It had been a long couple of weeks.

I stared through the darkness at the ceiling of Taylor’s bedroom, imagining I could see the swirl of glow-in-the-dark stars that was on the ceiling at home. Beside me Taylor was fast asleep – at one point he had shifted onto his left side so that he was facing the window, and if I looked in that direction at just the right moment I could see brief glimpses of his tattoo through the worn fabric of his T-shirt in the light that washed over him from the headlights of passing cars.

It had been a mutual decision. Even though the idea of hiding out by myself at home while my arm was on the mend was incredibly appealing, it just wasn’t feasible. My left side was essentially useless while I healed up – I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t pick up anything heavier than a pillow with my left hand, and trying to dress myself in anything that had more than a few buttons was out of the question. I couldn’t even wash my own hair.

So when Taylor had told Lisbeth to take Sadie back to his place nearly two weeks ago, and when he’d said the word home and not had it mean the caravan park, I hadn’t questioned it. Over the last few months, I had increasingly come to consider home to be anywhere that Taylor and I were together. It could have been a random hotel room, his parents’ house, my caravan or his place, but no matter what it still counted as home. And even though I couldn’t read his mind, as much as I might have wanted to sometimes, I got the impression that he felt the same way.

I had just decided to settle down and try to sleep when a bolt of pain went down my arm, and I barely managed to bite back a pained gasp. “Fuck,” I swore, trying to keep my voice down so that I didn’t wake Taylor up. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

When I felt the mattress shifting, accompanied by a change in Taylor’s breathing and the quilt rustling, I knew I hadn’t quite succeeded.

“Rue?” a very sleepy voice asked, and I looked over at Taylor. He had propped himself up on an elbow and was squinting at me through the half-dark. “Wha’s goin’ on?”

“My arm,” I managed to get out through gritted teeth. “It really hurts…” More pain shot along my arm, and this time I didn’t even bother holding back a yelp of pain.

He didn’t say anything else at first. Instead he reached behind him to where I knew his bedside lamp was, and I looked away just in time for him to switch it on. Warm yellow light that could have come from a candle flooded the room, and the mattress shifted again as he got out of bed and headed out into the hall. Any question I might have had about what he was doing was answered when I heard a tap running, the pipes in the walls groaning as water surged through them. He came back into the room carrying a glass of water in one hand, and the purple pencil case I’d bought from Smiggle a few weeks earlier that I knew had my meds inside it in his other. The hand that held my medication also held a white cardboard packet with a green stripe down one end and a yellow stripe halfway down the other.

“I know it hurts,” he said as he set the glass of water and my medication within my reach on the nightstand that stood next to my side of the bed. Almost as soon as I’d managed to sit up he sat down next to me. “I broke my arm too once. Hurt like an absolute bastard.”

“You did?”

He nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Summer before Middle Of Nowhere came out.” He stretched his right arm out and turned it so that I could see the long, thin scar that ran almost the whole length of his forearm, almost a twin for the line of stitches I had down my own arm. “House I grew up in, once we moved back from WA anyway, my dad built a cubby house in its backyard. It was this little house kinda thing up on stilts.”

“My dad built the same kind of thing in my yard when I was a kid,” I said. Right as those words left my mouth, I realised exactly how Taylor had broken his arm. “You fell out of it?”

“Off the ladder,” he replied.

“Ouch.”

“Massive understatement that.” He gave me a small, tired smile. “Landed myself in hospital for a couple of days afterward so I could have surgery to set the break. I have a plate and a bunch of screws holding my radius together, and I was in a cast for six weeks all up. Worst summer break from school ever.”

“I can imagine.” I eyed him for a moment. “That’s two of your scars I’ve seen now.”

He smirked at me. “I have a bunch more where those two came from. And before you ask, yes you can see them.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

“But not until tomorrow. We both need to sleep – you especially need to, seeing as you’re getting a cast put on in the morning. You finished all the Endone they gave you at the hospital, yeah?”

“Yeah, they only gave me enough of it for five days. I’ve been taking as much Panadol Extra and Nurofen Plus as I can get away with ever since.”

