21. Luna
LUNA
We’re in bed, the lamp low, somewhere past ten, his hand tracing idle patterns over my arm, when he touches the white streak for the first time with intention.
He’s touched it before, but not in this way.
Before it was incidental, passing, the back of a hand or a thumb in motion.
Tonight, he touches it the way he touches everything that matters to him, slowly and on purpose, one finger tracing the edge where the white meets the black, from temple to hairline and back.
“Tell me about it. About what happened here.” His voice is soft.
I listen to my heart, taking stock of whether I want to tell it. I do. That’s new—not the wanting but the ease of it, the absence of the old calculation about what happens after.
I’ve told the story three times in my life.
Once to Cherry, in my second year, late after closing.
Once to Hugo, in the context of why Star’s name in a conversation made me go strange.
He took it in, then mostly forgot it within the week, which told me a great deal about Hugo at the time and a great deal about the story itself.
It's brief, and it’s not dramatic the way the world expects scars to be dramatic. Hugo wanted drama. That was the only reason he ever committed something to memory—it amused him.
This is the third time.
“Star. My sister. She was ten when I was born, and she had the full attention of both our parents for a decade. I showed up and ruined everything. According to her.”
He waits, hand still.
“She never let me forget it. Not in a loud way—she wasn’t loud, she was precise. She knew which words to leave where so you’d step on them later, and she refreshed the supply whenever it ran low.”
Ivan says nothing. His hand doesn’t move.
“I spent years trying to get her to want me around. Dressed how she dressed, liked what she liked. Followed her around the house trying to be worth keeping.”
I stop, because even now there’s a small flinch in the telling, not pain exactly but the memory of a child who didn’t yet know that some people won’t choose you no matter how small you make yourself. “I was eight. She was eighteen. She had a curling iron heating on the bathroom counter.”
He’s so still.
“I don’t think she meant to hold it there as long as she did.
” I pause. “I don’t know that she meant it to go that way.
But she held it against my hairline and counted to twenty—maybe she did mean to hold it there that long, come to think of it.
But then, she let go, and that whole time, I didn’t scream because I had learned not to make noise when she was angry, because noise made it worse, and I didn’t want to know what the curling iron would feel like on my cheek. Or my eye…”
The facts arrive flat, sorted. “No hospital. My mother cleaned it, put something on it, told me Star had problems and I needed to be more careful around her.”
His voice barely registers. “She corrected you ?”
“Yeah.” I pause. “That was the sentence that did the real damage, honestly. Not the burn. The burn healed. The sentence stayed with me ever since. Putting the blame on me… on a little kid, for what was done to her by an adult. It didn’t feel right then, and it feels abusive now.”
The room is quiet for a while.
“I hated it for years. The scar, I mean. Kept it covered, changed my part, wore my hair specifically to hide it.”
He is still quiet. “You don’t anymore.”
I touch the streak myself, the old habit of checking it’s still there, still mine.
“I was maybe twenty-one when I was in the mirror doing my hair, and I thought, she tried to mark me as hers, and instead she made me unmistakable. The streak exists because someone tried to change me. To hurt me. I exist because I survived it. So…” I shrug.
He nearly smiles. “You’re a survivor. I knew that when we met.”
“Now the scar goes first. I make it go first. It’s the first thing you remember about my face.”
His jaw works once. His voice is dark like shattered black glass. “Where is she?”
I know why he’s asking, and I have never in my life felt so completely held and also so completely certain of what I’m going to say. “No. I don’t want that.”
He looks at me. The cold, flat place is still there.
“I mean it. I want you to hear me mean it.” I put my hand on his chest, over his heart. “There’s no revenge to be had here. No justice. You get me?”
He grits his jaw. “Fine.”
“Star is in Austin. She’s a successful lawyer with perfect hair and a cold, empty apartment. She has money, she has a career, and she also has no one. No Marty. No Fred and Gerty. No Hairy, no Cherry, no Mike. No you.”
I feel his breathing slow a degree. “Go on.”
“She called the warmest people in her life embarrassing and blocked the rest, and she’s going to be very impressive and very lonely for a very long time. That, Ivan, is my justice. That is already the worst thing I can think of, and I thought of it the day I stopped being afraid of her.”
His chest is moving under my hand, steady now, the cold flat place doing something more complicated than withdrawing. Processing. It’s one of the things I love about him, even when processing requires me to wait.
I can wait. I’ve learned from him that waiting is a form of respect.
He finally looks at me and nods. “You pity her.”
“I do. Completely. She took so much from me. The worst thing I can do to her is refuse to hate her and keep building a life so full she’ll never understand it.”
“I won’t interfere. I won’t seek her out. By your grace.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it all the way down.
He’s quiet for a long time. Long enough that I think we’re done, long enough that his hand starts moving again, the idle tracing, but slower now, more deliberate, covering the streak from end to end in long passes. “You are a better person than I am.”
“I’m a different person than you are,” I correct, gently. “In this one respect, I had more practice. It’s not a competition, and even if it were, you didn’t get the same raw materials to work with. Different starting conditions, different outcomes. Basic math.”
I kiss him, because his hands have gone from the streak to my face, cradling it in a way that says everything.
“The streak,” he says, after a moment, his mouth against my temple, right at the edge of it, the exact border where white meets black. “It does get seen first. You’re right about that. It has since the coat closet.”
“It’s funny. I was so taken aback by you in the closet that I didn’t have a chance to be scared.”
“Taken aback?”
“Startled. Surprised. Whatever. You were this huge stranger who snatched me up. I should have been way more scared than I was, and if I knew I’d end up here, I would have been.”
He frowns deeply. “What does that mean, exactly?”
I snuggle closer. “Had I known I would have ended up open and honest and vulnerable in your bed, I would have been way more scared of you. But I wouldn’t have done anything differently, either.”
He smiles at that. “Neither would I.”