Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
She is nearly as uncomfortable when she wakes as she was immediately before she went unconscious. In Heather's opinion, the only thing worse than being sick is finding out that you are sick in someone else's house. Sadly, she has previous experience with this phenomenon. She had to be fetched home at two o'clock in the morning from a birthday slumber party once when she was seven. The infamy of that moment had haunted her well into high school. The echoes of the familiar haunt her now - shifting around in discomfort that is only further cemented by the strangeness of the bed where you find yourself. The only thing worse is to realize that it is a stranger that is pulling your hair back for you as you throw yourself over the side of the strange bed in a desperate attempt to reach for the trashcan. Gail Green has never been anything other than perfectly polite to her, but that doesn't do anything to make the circumstances less unpleasant (no one really wants a stranger hovering over them when they are ill).
Luckily or not, depending on how you look at it, Heather is less than at full mental capacity for the first few hours of her residence in the Green household. She thinks she passes out again, but it may be that she is just that exhausted and dehydrated from the rounds of nausea that she can't focus well enough to determine whether she is awake or not. She thinks she hears a voice at one point saying something about fluids and things running their course, but she is too focused on trying to make her straying thoughts stick together well enough to form a plan for getting her out of what she assumes must be a guest room and back to her own place as quickly as possible.
She actually doesn't realize that she had made an attempt at acting on those plans until she realizes that Gail is half supporting her as she helps her back to the bed where she had originally woken. She knows she hears the word stubborn crossing the older woman's lips and is almost certain that the sound of it is tinged with amusement rather than aggravation.
When she is next solidly awake (and by that she means when she is awake and her thoughts are functional enough that she feels like she is actually processing things instead of just flowing with gut instinct reactions), she still feels like her stomach is churning (although what could possibly be left in there to churn is beyond her ability to fathom). Her head is still in that state of could use a few good drinks of water fuzzy, but she can tell she is on the upswing side of whatever it is that she has contracted. She likely needs to curl up into a ball and sleep for the next day or so to get the dregs of everything out of her system, but she has no intention of doing that anywhere other than her own bed.
"And I thought it was hard getting Johnston to stay in bed when he had the flu," a voice tells her with that slightly amused tone still running through it from somewhere over by the door. Gail is leaning against the frame watching her as she attempts to tie the laces on her tennis shoes (they were luckily within leaning reach, Heather hasn't quite worked up to standing yet although she is busy running a mantra of how she can do this in the back of her head).
"Just a stomach bug," she replies before she considers anything better (or more polite) to say in response. The other woman clucks her tongue and shakes her head at her.
"Oh, I know," Gail tells her. "I've been hearing that quite a few of the children in town have been in a similar state - a twenty four hour thing apparently."
"You're supposed to be immune to everything after your first couple of years of teaching," Heather replies with a sigh as she realizes that the reason she is having so much trouble tying her shoes is because her head still thinks the room is spinning around her. She is definitely dehydrated. She should do something about that. She leans back for a moment to let her head clear and loses an undetermined amount of time again when she falls back to sleep.
She has always thought of Gail Green as a nice woman. She has always been here, there, and everywhere pitching in with community projects and volunteering places and organizing things. Heather has never spent any real one on one time with the other woman, but her newcomer status to the town (which she has been told will remain with her far past the three years she has spent teaching and carry over until at least her first crop of students that she taught have become the people sitting across from her at her desk at parent/teacher conferences) gives her what she thought was a fairly unbiased view of a helpful woman who was well respected in the community because of her sincerity.
Heather has spent four hours under the woman's care (four awake hours, she isn't counting the time that she spent unconscious) - she has no doubts about her sincerity, and she can say with absolute certainty that Gail Green is very helpful - too helpful. She is also subtlety manipulative and an expert in the art of the guilt trip - all well hidden behind a plausible deniability facade of sincere helpfulness. Part of Heather is going slowly crazy. She feels like she's plotting her escape from some sci-fi novel dystopian society where everything seems lovely on the surface, but you're still being held against your will and no one is ever allowed to leave (she's had little to do but let her imagination run wild while she sips at seemingly endless cups of tea that the woman in question keeps pushing on her).
She can tell from the window that it is starting to get dark outside. She has to either convince Gail that she is fine or sneak out (which is feeling more and more unlikely) as soon as possible. She can't still be here when they get back - when he gets back.
All the effort she had made in trying to clear the air and make it clear that she understood and had no expectations so that the going to be awkward car drive could be less awkward had been wasted. (And she had worked so hard on that speech - going so far as to practice it in front of her dresser mirror in an attempt to make sure that nothing about her facial expression looked as if the words were not exactly what she meant. She had needed to sound confident and self-assured. She thought that she had actually done a fairly good job of succeeding at that.)
