“Brave is not what that was.”
“You survived hell.Literal, actual hell on Earth.”I stare at my hands.“I don’t even know how to talk about it.I feel like I lived twenty-four years in three days.”
“I hope it doesn’t stick to you, Bluebird.The evil.The soullessness.I don’t want you seeing what I see when I close my eyes.”
“What do you see?”
“The doctor’s ghost.He knows I fear him the most, so he stays.”He taps a finger against his temple.
“Yet you killed him.I think he’s the one afraid of you.”
“You don’t need to fix me.”He looks away, eyes shuttering halfway.
“I’m not trying to fix you.I’m trying to understand you.”
“That’s worse.”
I breathe out a whispered, broken laugh.
“All I’m saying is…” He sighs.“I don’t want you haunted by my little life of horrors.One of us losing sleep over it is enough.”
“And all I’m saying is…” I trace the cover of his journal.“I opened Pandora’s box, and the monsters didn’t fly out.They just lay there, defeated and chopped up.Hardly the apocalypse you promised.”
He snorts a deep laugh, his eyes glimmering.I see love in that stare, but we’re too new for that, the idea of us too uncertain and ill-fated.
If I stay, he dies.That’s my track record with men.The only certainty I have.I can’t lose sight of that.
“I know how hard this was for you.”I gesture at his journal.“You wrote about everything.Your mother, Denver, the doctor, adjusting to civilization, and even things about me.”I pause.“But not Jag.”
His whole body stiffens, rippling tension through the mattress.
“What happened with him?”I ask.
His throat works around something he can’t swallow.The smirk is gone.The black makeup, sequins, and lace all gone, leaving the scarred remains of a man staring into a dark that still answers back.
He rolls onto his side to face me, and his purple robe falls open.A robe I now know belonged to the woman who gave birth to him.The woman he killed when he was only eight because she viciously preyed on his brother.
The fabric parts enough for the lamplight to find him, illuminating his chest.His scars.I see them differently now.More than the healed-over crosshatching of trauma.They’re stories written in a knotted weave of threads, some thin and silvery, others bubbled and raised.A road map of pain that travels from his collarbone, down his ribs, and fades into the shadows beneath the robe.
My throat aches, not from horror but from heartbreak.He doesn’t flinch under my stare, but his eyes flick away, like he’s bracing for disgust or pity.
He won’t find either.
All I want to do is reach out and soothe the hurt with my fingertips.Let him know his past doesn’t scare me.That it doesn’t make him less.That, if anything, it makes him more.Proof of how much life he’s fought to keep.
My hand rises halfway before I stop myself.The fragile space between us shivers.I don’t want to break the spell by asking permission, but I also don’t want to steal something he isn’t ready to give.
When his gaze finally comes back to mine, there’s a flicker there.A question.Maybe an invitation.
“You ever touch a bruise and feel it ache even when it’s healed?”He captures my hovering hand, holding it immobile.
“Yes.”
“That’s what happened with Jag.”
I wait, saying nothing.
“Jag and I…” He regards me like I’m another cliff, another leap.“Your stepbrother pushed me past a line.I didn’t even know where it was until I crossed it.”
