It’s the fact that my body still wants anything at all.
It’s the fact that hers answered me.
Dragging both hands over my face, I force myself to look up. The mirror gives me back a face I’d like to break. Hat low. Mouth hard. Eyes too dark. A body pretending it belongs in a hoodie and jeans on a college campus when all it really knows how to do is hurt people.
Because that’s the other part.
Every time I see the scar on her left cheek, everything in me splits open.
She doesn’t remember me. Not the real version. Maybe she remembers in fragments. Maybe her body does, in the way bodies flinch, brace, and go still before the mind catches up. But she doesn’t look at me and see that room at Brightside. She doesn’t see broken glass on the floor or a dead moth in pieces or a boy being dragged out while she bled into her own hand.
I do.
I know exactly where that scar came from.
This morning, after all of that, after the pool, the overdose, my room and my mouth on her skin, I still put my hand on her in the car like I had any right.
The thought turns mean fast.
Maybe this is all I am.
Maybe the old men in offices, the Warden, and every idiot who ever looked at my file and saw violence before they saw a kid got it right. Maybe a person can be made wrong enough that even tenderness comes out with teeth.
I laugh once under my breath. It sounds ugly.
Because the worst part is that I didn’t lose control in the car by accident.
Not fully.
Some part of me wanted to know.
Wanted to see if she would still feel me after everything. Wanted to know if what happened in my room had only been liquor, grief, and exhaustion, or if her body would answer mesober enough to hate me for it. Wanted proof that I wasn’t the only one carrying last night around like a live wire under the skin.
When she moved against my hand, even for that ruined half-second, I became exactly the kind of man I despise.
My grip tightens on the sink again.
I should leave her alone.
That conclusion is obvious.
It changes nothing.
Because my mind knows what the decent answer is, but my body keeps betraying me in humiliating little ways. The way it reacts when she looks at me too long. The way it goes taut when she says my name with anger in it. The way it nearly came apart from nothing but the memory of her gasping in the car. Every part of me that should have learned restraint learned hunger instead, and now I’m stuck walking around inside a body that keeps dragging me toward the one person I should protect myself from.
Or protect from myself.
I think about what I said to her.
Last night was a mistake.
The alcohol made me do things.
Coward’s language. I know it. Knew it the second it left my mouth. But what was I supposed to say? That I wanted her before she ever knew who I was? That I watched her heal from a distance and still let myself want what I had no right to touch?
No.
So I lied around the truth instead.
