Chapter 35
Chapter thirty-five
Circles
Becky
Carrson helps tug off my shirt, which is now a twisted mess, and then undresses himself.
“Uh,” I giggle, “I think we were supposed to do that before. Shouldn’t we get dressed now?”
“I want you naked,” he says, kissing my shoulder and then my neck. I drop my head to the side with a sigh. My limbs are heavy, humming, and satisfied.
“Need to see you in the light,” Carrson mumbles into my shoulder.
I laugh softly, thinking he’s right. It was dark the first time. We were half-dressed the second. I never really saw him like this either.
His eyes move first, then his hands follow, fingertips gliding over every dip and curve.
He learns me, touches me with a quiet reverence.
I keep my hands to myself. I don’t want to overuse my new privilege of touching him.
Besides, seeing him naked is enough. Because he’s beautiful, hard in all the right places.
Strong and male and maybe…mine?
After he’s had his fill of exploring me, we lie on the blanket, the ground hard beneath my shoulder and hip. Carrson spoons me from behind, and I rest my head on his arm. His other hand comes around, tracing a shape across my chest, right between my breasts.
He repeats the motion, and I read it this time.
It’s a letter C.
“Haven’t you already marked me enough?” I ask sleepily. There are bite marks and bruises scattered across my skin, brown, black, and blue, but they don’t hurt.
“Never enough,” he whispers in my ear.
“Are you thinking of your knife right now?” I ask, already sure of his answer.
“Maybe.” His teeth scrape against my ear. Tender but sharp. That about sums him up.
I capture his hand, resting on my hip, and bring it to my mouth, kissing the back. His skin is warm, slightly rough, beneath my lips. A contented murmur rises from behind me.
I keep hold of his hand, tracing the lines on his skin with my fingers. His scars. I remember telling Remi about this in a letter, how I dreamed of touching him like this. Without distance. No fear.
Smiling to myself, I follow the lines on the backs of his hands, mapping them out slowly, like if I learn them well enough I’ll understand him better.
White streaks and thin slashes. Some faint, some deeper, overlapping each other.
I can tell they’re earned. Fights. Training.
I’ve seen him in the clearing. The way he keeps going past the point where anyone else would stop.
The split knuckles. The blood he never seems to notice.
This fits that version of him.
This makes sense.
But as my fingers move toward his wrists, the pattern changes.
The lines blur together. Until they’re no longer separate marks. One continuous band. A ring of white circling his wrist. His other hand, the one near my cheek, is the same. I frown and let my thumb brush over the skin. His scars are different there. Thicker. Raised.
White rings. Circles.
A memory flickers in my mind, half-formed. Floating in my peripheral vision.
“Becky?” Carrson must sense the change in me, the way I’ve gone rigid. He rises to his elbow, says my name again, but I’m not listening.
I shake him off, stare closer, trying to make sense of it. What could make marks like that?
White rings.
I’ve seen those before, haven’t I?
Earlier, around my wrists. I’d almost remembered. Rough fibers digging into my skin, the shape it left behind.
I fight through it, piecing the puzzle together.
Rope.
Like the one he bound me with, but there’s more. An image pushes forward, uninvited but insistent. It spreads like a weed, a disease. A pit opens in my stomach, and bile climbs the back of my throat as horror takes over.
White circles.
I remember now. Not skin. Wood.
The bed posts.
White rings on his wrists. Rope.
White circles on the bed posts. His father’s room.
Rope.
Carrson.
The bed posts.
I sit up like a bolt, twist to him, the words tumbling out.
“He tied you up,” I say, my voice breaking around it. “To his bed. Your father.”
To say Carrson goes still would be wrong. Still implies something natural. Resting. Paused. This isn’t that. It’s as if something inside him…stops.
Mid-motion. Mid-breath.
Gone.
The change is immediate and total. The warmth drains from his face, as though I’m watching it reverse, blood pulling back, leaving him hollowed out, carved clean from the inside. His cheeks sink; his mouth slackens, not open, not closed.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing too until my chest starts to burn.
His eyes slam shut, and this time it’s not a flinch or a reaction.
It’s a refusal.
Like if he shuts me out hard enough, I won’t know.
A better person would let it go. Pretend they didn’t understand. Let this crawl back into whatever place it came from.
I’m not that person.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Tears wet my cheeks, though I don’t remember when they started.
He nods. Eyes closed.
“He liked me on my knees,” he says. The words come out robotic, stripped of anything human. As if they don’t belong to him anymore. “Would push me down. Tie my hands to the bed posts.”
Oh my God.
On his knees…
There are no words for the images that flash through my mind. They’re so vile, so haunting, that I would do anything, give anything, to unsee them. That’s how much I don’t want to think about why Carrson was on his knees.
“You killed him?”
Another nod. Finally, his eyes open, and I wish they hadn’t. There’s nothing there.
No anger. No grief. No relief.
Emptiness. So deep you could fall in and never reach the bottom.
“I was seventeen.” His voice sounds distant, as if it’s traveling from far away. “He tied me up like always. But this time…” He swallows. “I realized I was as big as him.”
His hands twitch. Small, involuntary. Muscle memory, not movement.
“I don’t remember getting free, but my wrists were bleeding.
A lot. I don’t know where I got the knife from.
” The words catch, then shove their way out.
“When I came back to myself...” His pupils blow wide, swallowing everything else.
“He was dead.” His throat works. “I remember thinking…it was finally over.”
I shake my head, trying to catch up, trying to make it real.
“But I looked,” I say, my voice breaking. “When I—when I searched around the house today, there—there—” My throat closes. I can’t get it out. “There weren’t any bloodstains.”
“I changed the carpet,” he says, but it’s distant and I know he sees another time, a room soaked in blood. “The mattress. The wallpaper. Everything except the bed frame. I left that.”
“Why? Why that?”
“So I remember.” A pause. “Not to trust anyone.”
His eyes lift to mine. He blinks, slowly coming back to himself. A small crease forms between his brows. “Why are you crying?”
That question breaks me.
A sob tears out of my chest, and I lunge forward, knocking him onto his back. My hands find his face, his shoulders, anywhere I can reach, and I kiss him, frantic. His cheek. His jaw. His throat.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I’m sorry—”
I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for.
I just know he deserves it.
So I keep going, covering him with kisses, each one a desperate attempt to give him something. Anything. That isn’t what he just gave me.
I hope if I say it enough, if I touch him enough, I can make it different.
Make it hurt less.
And Carrson…he lets me.