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“You’re incredible.”
I grunted again, and that one was ayou tooorback atchaor something like that, but I wasn’t going to be wording for a while so caveman style was all he was getting.
After a minute he slid out and slid off, crashing down beside me, and I think I might have actually dozed off for a few minutes or maybe just lost consciousness, because when I opened my eyes again the sheets were pulled up around us and he was passed out on the pillow.
I just stared at him, trying to figure out when the fuck he’d turned into this, thick lips and long eyelashes and sex hair and just straight upit.His skin looked so warm and soft and I knew how good he smelled, and maybe,maybe, I inched a little closer, snuggled up next to him, and without even thinking about it first, I might have leaned over and kissed him on the shoulder.
And then he blinked his eyes open in slow motion and looked at me with that smirk I liked and damn it.
“What was that?” he asked me.
“Nothing. Don’t make it weird.”
“Are you beingsweet?”
“I said don’t make it weird, Beast,” I said, groaning into the pillow.
He slid his arm across my back, just casually wrapping it around my waist, and it felt soboyfriendythat I sighed, and it was embarrassing how happy I sounded, like breathing could sound like a smile.
A little soft touch, I kept hearing him say in my head, every time he did something like that. Somehow he knew some version of me that I’d never met, and he knew it so goddamn well.
I turned back his way and then reached out, rubbing my thumb over a thin white line beside his shoulder blade, right near where I’d kissed him. “You have a scar.”
“I have a lot of them,” he said, reaching behind himself to move his hand up and down his back awkwardly.
He didn’t seem bothered by it, and I leaned closer and saw the same kind of marks— pale, shiny, mostly faded, but there if you looked— along his shoulders and his sides and all over the small of his back.
“They’re stretch marks,” he told me, before I could ask. “From growing so fast.”
“You get stretch marks from that?” I knew all about stretch marks from my mom and her girlfriends— how having a baby ruined your body, how to cover them with makeup and how coconut oil was a scam. “I thought you got those from getting pregnant.”
“Yeah, it’s the same deal. Your skin has to stretch because your body gets bigger really fast and it like… tears and leaves a scar.”
“Oh. Did it hurt?” I asked him, letting my finger stroke over the mark on his shoulder again, not meaning to, but sort of fascinated.
“The scars didn’t. But my legs hurt a lot. Like all the time, especially at night. My parents thought I was making it up. The doctor said it was just in my head, but like…”
“People just say that when they don’t want to help you,” I told him, rubbing the little line again, flat obsessed all the sudden, and angry, fucking furious anyone would ignore him when he said he was hurting. “Like you’re gonna Hulk out like that and not feel it. What a bunch of assholes.”
He grunted and shrugged, but he leaned a little closer, like maybe he liked getting some back up too, and damn, feeling like it was me taking care of him for just a second made me want a lot more of it.
“That must have been weird as hell,” I said, staring at all the white marks that blinked in and out when he moved. Faded, but not gone. Barely noticeable, but not invisible. “You were always so… small. I didn’t even know who you were when you came back that year.”
“Yeah. It was strange. I felt like I was in someone else’s body for a long time. And Jesus, I was so fucking clumsy, I could hurt myself doing anything. Everything was just in the wrong place overnight it seemed like. I was all wobbly, I ran into everything. And it was really hard to find clothes that fit. But, you know. As far as complaints go… not a big deal.”
I frowned. He picked up on my bad habits quick, but I saw his too. Nothing he went through was a big deal, it could all be worse, he was always luckier than other people and he didn’t have any reason to complain. Somebody clearly force-fed that line to him, he just repeated it too damn much.
“Yeah, I don’t know, that sounds kinda bullshit,” I said, not nearly as slick as he was about calling things out. I hovered my hand over the center of his back. “It bother you if I… touch?”
I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to, scars were nobody’s business, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“It’s fine. I can’t feel them or anything. I never even think about it anymore, you can’t notice them that much I don’t think, they faded a lot.”
I straddled myself over the back of his thighs and made my way from neck to ass with my eyes first and then my fingertips, and then leaned down heavy and close, trapping him there while I traced and touched and stroked and licked, inch by inch, feeling something strange in my stomach, something tied to guilt, something tied to… some possessive, protective shit I guess, that kind of made me feel more guilty. I didn’t want anything to hurt him, and I also knew I’d done exactly that, and not just once either.
“I like them,” I told him, and I meant it, swiping my tongue across the ragged lines, rubbing with my thumbs, scraping with my teeth. Kissing the scars and the skin between, just wanting to be nice to every inch of him. “I like… all this.”
He made a low, stuttering sound, and probably it was because of the kissing, but maybe I wasn’t the only one who liked being seen in the right light, having my ugly parts complimented and coddled.