No matter how awkward the car ride could have been (and she had thought out several possible scenarios and the best method of responding to or ignoring them as the particulars required in a descending order from most awkward to least awkward categorized by topic of conversation, audience presence, and accounting for the possibility of finding themselves separated from the others and on their own), it had nothing on being held prisoner via politeness in the spare bedroom of the man's parents' house while desperately trying to escape before he got home to find her lurking.
She did not want to be lurking. She just wanted to go home so she could hear about the results of the trip later (preferably second hand via the Emily information funnel) instead of doing something inappropriate like pouncing on him the minute he walked through the door demanding details like she had no confidence in his ability to handle things (which she absolutely did, just not when it came to this particular instance which was why she had been slated to go in the first place) or looking him over for damage as if she thought he was incapable of going anywhere and coming back unscathed (even though he was generally some level of scathed every time that she saw him).
Besides, she had already pounced on him once. It had been impulsive and nice - for a moment. Then, it had been awkward. That had been followed by an entire month of second guessing and random moments of worry and having town gossip go silent when she walked into the room followed by more awkward that led to Jake flat out telling her what she was or was not allowed to do in front of a room full of other people (yeah, that had been another level of awkward - not to mention the looks that Emily had been leveling at her in the aftermath which were that whole I know how this story ends and I'm sorry that you're going down this path anyway sort that had been making ever more frequent appearances).
Also, she didn't have any claim to be checking him over for injuries, and she was pretty sure that Gail would have that covered anyway . . . and she absolutely got to call the woman Gail . . . because she had been threatened about continuing to call her Mrs. Green . . . and, honestly, Heather was starting to have a very developed fear of the woman and her disappointed looks which had started around the second time that she had caught her trying to climb out of bed - the time that she had leaned wrong while misjudging both her balance and the distance and knocked her head on the corner of the bedside table (not her best moment or her best argument for being allowed to leave).
Or did Gail have so much trouble keeping her boys in line that she was compensating by taking it out on random passers by now? That would actually explain a lot.
She was working on yet another attempt at making it to the door - because she really did feel much better in addition to the fact that she was running out of time to get out of the house (getting out of the house gracefully had long been left by the wayside) - when the sound of a knock sent her into a momentary panic that she was too late until she realized how silly it would be for Mayor Green and Jake to knock on the door of their own house.
Heather has done several things in her life that she later (or even in the moment) found embarrassing. She will never look at the way she nearly threw herself at Jimmy when she realized that he was the one talking to Gail in the front entryway as one of them. Jimmy was letting Gail know that the group that had made the run had called in - they were within radio range and would be back in around an hour. He was heading home to do a quick check in with his wife before heading over to the market to meet them when they arrived.
Heather's head wasn't completely clear (although she was only moderately unsteady on her feet and had even managed to tie her shoes this time), but she was fairly certain that somewhere on that route was close enough to her house to justify asking Jimmy to walk her home being a reasonable request. Gail, she figured, had to be more likely to agree if she had an escort (and, a still not quite clear headed and, apparently, dramatic voice in her head added that a witness might make it less likely for Gail to hold her prisoner).
She made her request as best she could - the words tumbled out rather hurriedly and mushed together. Gail clucked her tongue and said something disapproving about her not being well yet. Heather responded with something (she thought) about being on the later end of the twenty four hours. Jimmy, bless him, said he didn't mind.
"Nothing worse than being sick in someone else's house, am I right?"
Heather could have hugged him (but she thought spreading any germs further would be a poor repayment). Gail didn't like it, but for the first time all day, Heather carried her point.
It didn't matter that poor Jimmy had to stand awkwardly to the side while she threw up one more time in someone's bushes. It didn't matter that her knees were so wobbly the last block that Jimmy had offered to run and fetch the patrol car (which she adamantly declined as politely as she could still manage). It didn't ever matter that she only made it as far as the battered, thrift store sofa that took up a third of the space in her tiny living room. It didn't matter that she proceeded to lose another twelve hours. It didn't even matter that she was so dehydrated with such wonky blood sugar that when she did make it off the sofa, she gave herself a decent size goose egg directly on top of the knot she already had on her head when she lost her balance and clipped the bathroom vanity on her way down.
The only thing that mattered was that she had made her escape in time. She wasn't still in the man's house being smothered by his mother. She didn't look like she was waiting for him or checking up on him or expecting anything from him.
That awkwardness, at least, had been successfully avoided.