23. Wren #2
“I did. I didn't want him in the bed with us.” His thumb keeps moving over the sleeve.
“But that means you've never actually seen me.
All of me. You know the story now. You know what he did.
Or enough of it. But knowing and seeing aren't the same, and if you're getting on those trucks in eight days, I want—” He stops for a second.
“I'd like to show you my body. What's under the clothes.
What he did. What I did, after, when I couldn't stand carrying it.
The tattoos I put over all of it. I want you to see what you're choosing before the choosing's done.”
The feather goes still in my hands.
“Okay,” I say. “I'm sure it won't change my mind, Rowe. But show me.”
He stands. His hands go to the hem of his henley, and he pulls it over his head in one motion.
I make myself not gasp, because he's watching my face like a spooked animal, and I refuse to make a sudden movement.
His chest is beautiful—broad and strong and inked, black gothic work spreading across his pectorals and down his ribs in the same filigree language as the design I've had inside me.
But underneath the ink, woven through it, the ink following it, are lines.
Thin, raised, silvered ridges. Dozens of them.
Laid in with care. Some cluster in neat parallel rows over his ribs, four and five together, like tally marks. Like verses.
“He liked my chest,” Rowe says. Flat. Clinical. He touches a row of them below his collarbone. “These were Proverbs. He worked in lines. One cut per line of the verse.” His hand moves to his ribs. “Numbers. He came back to Numbers a lot.”
He turns.
His back is worse. Not the cuts—there are fewer cuts—but there are other marks back there, older textures, the geography of a childhood I can't let myself picture in full or I won't survive this without throwing up.
The tattoos climb over all of it, thorned vines and cathedral lines, ink refusing to let the scars have the last word.
Tears slide down my face. I don't make a sound. I hold the feather in my lap, and I let them fall. And I look.
He faces me again and holds out his forearms, turning them up to the lamp. Showing me the scars I've only ever caught in slivers under a sleeve. Long, deliberate, elevated lines from wrist to elbow, so many that they braid into each other.
“These ones on the outside edge—” he traces a set near his left wrist, rougher than the rest, less precise, “—are mine. After we got out. I was nineteen, twenty. Sometimes the memory of it would build up under the skin like pressure, and I thought if I opened it, it would drain.” His jaw works.
“It doesn't drain. It just makes more scars.
Logan found me the second time and sat outside my door for a month.
That's when I started tattooing instead.
A needle I controlled. Pain with my own hand, my own design, my own reasons.
My brother helped me where I couldn't reach.” His eyes come up to mine.
“Every piece of ink on me is over something. There's nothing decorative here.”
“It's not decorative,” I agree. My voice cracks. “It's testimony.”
Something shifts in his face. His hands go to the waistband of his jeans, and he unbuttons them, then pushes them down, taking his boxers with them. Even soft, his cock is beautiful. But instead of staring at it, my attention goes to the scars on his thighs, the tattoos there.
Even if Rowe could stand to be touched, there would be no way for him to take his clothes off in front of a woman without prompting questions. And he's lived with that his whole life.
I look down at the feather in my lap. Softer than anything has a right to be.
“Lie down on the bed,” I say.
He blinks. “Wren—”
“Lie down.”
“What are you—”
“Do you trust me?” I interrupt.
His throat moves. His eyes go from my face to the feather and back.
“Yes,” he says.
He lies down on the narrow bunk, on his back, arms loose at his sides, and I can see his pulse going in his throat, fast and hard.
I walk to the bed and stop with my knees an inch from the mattress edge, careful, so careful, my body a full hand's width from his everywhere. Then I lower the feather and draw the soft edge along the tally marks below his collarbone.
He makes a sound like a man being shot.
“Too much?”
“No.” It comes out mangled. “No. Don't stop.”
I don't stop. I trace the Proverbs lines, one by one, the feather barely bending against his skin, and his breath goes ragged, and then the tears come.
They slide from the corners of his eyes into his hair, and he doesn't wipe them, and I don’t wipe mine either.
I follow a row of scars down his ribs. The Numbers.
