“Left foot, Zlatícko,” I instruct, and she lifts it so I can move the dress out of the way. “Right one now.”
Closing my eyes, I breathe in and out, pressing a fist to my mouth before I stand, eyes meeting hers again in the mirrorbefore I find a point somewhere over her shoulder and try to focus on the curved rim of the tub in the reflection.
“You can look at me,” she whispers, voice laced with tears, but steady and sure.
I do look—and I wish I hadn’t.
She’s so beautiful I think it might fucking kill me.
I swallow, pinching my eyes closed before I ask, “Do you feel better?”
Sloan tips her head, considering, teeth grazing her bottom lip, and her voice so fucking sad I want to smash the mirror. “It’s still—it’s all over me, all the time, and I can’t get it off.”
“What?”
She blinks at me, one tear slipping past her lash line and falling over the pillow of her cheek. “All the ways I wasn’t enough for you.”
“Sloan—” I think the weight of the whole thing chokes me. It all sits right against my chest, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep breathing if I don’t fix this for her. “You’re enough. You always were and you always have been.”
“Then why can I feel it? Sitting right here, all over me, all the time, on my skin?” she asks, like it’s a literal thing and she’s really wondering.
“This skin?” I skate my thumb across her shoulder blade, back up across the lines leading to her neck. “Can I take it off for you?”
“I’m not sure how you’d do that.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “I think it’s a part of me now.”
“Let me rephrase. Can I show you just how fucking enough you are?”
Sloan inhales, blue eyes going wide. I watch her in the mirror, weighing the merits of me and the way I hurt her against the lie she told me earlier. But she swallows, lips parting, and she nods.
I don’t have a plan. I haven’t had one since I stood up and ran here.
But I’ve never really needed one, not when it came to her.
My body somehow knew what to do with hers when I was twenty, and I always knew how to hold her heart properly.
It’s pretty easy to pick back up right where we left off.
Not those months where my brain stopped working, but the day I got hurt and all the years before that.
My hands find her waist, fingers digging in before I spin her around.
A tiny gasp in her throat, eyes still wide and her hands suspended above my chest, like she doesn’t know where to put them.
I trace the constellation of freckles before dragging my thumb across her lips, pulling on the bottom one and gripping her chin. “Are these new? All weighed down with all those thoughts of not being enough?”
“My lips?” she breathes, blinking at me, one hand coming to rest tentatively right over my heart.
I hope she can feel it beat.
“Yeah, your lips, Zlatícko. They new, too?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I hate them the most, because they’ve never touched you.”
“I’m going to change that. How does a new first kiss sound to you?”
Those lips part—they’re still fucking perfect and I hate that she thinks they’re anything less than that because of me—the bottom one bowing in the middle, weighed down with all her perceived failures, but I think it used to be weighed down by how much she loved me.
She gives a little nod, and my mouth is on hers before I can listen to that broken part of my brain, sharp and stabbing, that tries to remind me I’m not good enough for her anymore.
