Then his hands catch the hem of the shirt beneath it.
He peels it off in one rough motion, my breath leaving me in a gasp before I can stop it.
For a second, I don’t know how to process what I’m seeing.
His body is beautiful in the most unfair, unwanted way. Hard planes. Broad chest. The kind of shape that would have been easy to notice even if he didn’t carry himself like a threat. But the beauty of it is broken by the scars.
So many scars.
They cut across him in pale, angry lines, some thin enough to miss at first glance, others thicker, raised, impossible to ignore. They mark his chest and stomach in ways that do not feel accidental. Not one or two. Not something isolated. A history. Amap. Proof of repeated damage. Proof that pain was not an event in his life but a condition of it.
“Who did this?” I ask, my voice sounding smaller than I want it to.
He sways slightly then, the alcohol finally catching up to him, his hands landing on my waist to steady himself. His fingers spread there, hot through the damp fabric clinging to me, but the touch feels less possessive now, more necessary, like he is trying not to fall apart in front of me.
Then he lowers his head until his forehead barely brushes mine.
“The man that made me a killer,” he says.
The sentence lands so hard it almost takes my knees out from under me.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek to stop whatever ache is rising too fast in my chest. He is drunk enough to say things he would never say sober. Drunk enough to let pieces of himself slip that he probably hates me for seeing. The room feels too small for it. For his scars. For mine. For the heat that still lives between us despite the wreckage of the night.
Guiding him backward until the backs of his knees hit the bed, he gives in with a kind of reluctant heaviness. Bracing myself against him to keep us balanced as he sinks onto the mattress, I push at his shoulders gently until he lets me drag him farther up, his head resting on the pillow, the sheets immediately darkening beneath his damp skin.
“You need sleep,” I tell him softly, more for myself than for him. “In the morning, this will all feel different.”
It is a stupid thing to say. A lie, maybe. But I need the lie.
“You’re drunk and lonely,” I add, sharper now because I need to put some kind of edge back between us. “You don’t even know what you’re doing.”
His eyes are heavy, but the answer comes fast enough to sting.
“Yes, I do.”
He rolls onto his side, turning partly away from me. His voice goes lower, quieter, but no less certain.
“I don’t let anyone touch me.”
The confession stops me cold.
There are questions lined up in my throat, all of them jagged. About the money Lacey held in her hand. About what he was trying to prove tonight. About why he paid another girl not to touch him, only to come home and put his mouth on the parts of me I hide from everyone.
Every one of those questions dies when he shifts a little farther, and I finally see the tattoo that stretches across his back.
Medusa.
For a moment, all I can do is stare.
The ink is striking even in the dimness, dark, intricate and impossible to separate from the body carrying it. Snakes coil where hair should be, twisting in layered detail across the span of his back. Her face is fierce, beautiful, unsparing. Not monstrous in the cheap, vulgar way men like to call women monstrous when they become too dangerous to control. She looks powerful.
This is not some random image he thought looked good on skin.
A man wearing Medusa does not do it by accident.
Medusa is what happens when violence gets rewritten as blame. She is a body violated and then punished for surviving it in a way that frightened people. Men turned her into a monster because it was easier than admitting what had been done to her. Easier than admitting that some forms of rage are born, not chosen. That some forms of ruin are handed to you, and all you can do is weaponize them before the world does it for you.
I look at the serpents. At the spread of dark ink over scarred skin. At the way that image sits over the broadest part of him like both warning and shield.
