“She's going to be okay,” he adds.
“I know.” I do know. That's the whole point of what happened in that barn. “I just miss her already, and I haven't even left yet.”
“You'll write. You'll call. You'll visit when the route loops back through.” A beat. “And if she ever needs anything, she has seven brothers-in-law she's never met.”
The Saturday show isthe best one yet.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe every show looks like this from now on. Maybe once you've watched a man walk a lion through a spotlight and known what he feels like inside you, the whole world gets brighter. But the crowd is huge and loud, Brutus milks his wave for three encores, and when Rome makes his emperor's crossing, a little boy in the second row starts crying from pure joy.
Afterward, we do the chores side by side, hay and water and Caesar's evening feed, the routine already fitting me like a coat I've owned for years. And then his trailer, and the lamp, and the door clicking shut on the world.
I flop onto the bench with the peacock feather still in my hand, twirling it slowly, watching the eye catch the light.
“I can't believe he just added peafowl to the menagerie. Without telling anyone. Who does that?” I spin the feather. “Six new patients. Avian. I don't even have mylarge avian references with me. He couldn't have mentioned it at breakfast? 'Oh, by the way, incoming birds, Doc'?” I look up. “For the record, I don't actually mind. They're gorgeous. But it's the principle?—”
Rowe isn't listening.
He's sitting in his chair with his forearms on his knees, and he's somewhere else. His thumb has found his left sleeve, moving over the fabric, back and forth, and his eyes are on the floor between his boots.
I stop twirling. “Hey. What's up?”
He doesn't answer right away.
“This morning,” he says finally. “With the chains. I kept my clothes on.”
“I noticed.” I keep my voice level, easy. “I figured you had reasons.”
“I did. I didn't want him in the bed with us.” His thumb keeps moving over the sleeve. “But that means you've never actually seen me. All of me. You know the story now. You know what he did. Or enough of it. But knowing and seeing aren't the same, and if you're getting on those trucks in eight days, I want—” He stops for a second. “I'd like to show you my body. What's under the clothes. What he did. What I did, after, when I couldn't stand carrying it. The tattoos I put over all of it. I want you to see what you're choosing before the choosing's done.”
The feather goes still in my hands.
“Okay,” I say. “I'm sure it won't change my mind, Rowe. But show me.”
He stands. His hands go to the hem of his henley, and he pulls it over his head in one motion.
I make myself not gasp, because he's watching my face like a spooked animal, and I refuse to make a sudden movement.
His chest is beautiful—broad and strong and inked, black gothic work spreading across his pectorals and down his ribs in the same filigree language as the design I've had inside me. But underneath the ink, woven through it, the ink following it, are lines. Thin, raised, silvered ridges. Dozens of them. Laid in with care. Some cluster in neat parallel rows over his ribs, four and five together, like tally marks. Like verses.
“He liked my chest,” Rowe says. Flat. Clinical. He touches a row of them below his collarbone. “These were Proverbs. He worked in lines. One cut per line of the verse.” His hand moves to his ribs. “Numbers. He came back to Numbers a lot.”
He turns.
His back is worse. Not the cuts—there are fewer cuts—but there are other marks back there, older textures, the geography of a childhood I can't let myself picture in full or I won't survive this without throwing up. The tattoos climb over all of it, thorned vines and cathedral lines, ink refusing to let the scars have the last word.
Tears slide down my face. I don't make a sound. I hold the feather in my lap, and I let them fall. And I look.
He faces me again and holds out his forearms, turning them up to the lamp. Showing me the scars I've only ever caught in slivers under a sleeve. Long, deliberate, elevated lines from wrist to elbow, so many that they braid into each other.
“These ones on the outside edge—” he traces a set near his left wrist, rougher than the rest, less precise, “—are mine. After we got out. I was nineteen, twenty. Sometimes the memory of it would build up under the skin like pressure, and I thought if I opened it, it would drain.” His jaw works. “It doesn't drain. It just makes more scars. Loganfound me the second time and sat outside my door for a month. That's when I started tattooing instead. A needle I controlled. Pain with my own hand, my own design, my own reasons. My brother helped me where I couldn't reach.” His eyes come up to mine. “Every piece of ink on me is over something. There's nothing decorative here.”
“It's not decorative,” I agree. My voice cracks. “It's testimony.”
Something shifts in his face. His hands go to the waistband of his jeans, and he unbuttons them, then pushes them down, taking his boxers with them. Even soft, his cock is beautiful. But instead of staring at it, my attention goes to the scars on his thighs, the tattoos there.
Even if Rowe could stand to be touched, there would be no way for him to take his clothes off in front of a woman without prompting questions. And he's lived with that his whole life.
I look down at the feather in my lap. Softer than anything has a right to be.
