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“I understand what you’re saying.” Moving closer, I lifted a hand and brushed a fingertip over his skin. “Is that okay?”
Patriot nodded.
My palm brushed slowly over his scars as I swallowed hard. His muscles bunched slightly with my touch. “You’re still strong. I bet you’re just as strong as you were before it happened.”
“No,” he replied, turning back around. “I’m stronger. You will be too.”
“Patriot?”
“Yeah, sunshine?”
“You should go into therapy or something. You’re way too wise to ride a motorcycle all day long.”
The intended joke found its mark, and he grinned wide. “I’ll take that into consideration.”
Patriot stood and walked over to his dresser where he pulled out a locked case and inserted a key from a set he kept clipped to his belt. I heard the rustling around of pill bottles. “Got some strong painkillers and an antibiotic. You’ll need them both.” He was like a one-man drug store.
“Okay.” I took the pills with a bottle of water that was sitting on a nightstand within reach.
“You know something?”
I lay down on the bed, wrapping up in the blanket as tightly as I could. “No.”
“You’re healing well.”
“How do you know?”
He was watching me closely, sinking into a thick leather chair that he tugged closer to the bed. “It hurt when I was cleaning your arm, right?”
I nodded.
“How did it feel right after it happened?”
“Wasn’t as painful as I would have thought. It wasn’t my arm that was hurting the most.” I glanced downward, betraying the focus of my thoughts. Residual or actual pain, did it matter? I was still forced against my will. “I suppose you’re right. The pain means the nerves are repairing.”
“Yep.” He swallowed hard. “Are you healing,” he paused, and his eyes dipped lower for a second before rising again, “down lower?”
Shit. That was super weird to discuss with him. I tried to be clinical about it. “I, I don’t know exactly. I think so.” My chin wobbled a little as I held back more tears. It wasn’t like I had the opportunity to shower properly and check since I fled the hospital. Once I ate and rested, I would tackle that obstacle. Not now.
“I shouldn’t have asked.” He seemed embarrassed. “Just tell me to shut the fuck up if I talk too much. It’s a personality flaw.” He forced the smile that followed, but neither of us voiced it.
“I will,” I promised. It wasn’t the many violations I had experienced over the last couple of years that made my emotions surface. It was the stupid vulnerability I felt. What was the matter with me? I felt utterly off-kilter. Like someone had shifted every aspect of who I was, and I didn’t know if I could ever recover the parts that made up Naomi Peters.
Would I ever be whole again?
PATRIOT SAW ME THEN, and he did now.
He didn’t judge me, think less of me, or even try to fix me. Just focused those intense blue orbs on my face as if he could read my sorrows and regrets, pain, and shame like an open book tattooed on my face in endless lines of inky black.
His perusal hid no part of me. I was fully exposed and stripped raw before him, and only someone with the same type of past could understand what that meant.
I wasn’t ignorant of the wounds he also kept bandaged, as unhealed and festering as my own. We both lived with the aftermath of regret and the debilitating pain of personal loss. The worst kind of loss, the innocence of the soul. We’d both had parts ripped away in the worst of ways.
There was no coming back from that kind of experience. Some injuries never healed.
I finally met his tortured gaze, knowing that I affected him as deeply as he affected me. We didn’t speak, but there wasn’t a need. He lifted his hand and tapped his heart over his t-shirt once.
With a trembling finger, I did the same.
