Bittersweet
by VATERGrrl
"Good morning, Seattle! It's time to wake up and smell the Starbucks! The sun is out, if you can spot it through the rain, and our predicted high temperature will be a balmy 45 degrees on the farenheit scale. In our lead news item, Mariners head coach "Sweet Lou" Pinella is hanging up his trident and will be…"
I groped a hand out from under the covers and flailed my arm in the general direction of the clock radio, hoping to turn off the far-too-perky voice that was drilling its inanities into my congested head. All I succeeded in doing was knocking a box of tissues off the nightstand, Miss Chipper's mindless chatter about sports figures and local politicians drowning out the faint thud the box made when it hit the area rug underneath my bed.
"Awww, fuuuhg." I groaned and waved my arm uselessly toward the floor, hoping that my hand would magically hit the side of the box without may having to actually open my eyes and look for the thing. Instead, my knuckles scraped against the low pile of the rug, and I pulled my arm back, trying to muster the minimal focus necessary to slap the alarm clock into silence.
It would have been better, I figured out a moment later, to just ignore the stream of noise, irksome as it was, in favor of retrieving the tissue box. As soon as I struggled into a sitting position, my nose began to itch and drip, forcing me to pinch it closed and sniffle hard to avoid making a mess. `Hehh, ehb, huuh."
Only a few months ago, my quick little inhalations would have been met with a low, purring "Mmmmm," noise. But my snuffling, catching breaths, all my attempts to ward off a sneeze until I could find a tissue, or a handkerchief, possibly even a towel, didn't garner any response at all in the empty, early-morning quiet of my bedroom. All I was left with, in the wake of my breakup with Heather Williams, was the bittersweet opportunity to suffer through a cold with no editorializing and no help.
"Huhh-ubtchooo!" My first sneeze roared out unimpeded, but I had the presence of mind before the second to raise my cupped left hand to my nose, bracing myself with my right arm against the firm mattress. "Huh-tshooooo!"
Again, I almost expected a response, a "Damn, that was sexy," growl like the ones I'd heard for nearly five years from Heather. Instead, I only got more silence.
"God bless me," I muttered, pulling open the nightstand drawer to grab the handkerchief I'd grown used to keeping in there. Correction, I thought, unfolding the square and dabbing hesitantly under my nose with a corner of it. It had been mostly Heather's insistence, her preference, that I kept the thing in the nightstand, as well as the box of tissues on top, near the radio.
"Just in case we decide to, you know…" she would say, coy. "Planning ahead takes all the fun out of it – I like to be spontaneous."
And she most certainly did: Heather had to be the very most fly-by-the-seat-of-your-
pants people I knew, at least sexually. In her job as a rising-star lawyer, she had to be by-
the-book and plan out her strategy like Garry Kasparov staring down Deep Blue over the chess field. In the bedroom, though, all of the restrictions of her profession went out the window, and she loved to be playful and impetuous.I'd gone along with it willingly, even eagerly, for a long time. Since Heather was, as she termed it, a "sneeze fetishist," it seemed odd to me that we'd lasted as long as we did together, given that I had very few allergies and only caught the rare cold. I just wasn't the type who sneezed naturally more than about once a week or so, unless I bothered to jump into a swimming pool and got chlorinated water up my nose or found myself trapped in an extremely dusty old library or an even older newspaper archive which hadn't been digitized yet.
Heather had been, to put it mildly, "inventive," showing me how to safely but effectively make myself sneeze through the judicious use of cotton swabs, twists of facial tissue, and an occasional sniff of a bouquet of roses. She loved it when I "induced" for her, finding my pre-sneeze expressions, my fight to stifle, and then my eventual giving in to a hearty and somehow satisfying fit of sneezing, erotic in the extreme. When I did occasionally come down with a cold, she seemed to relish every moment of it, from the initial sore throat heralding an infection, to my endless sniffling and scuffing my fingers under my nose, to finally giving in to a sneeze, or three.
"Bless you," she would say in her low, quiet, nerve-thrummingly sexy voice. It was nothing at all like the standard, polite and neutral comment most people gave me, certainly not the still-embarrassed mutter I made on the rare occasion I blessed someone. No, it was pure innuendo, her big brown eyes aglow with pleasure, a private message of "I want you" that went far, far beyond the Seinfeldian "You're so good looking" the friends had tried out in one episode. Granted, she'd tone it down in public, but in private it always seemed like an invitation to get down and dirty.
"Hehhh—" I sniffled again, hard, jolted back into the present by an irresistible urge, no, need, to sneeze. The hanky I'd used a minute ago to mop up my runny nose was still in my hand, and I lifted it up awkwardly, not quite knowing why I bothered since I was alone and wasn't going to infect anyone else, or save them from infection. But when I lurched forward not two seconds later, a wet and forceful "Huh-tshooo! Uh-tsh-hooo!" bursting out, I was glad of the layers of cloth protecting my hand. My beginning-of-cold sneezes tended to be embarrassingly violent and drippy, as if my body couldn't quite believe it was ill and couldn't contain itself properly.
