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My eyes feel hot. I don’t know why…she keeps on doing this. Why does she keep doing this?
The way she touches me… I inhale slowly, carefully, around the lump in my throat. I clench my jaw before I try to swallow. Gwenna’s fingers cut a slow path through my hair.
I mean to whisper “thank you,” but I groan instead.
“I love it that you like this so much,” she whispers.
All I hear is “so much.” Do I like her soft touch more than someone else would?
I feel her lips against my forehead. She keeps on stroking me. She kisses my right eyelid, then the left.
“Doesn’t work,” I whisper.
“What?” I feel her pull away from me, see her frown down on me. “What doesn’t work?”
I inhale slowly, my eyes on her waist. “Left eye. There was a clot there. A stroke. Just the eye.” My voice sounds rough, and I wonder in a distant way why right now is the time I chose to tell her this.
My gaze returns to her face, finding it troubled. I look into her eyes and feel my insides go cold.
“You can’t see at all from it?”
I blink down at the bedding, shake my head.
The moment spreads out around us, rippling like a stone’s punch through the surface of the water, slowly fading back to clear and calm. It doesn’t even last that long, although it feels as if it does.
Gwen’s palm brushes my cheek. She strokes my hair off my forehead, letting her nails tickle along my hairline.
“I didn’t know,” she murmurs.
I shut my eyes and focus on the way my ribs expand as I inhale. I’ve laid alone so many times and tried to pay attention to my body. To tell myself I’m still alive. I’m here, not there. The one thing that I always wanted most was to feel someone else’s arms around me. Thinking of it now, with her beside me, brings a feeling of contentment, followed quickly by a bite of shame.
“I think this is probably the wrong response,” she whispers in the dark, “but after ‘I’m so sorry you lost some of your sight,’ I’m kind of tempted to say how amazing it is. I mean…I couldn’t even tell. When we were sparring… How’d you do it?”
“It would be harder with someone else,” I say after a minute. “I couldn’t fight another Operator. Not
most of them.”
She laughs lightly. “So I’m an easy target, is that what I’m hearing?”
I reach a finger out to trace her cheekbone, smiling softly at her. “Still harder than most,” I tell her, aiming to appease.
Gwen leans over, smooths my left eyelid shut, then feathers a kiss over it.
“I’m not sure when I’ll stop being impressed with you. I hope you don’t think I’m being patronizing. It’s just like…you always hear about these badass vets, like Michael Stokes guys, and I’ve never actually known one.” Her eyes shine with kind sincerity.
I smirk. “Michael Stokes.”
“You should pose for him. People would go crazy.”
I chuckle, shaking my head. I want to tell her that I’m at my fucking worst. That I’m embarrassed by myself. By how I’ve changed. I can’t even get a bullet through a target. I can’t shoot a gun or bow, although I’m trying to relearn. But I look at Gwenna in the darkness, and I know that shit holds no weight with her.
I take her hand and bring it to my cheek, and then I press a kiss into her palm. I search her eyes for…something.
She’s not afraid to hold my gaze. Her mouth is soft and thoughtful. After a long moment, her free hand tucks a curl behind my ear.
“Who are you?” I rasp.
She smiles, and there is something bared in it. It’s like the absence of pretense. It’s like she’s smiling all for me.
