Audrey looked down at the ratty leggings and oversized sweatshirt she hadn’t had time to change out of before he’d gotten there, but he kept talking before she could contradict him.
“I missed you. And—”
“And?”
“And I really want to kiss you, but—b-but…I—”
When he lifted his hand to the elastic loop of the mask curving around his right ear, she held her breath. His fingers hovered there for a moment, grasping at the air, but still he hesitated. Her heart dropped.
Theo still didn’t want her to see his face.
Did he still not fully trust her?
Or was it just that he hated it that much?
“Do you want me to help you?” she murmured. He shook his head. “You don’t have to take it off if you don’t want to.” She rubbed his arm. “If you’re not ready, it’s okay. I’ll wait.”
It seemed like something he needed to hear. And shewouldwait. She would, as much as she was impatient to rip the mask from his face and kiss him senseless, just like he’d done to her the other night. But that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Jeopardizing the progress they’d made together was the last thing she wanted.
Theo grimaced. “No, I want to take it off myself. I’m tired of it too. I’m so tired of it, Audrey.”
But still he hesitated.
She leaned forward and lifted a hand to gently pluck his baseball cap away from his head. Theo’s eye snapped open and he watched her place it next to her on the couch. His breathing quickened, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t stopped her. And then it was her turn to wait and watch.
Only the rapid rise and fall of his chest betrayed how scared he was just now.
But his eye never strayed from hers.
His hand shook when he gripped the left elastic loop between uncertain, reticent fingers, and Theo finally lifted it over his large ear. He peeled the mask away from his mouth and cheeks, slowly sweeping it from one side to the other.
Bit by bit, his face gradually came into view, the pale, dotted expanse of his skin breaking through the black mask like the light of the moon and the stars shining through the clouds at night. The lips that had kissed her so well, so thoroughly, so passionately on her stoop not even a week ago were finally fully revealed, and Audrey’s own heart raced at the sight of them. They were beautiful, just as wide and plush and soft as she remembered. Pinker than she’d imagined, and parted now as he panted slightly for air, his chest fluttering anxiously.
But as soon as she saw his mouth in the soft golden glow of the fairy lights strung up around her apartment, her awareness of the scar followed.
It had been nearly two months since she’d caught a glimpse of it on that horrible day, wicked and jagged and torn, still held together with hundreds of black stitches pulling his skin painfully taut with the swelling and puckering at the edges of it. But looking at it now, it was clear that the wound had healed quite a bit. It was no longer so angry, or so red, or so deep. All the rest of the sutures were gone, and they’d been replaced with a thick, clear film running the length of his cheek.
But even though it was obviously healing well, it was still devastatingly extensive. The scar coursed all the way down the side of his face and dipped along his neck like a long bolt of lightning crackling through the sky, disappearing beneath his hoodie and running up into the dark hair still covering his right eye.
Theo let the mask drop onto her coffee table.
He waited while she looked at him, deep apprehension flickering at the edges of his expression, barely contained and tenuously controlled. He looked like he might break if she uttered a single word.
Only one piece of the puzzle remained now.
Audrey cupped his right cheek, softly sweeping her thumb across the skin next to his ear. She lifted her other hand and combed his hair away from his right eye with her fingertips, pushing his luxuriously thick, dark waves back and away to reveal his entire face to her for the very first time.
At long last, she could see him.
The wound cut across his eye too, slicing beneath it and slashing deep through his eyebrow. The skin around it was still slightly swollen and a little discolored, either from the trauma or from its more recent repair. It had been a narrow miss for his eye, and while he couldn’t seem to open the right one as well or as fully as his left, both of them rested on her now, anxious and unable to look away. His beautiful lips formed soundless words, not quite pressing together, the air not quite making it all the way through his throat, and he closed his eyes and swallowed again.
“Au…Audrey?” he finally managed to breathe. There was a question there, filling his lungs and caught on the tip of his tongue. A tear escaped his newly revealed eye and spilled down his right cheek, coursing along the side of the tape covering his scar and landing at the corner of his mouth. It disappeared between his lips, which quivered as he swallowed thickly. “I—I didn’t used to look like this.” He sucked in a short, anguished breath. “I, um…my—m-my eye, it—”
But before he could say anything else, she broke into a smile.
“Thereyou are,” she whispered. She combed his hair back again and ran her hands through it while she gazed at him, savoring thesilken feel of it between her fingers and drinking in her fill of his face. “Hi, Theo.”
He sniffed and drew back in surprise before his lips cracked into an unsteady, lopsided smile. “Hi.”
