The most boring thing in existence is recovering from illness. Pain hurts him less, his strength returns, so Harris stays awake more... to stare at the ceiling. His mind gnaws on his past and present woes like a puppy on a slipper.

Meanwhile, his dad's infuriatingly vague about his dealings with the insurance company. Or police investigation. Or Lonita. Because, he says, Harris should only worry about getting better.

Colin too wants him to 'get well' before facing the shitstorm at work. The nurses join the conspiracy with smiles and advice to rest and heal.

He's tired of resting. Tired of worrying about scarring or full motion range in his shoulder. Tired of everyone sounding upbeat around him.

Agatha is the icing on the cake of toxic positivity. Her social media feeds—yes, he peeked—overflow with wedding dresses, wedding makeup and wedding hairdos. Her followers can't get enough of her pictures in wedding dresses, when even one is a knife through the heart for him.

Five dresses per day is just a cruel and unusual punishment. It's not just a jilted lover talking.

No, it's a serious issue. The world has too many wedding dress' designers that oversupply the market. It's downright criminal how many wedding dresses are available to a single woman to try on!

As soon as he's not so depressed, he'd write a strongly worded letter about it. Right.

A glutton for punishment, he inhales her every post, stream and reel, hunting for raisins of non-wedding content in the bowl of the wedding flakes. There's an expose about the wedding industry. Then Agatha plays a mobile game for two hours straight, slaying monsters. And an oddball IG story on the weavers of Qing China.

He devours it all, since they don't let him attend to anything else and he can't reach her.

On the day Harris is checking out of the hospital, he's no closer to finding out where he's going to live than the day he woke up. Instead, he has his dad's assurance that someone will pick him up, and it will not be Sarkisian Senior. One guy in a wheelchair pushing another guy in a wheelchair is just too silly.

Despite his mounting anxiety, Harris smiles when he remembers this stupid joke. Too silly indeed... and it's good to see dad continuously in high spirits. If it took fire to make the old rogue whole again, maybe Harris needs to thank Oliver for torching his life... But no. Oliver has done nothing but destroy lives. It has to be Lonita's influence.

And it's likely to be Lonita on wheelchair duty today. It would be just like dad to concoct a grand plan for them to get more comfortable with one another. Dad, Lonita, Lonita's three kids and him under one roof. It's going to be tight, it's going to be awkward, but better than a homeless shelter.

The empty wheelchair rattles up the hall, coming toward his room.

Harris jumps off his bed, fully dressed, with a plastic bag containing donated clothes dad brought for him to the hospital. He doesn't need a wheelchair. It's just a weird formality the hospitals insist on, God knows why.

He yanks the white door open, swinging it all the way inward to accommodate the wheelchair.

"Good afternooo--" Words die on Harris' tongue. Numb fingers release the strap of his duffel and it thumps onto the floor. With a freed hand, he grabs the wall for support.

No, it's not a sudden dizziness. It's his heart. It runs so hot, each beat kicks so hard, he's afraid it's going to explode.

"Agatha." His brain shifts into autopilot. "G-good afternoon. How was... your..." The manners, drilled into him from an early age, demand a question about the turbulence during her flight or quality of her meal. But to Hell with that!

"You!" His face is too narrow to hold his smile. "Agatha!"

It's her! Agatha, with a thick dark braid over one shoulder, wearing a pair of sun-glasses and an ocean-blue wrap-around dress.

"Agatha, you came!"

What's with all the dumb short sentences? He scoffs, then laughs. Tears sting his eyes, and to hell with them too! He pushes from the wall, like a first-time skater on the ice and reaches for the wheelchair that blocks the last yards that separate him from Agatha. After being thousands of miles apart, he can't close the trifle distance fast enough.

Agatha steps around the chair without a single word before he could wrestle it out of her way. She yanks her glasses off, and her eyes do all the talking. They ran him up and down; and they were well with tears as well.

"Checking for damages? You can try this." He opens his arms.

She emits a pip-squeak and snuggles into his chest. Once safely ensconced, she finally says something. "Hi."

He rocks her lithe form from side to side. She smells like lilacs and sunshine. Her shoulders are warm under his arms, and so is her breath. "Hi."

His t-shirt grows moist and warm from her tears.

"You came." He plunges ever deeper in the state of elated stupefaction. Or climbing to euphoria. Whatever. She came! To him!

"But the dresses? The wedding chitchat? The medieval veils?" His questions are disjointed. Disoriented. No wonder she chuckles against his chest.

"Had to, so that Oliver—I... Can I explain at home?"

"Home?"

"Home, yes." She tilts her head back to hold his gaze. Just like her hair has no red dye in them, her irises are their natural brown, no red tint from the lenses. A wry smile flits to her lips. "We hope you'll like it."

He wants to kiss her too much to ask who these 'we' are, even though he has a list of suspects. Conspiracy right under his nose... so are her lips.

Minding that this is a public area, he lifts her chin and brushes his lips onto hers. "You came."

Her eyes crinkle at the corners. "Missed me?"

He pecks her lips between syllables. "Like crazy." Then he pecks them some more, butterfly kisses, totally PG-13.

It's a torture to bring his head back every time when her lips part like this. When he wants to run his tongue over her mouth, dip inside, latch on and not move until he passes out from asphyxiation.

"Maybe..." She pats the back of the forgotten wheelchair with her hand. "Maybe we should go."

Maybe they should because if she keeps talking in this sultry, breathy voice, it should tempt him to try an actual kiss. "You're right. We should."

He picks his bag from the floor and dumps it into the chair. "How about this?" For good measure, he makes puppy eyes at her.

"Oh, Harris! You can't play by the rules at all, can you?" she whispers.

