It's the body of the only woman I've ever loved, and it's a ledger of her time in hell.
There's a version of me that wants to drive a fist through the wall, another version that wants to point a truck north tonight, and a version that wants to grieve every mark out loud, one at a time.
Every one of those is about me.
My rage. My horror. My grief. My remorse.
If she catches a flicker of any of it she'll read it as pity, and pity's nothing but the flinch in a better coat.
So I hold all of it down off my face, and I get up off the bed.
I come up behind her slow enough that she can hear me coming, and I set my hands on her shoulders.
I bend my head and put my mouth on the worst of it—the top scar, the one that runs up under her shoulder blade.
I press my lips to it.
Then to the one below it.
I kiss my way down the ruin of her back with my hands steady and warm on her hips, not shaking, not hurrying, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, because to me it is.
It's her. There is no part of her I would cross a room to avoid.
She's gone completely still.
"Finn." Her voice cracks straight down the middle of it. "What are you?—"
"Nothing you don't want." I straighten and wrap both arms around her from behind and draw her back against my chest, and I put my mouth to her ear. "Turn around when you want to. Stay like this if you want to. I've got you either way, and I'm not going anywhere."
She turns around in my arms.
Her face is wet, and she isn't hiding it.
She looks up at me, and whatever she'd braced herself to find, she didn't find it, and I watch her understand that.
"Okay," she says. It's the sameokayshe gave me in the sunroom, except now it holds everything the first one couldn't. "Okay."
And she takes me back down to the bed, and she has the power here.
All of it, start to finish, exactly the way she wants and not one second faster, and I follow her every single place she goes, slow when she's slow and with her when she isn't.
My hands where she puts them and my eyes on her face, and when she comes apart it's with her forehead pressed to mine and my name in her mouth.
I hold every piece of her together while she does.
After, she doesn't leave.
That's what takes me apart.
She's got her head on my chest and one leg thrown over mine.
My hand's moving slowly up and down the scars on her back because she reached around and set it there herself.
She's breathing slowly and even against my ribs, and she doesn't leave.
"Stop thinking," she says, not opening her eyes. "I can hear it."
"Sorry."
