"Fever For You"

At first, Lizzie couldn’t tell what woke her.

For a moment she was still in Bournemouth, distant seagulls, electric crackle of salt air. The insistent hardness pushing at her back was a physical memory of giddy chaos, of pills and booze, shouting into empty seas at dawn.

The arm snaked around, hand cupping her vulva, body wound tight. Breath rattled against attempts to constrain it, hot with cigarettes, coffee and the thick sour hops of strong lager.

“I drove all night.”

The gauzy curtains of the nurses home window blew in, room cold and flat in thin morning sunlight.

“Crept in your room.”

These abrupt awakenings had been normal at home.

Not now.

“Woke you from your sleep to make love to you.”

Shaking free, standing half undressed in the cold air, she looked down at him, itemising the disorder, a nurse now, not a lover: naked, lips flaking, eyes ringed with sleeplessness, unshaven, musculature standing out, sweat cloaked with aftershave.

Before she left, she’d have done it, drawn worth from the tiny lacunae she could give him.

Now, training gave this a name.

“John, you’re manic,” she said. “We’ve got to get you help.”

Slowly, the betrayal sank in.