The flutters in my belly grew stronger as I pinched the sheet to keep from touching him before I was mentally ready. Drawing the fabric down to his waist, I took in the view. I had no reason to go lower until Istarted on his leg, and then I would be moving the sheet from the bottom up.
Did he work outside without his shirt all summer? His bronzed skin was tan line–free. The only lighter marks were neat scars. I traced one and his muscles bunched.
“How many surgeries did you have?” Guess I wasn’t done being intrusive. I had similar lines on my abdomen from my own crash.
“On my shoulder or in total?”
“From the accident.”
“Too damn many.”
If he didn’t want to talk about it, I wouldn’t push him. I rubbed the lube on the general area of his shoulder blade.
“Eight,” he said, and I continued to stroke softly, testing how much pressure he wanted, watching for him to tense. “Two on my face, two on my shoulder, and four on my leg—one foot surgery, one hip surgery, and two knee surgeries.”
I ran my palm over his shoulder and down his arm. He twitched like he wasn’t expecting me to roam so far away from his back. The strength radiating from him was tangible, rippling under my fingers as I floated my hands over his skin. “I had three when I was a kid.”
His biceps flexed under my hands. “How bad were you hurt?”
I rarely talked about the crash that had killed my parents. Memories would come and I’d get that smothering sensation again. The tightness in my chest and the struggle to breathe. “I had a punctured lung and abdominal bleeding. I don’t count getting stitches for all the lacerations.”
He let out a breath. “Me either. If I wasn’t under, it wasn’t a surgery.”
“Weird how we form arbitrary limits.”
“I spent half a day figuring out what I would call a surgery versus a procedure. If I was awake, it didn’t go in the surgery category.”
I rubbed small circles in the muscles between his spine and armpit. A low groan left him.
“I didn’t cause more damage, did I?” I couldn’t get the horror of watching him crumple out of my head.
“It wasn’t your fault, Summer.”
It was though. All of it. Instead of doing the responsible thing and telling Jonah exactly what had happened that day, I’d avoided him. I’d stayed away and I’d used his outburst at the hospital as an excuse. But Jonah didn’t realize what I was talking about. I was a coward, so I kept it that way. “I walked right into your house without announcing myself.”
“You take on too much, sunshine.”
I dug into the muscles at the base of his neck and he grunted. I eased up.
I didn’t take on too much. I hadn’t done enough.
My fingertips skated over several tiny bumps. More jagged scars from glass shards that had come from the bigger piece that had sliced his face. I didn’t have the large scars he did, but I had similar ones covered by my hair and scattered down my neck.
A few more minutes went by. He wasn’t bunching and tensing like he had been. A sign that what I was doing was helping.
“I was an adult,” he said, his words muffled like he’d melted into the mattress. “I can’t imagine what something like that is like for a kid.”
I swallowed hard and my fingers stalled. “I should start on your leg.” I had a lot more area to cover and the logistics would keep my mind occupied. He’d had hip surgery and the fall had likely jammed that joint too. If he’d let me, I owed him a toe-to-hip rubdown.
My breaths turned shallow as I covered his back with the sheet and moved to the foot of the bed. I rolled up the sheet, trying to keep his other leg covered for maximum privacy.
Now that my brain was full of logistics, I could answer him without trembling. “It was a nightmare. Mama Starr and Daddy Bjorn—that’s what I call my birth parents—they weren’t...” A shiver ran through me and the rest caught in my throat.
He pushed up to his elbows and looked solemnly over his shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
Some of the guys I’d dated had gotten really pushy. Others hadn’t wanted to hear a downer of a story. Eli had listened like I was telling him the plot of a movie, then he’d tried to cheer me up, not realizing the day my parents died wasn’t a topic I could move on from after a few laughs.
I squeezed more lube into my hands and rubbed them together. “Mama and Daddy weren’t answering,” I said, stronger this time, and he laid his head back down. “I knew something was wrong, and I knew it was bad.” I kneaded my fingers into his calf and earned another groan. “I think I even knew they were dead.” I swallowed hard. Almost twenty-five years had passed, and I’d had a damn good life since, but the pain of the day resurfaced as fresh as if I were in the hospital again getting told that yes, everything I had feared was true.
