The Day I Lost My Taste for Love, and for You Chapter 02
The hospital corridor always held a smell of disinfectant that never quite lifted.
To me, that day, the smell was magnified a hundred times over.
I sat alone on the bench and watched the names scroll across the board.
Three months earlier, a bad fever had damaged the nerves that carried taste.
The world had turned into a black-and-white movie with texture in it but no flavor.
Back then, Oliver had held my hand with red eyes and promised he would see me through it.
“Anna Andrews.”
The nurse called my name.
I stood and pushed open the door of the exam room.
The old doctor held my new scans and test results, and his brows were drawn tight.
“Have you been ignoring my instructions?”
He set the scans down and looked at me over his reading glasses, hard.
“I told you clearly last time. The nerves that carry your sense of taste are extremely fragile, and they cannot take any more strong stimulation.”
I opened my mouth and had no idea how to answer.
There was no good way to explain that my best friend had fed me soup with half a tube of wasabi in it.
Or that the man I loved had smiled while he watched me swallow live maggot cheese.
“The damage to your nerve endings is thirty percent worse than it was last month.”
The doctor tapped his pen twice, hard, on the report.
“Ms. Andrews, I have a duty to be straight with you. At the rate this is deteriorating, your odds of getting your sense of taste back are under ten percent.”
The room went quiet.
Only the cicadas outside the window sounded, and they sounded far too loud.
It was under ten percent.
It meant I might spend the rest of my life chewing food that registered as nothing but wax.
“Can anything still be done?” I asked quietly.
The doctor sighed.
“I’ll write you a prescription for nerve support and I want your diet bland. Above all, absolutely no more of whatever you’ve been eating.”
I walked out of the exam room holding a prescription slip that weighed nothing.
My phone buzzed right then.
It was Oliver.
Oliver: [Anna, Cookie’s been a nightmare today. She clawed the back of Jessica’s hand open.]
Oliver: [Jessica faints at the sight of blood, and she hasn’t stopped crying at the vet’s. I have to stay and calm her down.]
Oliver: [How did the follow-up go? Did you get a cab home yourself?]
I stood in the middle of the crowd in the hospital lobby and read those lines.
They brought back the winter before.
I had run a fever of a hundred and two and lay half-conscious in the apartment I shared with roommates.
When I called him, the background on the other end was a karaoke bar.
“Anna, Jessica got dumped and she’s crying and demanding drinks. I can’t get away.”
He had been just as gentle then, and just as certain he was in the right.
“Take something for the fever and sleep it off. You’ll be fine.”
I was always the one who could take something and sleep it off.
Jessica was always the fragile child who needed looking after.
I pressed the screen dark and did not answer.
I went to stand in line at the pharmacy.
An older woman ahead of me turned to complain to her husband.
“I asked you to book me with the specialist and you booked the wrong one. What good are you?”
Her husband laughed sheepishly and took her bag from her.
“My eyes aren’t what they were. I’ll get it right next time. Don’t be mad.”
It was an ordinary exchange.
But I stood there while a dry, aching pressure gathered behind my eyes.
A woman who was loved could lose her temper and feel entirely within her rights.
I was never that woman.
Even a sentence as small as “today was hard for me” got weighed and reweighed until I swallowed it back down.
I took a cab home.
The second I opened the door, a blast of chili heat hit me in the face.
It sent me into a violent coughing fit.
Tears poured out of my eyes on their own.
“Oh, Anna’s back!”
Jessica came out of the kitchen in a pair of oversized oven mitts, carrying an enormous pot.
Oliver followed behind her with plates and forks.
“Go wash up. Jessica cooked something special to celebrate you finishing your checkup.”
Oliver came over and took my bag off my shoulder.
“How did it go? What did the doctor say?”
I looked into those clear, concerned eyes of his, and my stomach turned over again.
“He didn’t say much.”
“I knew it was nothing!” Jessica set the pot down hard on the table and lifted the lid.
It was ghost pepper chili, a red slick of oil still rolling at the surface.
A thick layer of dried peppers floated on top.
“You wouldn’t use the oils the salesgirl recommended, so we’re going back to the old method.”
She handed me a fork, pleased with herself.
“I made this batch with triple ghost pepper. One bite and your taste nerves are going to get up and dance.”
I looked down at a pot of chili that could have been used as a weapon.
“The doctor said I can’t eat anything that strong. Not anything.”
My voice was soft, but it came out clear.
Jessica blinked, then laughed too loudly.
“You’re going to take some quack’s word for it?”
She speared a huge piece of pepper-coated pork and dropped it into my bowl without asking.
“Folk remedies cure what doctors can’t. You’re too obedient. That’s why you’re healing so slowly.”
She nudged Oliver with her elbow.
“Right, Oliver?”
Oliver looked at how pale I had gone, and his brows drew together.
But he opened his mouth and used that familiar, smoothing-it-over tone.
“Anna, Jessica has worried herself sick over this. She didn’t even bandage her hand before she got in the kitchen.”
He looked at me.
“Whether it cures anything or not, don’t throw her effort back at her. Just two bites. Okay?”