Ally woke up slowly, her back aching. After a few minutes, the ache turned into tiny fingers of pain, like daggers burying themselves deep in the vertebrae. Opening her eyes, she realised she was in Jack’s arms, half-lying and half-sitting against the headboard. He breathed slowly and evenly beneath her and every rise and fall of his chest caused the daggers to dig deeper. After several minutes, she could stand it no longer. She braced her hand on the mattress as she tried to move but a sudden stabbing pain in her spine forced out a gasp of surprise, stopping her in her tracks.
Jack squirmed beneath her and the movement buried the daggers deeper still, settling them in her bones until she didn’t care about anything but making the pain stop.
“Jack, wake up,” she hissed through clenched teeth, her chin quivering as she tried not to cry out.
“What is it?” he murmured groggily, stretching the arm that wasn’t draped over her.
She sucked in a breath, the pain instantly intensifying with the movement. “You need to move.”
“What?”
“Please – you need to move,” she pleaded, not caring how she sounded anymore. “Need to lay flat.”
He froze, then began to ease out from under her.
“Slowly,” she ordered, sucking in the curse words that were building beneath the pain.
“Okay.”
That one word was infused with both confusion and fear. She knew she would have to explain this later, but right now she needed to do something about the pain.
He moved out slowly from beneath her. Each tiny position change was agony. She cussed liberally in her head, although she was incapable of saying much aloud.
After what seemed like an eternity, he sat next to her and she was sprawled, half on her front and half on her side, in utter misery.
“What can I do?” he said gently. “How can I help?”
She tried to breathe evenly, clenching her teeth, staring at the pillow she was half-buried in.
“Pills, table, behind me,” she breathed.
Jack climbed off the bed carefully as she lay there, even the tiny movements caused by breathing sending pain rocketing through her spine.
“They’re not here,” he said desperately. “Oh wait – I think they’re still on the coffee table. I’ll get them.”
Careful to keep her breathing shallow, it felt like he was gone forever. When he finally came back with them, he knelt down on the floor beside the bed with the bottle of pills and some water.
“How many?”
“One,” she ground out through teeth clenched tight against the pain.
“Just one? Are you sure?”
“For now.”
He uncapped the bottle and she released the sheet she had clutched in her fist and opened her hand to take the pill from him. Carefully slipping it into onto her tongue, she fought the urge to cry out against the pain that simple movement caused. He handed her a glass of water and she slurped at it, spilling some on the pillow beneath her but swallowing enough to take the pill with it.
“Now what?” he murmured.
She pinched her eyes shut. “Wait.”
She felt him slip his hand into hers and squeeze gently. She hadn’t meant it as a question, but as a statement of fact. If she were in her right mind, she would have insisted he leave her alone to deal with this, but she wasn’t in her right mind. The pain overwhelmed her, sucking up every other emotion she had, including humiliation, and viciously discarding them. She kept her eyes shut to block everything out, even as Jack whispered something that she didn’t catch over the blood rushing in her ears. The only sense that hadn’t deserted her was touch, and she felt him softly stroking the side of her hand with his thumb. She concentrated on his gentle, smooth strokes as the pain slowly receded.
Eventually, she opened her eyes. Jack sat on the floor, his head resting on the bed, still holding her hand. His face was drawn tight with anxiety and a wave of love rose from deep within her belly as she felt herself fighting off tears.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” she sniffed, trying to recover her self-control.
“Did I do this? Because if I did, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she murmured, meeting his worried gaze out of the corner of her eye. “I should have known better than to fall asleep all twisted up like that. It’s my fault, not yours.”
“You said you had back pain sometimes, but I didn’t expect this. I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought, to be honest.”
He looked so miserable, she wanted to smile, to sit up, to tell him that she was fine. But she wasn’t capable of any of that yet.
“It’s the metal rods,” she mumbled into the pillow. “Hurts sometimes.”
“Can you see them?”
“See what?”
“The metal rods.”
“No. Just the scar.”
Jack’s gaze flitted to her back for a brief instant. “Can I take a look?”