Chapter 5: Velcro Vows
The apartment held its breath.
Daisy’s forehead was warm and damp against Willow’s knuckles, her silent weeping a tremble that traveled up Willow’s newly-tightened arm. The hiss of the Velcro was a sound that still seemed to hang in the air, a punctuation mark to something fundamental.
Willow watched. Her own breathing was measured, a deliberate rhythm in the tense quiet. The splints were snug—firm, bordering on restrictive—but the sharp gasp she’d given hadn’t been from real pain. It had been a reflex, an invitation, a carefully sharpened probe. And it had worked.
“They’re perfect,” Willow said, her voice cool and clear, a drop of water falling into absolute stillness.
Daisy flinched. Slowly, she lifted her head. Her face was a mess of pink splotches and tear tracks, her blue eyes wide with a bewildered shame. She didn’t let go of Willow’s hand. Her grip simply loosened from a desperate clutch to a tentative hold.
“I… I’m sorry,” Daisy whispered. “Did I hurt you?”
Willow tilted her head, a calculated gesture. She flexed her fingers inside their plastic cradle. A dull ache throbbed in the pinned joints, but it was the background hum she’d grown accustomed to. The sharper sensation was from the pressure of the straps, a constant, immediate reminder of confinement. Of Daisy’s hands applying it.
“No,” Willow said. “Not yet.”
The two words landed between them like a gauntlet.
Daisy’s breath hitched. Her gaze dropped to the splints, to her own thumbs which were still absently stroking the plastic edge. She looked utterly lost.
Willow decided to map the terrain. “Why were you crying?” she asked, her tone stripped of accusation, making it somehow more invasive.
“Because…” Daisy’s voice was thin. “Because I’m the reason these are here. Because I’m a disaster. Because you’re trapped and it’s my fault and I can’t… fix it.”
“That’s not all,” Willow pressed, gently. It was anything but gentle. “You cried when Leo fixed my wrist. When he used the hook. You cried when he touched my chin.” She let the observations hang, each one a piece of evidence laid on a table.
Daisy’s eyes squeezed shut. A fresh tear escaped. “I don’t know,” she choked out. “It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. Seeing you… like that. And him just… handling it. It makes me feel… I don’t know what it makes me feel.”
“Tell me.”
“Terrified,” Daisy blurted. “And… jealous.”
The admission hung in the air, raw and awful. Daisy looked horrified she’d said it.
“Jealous of Leo? Or jealous of me?” Willow’s question was a scalpel.
Daisy shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know!Both? Neither? I just… I want…” She trailed off, her courage evaporating.
Willow could feel the power humming in her veins, cold and intoxicating. She was the broken object, the fragile patient, and yet she held the strings to this confused, hungry guilt. She decided to pull one.
“I need to lie down,” she said, shifting her weight in the wheelchair. “My hip is aching from this chair.”
It was true, but it was also a command. A test.
The spell broke, reforming into the familiar ritual of care. Daisy nodded, sniffling and wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Okay. Okay, let’s get you to bed.”
The transfer from wheelchair to bed was now a familiar, awkward dance, but tonight it was performed in a fugue state. Daisy’s movements were slow, dreamlike. She positioned Willow carefully, propping the leg cast on its mountain of pillows, arranging the splinted arm on a soft rest. Her hands, when they brushed Willow’s skin—tucking the sheet, adjusting the strap of her tank top—lingered a fraction longer than necessary. Her earlier outburst had opened a valve, and a raw sensitivity was leaking out.
Willow watched her. “The itching is bad tonight,” she remarked, gazing at the ceiling. “Right under the knee cast, near the back. That spot I can never reach.”
Daisy stopped fussing with the blankets. She stood beside the bed, her hands at her sides. The quiet stretched.
“The hook is on the nightstand,” Willow added, as if it were an afterthought.
Daisy’s gaze flicked to the small, sterile instrument. She bit her lip. Her chest rose and fell.
“Could you?” Willow asked, turning her head on the pillow to look at her. She made her eyes wide, free of the cool calculation she’d worn earlier. She let herself look simply tired, and in discomfort. It wasn’t entirely a lie.
Daisy moved as if in a trance. She picked up the hook, its metal cold. She came around to the other side of the bed, to where Willow’s leg lay, a plaster monolith. She knelt on the mattress, the springs creaking softly under her weight.
“Where?” Her voice was thick.
“There,” Willow said, gesturing vaguely with her good hand toward the back of her knee. “The worst spot.”
Daisy hesitated. Then, with a trembling hand, she gently pressed the edge of the cast, searching for the gap. She found it—a small, vulnerable space where skin met plaster. She slid the curved tip of the hook inside.
