Chapter 7 - Wren #2
I run a finger over the puckered mark on his shoulder. Then along the ridge along his ribs, feeling the rough, jagged line of skin. He doesn’t stop me, so I keep going. I run a finger along the white lines on his forearms, following the crisscrossed scars.
Somebody hurt him, years ago, maybe when he was still just a boy.
“My father taught me how to be strong,” he tells me, as though that is a valid reason for a body full of scars. “He wore a ring, and he liked to use it as a… a teaching method.”
“How old were you?”
He shrugs. “A kid. A teenager. The usual.”
“I’m so sorry.” I can’t stop tracing the lines of scars along his forearms.
I keep the rest of what I'm thinking behind my teeth.
The monster was taught.
He pulls his shirt back on. “I’m not. I’d rather be strong than have unmarked skin. Some sacrifices are worth making.”
We stay like that for a moment — him in the chair, shirt back on, hands wrapped in white gauze, and me still kneeling on the marble floor with the kit closed beside me. The air has shifted. Something in the room has changed its weight.
I need to know something practical. Practical is manageable. Practical doesn't require me to look at what I'm thinking.
"How long did you rent this for?" I ask.
He looks at me.
Not the assessing look, not the controlled blank. Something simpler — genuine confusion, as if I've used a word in the wrong language.
"Rented," he repeats.
"The apartment." I gesture, vaguely, at the impossible marble floors and the floor-to-ceiling glass and the forty floors of Miami skyline arranged behind it like a backdrop. "How long's the lease."
A pause. Something moves through his expression — I catch it before he organizes it away.
"I didn't rent it," he says. The voice for facts that require no defense. "I bought it. For you."
I hear the words. They don't immediately arrange into meaning.
"You bought it," I say. Flat. The sentence just sits there. I can't make it do anything else.
"Yes."
“When?”
“Four days ago.”
I look at the windows. Three walls of glass. The rooftop pool. The kitchen stocked by someone who knew what I ate before I did. I know Miami real estate the way anyone knows things they've been too poor to touch — abstractly, by category. An address like this. A penthouse like this.
Millions. Plural. He bought millions of dollars of real estate for a woman who wouldn't leave a motel.
"That's insane," I say.
"Probably," he agrees.
No deflection. No argument. Just: probably.
He looks at me for a moment.
"It's yours," he says. "Whatever you do with it."
The word lands in the center of my chest and stays there.
Yours. I haven't had a yours since my mother stopped being someone who needed me to come back to.
Five years of places that are not-places, walls that belong to someone else, ceilings I stare at and don't learn the cracks of.
He's not offering. He's stating. He bought it and now it's a fact, the way his scars are facts — made before he had much say in any of them.
The scale of it doesn't fit anywhere in my understanding.
He stands.
Smooth, efficient, the same economy of motion he arrived with — managed, contained.
Brief instruction: eat, sleep, he'll check in tomorrow.
The jacket goes back on, hiding the worst of the blood stains.
He's at the elevator before I form a response.
The doors open at a touch of his hand and he steps inside and he's gone, and the doors close, and the quiet reinstates itself like a lid over everything he just said.
I'm still on the floor. Kneeling on marble. The first aid kit beside me, the space where he was sitting a foot from my knees.
Yours.
I press my palm flat against the marble and feel the cold of it travel up through my hand, through my wrist, up to somewhere central that has been very cold for a long time on its own.
I don't move for a while, and when I finally do, I only make it to the couch before going boneless.
The light changes — the last of the afternoon going gold and then amber and then the deep blue that means the sun is gone and the city is taking over, filling the windows from below with its grid of light. I watch it happen from the sofa.
At some point my hand finds the sketchbook.
I don't decide to reach for it. My body makes the decision before I do, the pencil stub already between my fingers, the cheap notebook open to a fresh page. It's what I do when I can't think anymore.
I draw his hands.
From memory — sharp, certain. The long fingers, the lines of the knuckles before the damage.
I get that down first, the hands as they should look.
Then I draw what was actually there: the split skin across the knuckles, the swollen joints, the left middle finger sitting at a slightly wrong angle now.
The pencil stub is worn almost to the wood and I lean into the pressure, pressing harder where the graphite won't cooperate, my palm warming with the friction.
The lines come fast. I smudge a shadow with the side of my thumb and the graphite bleeds across my skin in a dark streak, and I keep going.
The bandages I wrapped him in. The neat white gauze, the careful even layers. I know what they cover now.
Then I turn to the next page and I draw the scars.
I do this from memory too, which surprises me — I didn't know I'd looked that closely.
The thin white lines on the forearms, fading at the edges, the kind that accumulate over years of the same recurring trauma.
The puckered mark on the shoulder, raised, irregular, not a clean wound.
The ridge along the lower ribs, slightly thickened, the line of something that healed without help.
My pencil scratches across the paper. I don't think. I just let the lines come.