His left arm has fewer tattoos. Above his elbow, a detailed sunset, oranges and purples bleed into a flat horizon line.
I move to his chest. My palm flattens over his sternum, feeling the heartbeat underneath, and I trace the lines of him with my fingers. The broad plates of his pectorals, the hair across his chest. The muscles are relaxed in sleep, soft over hard, and I press my fingers into the thickness of his shoulder and feel the density of him.
He's solid in a way that used to terrify me. Big men meant pain. Big hands meant broken bones and bruises. Big bodies in small spaces meant nowhere to go and nothing to do but try to survive it.
Now I press my hand against the broadest part of his chest and I feel his heart beating under my palm and the bigness of him isn't a threat. It's a shelter. He's never once used his size against me and he never will.
I trace the line of hair that runs from his chest down the center of his stomach. My fingers follow it across the ridges of his abs, which are less defined than a gym body because this is a working body, a body that lifts beer kegs and hauls plywood.
My hand moves lower, past his navel, along the happy trail that disappears under the sheet, and the desire rises in me like a tide. Insistent and mine.
I have an overwhelming desire to taste him.
The thought arrives fully formed and it shocks me for a second. Not the desire itself but the clarity of it. I want to put my mouth on his neck and taste the salt of his skin. I want to kiss the hollow of his throat where his pulse beats. I want to go lower, following the path my fingers just mapped, down his chest and his stomach and further, and I want to take him in my mouth and make him make those sounds from last night, those deep, raw sounds that came from somewhere primal.
I want this in a way that feels new. Desire without fear, wanting without dread, my mouth on another person because I choose to put it there, not because someone's hand is on the back of my head pushing me down.
The curtain of darkness falls the instant that memory crosses my mind.
Fuck.
It comes without warning. One moment, I'm tracing the body of a man I'm crazy about and the next second I'm somewhere else. Not this bed. Somewhere dark and small. The smell is wrong and there are hands that aren't gentle and a voice that isn't kind and I'm on my knees and I can't breathe and—
Stop, stop, stop.
I close my eyes and I breathe.
Placing my hand flat on Tex's chest, I count the heartbeats until the flashback recedes, until the dark room fades and the real room comes back. Until the only sound is of Tex breathing in his sleep. Four. Five. Six beats. Seven. The room begins to stabilize. Tex's heart is steady under my hand.
I'm okay. I'm with Tex. I'm okay.
The dark shadow leaves pain behind. Not the memory itself, which I push back down into the box where I keep it, but a realization. A practical, terrifying, unavoidable truth that cuts through the happiness.
I don't know if I'm clean.
The things that were done to me. By men I didn't choose. In rooms I couldn't leave. Over many years. Those things carry consequences beyond the bruises and the nightmares and the flinching. Those things carry consequences that can be passed from one person to another through exactly the kind of intimacy I'm wanting.
I've never been tested.
Not one damn time.
I've never been anywhere safe enough to walk into a clinic and say the words out loud. I've never had a doctor look at me, ask the questions and run the tests because I've never had a doctor. I've never had insurance or money or a stable address or a single adult in my life who cared enough to make sure I was healthy.
And now I'm in bed with Tex.
A man I want to give everything to. A man I want to taste, to touch. And I can't. I can't go further until I know. Because if I'm carrying something those men put in my blood along with the fear and the shame and the bruises, and I give it to Tex, it will destroy me. Not the disease. The knowing thatI brought harm to the only person who has ever made me feel safe.
I would rather die than hurt him.
Which means I have to tell him. There's no hiding this. I have to sit across from the man who held me last night like I was precious, and tell him that before him, there were others, and those others weren't chosen by me. The things they did to me might have left something behind that could hurt him.
The shame of it rises in my throat like bile. The feeling that I'm contaminated. Dirty. That what was done to me made me into a person that carries damage wherever it goes, that poisons whatever it touches.
I know it's not rational.
I know that what happened to me wasn't my fault and the consequences of it aren't my shame to carry. But shame doesn't listen to smart. Shame listens to the voice that said this is what you're good for, and this is all you'll ever be worth.
Tex stirs. His arm tightens around me, his breathing changes and I feel the moment he surfaces, the shift from sleep to awareness, and then his hand finds my hair. His big fingers move through it, slow and gentle.