The first, gentle probe was a shock of relief so intense it made Willow gasp softly. It was a clean, sharp sensation, so different from the vague, maddening torment of an unreachable itch.
“Is that it?” Daisy whispered, her eyes fixed on her work.
“A little to the left. Deeper.”
Daisy adjusted. The hook slid another quarter inch, the metal a cool, precise intrusion into the private, itchy hell of the cast. Willow’s back arched slightly off the mattress. A low, involuntary sigh escaped her.
Daisy froze. Her own breathing had gone shallow. She watched the minute tremor in Willow’s leg, the slight tightening of her toes where they peeked from the cast’s end. She applied the hook again, a slow, circular scrape.
The relief was blinding. It flooded Willow’s system, a wave of pure, physical release that bordered on the sublime. Her eyes closed. She let another, softer sound escape her lips.
She felt the mattress shift. Daisy had leaned closer. The hand not holding the hook came to rest on Willow’s thigh, just above the cast line. The touch was heavy, warm, grounding. It wasn’t clinical. It was possessive.
The scratching continued, each deliberate scrape sending shivers up Willow’s spine. The combination was dizzying: the cool, anonymous metal solving an agonizing problem, and the warm, familiar hand claiming the territory. Arousal, long buried under frustration and medication, unfurled slowly, dangerously, in the pit of Willow’s stomach. It was tangled inextricably with the relief from the itch, with her own helplessness, with Daisy’s trembling, guilt-ridden focus.
“Does it feel good?” Daisy asked, her voice barely a breath.
“Yes,” Willow breathed, her own voice unrecognizable to her. “Don’t stop.”
Daisy didn’t. Her circles became more confident, more rhythmic. Her thumb began to stroke the soft skin of Willow’s inner thigh in time with the scratching. The two sensations, one solving a pain, the other creating a new, building tension, began to weave together.
Willow opened her eyes. Daisy was watching her face, her pupils dilated, her lips parted. The hunger there was no longer a confused shadow. It was clear, desperate, and directed.
“You like this,” Willow stated, not a question.
Daisy’s circling thumb stilled for a second. Then it resumed, firmer. She gave a tiny, jerky nod, a tear spilling over and tracing a new path down her cheek. “I hate that I like it.”
“Why?” Willow pressed, even as her body was responding to the relentless rhythm. “Because you shouldn’t want the person you broke?”
Another nod, miserable. The hook scraped.The thumb pressed.
“What do you want, Daisy?” Willow’s voice was low, hypnotic. “Right now. Tell me exactly.”
Daisy’s composure cracked. A sob broke from her, even as her hand kept moving. “I want it to be me,” she choked out. “I want to be the one who fixes it. I want to be the one who makes it better. I want to be… necessary.Like this. I want you to need me to scratch the itch. I want you to need me for everything.”
The confession was ugly and beautiful, selfish and selfless, all at once. It was the root of every clumsy accident and every tender, guilty touch.
Willow reached out with her good left hand. She cupped Daisy’s wet cheek, her thumb wiping away a tear. Daisy leaned into the touch, her eyes closing.
“I do need you,” Willow whispered. And in this moment, in this twisted, charged space they’d built from plaster and guilt, it was utterly true.
The hook fell from Daisy’s fingers, clattering softly onto the blanket. Her free hand came up to cover Willow’s on her cheek. Then, slowly, she bent her head. Willow thought she was going to kiss her palm. Instead, Daisy pressed her lips to the inside of Willow’s wrist, just above the rigid line of the splints. The kiss was hot, damp, and fervent, a brand of desperate devotion.
It was too much and not enough. The line they were toeing was no longer a line; it was a smudge, a blurring of patient and caregiver, of culprit and solace. The arousal in Willow’s gut was a live wire now, but so was a sharp, warning pang of something else—the understanding of how deep this dependency ran, in both directions.
Daisy pulled back, her eyes searching Willow’s, looking for permission, for condemnation, for a map.
Willow didn’t give her one. She just let her hand slide from Daisy’s cheek down to her shoulder, a silent, heavy anchor. “I’m tired,” she said, the words a gentle dismissal and a devastating intimacy all at once. “Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
Daisy nodded, wordless. She retrieved the hook, placing it carefully back on the nightstand. Then she curled her body on top of the covers beside Willow, her head resting near Willow’s hip, one hand returning to rest on the plaster of the leg cast, as if guarding it.
Willow stared at the dark ceiling, feeling the weight of Daisy beside her, the ghost of the hook’s relief still tingling under the plaster, and the quiet, terrifying certainty that they had just stepped into a new kind of wilderness. One with no maps, and no clear way back.
