Closer To The Sun [Poly] [Bi]

12 - Nora

CW for this chapter: description of injury & surgery

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Q.O.T.D – What are your favorite songs to read or write to? 

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🌼 . 🌲 . 🌼

This is Shea. Rory said I should talk to you.

He also said you might not want to talk to me.

I'm going to explain myself anyway because you might already be sleeping, and I'm really bored.

These were the first three out of seven messages Nora got from Shea. She felt the rest vibrate quietly in her pocket as she tried her best to ignore them. Her hands massaged the spots on her thighs that still ached. Were these muscles, or tendons? They felt tight.

"You know your doctor said you're not supposed to be running," Grandma Ludwig said.

"That was eight years ago, Grandma. Almost nine."

Surely she had to be better by now. But still, she felt so brittle... like her bones were still in pieces.

There was a kind of fear that set in after an injury. It was hard not to fixate on the anxiety and the memory of dysfunction, even once the pieces had been glued back together. It was just too easy to remember what it felt like to be broken.

"Let me see your legs," her grandma said.

Nora gingerly pushed up the hems of her jeans; Grandma Ludwig leaned forward to examine the five zebra scars that patterned Nora's legs. They weren't perfectly horizontal, weren't evenly spaced or evenly sized. Nora had resented them for years after the car accident that had bestowed them. 

They were somehow both lighter and darker than the skin surrounding them. They had healed like fabric rather than skin, ill-fitting, tight in some places and loose in others. All over they were wrinkled, dotted along the edges where doctors had stitched them. She could see the smaller, tighter, cleaner scars where surgeons had gone in to install a plate or screw here, borrow a length of tendon there.

Callum liked to kiss along the edges.

"These aren't runner's legs," Grandma Ludwig said.

Nora pulled her jeans back down. "I don't think you try to be mean, but sometimes you manage to do it anyway."

Grandma Ludwig didn't apologize. "I just don't want to see you throwing away some-thousands of dollars worth of work. You don't get a new pair of legs every day, Nora. Would that it were the case."

She cackled and pulled up her own skirt just slightly to show off the varicose veins that bloomed along her skin like tree roots.

"It was just four-and-a-half miles," Nora grumbled. "Don't worry, Grandma. I'm not running any marathons anytime soon. Or ever."

It wasn't that Nora aspired to be some great athlete; she despised running and was pretty sure so did most other people, including self-described runners. But there was something about being told she couldn't do something that felt crueler than making up her own mind not to do it.

She sometimes felt resentful of Rory, walking a hundred miles in a week without having to worry if his ramshackle legs would shake their screws loose and fall apart.

"Shouldn't you be hanging out with your boyfriend?" Grandma Ludwig asked. 

This was definitely something Nora didn't want to talk about with her grandma.