, Alex mumbles "I love you Thomas" into the pillows. Thomas feels just the slightest shift of Alex's foot to rest alongside his own. A quiet snore shortly after that. Thomas can finally relax.
Alex coughs in his sleep.
Thomas doesn't sleep at all.