Taylor let out a quiet sigh. “Of course they did. I hate that they do that.” He held up the cardboard packet he’d brought back from the kitchen with him, and for the first time I could see the word that was printed on it in black – Zydol. Underneath it in red was printed tramadol hydrochloride 50mg. “Technically I’m not supposed to do this,” he said. “But I think you need it right now. My doctor has me on this for flares, and even then I’m only supposed to take it when the Panadeine isn’t doing anything. It’s pretty strong stuff.”

He held the packet out to me. “Two of those with two Panadol,” he said as I took it from him. “Helps it kick in faster.”

“And you know how many are left, yeah?” I asked as I opened the packet one-handed and shook out the blister pack inside. It was full of bright yellow capsules.

“Well, my medication tracker on my phone knows, but yeah.” He picked up the blister pack and popped out two of the capsules, doing the same with the packet of Panadol Extra I fished out of the mess of colourful cardboard packets and white plastic bottles that made up my arsenal of medication. “It’s not that I don’t trust you with my shit,” he added as I took my painkillers, chasing each pill with a mouthful of water. “Because I do. But…” He trailed off and half-shrugged, almost as if he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“But you want to make sure you have enough for when you need it,” I finished, and he nodded. “That’s like me with my migraines, kind of – so long as I keep up with my meds every morning I’m not likely to have one, but I keep my tablets with me anyway just in case.”

“I knew you’d understand.” He gave me another smile. “How’s the arm feel?”

That was when I realised the pain in my arm had diminished considerably, and I let out a quiet sigh of relief. I was pretty sure the painkillers hadn’t kicked in yet, so I knew it had to have been Taylor distracting me that had made the pain ease off. “Better. You’re amazing, did you know that?”

“I do my best.” He grinned before starting to clear away the mess we’d made of my side of the bed, returning blister packs of pills to their respective packets and putting my packet of Panadol back with the rest of my medication. “Try and get some sleep.”

“Love you, Tay.”

He smiled and drew me in close, and I put my head down on his shoulder. “Love you too, Rue.”

In the morning, after I’d had the stitches taken out of my arm and exchanged my splint for a bright purple fibreglass cast (and had my arm bundled up in a sling to keep it as still as possible), Taylor and I went back to his place. His mother had headed back to Newcastle a couple of days earlier, so we had the house to ourselves.

“All right, showtime,” I said once the two of us were settled on the lounge, a paper parcel of hot chips sitting within reach on the coffee table. “You promised.”

Taylor chuckled quietly. “Yes, I did promise.” He unwrapped the parcel, and I immediately felt my mouth watering and my stomach begin rumbling. “They’re not all as traumatic as the ones you’ve already seen, so I’ll try not to bore you too much.”

“You could never bore me.”

At these words, I could have sworn I saw him go bright pink for just a moment, and I hid a smile behind a hand. “Where do you want to start?”

I thought about it for a few moments while I ate some of the hot chips. “While you were laid up last month, I saw one under your left eye,” I said at last, and I ran a finger under my own left eye. “Maybe you could start with that one?”

“So we’re going oldest to newest, then?”

“I guess so.”

“You’re lucky I have such a good memory.” He gave me a smile. “Five years old, going through a plate glass door while we were living in Mount Isa.”

I winced. “Ow.”

“Mmm. I was chasing Isaac through the house and he slammed the back door shut in my face. Had too much momentum to stop and crashed straight through the glass. Almost lost that eye – a centimetre higher, and I probably would have.”

I wasn’t sure what made me do it. I leaned forward until the two of us were so close that I could see every individual freckle on Taylor’s face and count each of his eyelashes, bracing myself with my right hand on his knee so that I didn’t topple over. He stayed very still as I closed my eyes and pressed a kiss to that first scar – one that made him suck in a sharp, shocked-sounding breath.

“Was that okay?” I asked as I pulled back.

“Y-yeah,” he replied, sounding breathless. His eyes had gone wide, their bright, clear blue a few shades darker than normal. “Ruby, believe me, that was more than okay.”

