“Me neither,” I whisper.
I meet his eyes and then I can’t look away, trembling as Leks’s lips curve into a tender smile. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Or maybe I do know what to do about it, but I’m just scared of what will happen.”
24
LEKS
Iwant everything that Natalia has to give me.
The realization builds slowly, but when it arrives it knocks the breath from my lungs.
I pull her tighter against me. We haven’t left my bed all morning, just lying together and talking.
She’s sitting in my lap and tracing her nails over my torso, determined to get an explanation of every single scar and tattoo that lines my body. Her unblemished, silken skin is a whole world away from the mess that years of fighting and punishments have left all over me.
I don’t normally like to share my stories, but with Natalia I don’t think twice. Lying to her feels wrong.
“How did you get this one?”
She presses her lips to the scar on my left cheek.
My hands tighten on her waist.
“My father.”
Her hand tightens on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Leks. I knew he was cruel, but I didn’t know…”
“That he was a sadistic bastard who tried to kill me and my mother?”
I take a gulp of air. My lungs tighten with panic the way they always do when I think about my father.
Repressed childhood trauma, they said at the Ivanov Center. Not a groundbreaking diagnosis, that one.
When your father leaves you with more scars than memories, it does damage.
The safe house that my mother escaped to — a tiny cabin in the forest where we would watch Golden Girls together and weather the storm of my father’s bad moods — is the one place where I have happy childhood memories. She would always go back to him. But he never found out about that place, never took it from us. It was the only reason we survived when his moods turned dark, escaping in the night with only a rucksack of food and some change for the bus driver.
Tightening my arms around Natalia helps, the way it always does. She doesn’t understand — how could she? — but she’s trying to.
“The scar is about the same age as you,zolotse.”
She rolls her eyes at that, the way she always does when I bring up the fact that I am simply way too old for her. Not only in age, but also because of the difference in our lives — Natalia has been sheltered from everything bad in the world, while I’ve been exposed to all of it.
Maybe half of my need for her is the wish that I couldabsorb that perfect innocence and replace my cynicism and weariness with the world.
“I hate seeing you with all these cuts and bruises.”
Natalia traces her fingers over my skin, feeling the raised bumps from old scars and the rough patches from new ones.
There’s never been anyone beside me to count up my scars.
I try to imagine what I’d do if someone left a scar on Natalia. I don’t think they’d still be walking the earth.
“I’ll stop fighting if you want me to,zolotse.”
She draws back, surprised.
