The room is cold. A hospital cold that lives in the walls. But he’s burning. Sweat darkening the collar of his borrowed shirt, fever mapping his temples in wet heat. The smell of him fights the smell of her pasta: garlic and butter and something dark that reduction brings, tangling with the medicinal undertone of whatever drips into his arm.
She sets the bowl down and steps back. Not far. Just far enough to watch.
The fork is too heavy in his hand. She sees this. The small tremor, the way he has to anchor his elbow on the tray to lift it.
Her jaw tightens. She doesn’t move.
She made it alone, eight years ago. At three in the morning. Too much garlic, too much heat– the kind of pasta you cook when you’re trying to burn something out of yourself. Nobody was supposed to taste it. Nobody did. Until now.
He brings the fork to his mouth. The steam from the bowl has fogged his glasses. He doesn’t remove them. He eats blind and deliberate, and she watches the small collapse at the corner of his mouth– not quite pleasure, not quite pain. Recognition, maybe. The way you taste something and your body knows it before your mind catches up.
The medical equipment hums. Steady. Indifferent. His breathing doesn’t change.
He eats mechanically, deliberately, as if the work of eating is the only thing that matters. Halfway through, he pauses. His hand hovers over the bowl. She thinks he’s going to stop, that the fever or the medication or just the effort will break him. But he continues. Continues until the bowl is nearly empty, until he has to scrape the spoon along the bottom, gathering what’s left.
When he sets the fork down, his hand is shaking worse than before.
“This isn’t the one people talk about,” he says. His voice comes from somewhere deep.
She doesn’t answer.
He looks up at her. For a moment she thinks he’ll say something else: an apology, an admission, something that closes the circle. Instead: “I’d like another bowl.”
She leaves the room without acknowledging the request. In the kitchen, the pasta water is still warm. She hasn’t cleaned the pot. The garlic goes in first. The heat rises.
She carries the second bowl back into the cold room.
He eats it the same way. Blind. Deliberate. Like he’s trying to solve something with his mouth.
Halfway through, she looks away.
She takes the empty bowl. Waits. But there’s nothing more. Just the hum of the machines and the sick sweet smell of him cooling under the hospital blanket and the ghost of garlic in the cold air between them.
She doesn’t make a third bowl.
