Page 37 of Mr. Match

Oliver reaches under my knees and lifts me up. And then he carries me upstairs and into the master bathroom, setting me on the counter.

We shower. He fucks me against the tile wall. So slowly in the steam, it all becomes a dream. The water runs down us like rain. Like we are trees.

“I will kiss you here,” he says, his mouth just below my left ear. Right where the silver-white scar starts. The first cut that ruthless man made on my body all those years ago. The same spot where Oliver tried to erase it with tattooed words.

“And here,” he says, kissing my left shoulder and reading his second set of words tattooed over the much deeper cut that man made on my body.

“And here.” Oliver drops to his knees and kisses the scar across my ribs and then the two just below my left breast. I never told him how it happened. I never told him about the first cut across my neck as my parents watched. Both of them beaten purple with bruises. They were huddled on the ground and I was so afraid they’d never get up from that floor. That I’d be left alone with this man.

He used a scalpel for the first cut. It was just a threat. A light tracing of the blade starting at my left ear and sloping down across the dent in my throat, before rising again and stopping just below my right ear.

I remember the blood. And the heat of it. The smell of it. He barely cut me, but the resulting mess was profuse.

I panicked. What happened next was my fault, because I panicked. My fingers were clasping onto the man’s wrist. At first desperately trying to pry then away from my neck. But then he said, “Shh,” into my ear. “Be still. Because if you move this blade will end your life.”

So I stopped fighting and stood so still I was made of stone.

The blood was too much and I freaked out. Twisted in his arms. I was only eleven. I can’t hate myself for the way I reacted. I was just a kid. I was naked, bound, my parents looked like they were dead or dying. And they had my little sister in the next room. She was only seven at the time. They let her play with dolls. She had a fantasy tea party with her dolls in the next room while we were being tortured.

The man dropped the scalpel and I wiggled away. Not far enough away. No. That’s not what happened.

Because he had a knife too. Not as sharp and precise as a scalpel, but sharp enough to make the next three cuts in my flesh as I fought him off.

The wound in my shoulder was deep. Someone in his organization had to stitch the muscle back together before they even thought about repairing the outer layer of skin.

The slices down my ribs were just a graze. Just enough to leave pink marks on my pale body for six months.

“And here,” Oliver continues, bending down in the shower to take his kisses to my hip.

That cut scraped bone. It lingered and got infected too many times to count. It was bright red for years. Only in the last six months has it even started to fade.

Oliver covered my scars with his poetic words the night I left Fort Collins. He inked them on my skin. Carved his reassurances into me.

I will kiss you here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

You express me better than I express myself.

You shall be more to me than my poem.

Poems were always Oliver’s thing. He wrote poems for me, but he only wrote them on me. On my naked body after sex. In pen, or marker, even paint one time.

We would fuck, and he would write, and sometime I’d just sit there and enjoy how slow and silent the world became when we were together. Sometimes I would read out loud to him as he composed. Dirty stories I would snatch up for pennies in used bookstores. Victorian-era erotica filled with masters, and spankings, and sex.

I don’t know how something so fucked up could be made into something so beautiful.

But he did that.

Oliver did that for me.

After the shower we go to bed. Spent, happy, satisfied.

But I am so restless, I can’t sleep. So I just lie there, wrapped up in his arms. Barely able to understand how I got here.