“Are you trying to piss me off?” Billy glowers, nose sticking out from under the hospital blanket.
His voice is low and raspy with sleep, his hair a nest of messy curls sticking up in every direction. Bleary-eyed, he blinks at Steve like he’s been dozing all day and he just woke him up.
“Nope.” Steve gives him his brightest smile as he
strides up to the foot his bed “I’m trying to cheer you up. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” Billy grumbles and slips lower like he’s trying to hide under his sheets. “And I told you I don’t want visitors.”
Steve shrugs. It’s not that he doesn’t care about what Billy says, it’s just that after what he overheard last time, he knows better than to believe him.
“Yeah well, I wanted to see if you changed your mind.” he says “Besides, you also said you don’t want flowers but you kept these nevertheless.”
He nods in the direction of the wilting sunflowers. At some point since his first visit, the bouquet must have migrated from the table by the window to the nightstand by Billy’s bed.
It’s a sad sight. The flowers look as sullen as the patient inhabiting the room, there’s a halo of dried up yellow petals underneath each hanging head.
They both stare at them, like they’re the evidence of a crime, until Billy clears his throat after a prolonged moment of silence.
“The nurses made me.” he claims with a pout.
Steve has to suppress a grin. Hargrove is kinda cute like this, grumpy but still too soft with sleep to be mean.
“Sure they did.” he says gently, shrugs out of his coat and folds it over the back of a chair that’s been pulled up to Billy’s bedside.
“What, you don’t believe me?”
A frown, a dagger of a glare. Even bedridden Billy’s hackles are as quickly raised as they used to be.
“I believe the nurses will be happy if I replace these with fresh ones then.” Steve retorts all nonchalant and unwraps the merry little bouquet of gerbera he brought “They didn’t have daisies but I thought a little color would be nice.”
Billy shakes his head, looks affronted at the bright flowers in Steve’s hand.
“It doesn’t matter which flowers you bring. Just tell me what you want, Harrington. Why did you come back?”
“I told you. I came to cheer you up.”
