"Don't fucking stop," Ash breathed behind me.
I giggled. "Luke? You know we're not alone, right?"
"Yep." He pulled off his shirt and tossed that in a chair. "Cy said you were swimming. Figured I'd join you."
Then he grabbed his belt buckle, yanked at it, and worked the tail of his belt free. Behind me, Ash groaned in appreciation, but Luke wasn't done. Popping open the button on his jeans, he glanced up and smiled.
"Enjoying the show, Ash?"
"Wish I had some singles right about now," Ash told him. "Take it all off, baby!"
Luke grinned, but the craziest thing was that he kept going. Slowly, he pulled at the side of his jeans, forcing the zipper down. Then he pushed, easing them over his hips, leaving behind nothing but a pair of long grey briefs. They molded to his body a little too nicely. Just as he got the pants off his ankles, the back door opened again, and this time, Cy came out. Unlike Luke, he was in a pair of swim trunks. He also had a pair of towels.
But when he moved to set them on the table, Ash made a noise to stop him. "Don't block the view, Cy."
"Shit," Cy laughed. "Thin as that cotton is, just wait until he's nice and wet."
"Already am," I mumbled.
Ash laughed. "Bet you are. Please paw at that man for me a little?"
"I actually had a question," Luke admitted. "And since I've been shoving my foot in it all night, I'm just gonna throw it out there."
But he didn't ask. Instead, he headed to the edge and dove in. I was trying not to laugh at how Cy turned to watch or Ash standing up behind me so he wouldn't miss the show. I had a feeling they were partly making a big deal out of it to help Luke feel more comfortable, but also because there was no reason to hide it anymore.
Then Luke broke the surface, swimming his way over to where Ash and I were floating. All too aware that I was cuddling with another man, I shifted over, but Luke didn't seem to care at all. He just hooked a hand on the wall beside me, reached up to wipe the water from his face, then he jerked his chin at Ash in acknowledgement before looking back to me.
"I heard Faith had been cutting. Cy says she stopped, but you saw it?"
It felt like my guts dropped all the way down to my toes. "I couldn't say anything without betraying her trust," I explained.
"I get that," he promised. "Cy kinda explained it. I was just hoping for some idea of how bad, and why she's doing it. I dunno, some idea of what's in her head."
So I told him what I knew. "I saw about five lines at the edge of her pelvis. I've seen her in a bathing suit, so I can say she's not going after the inside of her thighs or upper arms. I think what I saw are all she has, which means it's early. That should make it easier to stop."
"You used to do it?" he asked, glancing over to Ash, then back.
Cy dropped down on the edge of the pool beside us, sticking only his legs in. "I kinda told him about that, Vi. Told him to ask you."
"Yeah." I turned my arm to show him the faint scars on the inside of my bicep. "I started when my mother dumped me off with some old woman I'd never met. Gran was a stranger at the time, and I didn't know why Mom had stopped talking to her."
"Because she was with Bea?" he asked.
I nodded. "Because she left my grandfather to be with a woman. Mom hated her for both, and refused to talk to her again. Never mind that my mother was married before Gran left Gramps. And my mom is a piece of shit, but that's beside the point. I felt like I was all alone, and like no one was listening to me. The only way to make all of that stop hurting was to feel real pain, so I cut."
Cy scooted forward, then slipped into the pool. "Ash and I used to steal away anything sharp she could use."
"I told Gran," Ash said. "Dropped a few razor blades you'd plucked from the disposable razors, a pair of scissors, and a fucking paperclip on her desk and said you were hurting yourself. She started letting me in your room after that."
"Door open," I said, doing my best to sound like Gran.
He chuckled. "Yeah, but she asked me to keep my eyes open. Said it wasn't telling if it helped."
"Thank you," I told him. Then I turned back to Luke. "I started at twelve and didn't stop until around the time I first met you. Then I gave up eating instead. In my head, it made sense. The cutting wasn't fixing anything, and I was fat, so I needed to be thin. Gran tried to get me to talk to the shrink here, but the normal tricks didn't work for me. Things like a rubber band on my wrist that I could snap for pain instead. I didn't want that. I wanted to feel the ache linger."
"Why?" he asked, gesturing to my arm in a silent request to look closer.
I let him. "I'm probably wrong, but I think it's because the mind can only take so much before it needs an outlet. My entire world had been destroyed. Everything I knew was gone, and everything I wanted was impossible. I couldn't be cool. I couldn't be pretty. I wasn't allowed to play with the kids I could see down the hill. Not at first. And this old woman couldn't understand anything I was going through. Well, that was what I convinced myself at that age."
