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He smiles despite my eyes straying to the fresher scars on his arms.
“Do they hurt?” I ask.
“No. I feel proud to have got them the way I did.”
His words make me swallow hard, though I wish he wouldn’t say such intoxicating things.
“What?” he asks severely as he contemplates my grave silence.
“Nothing.”
He shakes his head slowly in disapproval. “Spit it out, wildflower. I know when you’re holding something back.”
“Oh, do you, now? You think you know me sooo well.”
He shifts his weight towards me. “Indigo, you either use that little mouth of yours to talk to me, or I’ll occupy it in another way.”
“I guess I’ll be shutting up then,” I respond, biting down on my lips to conceal an impish smile.
His eyes glitter as he watches me. “Talk.”
I shake my head. “I have boundary issues.”
“No, you don’t.” His pupils dilate and contract in the feeble glow of the library. “You’re just like me—desperate to unravel every little piece of string to find out what’s underneath. Now talk. That’s an order.”
“You… have other scars…”
His lips part and he edges back a little, as if he were expecting me to say something else.
He seems to forget to breathe for a moment, suspended in the abyss of unbidden memories that wrap around us as I begin to kick myself for asking invasive questions.
Before I can retract the stupid question, he reaches for the bottom of his sweater, pulling it and the white T-shirt beneath off his body, chucking both onto an armchair behind us.
Several turbulent heartbeats later, he turns slowly, his back now to me on the stool, allowing the full horror of the injury to his flesh to emerge like a spider crawling out of its tenebrous cave.
This morning I got a better glimpse of the scars I’d seen at the pool, but in my blurry-eyed half-awake state, and with him already on his feet by then with the curtain closed, I couldn’t discern what I can now.
They are not just scars. It looks like pieces of his muscle are missing, the left side absent of the thick clean curves on the right of his back. The scars are a lot longer than I thought, snaking from the center of his back all the way around his left ribcage and onto his arm, the back, sides, and from what I saw earlier, the front.
There’s a shiny pallid scar about four inches long incised into his vertebrae in the middle of his back, no doubt from some operation and next to it, the skin isn’t just scarred. It’s mangled, as if chewed up by some wild animal, the muscle either missing or macerated.
What’s more, there are several separate sections of what looks like a grid pattern of sorts. Skin grafts maybe. I’ve heard they’re agonizingly painful.
My body withers at the thought, suddenly aching to lie down, put the covers over me and hide, preferably with him, but instead, I speak.
“Can I touch?”
He stiffens visibly, his head lowering. A sound emerges as if through clenched teeth. “Yes.”
The moment that this potent man flinches as my fingers touch his skin almost makes me want to weep for reasons I don’t understand. I run the pads of my fingers along scars, some branching out into smaller strings, others raised and ragged lumps of chord. I follow some around his ribs until they disappear out of sight.
And then, I explore the bumps of the grids. You can tell the scars are old, healed as best they could be, but as I search for muscle beneath the scars that isn’t there, all I can see before me is blood spurting in cruel bursts from flesh that must have been cleaved open and macerated by something.
Or someone…
Frigid air freezes around me.
“You had skin grafts,” I say, never having noticed where they could have come from.
