Intricate.
Delicate.
It shouldn’t fit, but it does.
I ease away from my desk and pad up behind him, hypnotised by the dance of his pen across the parchment, and the inky beauty left in its wake. Theswiftdance. He pens a verse onto a greetings card in the time it takes me to form a single word. Then he’s onto the next, over and over, a production line that doesn’t come up for air. “You should’ve been a surgeon.”
Tam pauses. “Blood makes me puke.”
“Is that why the hospital freaks you out?”
Tam takes a breath and carries on writing—a subtle hint for me to shut the hell up, or he’s too busy to stop while I poke at him. Either way, I don’t expect him to answer, and I’m halfway back to the other desk when he does. “I don’t like that hospital because I died there a couple of times after a bike crash.”
I freeze, horror squeezing my heart, the flash of that scar on his back invading my mind. “When?”
“Six years ago.”
“What happened?”
“Can you come here again?”
I return to the space behind him. “Where do you need me?”
Tam’s hot smirk returns, fainter than usual, but pronounced enough that I know he’s still in there. “Right there would be good, but for this, I need to see you.”
There’s no room to consider the implications ofright there. I move to Tam’s side, eating up the inches between us untilwe’re touching, until he can feel me. Then he takes another breath, his pen still weaving across the page, and the words seem to flow with every dip and swirl of the nib.
“I was riding home from a messy break-up. It was around this time of year, actually, and the weather was all over the place. Snow one day, sunshine and showers the next.”
“Black ice?”
Tam hums. “Yeah. And I knew it, but I was distracted—I wasangry, and I was driving like a prick.” He stops to scrutinise the sentence he’s just written. Goes back and extends the tail on the letterY. “I mean, everyone was, but if I’d had my head screwed on right, I’d have seen the taxi burning up the slip road behind me.”
I lean closer, instinct, not a conscious decision, and it narrows the paper-thin space between us to nothing. My shoulder eases against his, and it’s a perfect press of flesh and bone. Solid. Warm. Like the soft smile he sends my way, even through the hurt simmering in his gaze.
Tam starts writing again. “The taxi took me out. Sent me flying into the path of another car already on the motorway. Fucked my back and mashed my liver.”
“Your liver?”
He sets his pen down mid-word and tugs his shirt up. I’m expecting the road burn scars. The faded white line of a liver resection catches me off guard.
I reach for it without stopping to make sense of what I’m doing. Trace it with my fingertip as Tam shivers at my touch. “That’s some major surgery.” One that lets me know he really did almost die. How lucky I am to have ever met him. “Any after-effects?”
“Not often. About twice a year I get so tired I pretty muchfall into a coma for a couple of days, but I don’t know for sure that it’s related.”
“Probably is.” I trace the scar again. Another shiver skitters through Tam’s torso. “It’s sensitive?”
“Not that I knew of before you fucking touched me.”
I let my hand drop.
Tam grips my wrist and brings it back. “I like it.”
I like it too, and it’s a struggle to keep my head in the game. If we’d been talking about anything else…
But the gravity of that white line and what it means isn’t lost on me, and I let myself glance over the other marks on his body. There’s a tattoo on his back too marred by surface scars to be recognisable. My fingers skim it, and this time, Tam groans.
“And you say I’m a fucking tease.”
