“You’re flushed,” he said, an opening so unexpected—not the least of which because he wasn’t even looking at her—that for a second, she could only stare at his profile.
“It’s warm in there,” she finally said, but honestly, it wasn’t. Not until she’d seenThe Kiss.
“Hm.”
Hm?!Her brain shouted back, that one syllable flushing her anew—this time, with anger. At his reticence and remoteness. At herself for rushing out here, for risking everyone’s attention, everyone’spity, for thinking there was some reason to come out here and find a person who did notreallywant to be found.
For looking at something likeThe Kissand thinking it had anything to do with her, and him, and all he had to offer wasHm.
“Are you enjoying the gardens?” she said, her voicedrippingwith politeness, distance, because she knew it was the tone that would make him the most mad.
He didn’t take the bait.
“I wouldn’t say enjoying.”
She scoffed. Of course he wouldn’t be enjoying it. Of course he’d make Michael late and then only drag himself along; of course he’d make the rest of the day more difficult by being aloof and—
“I’m thinking,” he clarified, and there was something so soft in how he said it. It wasn’t closed-off, heavy-brow, bronze-cast thinking.
It was an invitation, as sure as that step to the side.
Everything in her softened again, too.
“About what?”
He shrugged, but it wasn’t dismissive. Just more of that soft contemplation as he kept his eyes up, coursing over the bodies in front of them. She wondered if this is how she’d looked inside, in front ofThe Kiss. She wondered if she should walk away, and leave him to his thinking.
“Pain,” he finally said.
She swallowed at the starkness of it. The honesty of it. It’s whatshe’d wanted him to admit to her last night, on that street where everything had felt so true between them, but now that he’d said it, something inside her turned over.
She didn’twanthim to have pain. She didn’t want this to be true for him.
“They look to be in pain, right? This one—” He took a hand from his pocket, gestured to the figure on the far left. “The way he’s holding his body. This whole side of him, bent. Like he’s trying to get away from himself.”
Her heart thudded. She felt as frozen in space and time as one of these sculptures.
“And their hands and feet,” he said. “They look so big. That—that looks like pain. To me, it does.”
For what felt like a long time, she simply looked: paid attention to what he said he saw in these figures. Let her eyes linger on the long, brutally stretched shoulder of the figure on the left. Let herself study every curled finger and exaggerated knuckle, six separate feet stuck permanently to a hard, crooked ground.
She thought it was what he wanted her—what he was asking her—to do.
“I have neuropathic pain,” he said, and she let her eyes go to him again, though he wasn’t looking back at her.
“From burns that cover…a lot of me. I also have contracture scarring. That’s painful, too, though it’s not—it’s not like the nerve pain. Which is difficult to predict. Confusing. Not well controlled.”
She almost said,I’ve seen it before, but thought better of it. Thought better of blurting out something clinical, something that had nothing to do with him, specifically.
“I don’t have many pharmaceutical options,” he said, making himself sound like the clinician. “Opioids were…not well tolerated. Anticonvulsants gave me severe vertigo. I use compression wrapson the worst of the contracture scarring, sometimes. Sometimes silicone patches on other areas. Temporary relief.”
Automatically, a flood of information she wished she didn’t have access to came to her: images, case studies, drug lists, treatment protocols. A professional hazard.
She turned her face back to the statue. Looked at it like it wasn’t any kind of med school slide deck, any kind of textbook.
“When it happens,” he continued, quieter now, so she had to strain to hear him, “when I get pain, it feels the way this looks. Twisting, deforming. I’d tear myself in half to get away from it. And it—” He paused, shifted on his feet. “It makes all the parts of me feel out of proportion. Those big hands. This stretched-out neck. I get disoriented. I don’t—I don’t feel sure of myself, in space.”
She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of the way he backed away from her. His hands in his pockets, his unwillingness to touch even the car door.