One with no maps, and no clear way back. The silence that followed was thick, a living thing between them, punctured only by the faint rasp of Daisy’s thumb stroking the plaster of Willow’s cast.
Sleep was a distant country. Willow lay pinned by the weight of Daisy’s head against her hip and the new, bewildering weight of the admission. I want you to need me for everything. The words echoed, rearranging every clumsy accident of the last six months into a sinister, beautiful pattern. Her skin still hummed from the hook’s precise mercy.
Daisy’s breathing had finally evened into the shallow rhythms of sleep when the itch returned. Not the same one. A new, vicious bloom of fire ants marching along the inside of her forearm, deep within the fiberglass of the newest cast. She twitched. The movement was subtle, but Daisy stirred immediately, a caretaker’s instinct wired deep.
“Mm? Willow?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.” Her whisper was strained.
Daisy pushed herself up on one elbow, her blonde hair a messy halo in the dim light from the streetlamp outside. Her eyes found Willow’s in the gloom, no longer clouded by tears but clear and focused. “Where?”
Willow clenched her jaw. “Left arm. Inside. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” Daisy’s voice was quiet but left no room for argument. She moved, the bed shifting as she rose and walked around to the other side. She didn’t turn on the lamp. She picked up the hook from the nightstand with a familiarity that sent a fresh ripple through Willow.
“Show me where,” Daisy said, her tone softer now, almost clinical.
Willow didn’t lift her arm. She just held it out, a pale log in the half-light. “You can’t reach it. The opening’s too narrow. Harding said only the air blower or…” She trailed off.
“Or the assistant with the long, thin tool at the clinic,” Daisy finished, her words measured. She looked at the hook in her hand, then at the cast’s narrow opening at the wrist. It was too small. She put the hook down.
Willow watched her silhouette move to the door and disappear into the darkened living room. There was a rustle, a clatter from the junk drawer. When Daisy returned, she held something slender and metallic that gleamed faintly. A knitting needle. A size one, unbearably long and thin.
“Daisy.” Willow’s voice held a warning, or maybe a plea.
“It’s sterile. I never used this one. The yarn kept splitting.” Daisy sat on the edge of the bed, her expression unreadable in the dark. “Tell me where.”
The command hung there. The previous intimacy had been exploratory, a confused crossing of a line. This was deliberate. Willow felt a cool sweat break out on her back. She swallowed. “Mid-forearm. Press down, you’ll feel the worst spot.”
Daisy’s fingers, warm and sure, pressed along the cast. She found the epicenter of the torment. She positioned the tip of the steel needle at the wrist opening. It slid in with a faint, whispering scrape against the fiberglass liner.An invasion. A relief so acute it was borderline violent.
Willow gasped, her head pushing back into the pillow.
“Good?” Daisy asked. Her voice was a low hum.
“Don’t stop.”
Daisy worked the needle deeper, a slow, inexorable penetration into the private, inaccessible heart of the cast. The scratch was not the broad, solving scrape of the hook. This was a precise, almost surgical violation of the itch. It was better. It was worse. Every nerve in Willow’s body focused on that single point of contact, a radiant point of agony and ecstasy.
“You’re so still,” Daisy murmured, her breath warm on Willow’s skin. “You barely breathe when I do this.”
Willow couldn’t answer. Her good hand fisted in the sheets. The sensation was overwhelming, a tide pulling her under. The clumsiness was gone. In its place was a terrifying, flawless competence. This was the Daisy who had, however accidentally, orchestrated every one of her breaks. This was the real Daisy.
“There,” Daisy whispered, giving the needle a final, subtle twist.
A full-body shudder racked Willow. A low, choked sound escaped her, one she didn’t recognize. It was pure reaction, stripped of thought.
In the silence that followed, the only sound was the soft clink of the knitting needle being placed on the nightstand. Then, the warmth of Daisy’s hand covered Willow’s splinted fingers, squeezing gently.
“I can do that,” Daisy said into the darkness, her voice thick with a new kind of certainty. “Whenever you need it. I can reach all the places you can’t.”
The words weren’t just a promise. They were a verdict. Willow lay very still, the ghost of the needle’s path a cool, fading trail under the heat of her skin. Daisy’s hand remained on hers, a grounding weight that felt more like a tether.
“I know,” Willow finally said, the two words scraping out. Her throat was dry.
The apartment in the pre-dawn light was a landscape of grays and muted blues. Daisy helped her to the bathroom, their movements a silent, practiced routine. But the silence now was different, charged with the night’s confessions. Daisy’s hands, as she steadied Willow by the sink, were not just helpful. They were proprietary.