Old Harris would have come up with a witty retort, but quips are slower in coming to him after his brush up with death and coming to the brink of losing everything. Rule-bending starts with little things like skipping a ride in a wheelchair. Just a stupid requirement, here and there, all for a good reason. Before one knows, though, he's risking others' lives because rules aren't for them.

With a sigh, Harris scoops the bag out of its seat, sits the hell down and shuts his eyes. The rules say nothing about looking at doctors, nurses and patients streaming past a miniature girl pushing a six-foot man in a wheelchair for miles.

"I feel like an idiot," he mutters.

"That's because you are," she replies. "A big, stubborn idiot."

Warmth spreads through his chest and a huge smile spreads across his lips. He can't stop smiling with Agatha around, even if she questions his mental acuity. To tell the truth, he's looking forward to her doing it countless times in the future. She came...

***

Agatha's rental is a practical Toyota Corolla in a practical shade: white.

He wishes it was a cab, so they could snuggle in the back seat. But Agatha is driving, so no nuzzling her neck. They head toward the lake, then bear North out of the downtown. But not too far out.

Harris chews his nail. "Agatha, what did you buy?"

"Nothing yet. I pulled some favors with a friend of a friend in the developers' circles. Maybe not a friend exactly, but someone who owed the Leungs a favor. So with a bit of wheeling and dealing... this is it. Your new home."

It's a long apartment building, beige, with the raised first-story given to a café, an oil-and-vinegar imports shop and some retro-chic boutique with a funky sign in its window.

The retail portion is cased in darker brown slabs. It juts out on a sidewalk wide enough for the footprint not to be an obstruction, but a welcome shelter from the sun and wind. This nook has plastic tables and striped umbrellas, so that the passersby could sit and people watch with a beer, a coffee or a funnel cake.

"Nifty." Harris cranes his neck to count the stories above it.

Six floors. The top one ought to have the lake view. All of this minutes-from-downtown redevelopment lux isn't anywhere as breathtaking as Agatha to him.

He clasps her fingers on the shifter. "You came... you really came!"

"You keep saying it, like you can't believe it."

"I've messed up," he whispers and clutches the grown-out hair with his other hand. Musses it up even more to massage his skull through it. The regrets flood as the string of his latest blunders unwinds before his mind's eyes. "I've messed up so bad... said crazy things... did everything wrong."

Her lips touch his cheek. Her breath is mint-flavored and enticing. "Eh... maybe you've managed a thing or two right in there somewhere."

"I don't deserve you."

"Harris, my love... get out of the car before we add public indecency charges to your long list of misdemeanors."

Chuckling, he climbs out of her Toyota. Once she follows, he meets her on the sidewalk, square in front of her. "I have a bit of local trivia for you. In Wisconsin, a guy can kiss a girl in the street, provided the girl is willing."

Laughter bunnies dance in her eyes. "No, really? How quant!"

"Very, very peculiar..." He proves that in Milwaukee you can do this indeed, even with a borderline indecent tongue action, and people would avert their eyes and smile into their beer.

"Do you want to see the place, or not?" She sighs with a pretend aggravation after he comes up for air.

"They cooped me up inside the hospital for days. And the summer won't last forever." He turns her to stand next to him, his arm still wrapped up around her small waist. He lifts his face to the warmth of the sun. There, it's appropriate to stand on the sidewalk like this nearly everywhere in the world. "Do you want some ice-cream?"

She burst out laughing. "Nope! I want you to see the damn apartment!"

"You want me to see an apartment? Why didn't you say so in the first—"

She shadow-boxes his side with a light fist.

"Ouch! It's tender."

She yanks her hand back. "Sorry"

He yanks her closer, looks so deep into her eyes, his head starts to swim. "I'm not."

The good citizens have to hide more smiles in their beers. Hey, if one comes to the waterfront and sits under the striped umbrella on a nice summer day? They should be ready for anything. It's Milwaukee, Wisconsin, baby!

Harris retrieves his bag from Corolla's trunk and follows Agatha into a too-spacious elevator. She presses the fifth floor button.

"Close your eyes and open the palm of your hand," Agatha instructs.

"Not my mouth?"

"Thanks for the reminder. Shut your mouth, then close your eyes and open the palm of your hand."

Chuckling, he obeys her every instruction: squeezes his hospital bag in one hand and opens his free palm for her. She puts a small metal object into it and closes his fingers around it.

A key.

A kiss on his cheek, which is also a key to certain doors. He fantasizes about opening it right here, in the elevator. He only needs to hit the stop button...

"You can open your eyes now."

Again, he obeys without a protest, despite the throbbing brought upon by the daydreaming.

The elevator stops. They come out into a long hall with a brightly painted vase in an alcove, carrying a bunch of artificial flowers and real twigs. To each side of the floral arrangement, the management hung some dull paintings of bridges in the mist. One is the Golden Bridge. The other is an ultra-modern one. He doesn't recognize it, but it looks like a marvel of engineering.

"I like the Golden Gate more," he says.

Agatha takes him by the shoulder, turns him to the right, to face a long corridor in a fashionable shade of gray. The carpet has a coarse, checkered weave to it. Matching doors stare one another down from the opposite sides of the hall. The apartments on the west get the City views, he guesses, and the eastern side has the lake views.

"The corner suite," Agatha guides him.

He walks toward the white door with a golden number 510 on it and inserts the key. There is a dreamlike feel to all of it, the woman, the hall, the corner suite. He expects the key not to fit. He expects to step into Wonderland. He expects to wake up.

The key turns with a soft click onto a coat room full of filtered natural light.

"After you." Harris holds the door for Agatha, and his heart races when she walks in. They will be alone at last, with nothing to stand in their way.