Once I'd blown my nose, refolded the cloth, and blown again, I slapped the used handkerchief onto the nightstand, sniffled a few times in the hopes of driving off still more itching, and bent down to retrieve the errant tissue box. It had fallen sufficiently far from the nightstand, and down under the bed, that I couldn't reach it without kneeling on the floor, a frustrating and awkward experience given that the new position caused my nose to start running in earnest.
"Oh, wudderful," I muttered, finally succumbing to the entirely childish act of rubbing my drippy nose on my shirt sleeve when I couldn't pull tissues out of the box quickly enough. Even Heather, I figured, would have been put off by that, though she'd often been the one to hold a clutch of tissues or a handkerchief under my nose and order me to blow, again as if I were a child. I'd usually demur, at that point, or shake my head somewhat petulantly, but she was even more stubborn than I, so in the end, I would acquiesce, if only because I wanted the sweet relief of clearer breathing.
It was another odd, bittersweet moment, then, to pull tissues one after the other from the box, pinch them under and around my own nose, almost enjoying the mundane task of blow-swipe-toss. Part of me almost longed for the opportunity to fall back into the childlike role I'd half-resented when Heather took it upon herself to mother me. But, I had to own, I liked looking after myself, in my own time and in my own way.
That wasn't to say, I reasoned, peeling off my shirt and tossing it in the general direction of my dirty clothes basket, that being involved with Heather, indulging her fetish from time to time, had been dull or futile or even a turn-off. I'd had fun with it, as well, even when a long interlude of inducing had left my nose sore and tender for a day after. And playing around within the fetish, odd though it had felt to me at the start, had made me a lot more comfortable with sneezing in public, blessing other people, even carrying a handkerchief when I didn't figure I'd have any need for it.
"Heh-ebbh…" I groped behind me, toward the nightstand, to try to retrieve the `kerf I'd sneezed into just a few minutes earlier. That was one other unexpected benefit of my relationship with Heather: With so many opportunities to experiment and practice, I'd come to find out how much more comfortable I was with sneezing into something, ideally a handkerchief but often, given how little warning I usually had, just my cupped hand. I hadn't necessarily improved my aim, but at least it was now more habit than not to try to cover my nose and mouth.
"Ihhh –heh-chmmmpf! Chmmpf!" A gulp of air, then another quick "Uh-tchhmmm! Chmmm! Snfff!"
I imagined Heather's aroused, approving moan in the wake of my "performance," and let out a low sigh of my own, though it was more an automatic release of pent-up breath than any sexual excitement on my part.
"Maybe a shower would help," I muttered to myself, using the handkerchief I was holding for one more blow before pitching it, followed by my sweatpants and boxers, into the clothes basket.
Five minutes standing under a steaming spray of water did help clear my head a bit, though even there, in the fogged-in stall, I couldn't escape memories of Heather and our fetishy encounters. She had come to help me shower, more than once, when I'd had a cold or after a long round of inducing, had pulled a washcloth from its place draped over the curtain rod and offered it to me as something I could blow my nose into. Often, even with distance from an allergen or an inducing tool, I'd still be sneezing for two or three minutes after I turned on the water, and the tile walls would only echo and intensify the sound. She'd loved that, had gone hot and wet in a way that had nothing to do with the showerhead, and we'd had more than a few steamy encounters in there before moving back out to the bedroom.
Now, I could simply turn off the water, step out of the stall, and wrap a big bath towel around my waist, rubbing at my short hair with a hand towel. When I wandered back out to flop down on the bed, a trick of my brain made me anticipate that Heather would be there, stretched out languidly, so seeing the covers mussed and tousled exactly as I had left them confused me momentarily.
"Hah-chooo!" My body, always-obliging, kicked me back out of my reverie and confusion with a sneeze that I'd not had sufficient warning to cover, but I was able to smother a second in the hand towel, an odd "Huh-chnnf!" noise.
"Great." I held the hand towel to my face a few moments longer, until I was reasonably sure I wasn't going to sneeze again, then tossed the towel onto the bed. Drying off was a quick, mindless activity, and in less than two minutes, I was pulling on a fresh pair of boxers, and rooting through another, lower drawer of the dresser for a pair of jeans.
It wasn't until I was buttoning up a red corduroy shirt and pulling open the top dresser drawer again to grab a handkerchief, or two, that I noticed it: There, on top of my larger, uniformly white handkerchiefs, Heather had left one of her own, a small, bright square that I recalled from our very first meeting, when she'd accidentally-on-purpose blew a puff of dust in my direction and sent me into a mini-fit of allergic sneezing.
I cursed the slight shake in my fingers as I plucked the bright little square up and, in a fit of nostalgia and stupidity, tucked it into the breast pocket of my shirt. As I wandered out of the bedroom in search of a cup of coffee, I sniffled, and I could not tell if it was a consequence of my cold, or something else.
A/N: I don't recall exactly when Coach Lou Pinella quit his association with the Seattle Mariners (baseball), but I heard about "Sweet Lou" on the radio last week, so I thought I'd mention him in this story.
Based on Week #170 (General Bunny): Plot Bunny Idea: A character catches a cold. He reflects on a relationship he is no longer in, which he had with a sneeze fetishist. Is he nostalgic and wishes his former fling were there? Is he glad he doesn't have to be watched closely every time he sneezes? What else is he feeling?