And everything stopped.
His hands froze on my shoulders. His breathing halted. His entire body went rigid against mine, and the shirt hung forgotten from his fingers. I opened my eyes.
Finn stared at my torso.
The scars.
Jagged white lines of stab wounds crossed my left ribs, one still slightly puckered where the blade slid deepest, the skin pulling taut with each breath like a half-closed mouth. Lower, just above my hip, six cigarette burns formed a neat, deliberate row. The spacing between them was even. Careful, whoever made them had paused between each one, had waited for the right moment, had continued.
His thumbs rested over the worst of them.
Each one memorized. Every patch of skin that sat differently from the skin around it. I’d had years. Long enough that certain nights still returned the smell without warning: the searing hiss of contact, my voice muffled by a hand pressed hard over my mouth, and the silence that followed when I stopped making noise because I accepted that making noise made it worse.
For one suspended second, two realities coexisted: His warmth still enveloped me, the undeniable pressure of his desire against my stomach, and the lingering ache between mylegs. Simultaneously, the dread I’d carried since the first time someone undressed me and fell silent in the same way, years ago, returned.
I watched his face transform.
The hunger vanished from his eyes, replaced by a sudden, definitive closure. His nostrils flared. The hands still resting on my skin trembled—not from passion, but from a different, starker emotion.
The fury wasn’t directed at me. I knew that unequivocally.
Yet, it inflicted its damage.
I recognized that shift: hunger morphing into something else, desire into careful pain. I had witnessed it on every face that had come close enough to discover what lay beneath my clothes. The pattern was always the same: the wanting ceased, the questions began, and I became a problem to be solved rather than a person to be touched.
My arms fell. I moved to cross them over my chest, to conceal what his eyes had already consumed, to push everything back into the darkness where I kept it contained—but his hands remained on my skin, now gentle, so tentative that my throat constricted, silencing any words I might have uttered.
“Libby.” His voice emerged rough. “Who the—”
The heat drained from me like a fading light. My stomach clenched. Shame climbed my throat and flushed my face, hotter than any burn, and my skin—the same skin that had arched into his hands thirty seconds prior—now demanded to be covered, removed entirely from his gaze.
I shoved his chest. Tears pressed hard behind my eyes; I needed to move before they fell—before they confirmed what I already understood: this, right here, would hurt worse than anything before. The knife and burns had come from someone who sought to take something from me. But this—watching desire drain from Finn’s eyes, replaced by something careful andassessing—came from someone I had actually wanted, and that distinction made the exposure unbearable.
“Don’t,” my voice fractured. “Just don’t.”
His hands withdrew.
The shirt slipped from his fingers, landing on the ground between us.
Cold air filled the space his body had occupied. I grabbed the shirt, pulling it on in one motion, my arms shaking. I faced the skyline. Below us, the dead moved in slow, indifferent circuits; the city sat dark to every horizon. On this roof, the only distance I could put between myself and him was the six inches I had just created. I kept my eyes on the buildings.
I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping both arms around them.
The wind swept across the rooftop, carrying with it the sounds from below—that low, restless, shuffling hunger that now ran continuously beneath everything, the ambient sound of what the world had become.
Finn sat beside me, close but not touching. His breathing was still uneven, not yet fully recovered. I sensed his choice not to speak, and the weight of that silence pressed harder than any question he might have asked.
My chin dropped to my knees. My eyes burned, and I held them open, letting the cold air do what it could. I was folded into myself on a dead man’s couch, on a rooftop above a dead city, and the things scraping at the walls below were the least of what was killing me.
It lived here, pressed into my skin: six circles above my hip and lines across my side, a record of someone else’s choices written permanently into skin I couldn’t leave behind or explain away to someone standing close enough to read it. I carried it through every room I’d ever tried to start over in, visible to every person who’d ever gotten near enough to matter.
He looked at me with pity.
What remained was the wind, the sounds below, and the knowledge that Finn now understood the secret that followed me through every door I opened, through every version of my life I’d tried to build on the other side of it.
It had followed me here, too.
It always followed.
