is obviously fine, and so is keeping my head tilted back, but sometimes when I sleep on my face, I wake up in the middle of the night because I can feel something trailing down and… You get the point. Also, when it starts up when I’m working or like when we were at the charity event, I have to push a cotton ball or some tissue paper up there, something so I don’t have to hold a tissue under my nose like this all the time.” I lamented my words when I had to hold the Kleenex up to my face again. “In any case, whatever I do, it gets drenched too quickly anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this before, Rose? Why did you wait?”
“I was working, and I thought it would go away on its own. Plus, I don’t like doctors. Sometimes it starts up and doesn’t stop for hours. Sometimes it disappears after half an hour or so. I try my best not to tilt my head down, because that triggers it too. Thankfully in the mornings it’s slow, for some reason, so it hasn’t been a big issue when I’m baking, but I never know when it’s going to happen. Speaking of…”
I felt it coming down again, and the Kleenex in my hand was done already. Holding on to the chair, I slowly got down to my knees, my eyes looking up at the ceiling. Blindly, I tried to reach for my bag, but suddenly Jack was on his knees too, reaching for my hands. I felt my eyes blur a little.
“Can you get me a tissue, please?” I asked, keeping my chin up and away from his gaze.
He let go of me and got up to leave.
“Wait, I have some in my—”
He walked out of his office before I could tell him I had some more in my bag. I stood up. He came back with a pretty box of Kleenex and held it out for me. I pulled one out and, sniffling, held it under my nose.
“Are you okay?” he asked again, looking straight into my eyes. I nodded and tilted my head back a little more to stop the flow a bit. Sometimes that helped. Now that I’d learned what it could be, the feeling of that warm trickle was freaking me out more than it had only hours earlier.
Jack massaged his temple, walked a few steps away, and then came back to stand in front of me. “Okay. Okay, tell me what the doctor said. I’m assuming it’s not allergies from the look on your face.”
“Nope. Turns out it’s probably not allergies or a cold. He wants to run some tests, wants to get a CT scan and an MRI, but he thinks I might have cerebrospinal fluid leak, especially because it’s only coming from one side of my nose.” I twisted my lips and tried my best to hold back my tears. His eyes studied my face, and the longer I looked into his gaze, the more his image started to blur.
“Don’t do that,” he ordered, his face unreadable.
I nodded. Given the kind of guy he was, I didn’t think dealing with a crying female would be his favorite thing to do, but even hearing his gravelly voice was breaking the tight hold I’d had on myself ever since I left the doctor’s office.
I’d put my bag on the chair as I was standing up, so I grabbed it and hitched it higher on my shoulder then nodded to myself. Tightening my fingers around the Kleenex in my grasp, I dropped my hand down. “I should leave, really. I should’ve gone straight back to work in the first place. I just thought I’d drop by and tell you I might not be able to join you—” When the first tear slowly slid down my cheek, I angrily swiped at it with the back of my hand. “I might not be able to join you at events for a while. I think they need to do surgery so I’m not sure if I’m gonna…”
He looked at me for a long time as the tears I had promised myself I wouldn’t shed started to come more rapidly after the word surgery. Then I felt the now familiar feeling that something was running down my nose, so I quickly tilted my head back. The last thing—the very last thing I wanted was for him to actually see something coming down my nose.