“Want me to keep doing it?”

I almost felt like he didn’t even need to think about his answer. “Oh, hell yeah.”

I let out a quiet laugh. “This one next,” I said, opting to skip the scar along his right forearm, and traced a finger along my hairline on the right side of my forehead.

“Day before I found out I was sick the first time.”

“When you passed out and hit your head, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah.” Here he lifted his chin and pointed to a scar the length of my thumb roughly halfway along the right side of his lower jaw. “This one’s from having a lymph node removed, couple of days later – the oncologist I had the first time I was sick wasn’t sure how far it had spread, so she had it biopsied and ended up taking the whole thing.”

“How far did it end up spreading?”

“Lymph nodes and spine. I was incredibly lucky it didn’t get into my bone marrow either time – I probably wouldn’t be here right now if it had.”

“I’m glad it didn’t.”

He gave me a small smile. “Yeah, me too.”

I leaned in again and kissed both of these scars, starting with the one under his jaw. The scar along his hairline I traced first, touching it as lightly as I could, and kissed him just above his right ear. Both times he let out a very shuddery breath, and I bit back a grin.

Almost as soon as I had sat back again, he started to take his T-shirt off. I tried not to stare too much as he pulled it off over his head, realising that this was the first time I would ever be seeing him completely shirtless. The teenie fangirl that still lived in the back of my head stayed mercifully quiet as he dropped his shirt on the floor.

“You know, you can look,” he teased me, and I threw him the forks.

“I’m trying not to stare, fuck off,” I retorted. He snickered quietly at this. At the same time, though, I stopped averting my eyes. If Taylor said I could look, then I was going to look.

He was thin, which I knew already, pale and wiry, with most of his muscle in his shoulders and upper arms. I could already see two scars, one low on his right side and the other high on the left side of his chest, along with a darker patch of skin about the size of the palm of my hand over his heart. “I think I can guess what this scar is from,” I said, touching the scar on his right side. It was long, at least five centimetres, and angled down toward the waistband of his jeans. “Appendix?”

“Yep. That one was…” He frowned a little, as if he was trying to remember. “A couple of days before my twenty-first birthday. Without a doubt my worst birthday ever.”

“I bet you’re glad you had it out, though.”

“Oh yeah, of course. I didn’t get to ride my new surfboard for about three weeks afterward, though, so that sucked.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” I teased him, before leaning over to kiss his appendectomy scar, the whole time acutely aware of how intimate this was becoming. “What’s this from, though?” I asked once I’d straightened back up, and started tracing the outline of the dark patch in the middle of his chest.

“It’s from when I was sick.” He was quiet for a few moments. “The type of lymphoma I had, it causes a tumour to grow near your heart, so I had to have radiotherapy along with chemotherapy both times I was sick to shrink it. It was like a really bad sunburn.” He put his fingers over mine to still their movement, and moved my hand up to the second scar his shirt had been hiding. It looked like a twin to the scar above his right collarbone. “Second time I was sick I had what’s called a Hickman line for a couple of years – it goes in up here” he pointed to a spot low on the left side of his neck, where I could just barely make out a hairline scar “and it gets tunnelled down.” He traced a line down from that scar to my hand. “And the upper end gets passed through to here.” Another line, this time up to a spot near his heart. “It was no picnic, but better than having another one put in up here.” He tapped his right collarbone a couple of times.

“You’ve been through it, haven’t you?”

He gave me a tight smile, one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Still one left,” he replied, and he pointed to a horizontal scar right at the base of his throat. I ran a thumb along it – it was raised a little, and like the rest of his scars it was lighter in colour than the skin surrounding it. “The…the second time I was sick, I had to go through some seriously intense chemotherapy. And after the second round of it I somehow managed to catch the flu, which ended up turning into pneumonia. Again. Normally either of them wouldn’t be a huge deal, but…” He trailed off, almost as if he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“You were already sick, and your immunity was low because of the chemo,” I finished, and he nodded. “That was the third time you nearly died?”

