37 #3
The pressure behind my eyes is unbearable, and my nose starts to burn.
Don’t you dare. Because if I cry, he’ll have to deal with me crying.
I know exactly how it would go. He’d get that crease between his eyebrows and reach for me and say something gruff and useless like hey, come here, it’s fine, and he’d spend the rest of tonight taking care of me, and I’d rather die before I let him do that right now.
So I breathe in through my nose, the way he does, and hold it until the burning backs off.
“What happened after?” I hear myself ask. I can’t help it.
“My mom drove us to the ER. Him with his hands wrapped in wet towels in the front seat.” His jaw moves. “Then the burn unit. Two weeks. Two surgeries for the grafts.”
His mom was there. Now I’m horrified. I swallow. “What did you tell them?”
One shoulder lifts. “That it was an accident.”
“Nash.”
“It was an accident,” he says. “He put it out with his hands.” He stops. “He was standing right there when I said it to the nurse. And every time since, he talks about it like I didn’t listen. Like he told me to step back and I didn’t.”
I feel like I just swallowed something with edges.
I think about the first week, when I still thought he was an asshole for sport.
I think about that Friday night, weeks ago, his hand snapping around my wrist so fast it stung when I slid my fingers under the hem of his shirt, and how he said two words, leave it.
I put my hand on his shoulder and kept kissing him like nothing happened.
I’d seen it on Declan’s driveway by then, so I made up a whole theory about body stuff and hockey guys, and I was so, so proud of myself for being understanding about it.
It was never about his body. He wasn’t hiding the scar. He was hiding who put it there.
I hear myself ask the next question quietly, before I can decide not to. “So, it wasn’t the only time he hurt you?”
Nash doesn’t answer. He sits against the wall with his forearms on his knees, looking at the blinds, and he doesn’t answer for so long that it tells me everything. The bass next door stops, then starts again with a different song.
“No,” he says.
There’s a question sitting right behind my teeth.
When. What else. How many times. It’s the question I’m dying to ask.
And I close my mouth on it because he just opened a door he’s kept locked, and I’m not going to be the person who shoves it the rest of the way with my foot.
I put my hand on his ankle instead, because it’s the closest part of him.
“Do you hate him?” I blurt out.
“No.”
There’s no pause at all. It comes out of him so fast and so plain that it’s worse than if he’d said yes. I wanted him to say yes. I wanted it so badly my hand tightens on his ankle.
“He’s my dad,” he says.
I wince. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know.” He rubs a hand down over his face and leaves it over his mouth for a second. When he takes it away, he says it again, quieter, to the blinds instead of me. “I know.”
I look down and realize I’m squeezing his ankle, and I loosen my grip.
“Is that why you keep your shirt on?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“With everybody?”
He looks at me then. His eyes are dry, and so tired, and so much more careful than I’ve ever seen them. “Yeah.”
Oh.
I put my hand back on his side, flat, the way he put it there himself that night in my room.
He watches me do it. I move my thumb along the edge of the scar, and then I lean down and kiss it again, low, where it goes deepest. Then I kiss the skin next to it.
Then his ribs above it, and his stomach, and the middle of his chest where his heart is still going too fast, and his collarbone, and the side of his throat, and his jaw, and then his mouth.
All of him. Not that one part like it’s something holy and the rest of him like it’s just a body.
Him. The whole infuriating, enormous thing.
He lets me. And then his hand comes up and cups the back of my head, and he kisses me back.
We end up lying down with the lamp off. I’m on his chest with his arm heavy around me, and my hand is where it’s been all night, over his side.
“Is that why you’re ignoring his calls?” I whisper.
“Yeah.” A long breath under my ear. “I need space.”
I don’t ask anything else on the tip of my tongue, whether he’s talked to his mom or what happens at Christmas. Every one of those questions is lined up, and I swallow them one by one until they’re gone.
He doesn’t reach for a shirt. He doesn’t roll away. He lies there with me on top of him and his hand moving up and down my back, slower and slower. I’m most of the way asleep when I realize my thumb is going back and forth over the edge of the scar, and I stop.
He catches my hand. For half a second, I’m sure he’s going to move it off, and I’m already saying sorry in my head. Then he pushes his fingers through mine and puts both our hands back down on it and holds them there.
I lie in the dark with my ear over his heart, wide awake again.
He told me.