This Sickness Demands His Skin

§01

The attack came on a Monday.

It started as a low hum beneath my skin, a familiar, dreaded static.

By noon, the static had sharpened into needles.

A thousand tiny, ice-cold needles pricking every inch of my body from the inside out.

I curled into a ball on the couch, pulling a worn woolen blanket tighter around me, but the cold wasn't external.

It was a cold of absence, a hollowness that no amount of fabric could fill.

My name is Ada Marsh, and I suffer from what the textbooks call severe touch starvation.

A less clinical term would be a soul-deep hunger for human contact.

I burrowed my face into a cashmere scarf I’d salvaged from the laundry basket, inhaling deeply.

It was Everett’s.

The faint, clean scent of his cologne, mingled with something that was just him—sterile, calm, and utterly safe—was the only thing keeping the needles at bay.

It was a poor substitute for the real thing, the scent already fading after one wash.

The doorbell rang, a shrill sound that lanced through the fog of my pain.

My heart leaped with a desperate, pathetic hope.

Everett.

He wasn’t supposed to be home for another six hours, but maybe a surgery was canceled.

Maybe he just knew.

I stumbled to the door, my movements stiff and uncoordinated.

I fumbled with the lock, my trembling fingers barely cooperating.

But the man standing on the porch wasn't Everett Roth.

The disappointment was so sharp, so absolute, it felt like a physical blow.

My head dropped, my gaze fixed on the welcome mat.

“Ada? You okay?”

It was Seth Fischer, a classmate from my finance seminar.

“Seth,” I mumbled into my chest. “What are you doing here?”

“You texted me, remember?” He frowned, his brow furrowed with concern. He reached out and gently touched my forehead. “You said you needed help. What’s going on? You’re not running a fever.”

His hand was cool, but it wasn't the right kind of cool.

It felt alien, intrusive.

I recoiled from his touch, pulling back into the shadows of the doorway.

“I… I must have texted the wrong person,” I said, my voice muffled. “I meant to text my guardian.”

I corrected myself internally. *Not guardian. Everett.*

“Is his car in the driveway? I didn’t see it.”

I didn’t look up.

I didn’t see the flicker of confusion and something else—something harder—in Seth’s eyes.

He slowly withdrew his hand. “You and your guardian… you’ve gotten pretty close, haven’t you?”

The needles were back, sharper this time, piercing through the flimsy shield of the scarf’s lingering scent.

He hadn’t even finished his sentence when the door, which I had failed to close properly, swung open again.

A familiar scent flooded the entryway, a wave of calm that washed over the rising tide of my panic.

Everett was here.

He strode past Seth as if he were invisible, his gaze locked on me.

In two long steps, he was in front of me, shrugging off his impeccably tailored suit jacket.

The next moment, I was enveloped in it.

The jacket was still warm from his body, saturated with that clean, antiseptic scent that was my only true medicine.

The needles retreated instantly.

My muscles, coiled tight with pain, finally began to unspool.

I sagged against him, my consciousness fading at the edges.

Through the haze, I heard Everett’s voice, cool and steady, but with a faint, ragged edge of exertion, as if he’d run all the way from the hospital.

“We've always been this close,” he said to Seth. “You just didn't know.”

§02

Under the heavy drape of his jacket, my hands began their desperate, instinctive exploration.

This had become our ritual, the dark bargain struck in the aftermath of my first major episode.

My fingers found his, lacing through them.

His were cool, steady, a silent anchor in the storm of my over-stimulated nerves.

I pushed aside the lapels of his jacket, pressing my face against the crisp cotton of his shirt, inhaling the scent of him, the heat of him.

My other hand, emboldened by my fading lucidity, slid beneath the hem of his shirt.

I counted his abs with my fingertips. One, two, three… each ridge a solid, grounding reality.

That night, the night it all began, I was in the throes of a panic attack while preparing for my midterm presentation.

The world had dissolved into a vortex of cold and uncontrollable shaking.

I was huddled on the floor, my sobs raw and ragged, when he’d come home from a 36-hour shift at the hospital.

He had found me, a crumpled heap of misery, and without a word, had simply lifted me into his arms.

I don't remember how many times I’d sobbed “I’m sorry” into his chest that night.

I only know that we emerged from it bound by this strange, pathological symbiosis.

He was my exclusive pacifier.

My personal sedative.

He was Dr. Everett Roth, one of the most promising young surgeons in Portland, my legal guardian since I was three, and the only person on earth who could stop the pain.

He was impossibly busy, the weight of a dozen lives resting on his steady hands every day.

I helped him manage his world, organizing his desk, laying out his supplements. He helped me manage mine, lending me his body to calm the screaming chaos inside me.

Physical contact was the only thing that worked. It was a temporary fix, a dose of a drug I constantly needed.

I was an orphan, a cliché he’d plucked from beside a dumpster. Without him, I wouldn't have survived to see my fourth birthday, let alone my twenty-second.

Having him as my anchor was a miracle I felt I didn't deserve.

So I never asked for more. I never asked what this was, or what it meant. I was terrified he would find me too troublesome and cast me aside.

Download the Novellia app, Search 【 274534 】reads the whole book.