“Yeah. I fell asleep on the lounge downstairs in the practice space literally four days after I got home from hospital, and I woke up two and a half weeks later in ICU with a tracheotomy tube sticking out of my neck.” He rubbed his scar a little. “I don’t remember a thing from it, but apparently I stopped breathing once before an ambulance showed up, two more times on the way to hospital, and my heart nearly stopped twice.”

“Jesus,” I breathed, realising for the first time how lucky Taylor really was to still be here. “How long did you have it for?”

“The trach?”

“Yeah.”

“Nearly two years. Until I finished chemo, basically.”

“Damn.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“How come you had it for so long?”

He didn’t say anything for a while – so long, in fact, that I almost didn’t expect an answer. When he finally did speak again, he almost sounded exhausted.

“I kept getting sick,” he replied at last. “Every cold my brothers and sisters brought home, I’d catch it and end up in the hospital. And when I didn’t have a cold, or bronchitis, or whatever, I’d wake up in the middle of the night because I couldn’t breathe. Keeping the trach was a lot easier and a whole lot less traumatic than having a tube shoved down my throat all the time.”

“That’s totally understandable.” A thought popped into my head as I said this, and I grinned a little evilly. “Is that where your scarf fetish comes from?”

“My what?” he asked, sounding almost scandalised, and I burst out laughing. “I do not have a scarf fetish!” he protested as my laughter tapered off, and I raised an eyebrow at him while I ate some more chips. “It’s a collection, and yes that’s where it came from. It stopped the stares when I had to go out.”

“I think I can understand not wanting to be stared at. You’d be surprised how many stares I get when I’m in my wheelchair.”

I leaned in once more and kissed first the scar on Taylor’s chest before moving up to the base of his throat and pressing a final kiss to the scar there. His eyes bore into mine as I straightened back up, the bright summery blue of his irises meeting my green, and I held his gaze for what felt like forever before I looked away again.

“Thank you,” I said as Taylor picked his shirt up off the floor and pulled it back on again.

“For what?” he asked from inside his shirt, his tone quizzical.

“Trusting me.”

Taylor’s head popped out of the collar of his shirt, turning his hair into a halo around his head, and I reached over to smooth it back down. “Trusting you? With what?”

“Your scars. I know there probably aren’t many people who know about them.”

“Oh.” He gave me a small, almost shy smile. “You’re welcome, Ruby.”

---

“Ruby McCormick?”

I slowly eased myself to my feet, keeping my left arm close to myself as I moved, and waited until I was sure I wasn’t going to fall over before following Dr. Marsden down the corridor to her office. Unlike my last few doctor’s appointments, this morning I was by myself. Taylor was, in the words of my Pop, running around like a blue-arsed fly this morning getting ready for the upcoming South Australian tour, and even though he had offered to come with me I hadn’t wanted to interrupt that. The tour was set to kick off in Mount Gambier in a week and a half, though I wasn’t sure at this point if I would be flying out with everyone else or if I would have to delay things by a few days. Everything hinged on this doctor’s appointment, and on the results of the x-rays I’d had taken the morning before.

“How are you travelling this morning?” Dr. Marsden asked once she had closed the door of her office behind us. She sat down in front of her computer and turned her chair to face me. “And how exactly did you manage to do this to yourself?” she added, her gaze having landed on the cast around my left arm.

“I was walking Sadie – she went chasing after something, and I didn’t let go of my end of the lead after she took off. Tripped over my own feet and hit the deck.”

“That sounds like it hurt.”

I let out a rueful chuckle. “Oh, it hurt all right. Still does, but not as much as it did to begin with.”

“And you had some x-rays taken yesterday, is that right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. They said they would send them over once they’d been developed.”

“Yes, I received them this morning.” She indicated a large white envelope that was marked with my full name in heavy black letters, before bringing an electronic copy up on the screen of her computer. The bones of my left forearm, complete with a plate and a bunch of screws that had been attached to my radius where I had broken it, were lit up in sharp black and white relief. It hardly looked like I’d broken my arm at all. “Your arm is healing very nicely,” she said, giving me a smile. “The cast should be ready to come off in two weeks’ time. Does it feel loose at all?”

