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It's close to noon on Sunday when you finally wake up.
She had burrowed into your side sometime around four-thirty once most of the tears and hiccups had subsided, and now she was half-hidden behind the hood of your Washington State sweatshirt. The gray sky become lighter but refused to let the sun poke its way through the clouds. When you open your eyes you're met with a curtain of dark brown hair obscuring your vision.
If it was possible, the two of you, who rarely got along on a good day, were closer than you ever thought physically possible. Sometime during your sleep, you had shifted down, or she had shifted up and you'd lost a pillow or two. There was some entanglement of limbs near the end of your bed and linked fingers stretched out to your side, and you couldn't be more comfortable.
With forehead against temple, you can feel the beginning of a fever coming on for the younger girl when she shuffles just that little closer. If you move, because your self-confessed sickness cure is in the kitchen, there is a guarantee that you'll wake her up. And after the last emotionally draining twenty-four hours, you decide that sleep is probably the best thing for her.
At least, she wasn't crying.
It takes you a moment before you fully extract yourself from her grip and you mentally remind yourself to thank your father silently for shutting your curtains last night because the lightening was distracting you. Standing next to your bed, you can see a bright red nose peeking out from behind the wall of hair and the side of the hood. You press an umpteenth numbered kiss to her forehead, grab your thickest dressing gown and disappear into the hall.
You're halfway through with making something to eat for both of you when her voice sounds from behind you along with a few sniffles. You turn startled, even though you know she is the only other person in the house – your father had left for work several hours before according to the note on the fridge.
"You said you weren't going anywhere," she whispers hoarsely.
"I figured that I would get the essentials and come back up. You're getting sick," you say with a small smile.
With tousled hair, red rimmed eyes and a serious case of the sniffles, she looks smaller than usual. She's tired and exhausted but it will only get worse if she doesn't eat something, so when she says that she's not hungry, you feel like a parent bartering with a child on how many bites they have to eat before they can leave the table.
You manage to compromise on half a piece of toast and a cup of your all-sickness-curing honey tea before she looks a shade closer to normal than she does pale. Leaving the dishes in the sink, you round the centre island and hug her from behind.
It was an automatic response to her sinking into the embrace and nibbling on your piece of peanut butter toast. Your lips met her neck, purely for comforting reasons. You found the tilt of her head a little surprising, but considering her touchy-feely nature in any kind of intimate situation, it didn't quite shock you.
It made you that little bit more curious when she held up your breakfast so you could take a bite.
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