Page 19 of My Girl to Take

“No.” My voice does something unhelpful. “Yes. No.”

“Kiera.”

“I don’t want the wine. I want to stop being nervous, and the wine won’t do it. And I’d rather not be holding a glass when—”

I stop.

“When,” he says.

“You know when.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he takes my hand—which he has never done—and it’s such a small, ordinary thing that I have no defense prepared for it at all. He walks me into the bedroom and stops at the end of the bed.

“Then we’ll get to it,” he says.

He takes his shirt off first, one-handed at the back of the collar, without ceremony.

I have about half a second to be pleased with myself for being ready for this.

I am not ready for this.

The arm I’ve seen. The arm is the part he lets people see, dense and dark from wrist to shoulder, and I had built an entire understanding of him around it. A man with a tattooed arm and a good suit.

It doesn’t stop at the shoulder. It comes across his chest, over the top of it and down, and when he turns to put the shirt on the chair, I see the design on his back.

“Oh,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I thought it was just—” I gesture, stupidly, at his arm.

“I know what you thought. You’ve been very polite about it for two weeks.”

I take a step closer without meaning to. “Can I—”

“Yes.”

I put my hand flat on his chest. He is very warm, and under my palm, I feel him breathe in.

Up close it isn’t abstract at all—it only reads that way from across a room. There are objects in it, small and layered. Instruments. A bridge. A bar of music. A door standing open. None of it means anything to me. I realize I’m looking at seventeen years of a man’s life in a language I can’t read.

“You weren’t here,” I say.

“No.”

“All of this happened somewhere I wasn’t.”

“That was rather the point.”

Then my hand moves left and stops.

Over his heart, in letters an inch high, is the word EDWARDS—except it’s coming apart. The letters break down as they travel, dissolving into something else—BLAKE, clean and finished, like it was underneath the whole time.

Beneath both, in a small plain hand, one word.

Maggie.

I don’t say anything for a while.