I moved my left arm experimentally, rotating my wrist a little, and frowned when I felt it shift inside the cast. “Yeah, it does actually. Definitely more than it did a week ago.”

“All right. I can replace your cast right now, if you have the time?”

I thought about it for a few moments. Taylor had told me as he had dropped me off for my appointment to ring him when I was done, no matter how long my appointment ended up taking, but it hadn’t even been twenty minutes since he’d headed off into town – it hardly seemed worth calling him this soon. Plus with my cast starting to feel looser than it should have, it seemed like as good a time as any to get a new one put on.

“I’m all yours,” I replied. Almost as an afterthought, I added, “Can I have a blue cast this time?”

Dr. Marsden gave me a smile. “I think that can be arranged.”

In what seemed like almost no time at all, Dr. Marsden had cut the cast off my arm with a loudly buzzing saw and a pair of scissors, replacing it with a newer, much more closely-fitting cast. “Keep your cast away from water for the next few days so it can dry completely,” she said as she finished wrapping the bright blue fibreglass around my arm. “And no driving or heavy lifting.” Here she gave me a smile. “I know that you probably know the rules, but a reminder never hurt anyone.”

“Thanks, Dr. Marsden.”

“It’s no trouble at all, Ruby. Did you have any questions for me?”

“Yeah, I do actually.” I fidgeted a little, picking at a hole in the right knee of my jeans. “I’m due to fly down to Melbourne in a week and a half – will I be okay to travel?”

“I don’t see why not, though I would recommend you keep your arm in a sling while you’re on the plane in case of turbulence. That being said, I’d like to see you again before you leave.”

“Yeah, no worries. I’ll get that sorted on my way out.”

Once I’d booked another appointment, this one in a week’s time, I left the medical centre and parked myself just outside the door, and fished my phone out of my pocket. I balanced it on my cast, unlocked it, and opened my text messages so I could send one to Taylor.

Done @ doc’s, got a new cast, I tapped out. Heading up to woonona macca’s if you want to meet me there when you’re done in town xo

As soon as it was sent, I locked my phone again and slipped it back into my pocket, and started heading up the footpath toward McDonald’s.

I’d been sitting at a table in the McCafé section of the restaurant for about fifteen minutes, picking the blueberries out of a muffin and sipping a chocolate frappé, when the seat across from me creaked. I looked up from scrolling through Twitter on my phone to see Taylor sitting down, putting his messenger bag down on the floor as he settled himself, and he gave me a smile that I immediately returned.

“Got you something,” I said, and pushed a coffee mug and two paper bags over to his side of the table.

“Oh, thanks,” he said, sounding grateful. “I’m fucking starving.” He picked each paper bag up and opened it so he could peer inside. “Have I ever mentioned how much I love you?” he said with another smile, having seen what was inside each of the bags – a ham, cheese and tomato toastie inside one, and a little raspberry cheesecake inside the other.

“Quite a few times,” I replied, hiding another smile of my own behind my frappé. “How’d things go in town?”

I had always liked to listen to Taylor talk. Even before we had met and become friends, Hanson’s radio and TV interviews had long been one of my favourite things about their tours and album releases. The way Taylor got fired up when he hit on a subject he was passionate about was one of the many things I loved about him. I settled back in my seat and let the sound of his voice wash over me.

“So are you still good to come on tour next week?” Taylor asked, and I started a little.

“Yeah, I asked Dr. Marsden after she replaced my cast,” I said, and held my left arm up so that Taylor could see it. “She said that I should wear a sling when I’m on the plane in case of turbulence, and she wants to see me again in a week, but apart from that she doesn’t have any problem with me coming along.” I eyed my cast apprehensively. “I’m not sure how things are going to work with my suitcase and my wheelchair, though. I’m still not supposed to drive or pick up anything heavy with my left arm, and I’m assuming that doesn’t just apply to my car.”

“We’ll manage.” He gave me a smile that I took to be reassuring, and reached over to entwine the fingers of his left hand in my right. “Just like we always do.”

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