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I give Tasha a tight hug before she leaves. “Thank you,” I whisper to her. “For everything.”
“We’ve got your back,” she tells me. “Just like I know you’ve got ours.”
She’s kind, but I know we’ve overstayed our welcome.
Tomorrow, Archer and I will leave. I’ve dotted a couple of motels on our path north that I think we could stay in for the night.
I’ve put the maps down, and I’m drawing in my notebook when Archer exits the shower.
He doesn’t say anything when he sees me in his bed. It’s something unspoken between us, like we’ve both agreed without having to say it: I belong here. In his bed. With him.
He has a towel slung across his hips, and he uses a second towel to run through his hair. His skin is pink from the shower, the bandage across his chest fresh. It’s hard not to stare; his body is like a map. Mountains of muscle on his chest, his abdomen. The veins across his arms like rivers. Dark shadows textured with hair down the center of his body.
There are marks on him, too. There’s a white lifted scar across his left bicep. A divot in his hip. Another jagged line that cuts across his belly. I want to know the origin to all of his scars—war wounds? Or just a careless young boy who fell off his bike?
He doesn’t seem ashamed of them, either way. Maybe he’s forgotten they’re there. He steps closer to me, still toweling off his hair.
“What’re you working on?” he asks.
I pull my pencil from the page. “It’s the picture of you. Do you want to see it?”
The sound he makes is somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. A derisive sound, as if the thought of anyone drawing a picture of him is a joke. But he appeases me. He sits on the edge of the bed. “Sure.”
But I stubbornly hug the notebook to my chest. “Sure or yes?” I clarify.
I won’t be mocked. Especially not my work. He either wants to see it, or he doesn’t—there’s no in-between. My art is sacred to me. It might not be good, or worthy of a place in a gallery, but it’s mine, and it’s important to me.
Archer holds out his hand. “Hand it over.”
So I do. I fold the spiral notebook over on the right page, give it to him, and then hug my legs to my chest, chin on my knees. Waiting for his judgment.
It doesn’t matter that I got into a prestigious art school, or that I get good grades on my projects, or that I sold all my pieces at my end-of-semester art show. Secretly, I’m still just a five-year-old girl who wants her daddy to pin her art to the fridge—a fridge already too cluttered with lottery tickets, betting draws, and food stamps.
I’m a product of my own disaster of a childhood.
I hold my breath as I wait for Archer to say something. It seems like he stares at it for the longest time, saying nothing.
Finally, he says, “Is this how you see me?”
I’m not sure what he means. So I shift, curling my knees underneath me, and settle in beside him, my shoulder against his so I can look at the picture.
“Yes. You were asleep. You looked peaceful. I took advantage of the moment.”
“Peaceful,” he says, echoing the word as though it’s the first time he’s heard it. “I don’t get described that way often.”
I notice it then, the film over his eyes. He’s emotional. He doesn’t look away from the picture, as though staring at it long enough will unlock some deep secret from within.
I bump my shoulder against his. “You’re more than just a killing machine. You know that, don’t you?”
The muscles in his jaw lock underneath the skin. “You don’t know that.”
Gently, I pluck the picture from his grasp and hold it up for him to see. “Does this look like a killing machine to you?”
But he’s not looking at the picture anymore. He’s staring down at his hands—those huge palms, long fingers splayed wide. Tendons like rope running from his knuckles to his wrist.
There is power in those hands.
“The things I’ve done…” he starts, his voice low, almost a murmur. “What these hands are capable of…”
