vicarz | (no subject)

I was honored by the fact my girlfriend's family took me in as a member of the family. This honor once extended to joining them on a family vacation when they traveled to visit relatives in the hills of Massachusetts. The girl and I were very active at that point of our relationship, but knew how important it would be to keep everything on the down-low for the duration of the trip. Her extended family was old-fashioned, and it was already pushing boundaries to allow me to attend at all.

We were staying in her aunt's home in the woods for a couple of days. The house was heated by a wood stove with a stone top, and we had the theory of radiated heat explained to us. Somehow the family got comfortable enough, or the rooms upstairs were isolated enough, that her parents told us we had a room to ourselves. We were very teens-in-love, so I was both excited and more than slightly alarmed at the prospect. I was terrified of doing anything to upset the family that meant so much to her and that I expected to be a part of in the coming years, and feared that one gasp or creak would bring the house crashing down around us.

Our room was next to the bathroom. Our first night there, I took a shower and returned to our room. She did not let me retreat to my clothes without her affections for a seemingly long time before she retreated to the shower herself. She made several comments to let me know that family or no, this night was going to be surprisingly special. I was in a state of excited terror.

The voice that called me from the bathroom sounded strange, and I practically ran in to see what was wrong. My beautiful wet girl was hunched over in a towel, and could hardly breathe. I asked her what was wrong, and she looked up to me with scared eyes saying she didn't know. I called her sister over to watch her, and went downstairs to her family. Her mother and father, aunt and her aunt's husband were sitting around the living room deep in a discussion. I apologized for interrupting, and explained to the parents that their daughter was having trouble breathing. The Dad went to investigate (he was a Navy Officer, calm, but always in command when it was serious) with the Mom in tow. I could do little but follow along and stay out of the way - I had no idea what this was about, I only knew I was scared as hell but couldn't show her.

A few calls to the family doctor later the adults were satisfied that everything was under control - she was allergic to who-knows-what, despite not having any known allergies or episodes like this, but would be fine with some over-the-counter antihistamines and was encouraged to hack up all the phlegm which was filling her lungs. We bundled her up and stuffed her in the bed, mortified that now the extended family knew we were sharing the room. I held her, and she shook while she coughed for hours. She cried and apologized for how this night had turned out - I chided her for caring about something so silly at a time like that. We knew we had forever in front of us.

The hacking and coughing kept us both up, and we talked in-between dozing. Sometime during the night, we latched onto a conversation in which I discovered my beautiful bride-to-be didn't know how to spit. I referred to hacking up a loogie, and the term escaped her entirely. I explained the thing, and she was grossed out. She was also tired and sore from coughing up phlegm, and more susceptible to suggestions than on average. Eventually I just demonstrated and taught her how to hack it up and spit, and after initial protests she practiced and learned. She still tried to hide it from me. I couldn't have cared less about how gross this was supposed to be, but I understood this was not the behavior she wanted to show me. I lay in bed with her all night, often pretending to be asleep while she would cough up minor pieces of her insides.

It was a strange piece of bonding when I taught my girlfriend to spit.