“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said, and Cora made a vague noise around her mouthful of chocolate.
As Paolo stepped into the bathroom, he caught Cora tugging Us Weekly onto her lap out of the corner of one eye and smiled.
On the counter of the little beige-and-white bathroom was a box of Tampax that hadn’t been opened and a little plastic package of Always pads tellingly ripped at the top. For some reason, seeing them made Paolo’s heart warm yet feel heavy with sorrow and sympathy at the same time. Paolo wasn’t too sure about all these feelings he was experiencing.
He thought restlessly about it all as he scrubbed himself down with the shower gel Cora favored under a flow of hot water. He’d come straight from the office and he just wanted to get rid of the grime of the day before he dealt with Cora’s menstrual mood swings. He was quietly amused with himself for putting himself through this. He could just as easily have gone home and sent Marisol to drop off a gift basket but he knew that wasn’t the man that Cora wanted.
But this… this menstruating stuff… added a new dimension to their relationship. Somehow, this elevated it to a new level; something he wasn’t sure he had planned on. It made things just too real. This meant that Cora was fully-functioning as a female — could get pregnant, probably.
It was a horrible thought, and Paolo knew it, and he hated himself for immediately slipping back into what he’d felt with Gina — the urge to take care of her, to bring her the heating pad and get her Ben and Jerry’s. And more than that, he hated himself because he liked taking care of Cora. Some base instinct in Paolo rose and took over at Cora’s sudden helpless vulnerability.
When he emerged from the bathroom, hair toweled until it was just slightly damp curls, with his boxers hanging on his hipbones, Cora didn’t even look at him.
Live! appeared to be over, and Cora was staring, unseeing, at Mad About You. One hand was still holding her belly, and Paolo wondered if that made it feel better — pressure — or if Cora was just darkly obsessing.
“Hey,” said Paolo cautiously, “has the Midol kicked in?”
“You remember Nytol?” replied Cora in a distant way, and that was certainly no answer.
“Nytol?” echoed Paolo.
“Y’know. ‘Nytol will help you get your Zs; you did say you grew up here right?” Cora said in a low, tuneful way that was almost singing but not quite. She was still staring at the TV.
“Right!” Paolo did remember, vaguely. “The pills had Ns on them, and in the commercial, they rolled over until the Ns became Zs.”
“Yahtzee.”
“What made you think of Nytol?” asked Paolo in amusement. “And are you actually watching Mad About You?”
“Rhymes with Midol,” said Cora shortly. She’d apparently decided to ignore Paolo’s last question.
“They’ve got to be running something better than this on some channel. You tried HBO?”
Cora didn’t answer, which made Paolo take pause and then sit himself tentatively on the side of Cora’s bed.
“Hey. So is the Midol helping?”
“Guess so.” Paolo watched Cora’s hand, all knuckly and deliberate, stroke her stomach. Then Cora’s face sort of pulled, and she muttered, “My tits hurt.”
Paolo didn’t quite know what to say to this. Now that Cora mentioned it, he vaguely recalled that being a part of Gina’s “don’t touch me” moods… but he had no idea what to do for it. It didn’t seem like chocolate would help that particular symptom.
“Is it bad?” he asked quietly, not wanting Cora to get all caustic and clammy on him again.
“Just – ache, or something’.”
“Do you have them wrapped up?”
“Tch. Yeah. I’m not wearing a bra, Pablo. Don’t you even start with that –”
“No, no,” said Paolo quickly. This was a touchy subject even when Cora wasn’t all hormonal and bleeding. He made sure to inject extra sympathy into his voice, almost like he’d talk to his sister right after she broke up with one of her boy toys. “It’s just… you feel bloated ’cause your body’s retaining water. Squeezing your chest down when you’re bloated is just gonna make it hurt.”
“The sheer amount of girly knowledge you got stored away is scaring me,” said Cora, finally giving him a look that was all furrowed eyebrows and burning eyes. “What, you got a pussy too?”
“Here,” said Paolo, blatantly ignoring that. “Sit up and I’ll help you get the bandage off.”
“Oh, jeez.” Cora rolled her eyes — but she straightened up with a huff as if on autopilot, and Paolo pulled his legs up onto the bed so he could scoot in behind Cora.
“Just hike your shirt up, Cora,” instructed Paolo.
“There,” he said, reaching around Cora to pull the bandage off completely —
And his right thumb brushed over the soft, irregular swell of one of Cora’s tits.
Dimpling up wryly, Paolo shook his head and tossed the roll of bandage somewhere vaguely in the direction of Cora’s drawer. It was a poor shot that would’ve missed the basket entirely if he was playing Horse, but Cora didn’t have a comment about his sucky throw. When Paolo looked at her expectantly, he found Cora absently staring at Helen Hunt and rubbing at one of the small curves on her chest — gentle, but in the same insistent way as she’d rubbed her stomach.
“Shut up,” she repeated.
“Uh,” said Paolo. “Hopefully the Midol will help with the swelling like it helped with the cramps.”
Cora just made a face. “Hasn’t helped much with those. You sure you don’t have morphine or somethin’…”
“Yes, Cora,” said Paolo, “I got morphine at our friendly neighborhood Walgreens. I had a coupon.”
At that, Cora quit fiddling with her chest and gave Paolo the finger, and the mere suggestion made Paolo’s mind give a lurch in entirely the wrong direction.
There was a lengthy pause, then, filled with Paul Reiser’s whine and a laugh track and Cora’s forehead furrowing into lines of depressed discomfort. In the middle of a loud, annoying commercial for Gallagher Ford’s Rock Bottom Sale, he spoke up all suddenly, without being entirely certain as to why he was speaking at all.