The feather whispers over each ridge, replacing—not erasing, nothing erases, but replacing, laying a new sensation over the old one like ink over scar tissue.
His hands fist in the blanket. “This is soft with nothing before it.”
“This is soft with nothing before it,” I repeat, and draw the feather down the raised braid of his left forearm, over the neat lines and the rough ones, his and Harlan's alike, all of it, every inch, because all of it is him and all of it gets touched tonight.
His breathing changes somewhere around the third pass up his ribs. The tears slow. The tension in him shifts, and when I glance down his body, I see that he's hard, leaking over his stomach, and the flush on his face turns into mortification.
“I'm sorry.” He starts to sit up. “God, I'm sorry, you're doing something—this isn't supposed to be—”
“Shh.” I press the feather flat against his sternum, the gentlest stay in the world, and he stays. “Rowe. Your body just learned that soft can lead somewhere good. That's not a betrayal of the moment. That is the moment.”
He stares at me. Lies back down.
I set the feather on the blanket beside him, and I strip.
Not slowly like last night. Fast, sure, my clothes hitting the floor in seconds, because I'm not shy anymore—not for him, not ever again.
His eyes go molten watching me, tracking every inch, and when I pick the feather back up and stand naked at the edge of his bunk, his cock jerks against his stomach.
I lower the feather and drag the edge up his shaft.
The noise he makes is obscene. His whole body bows, hips lifting into a touch that can't be chased—that's the cruelty and the mercy of a feather, there's nothing to thrust against—and he collapses back down, panting.
“Wren—”
“Look at me.” I slide my own hand down my stomach, between my thighs, where I'm already soaked, and his eyes lock onto my fingers like a drowning man onto a rope.
“This is what you do to me. All day. At breakfast, I could barely sit, I was so sore from you, and I liked it.
I sat next to your whole family aching where you'd been, and I liked it.”
“Fuck.” The feather traces the underside of his crown and his cock jumps, dribbling onto his stomach, a thin strand connecting him to his own skin. “Wren, that's—I can't—”
“You can.” I circle my clit slowly, letting him watch, letting him hear how wet the movement sounds in the quiet trailer.
“You lie there, and you take the softness, and you watch me touch what belongs to you.” The feather ghosts down to the base and back up, and up, and his stomach is glazed now, his thighs shaking, sounds falling out of him that aren't words.
“I'm going to be in those trucks in eight days. Every town. Every night. This body, in your bed, chained open whenever you want it—”
“Please.”
“—and every scar on you is going to learn my—” My own rhythm betrays me.
The orgasm has been building faster than I planned, fed by the sight of him wrecked and glistening and mine, and it slams through me mid-sentence.
My knees buckle against the bunk frame. I cry out, fingers working, his name in it somewhere, my whole body shuddering in the lamplight where he can see every wave of it.
He breaks.
His hand comes up and knocks the feather out of my grip, and his fist wraps around his own cock, and it takes three strokes.
Three. He shouts through his teeth and comes all over himself, thick ropes striping his stomach, his chest, one reaching the tally marks below his collarbone, painting his own testimony white while his heels dig into the mattress and his spine bows and my name tears out of him like it's the only word he's ever learned.
Then quiet. Two people breathing hard, one wrecked bed, one peacock feather lying on the floor like a dropped instrument.
He turns his head. Looks up at me with wet lashes and worshipping eyes and everything in him laid open.
“Hi,” he rasps.
I laugh until I have to sit down on the edge of the bunk, a few careful inches from his hip.
“Hi,” I whisper back.
“Wren.”
I look at him, and the smile melts off my face at the expression I see on his.
“I love you,” he whispers. “God damn it, I love you so much it hurts.”
I'm crying again, tears of love and joy, my body shaking so hard the bed shakes with me. It takes me almost a full minute until I can speak, Rowe patiently watching me the entire time with love shining in those gray eyes.
“I love you right back, Rowe Holloway,” I finally manage to say. “So fucking much.”
I kiss the tips of my fingers, the ones I used to hold the feather and stroke his ruined body, and bring them close to his face. Soft as a whisper and briefer than a thought, he presses his lips against them.