32. Tank
Tank
I've spent most of my life imagining her face when she finally sees mine.
No matter what, every version ends the same way. She runs. She screams. And she never wants to see the horror of my face again, masked or not.
So when the mask drops into her hands, I close my eyes and wait for the inevitable.
It's a coward's move. I know that. But I'd rather not watch myself lose the only purely good thing I've ever had in real time.
Her breath catches.
And there it is, the moment I've been dreading for so many years. That sharp, sudden sound a person makes when the monster in front of them is worse than anything they braced for.
My whole body turns to stone in response.
I've heard that sound my entire life. From nurses, from my social workers, from foster parents who demanded I take off the mask and immediately regretted it. Even Kade made the same sound the few times he's seen me without a mask.
It's only natural when you're looking at a face that shouldn't be worn by any living person.
I wait for her hands to leave my face, for her to scream and put as much distance between the beautiful princess and the hideous monster as possible.
But she doesn't. Her hands don't leave the shocking ruin of my face that fingers like hers were never meant to touch.
It feels like blasphemy even letting her.
But she just let me see her break apart over a letter she didn't write, laid herself open on the kitchen floor with nothing left to hide behind.
The least I can do is meet her there.
One of her hands is still resting against my jaw, where the leather was a moment ago, and now it's just her fingers against the mess underneath. The torn place where a cheek should be and the permanently exposed teeth.
She's not moving or recoiling. She's definitely not screaming.
Instead, she's just breathing, fast and uneven, and I force myself to open my eyes. Because if she's going to leave, I want to at least see her one last time.
She's crying.
But somehow, I don't think it's in horror. I know what tears of horror look like. These are something else, but for the life of me, I don't know what that something else is.
Her eyes are wet and fixed on me, wide as they take it all in.
It takes everything I have to not yank my mask back on. I know what she's looking at right now. I make it a point to avoid mirrors, but I've seen enough over the years to have a firmer picture fixed in my head than I'd like.
I wish I could forget it, but my face is the kind of thing that stays with you.
There are scars everywhere, deeper and uglier than the ones on the rest of my body.
There are the exposed teeth on one side, the torn grin on the other and the fucked up eye that doesn't blink right, the whole morbid affair of… me.
Even I'm horrified by my face.
How can someone as perfect and beautiful as her even look at me without screaming?
Maybe she's just in shock. Of course she is. It's a lot. I am a lot, and I have always known it.
But she still hasn't run and that's… new.
Her thumb moves. Slowly. It traces along the edge of the scarring below my damaged eye, carefully, like she's studying something fascinating instead of witnessing a horror show.
No one's ever touched my face in a non-medical setting.
Not even once. Not at all since the hospital, and the people there wore gloves and carefully avoided looking me in the eye while they did it.
They were medical professionals who spent all day treating grave injuries and their hands still shook.
Somehow, this tiny, perfect woman is braver than all of them.
"Does it hurt?" she whispers.
The question knocks the air out of me.
I was starting to hope for what happened or even oh my god. Even the awkward silence where people scramble for something polite to say even though their brain is jarred blank and they're fighting to not show it.
She wants to know if it hurts.
I manage to lift my hands when I get over my confusion and give her the honest answer.
Sometimes.
Her face crumples a little at that, and she nods, but her thumb keeps moving over the scarred flesh. Like she's memorizing what I can't stand to look at, let alone touch. Her other hand comes up so she's holding my whole face, this thing nobody can stand to look at, not even me.
My stomach clenches and I screw my eyes shut again.
"How?" she asks. "How did it happen?"
I take a breath I can't hear over the blood rushing in my ears and lift my hands again. I'm so dizzy from sheer terror, raising my arms makes me feel like I'm going to end up on the fucking floor.
Dog, I sign, somehow. When I was a kid.
Her eyebrows pull together. "A dog did this?"
Not the dog's fault. That part comes first. Always. Mom left one day. Just gone. Left me alone with her boyfriend. He lived in a junkyard and… there were dogs.
The dogs were the only part of that hellhole that I actually liked, ironically. The only living things that didn't treat me like I was invisible, just another scrap of junk in the yard.
He ran dogs. Fighting dogs. My hands are slower now as they make the signs. This is a road I don't walk down often. One night he and his friends got drunk. Thought it would be funny.
I stop.
Ellie waits. She doesn't fill the silence with anything, either, she just keeps her hands on my face and lets me continue on my own time while I try to fight off the impending panic attack.
