Episode 728: Back To Life

Or, you know, it could be his guilty conscience making him sweat.

"What did the doctor say?" she asked.

Jesse wasn’t sure he could lie directly into her eyes, but he couldn’t take the sun’s glare either, so he looked away, and landed at Caro’s boyfriend. That guy, palling around with her cousins, taking up space on the beach blanket, it reminded Jesse that he was deceiving Caroline for the greater good, so that wasn’t so bad, was it?

He managed to look at her. "The doctor said there’s nothing to worry about."

"That’s not a diagnosis," Caroline pointed out. "It’s a little hard not to worry when you still haven’t told me an actual diagnosis. You can’t have had all those bouts of fatigue and stuff and it’s nothing. It was something. It broke us up. So what was it, Jesse, and how do you know for sure that it’s gone away?"

Jesse knew Caroline would be beyond pissed at him if he led her to believe he was cured, only for her to see him collapse again. She may never forgive him if he ended up blindsiding her like that, but that was the chance he had to take as her boyfriend headed over to where they stood. He had to make a move before he lost Caroline to that guy for good.

This was the only move he had. And, he hadn’t lied about his lack of symptoms lately, so maybe whatever was wrong with him really had worked its way through his system. Maybe Caroline would never know that he wasn’t being altogether honest with her.

"It was just growing pains," he told her. "Just like my mom said that first day it hit me. It’s not a big deal. It’s just some people react more severely to all the changes than others, and now it’s pretty much done and I’m okay, so that’s it, I’ve been to a doctor like you wanted, you don’t have to keep dating someone else in protest."

Episode 729: Come Some Rainy Day