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When I walked in, he looked up.
“Need anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head and smiled. I was so, so good, he had no idea. Then I walked to the bed, popped off my tall, strappy heels, and climbed on.
Sean stretched out on his back. He’d given me use of the pillow and was using his arm bent up behind him as a cushion.
Even if I had been fully drunk, I wouldn’t have allowed that.
I motioned for him to lift his head, stuck half the pillow under there, and then lay on my side with my back to the wall, facing Sean. We shared the pillow.
“You mind if I leave that light on?” he asked, talking about the small lamp on the trunk beside the bed.
The overhead light was off now.
“No. Not at all,” I told him, voice breaking with a yawn. “Do you mind if I cuddle you at some point? I’m a natural cuddler.”
Sean cut his eyes to me. “I didn’t mind it before.”
Aha. So he had been awake the other night on my couch when I’d done that. Good to know.
“Okay.” I closed my eyes on a second yawn. “Good night, Sean.”
“Night, Shayla.”
Sean dozed immediately.
Forty minutes later, I was still awake and playing with a thread on my dress while watching Sean sleep when the urge to use the bathroom again hit hard.
I carefully climbed over his legs and snuck out of the room.
After doing what I needed to and washing my hands, I grabbed my phone out of my bag and set an alarm for eight a.m., just in case Sean didn’t have one set. Then I returned to the bedroom and placed my phone on the trunk.
Standing beside the bed, I looked down at Sean.
He was still on his back, one hand on his abdomen and the other buried under the pillow. His head was turned toward me, lips parted, allowing breath to leave him slowly and quietly.
I let my eyes wander to his ink.
The low light from the lamp cast a glow over his body, illuminating areas of his skin and shadowing others.
Sean’s tattoos were still a mystery to me. I’d seen them, but not up close and not like this, where I could stare and study without him knowing.
On his upper chest were images blended beautifully together among a lot of shading. I could make out two baby footprints on one of his pecs, like you’d see on a birth certificate, and the girls’ names: Caroline and Fiona were scripted just below each of his collarbones. Woven throughout the shading were lines that didn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to them. They were thick and dark, looped down to the tops of his ribs, and reached his shoulder, ending there in a bull’s-eye swirl pattern. Below the bull’s-eye on his left upper arm was that drawing I’d noticed a couple weeks ago. I couldn’t see it too well without Sean rolling over, but I could see it enough to know I was right in my observation before—it was a stick-figure person. One like a child would draw. And I knew one of his girls had put that on him.
God, he’d gotten it permanent. That was incredibly sweet.
When my eyes swept back over Sean’s chest to study more of the ink, I noticed something. A word written in the background on the skin of his left pec, a word that was mostly hidden by handprints and shadows and the lines weaving, but it was there.
I bent down and got closer.
I saw the word—Nothing—tattooed in someone’s handwriting. Gasping, my hand flew to my mouth, and my eyes shifted, refocusing on another spot on his chest. I saw another word—Loser. Same handwriting. And another—Worthless. This one was written around the curve of his ribs.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered behind my hand.
The words were everywhere. Pain. Hate. Pathetic. Undeserving. They were hidden all over him. On the inside of his arm—the one closest to me that was bent up, and I was sure on the other one as well. I just couldn’t see it. Curving around to his back, and in the center of his chest where his heart was. I looked down to the hand resting on his stomach. On the top, spanning to his knuckles, was a tattoo of a skull with roses coming out of its eye sockets, but when I leaned closer and searched, I could see the word hidden in the shading.
Space.
“Didn’t have parents. Had a woman who didn’t want me around. That’s it. I took up space.”
I whimpered so loudly, I was shocked I didn’t wake him.
Turning away, I clamped my hand over top of my other one and pressed down as wave after wave of agony pulsed beneath my skin and sunk into my bones like a cancer. This pain was rotting, capable of tearing me apart from the inside out. It would destroy all of me, I just knew it.
