The room empties all the air out of it.
Just for a second, all the sound drains out of it too, the hum of the refrigerator and the steady sound of my own breathing, all of it gone, leaving nothing but the hard, ugly thud of my heart against my ribs and the sensation of his thumb still resting against something he just made feel ugly.
I don’t move. I don’t react. But it lands.
It always lands hard whenever he brings it up, because there was only one other person who has ever touched that scar and never once did he make me feel bad for having it. He traced his thumb gently over it, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You don’t get a scar like this from being weak. That shit stays because you fucking survived it.” He never thought it needed fixing.
“I could talk to Chris,” Damien says. “My brother knows a plastic surgeon. A good one. He could probably fix it.”
Fix it.
The words punch through something old and bruised that I keep in a place I don’t often visit. My eyes close before I can stop them. Suddenly, it isn’t Damien’s thumb on my skin. It’s Zane’s. His voice cuts through my thoughts. That scar says you kept breathing even when she wanted to break you.
I open my eyes and see Damien still in front of me.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“Talk about it.”
“I was only trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
His expression shifts—the warmth draining back behind something harder. “You don’t have to snap.”
“I’m not snapping.”
“Yes you fucking are.”
I try to step sideways, out from between him and the counter. But his body shifts with mine before I get anywhere, closing the gap, hip to hip, chest to chest, the counter edge pressing into the small of my back.
The conversation about my scar dissolves. His hand drops to my thigh.
The shift is so quick it almost steals my breath. One second he is talking about my ugly scar; the next, his palm is warm against my skin, sliding beneath the hem of my dress, fingers tracing upward along the inside of my thigh with the unhurried certainty of a man who has never once been told his timing is wrong.
His fingers graze higher and reach the edge of my underwear, brushing across the fabric.
My stomach turns.
“Damien.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
“You need to relax.” His fingers glide higher still, with the lightest pressure. “You’ve been wound up for days.”
I catch his wrist in my grasp.
He looks down at my hand wrapped around his wrist, then back up at my face. Something shifts in his expression that I don’t like the shape of.
Then there’s a loud knock at the door. The relief that floods through me is so immediate it’s almost embarrassing.
“I’ll get it,” I say, already trying to step sideways again.
“Leave it.”
