Chapter 18 #2
Scars stretch across her skin, thin and pale against the sheen of sweat. Some are long, others jagged. I knew they were there, but seeing them now, written across her back and ribs like battle lines, hits me like a sucker punch to the gut.
I try to marry the scars against the footage seared into my brain, and it dawns on me that I didn’t understand what surviving meant until this moment, until I saw it carved into her.
That is not the body of a kid. It’s the body of a warrior.
God, how hard must that have been for her?
Sweat drips down her neck, following the slope of her shoulder, and as much as I miss tugging her braid to get a rise out of her, the short hair suits her, suits who she is now.
I take a step toward her, and her eyes flick up to my reflection in the mirror.
“Fuck.” She jerks around and drops the barbell onto the rack with a loud clunk.
My eyes are glued to the scar running over her hipbone as I step even closer and reach for her on instinct.
My hand settles on her waist, and when she doesn’t pull away, I let my thumb brush the edge of the scar.
She shudders under my touch, and my heart races.
I can feel her staring at me, but I keep my eyes on her jagged skin, keep my fingers moving, tracing. Mapping.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” I murmur, my voice caught somewhere between apology and awe. “Not really.”
She huffs, the sound more exhaustion than sarcasm. “How would you? Nobody told you.”
“Tell me, then.” My gaze flicks up to hers, but I can’t seem to stop my fingers from tracing her skin.
“I’ve been feeling guiltier every damn day since you two came back.
I told myself for years that maybe it wasn’t as serious as everyone made it out to be.
That maybe it hurt less because you were always so goddamn tough. ”
But I can see now it did hurt, that it still does. And now that I’ve laid my hands on proof of everything she’s been holding together, I don’t know how to hold my own body upright.
“Tell me how wrong I was for not pushing more,” I add.
For not showing up, demanding to know. For being the coward who let time and distance make it convenient to forget.
“I think I needed to see this to understand what you and Dane went through without me.” My thumb brushes another one of the scars, lower this time, then I meet her eyes again. “Show me the truth of it.”
She searches my face, probably weighing whether I deserve to know, then she wordlessly reaches out and takes my wrist, guiding my hand upward, letting my fingertips ghost along the edge of her ribs.
“Compound fracture,” she murmurs. “It snapped through the muscle. Took two surgeries to piece it back together.”
Jesus. I blink hard, but my hand doesn’t falter as she guides it up her ribs. Her skin is soft under my calloused fingertips, too soft for the damage it hides.
“Three cracked ribs. And my scapula… that was a mess. Still locks sometimes when I’m cold.”
She guides my hand to her left hip bone, where I feel the hard ridge of surgical metal just under the surface.
“Shattered hip. Took a rod and three plates to put me back together. Still hurts like a bitch, every damn day.”
God, I want to take some of that pain from her so she can breathe.
She draws my touch across the side of her lower back, just above her waistband, where a small, twisted scar curves beneath the skin. I wouldn’t have noticed it on my own, not with the others drawing my eye. But now, touching it, I can feel how deep it runs.
“Left kidney. Took too much damage from the impact… from the bleeding. They couldn’t save it.”
She breathes out shakily as my hand rests there, her body trembling. “There was… a lot of bleeding in the abdomen. They thought it was just the organ damage at first, but…” she shakes her head, “… let’s just say I’m a mess.”
I want to tell her she’s not. That she’s more put together than most people I know, for sure more than I am, but my throat is too tight for words. So I let my touch speak for me, fingers reverent, tracing her pain like it’s poetry.
She lifts my hand upward until my fingers slide beneath the edge of her sports bra, making her gasp. Fuck, that sound. I keep my touch gentle, skimming along the warm slope of her ribcage while my eyes flick up to hers.
Her beautiful molten caramel eyes.
Alaina is staring at me, and her pulse is hammering under her skin just as fast as mine is. My fingertips settle there, against the raised edge of the scar, but my palm flattens around the warm, smooth skin surrounding it.
My eyes drag from hers to her parted lips, then back again, and for a moment, we just breathe together.
“My lung was punctured. Collapsed,” she pants out finally. “I couldn’t breathe. There was a tube down my throat for days.”
Nodding slightly, I watch my hand rise and fall with her breaths, the ones she can take now.
Goose bumps ripple across her skin, and fuck, her nipples are pebbled under the thin fabric of her sports bra, tight and aching just like the heat pulsing low in my gut.
We’re in sync with every breath, every rushing heartbeat, and it wrecks me.
Not only because she’s beautiful and standing half-bare in front of me, letting me touch her, but because I wasn’t there. Because she went through hell alone.
But I’m here now.
And I will never look away again, not even if it kills me.