“Please, Odd. Justgo.”
The regret and desperation in his voice is a dagger to my heart. I stand up, dusting myself off. He looks down at the floor and adjusts the designer watch on his wrist as his jaw tenses. I know more than I did on the drive up, but I feel no better for it. He can’t possibly think I’d—
“You would try to be sweet about it,” he says, steel in his voice. “You’d try to love every scarred inch of me.”
I open my mouth to protest.I already love every scarred inch of you.
He puts up his hand, and I hold my tongue. “I apologize for the mixed signals. It’s hard to think with you around,” he says, tugging at my hair with a sad smile. “But I can’t go there with you.I won’t.”
The determined set of his jaw, the terrible melancholy in his eyes…there’s nothing I can say to change his mind. I think he’s wrong, but he doesn’t believe it, and I can’t make him believe it.
I grab my tools then pause to look at him one last time, cataloging every beautiful, stubborn detail before walking out the door.
2
DeShaun
It’s been weeks since that disastrous day in the electrical closet, and I still can’t account for the way I went after him. When he delicately sucked on the tip of my thumb, crossing by the thinnest margin the lines I’d so carefully drawn around us, it was like touching a match to kindling soaked in gasoline.
Since then, save for a dinner at the Bashes, I’ve avoided Odd entirely. I thought it would be for the best, that it would help us get the distance we need. That it would help me forget the press of his body, the taste of his mouth, the silken glide of his hair between my fingers.
I don’t think I could be more wrong; we’re still fire and accelerant. Having forgotten nothing in our time apart, it all feels worse. And seeing him today after all these weeks…it broke me a little.
He’s shaved off his beard. And his hair—his beautiful, gorgeous hair—is gone, nothing more than a sharp, perfectly razored undercut.
I didn’t recognize him when he walked into our operations center, and when I did, it drove the breath from my lungs. I know he did it because of me. It feels like a knife to my stomach that he somehow looks even more beautiful stripped of the small details that I found so endearing.
He gave me everything I asked for.
I hadn’t even planned on coming to the meeting, but I have an appointment with Anders, and I thought I’d check in on the team. Mistake. Odd didn’t look in my direction even once during the meeting and was out the door the second I closed it down. The rest of the team avoided my eyes.
Afterward, I followed Anders as we drove to a borrowed doctor’s office. I’m sitting in my underwear on crinkly butcher-block paper with Anders prodding at my knee and examining the various scars that make their way up my thigh. I am so hating life right now. He’s Odd’s twin, nearly identical, and the resemblance makes my heart ache.
When I think about it, this appointment is a result of that fateful, fucking visit. Odd and Caliste had double-teamed me about the knee and what followed was a sustained, coordinated attack on my sanity. At one point, still recovering from childbirth, Cal sent Rodney to the office, and he begged me not to make him go back home without proof I’d booked an appointment. I finally gave in and saw a surgeon.
What a fat lot of good that did. Dallas is a big city with a lot of world-renowned doctors, and I went to the best orthopedic surgeon I could find. The doctor explained that she couldn’t fix my knee—which would have needed a full replacement—without addressing the state of my skin. The improperly healed skin is pulling on the muscles, which, in turn, are pulling the knee out of alignment.
Partial and full-thickness burns in an area of the body that sees a lot of movement are tricky, and my body did not react well to the skin grafts. After too many corrective surgeries to count, two of those on my junk, I tapped out. Nowaywas I going through that again.
This new doctor had been kind, but it had been a degrading and embarrassing waste of time. Anders called me a week later, informing me that he’d gotten my medical files and might have a solution for me.
“Do I want to know how you got ahold of my fucking medical files?”
“You signed releases for me and Jake to grab your data, including your medical.”
I hung up on him quickly and, roaring with frustration, threw my phone across the room.
It’s goddamn humiliating. The only person I’ve ever told about the extent of the scarring is Thane, but now Odd and Anders know. It’s like I’ve been keeping the whole, fucking awful experience from everyone for nothing.
Now I have a new phone, a new lamp, and Anders Fucking Bash trying to peel up the edge of my underwear. I bat away his hand, agitated. “For fuck’s sake, Anders. Boundaries.”
“Your call, hoss,” he says, going back to his iPad to add notes to my chart. “You can get dressed.”
I nearly fall while trying to pull up my jeans, but I practically growl at Anders when he tries to help. My knee is not happy after the long drive, my heart is a goddamn mess, and who the hell knows what kind of terrors my mind will come up with when I try to sleep tonight. I have no idea what he thinks we can do with this wreckage.
Obviously, Anders and I have previously discussed the possibility of using the serum on my knee, but I don’t know my family history, other than that my grandmother died of a heart attack. There are tests that can tell me if I have any genetic markers for any of the big cell-growth-based diseases, but I’ve put the testing off because I’d rather not know if something terrible is coming my way.
I have plenty to deal with already, thank-you-very-much.
