37 #2
It’s been ten days of him like this, ten days of skin, and it hasn’t gotten old.
It’s gotten worse, honestly. I move down him slowly, because I can, because he’s letting me, because there’s so much of him and I want every inch.
His hand comes up into my hair and stays there, loose, just holding on.
I kiss the middle of his chest and feel his heart going hard under my mouth.
Lower. His stomach pulls tight the second my lips touch it, every muscle jumping at once, and I smile against him, because I did that.
My mouth is at his ribs, and the edge of the scar is right there.
For ten days, I’ve been going around it. Not on purpose. My hands just learned the shape of where not to go.
Tonight I don’t go around.
I kiss it once, low on his left side where the skin changes, and it’s different under my lips.
It’s smoother, tighter, cooler than the rest of him, even though the rest of him is so hot.
His hand stops in my hair. He doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t pull my head up.
Everything in him goes still at once, his hand and his stomach and his breathing, all of it.
I look up. He’s staring at the ceiling. His throat moves around a swallow, and he doesn’t look down, and he doesn’t stop me.
So I put my mouth on it again. I don’t ask if it’s okay.
I don’t ask what it is. I’ve been not-asking for weeks now, and I’ve gotten weirdly good at it, which is hilarious, considering I’m the girl who once went through her boyfriend’s Venmo history to find out where he really went on a Saturday.
I kiss it a second time and a third, further down where it goes deepest toward his hip, and run the pad of my thumb along the edge of the graft, where the shiny skin meets the rest of him.
And he lets me. His hand comes back to life in my hair, barely, just his fingers.
We’re still like that, my mouth on his side and his hand in my hair and the lamp on and the room dead quiet, when he finally breathes out. I’m starting to think this is good, him letting me.
“My dad did it,” he says quietly.
Everything in me goes cold.
I stay exactly where I am for a second, with my hand on his side, because I don’t know what happens if I move. Then I come up and sit back on my heels beside him, and he sits up against the wall and doesn’t look at me. He looks at the window, the blinds, the desk.
His dad?
My brain keeps catching on that, over and over.
I met him. Wade Kennebeck drove five hours on a Saturday to watch his kid play an exhibition, and afterward, he hugged Nash in the rink lobby with both arms, one of those back-thumping, rocking-side-to-side dad hugs.
I stood there with my popcorn and thought it was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.
I liked him. Jesus Christ, I liked him. He told me about six-year-old Nash sleeping in his shoulder pads with his mouthguard in, and his whole face lit up while he said it, and I laughed, and he looked so pleased.
And in the middle of that hug, he put his hand on Nash’s side. Left side. Low.
I was right there. I watched Nash go still under it, so still I figured he’d taken a hit to the ribs in the game, and I decided that’s all it was, and I didn’t push. I stood three feet away and smiled while that man rested his palm on the exact place he—
His palm.
I shook his hand. Twice. The middle of it was smooth and shiny and tight, like shrink-wrap, with a ridge at the base of his thumb, and the same shine on the back of his wrist going up into his sleeve. A work thing, probably.
My mouth floods with spit, the thin, sour kind you get right before you throw up, and I swallow it down hard.
“Your dad,” I say. It comes out wrong. It isn’t even a question.
“Yeah.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth, and it takes him a long time to say the next thing. “I was fifteen.”
Fifteen. He’s eighteen. It’s the simplest math I’ve ever done, and I do it anyway, twice, because it’s so stupidly small.
Three years ago, I was crying in the car about a C-plus in chemistry.
Three years ago, my biggest problem was that my mom wouldn’t let me hang out with my boyfriend on a school night.
And three years ago, this exact body, this exact stubborn, enormous, impossible boy, was fifteen, and he was—
“It was November. I’d just gotten cut from a showcase team, the one the scouts go to.
” He stops and starts again. “We’d been fighting about it for three days.
He said I got cut because I played soft and never listened.
And that Saturday, he was out back burning a brush pile.
Leaves, old fence boards. He does it every fall.
It wouldn’t catch right, and he’s yelling at me the whole time, and he tells me to go get the gas can out of the garage and hold it. ”
His thumb is moving on the edge of the mattress.
“So I’m standing there holding a gas can while he tells me I’m soft. And I said I was done. I tried to walk away. And he took the can out of my hands and poured it on a pile that was still going.”
He does it with his own hands in the air in front of him, a short, hard tip, and I watch him do it.
“It goes up all at once,” he says. “It came up the side of the pile and got me. The whole left side.”
I start to picture the pile, the smoke, a fifteen-year-old Nash’s hoodie going up in flames. I make myself stop right there, halfway through, because I physically cannot finish that picture while my palm is lying on top of the result.
“He tackled me,” Nash says. “Rolled me. It wasn’t going out, so he beat it out with his hands. I remember him screaming my name the whole time.”
His dad’s hands. The ones I shook.
“He swore he didn’t do it on purpose,” Nash says. “But he––it wasn’t the first time he hurt me.”
And then a flash goes through me so hot and ugly that the edges of the room blank out.
I want to get in my car. I want to drive five hours to whatever town that backyard is in and stand in front of that warm, funny, handshaking man and—I don’t even know.
I’m five-four. I’ve never hit anyone in my life.
I don’t know what I would do. Something.
Something that would make him understand, make it go into him the way it went into—