“I’ll start breakfast,” Daisy murmured, her voice still husky from sleep and tears. “Pancakes? The blueberry kind you can’t cut yourself.”
It was meant to be a joke, a return to their old, light-hearted script. It landed like a stone.
“Sure,” Willow said, not meeting her eyes in the mirror.
The kitchen was its usual disaster zone. A half-unpacked grocery bag slumped on the counter, a bottle of maple syrup threatening to topple near the edge. Daisy moved with a new, unsettling quietness, not her usual bubbly chaos. She was concentrating, her brow furrowed as she measured flour.
Willow maneuvered her wheelchair to the small table, the leg cast thumping dully against a chair leg. She watched Daisy’s back, the set of her shoulders. The air felt thick, saturated with everything they’d said and done. She needed to break it. “So, the knitting needle. That was… resourceful.”
Daisy flinched, a puff of flour rising from the bowl. “It worked.”
“It really did.” Willow let the ambiguity hang. She flexed the fingers of her splinted hand. “Think Harding would approve? As a medical technique, I mean.”
Daisy didn’t turn around. Her whisking became more vigorous. “I don’t care what she’d approve.”
The bluntness was new. Willow felt a thrill, dangerous and sharp, cut through her. This was the Daisy from the dark, the one with the steady hands. The one who wanted to be necessary.
The kettle began to whistle, a shrill, escalating sound. Daisy turned to grab it, her socked feet sliding on a patch of something glossy on the linoleum—a spilled drop of syrup, invisible. Her arms pinwheeled, the kettle sloshing boiling water. She cried out, lurching backward to regain her balance.
Her hip connected squarely with the handle of Willow’s wheelchair.
It happened with a slow, dreadful clarity. The chair, unlocked, shot forward from the impact. Willow’s good hand scrambled for the table edge, her fingers brushing the wood. She missed. The wheelchair wheel caught on the leg of the kitchen table, jerking to a sudden, violent halt.
Willow was not so lucky.
Newton’s laws, indifferent and precise, took over. Her body continued its forward trajectory. The heavy, plaster-encased mass of her right leg led the charge, twisting her sideways. There was no graceful slide. There was the hard, unforgiving edge of the tile floor rising to meet her, and the sickening, muffled crunch that seemed to come from inside her own head.
It wasn’t a loud sound. It was a dense, final one.
The world dissolved into a white, blinding sheet of pure sensation. It wasn’t even pain, not yet. It was a brilliant, silent shock that erased all thought. Then the air rushed back in, and with it, a wave of nausea and a deep, resonant throbbing that centered in her left side, radiating from her hip.
She lay on the cold tile, staring up at the fluorescent light fixture, seeing the dead insects inside it. Her left leg was splayed at a wrong, impossible angle.
“Willow!” Daisy’s scream was raw, shredding the quiet. The kettle clattered into the sink. She was on the floor in an instant, her hands fluttering over Willow like panicked birds. “Oh god, oh god, no, no, no. Please. Willow, talk to me.”
Willow tried to breathe. Each inhalation was a knife in her ribs. “My hip,” she managed, the words thin and reedy. “Daisy. I think… I think it’s the hip.”
Daisy’s face, hovering above her, was a mask of absolute horror. Tears were already streaming, her mouth a trembling line. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I slipped, I’m so stupid, I’m so—”
“Daisy.” Willow’s voice was a command, sharp with pain. “Phone. Ambulance. Now.”
The command broke through Daisy’s panic. She scrambled up, slipping again in her haste, and grabbed her phone from the counter. Her voice, as she spoke to the 911 operator, was high and thin, but she relayed their address, the nature of the injury—“a fall, a previous patient with existing fractures”—with a chilling, efficient clarity.
She came back, sinking to the floor. She didn’t try to move Willow. She knew better now. Instead, she carefully slid her hand under Willow’s head, cushioning it from the tile. Her other hand found Willow’s good one and laced their fingers together, squeezing hard.
“I’ve got you,” Daisy whispered, her tears falling onto Willow’s shirt. “I’ve got you. They’re coming.”
The pain was solidifying now, a deep, awful ache that promised to get worse. Willow focused on Daisy’s face, on the devastating guilt etched into every feature. She thought of the needle, the hook, the words I want you to need me for everything.
A bizarre, breathless sound escaped her—part sob, part laugh. It hurt her ribs.
“What?” Daisy begged, her voice breaking. “What is it?”
Willow turned her head, just slightly, to look at the unnatural angle of her own leg. Then she looked back at Daisy, whose care had just, once again, sculpted her body into something new and broken.
“You really can,” Willow whispered, the words laced with agony and a dark, undeniable awe.