Last Chance Luna: The Bond Wouldn't Heal Her novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Flare

"Roe," I said into the dark. "It's the first day."

He was awake before I finished the sentence.

He sat up and switched on the lamp, and his blue eyes went over my face and my hands and the way I lay.

"Where?"

"Thighs. Hips. It's going into my shoulders."

"What's the number?"

"Six."

"Okay."

He picked up the phone from the nightstand.

He had already stored the clinic's after-hours line.

He talked to the on-call nurse in a calm low voice, with his notepad on his knee.

*Six. Thighs, hips, shoulders. No fever. Stiff after rest.*

I listened to him say it all, and something in my chest loosened that I hadn't known was tight.

Nobody had ever called in my flare for me.

The nurse said the doctor would phone in a short course of steroids to the pharmacy in the morning.

That I should rest, drink water, and eat salt.

Roe wrote down every word.

By Wednesday afternoon the steroid had taken the pain from a six to a four.

I lay in the parlor bed under a thin cotton sheet, because anything heavier hurt my skin, and watched the light move across the ceiling.

My muscles felt like wet sand.

My knuckles were swollen.

I wanted to cry, and I did not.

Roe had been in and out all day between the barn and the bed.

He brought me crackers and soup and a glass of cold water with a straw.

He sat on a chair by the bed now with his boots off.

He was reading aloud from the almanac, in his dry slow voice, about the first frost in the county in 1963.

I wasn't listening.

I was looking at his hands.

They were big, with square knuckles and a scar across the left thumb, and they lay on his thighs very still.

I wanted them on me so badly that I ached in a completely different way.

"Roe."

He stopped.

"Yes?"

"I want something."

"Name it."

"I don't want to be held. Anything heavy hurts. My skin is sore."

I swallowed.

"But I want you to touch me. Very lightly. Where I say."

His eyes went dark.

"Elke. You're in pain."

"I'm in a four. A four is a day I can live in."

"And I'm lying here thinking about you, and it's making the four a lot better."

He closed the almanac.

"If it hurts, say so, and I stop. Not because you're fragile. Because I can't stand it."

"Fine."

"Where?"

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