They put me in the ring, I sign, even though my hands don't want to shape these words. It's unfamiliar territory, considering I've never told anyone the whole story. Not my social workers, although they probably saw enough from the police report and hospital records to piece it together.
Hell, even Kade doesn't know the whole sad, sordid story, and he's never pressed. He's good about that.
I force myself to sign the rest.
With one of the dogs.
Ellie's fingers slip up into my hair and tighten. Her jaw goes stiff and I see the rage building behind her eyes. The same rage I've seen in Kade's whenever he gets another piece of the fucked up puzzle.
I don't blame the dog. They'd tortured him for years.
I force myself to hold her gaze, not letting myself look away, because she deserves the truth.
She's the only one who's made it this far to hear it.
He didn't want to be in that ring any more than I did.
We were both broken toys in the hands of monsters.
A tear slides down her cheek and drops off, and I want to catch it, but my hands are busy telling her the rest. I don't trust myself to keep going if I stop now. I'll lose the courage, because I can walk into a war zone without batting an eye, but Ellie…
Ellie is everything.
He got most of the lower half of my face before they pulled him off.
I touch my own throat, the deep scar there that the doctors still call a miracle because it should have been it.
It felt more like a punishment. Almost got the rest. They did grafts, but not all of them took, obviously.
I was in the hospital for a long time, months.
That's how I ended up in the system, and how I met Kade.
Her thumb sweeps under my eye again, wiping at a wetness I didn't know was there. Didn't know I was even capable of that anymore, but I guess she's all my firsts.
I almost died, I sign, slower now. For a long time I wished I had.
"Tank…"
Until you.
Her breath hitches again, her eyes widening slightly.
If I'd died, I wouldn't have met you.
My hands aren't steady anymore and I don't even give a shit. This woman has seen me at my lowest. She might as well see it all, so she knows what she's getting into. If by some miracle she doesn't walk away after this, I'll know what she's actually saying yes to, and so will she.
So I'm glad I didn't die. That's always been my reason, Ellie. You.
For a second she just stares at me, tears running freely down her face now, and I brace again out of pure habit. In my very limited experience the part where the tears begin is the part where the good things end.
Then she takes my face in both hands and pulls it down to hers until our foreheads touch.
"I love you," she says.
The world stops.
"All of you." Her voice is wrecked but the words are clear with conviction.
"With the mask. Without it. The scars, the teeth, all of it.
I loved you when I was eight and I loved you when I was seventeen and I never stopped, not even when I left, not for one single day.
I love you, Tank. And nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, changes that.
Seeing your face certainly doesn't. It just gives me a better picture of the man I love. "
I have been called a monster my whole life. By strangers. By family. By myself, every time I catch my reflection in a window I forget to avoid.
And the most perfect woman in the world loves me.
She looks at me and sees the man she loves instead of the monster everyone else fears.
How?
My brain doesn't want to compute it. My heart is having an even harder time working it out.
My hands come up between us, shaking, and I sign the only thing I can put into words right now.
I love you, too. I breathe, looking down at my hands to make sure they're still working because I can't feel them right now at all. Always have.
Her face breaks into a smile that would take my breath away if I could breathe properly.
That part's easy, I add. Loving you is easy. Loving ME is… probably something you should get checked for.
She laughs for real then, and before I can sign anything else, she pushes up on her toes and kisses me.
I freeze. My whole body locks up, because I don't kiss.
I can't. I literally don't have a mouth that does this.
I don't have intact lips to give her. All these years and I never once let myself want this because wanting something I could never have was just one more cruelty I could inflict on myself.
But she's not pulling back. She's right there, soft and patient, and after a second, I do the only thing I can.
I kiss her back, with my tongue.
It's clumsy and wrong and probably completely repulsive to her. But it's the only language my mouth has left and I have to do something. The thing I'm feeling right now, the thing I've always felt for Ellie, is too big and too demanding and it has to go somewhere.
She doesn't pull away or recoil, though. She makes a small sound and leans into it, her fingers sliding into my hair, and she kisses me back like there's nothing wrong with the way I do it at all.
When she finally breaks away we're both breathing hard, and the shame creeps back in the second I have room to think.
I can't even kiss you right, I sign, looking somewhere over her shoulder.
She catches my chin and turns my face back to hers.
I make myself meet her eyes again.
"I like your way better," she says, and there's a glint in her eyes now, a little defiant spark. It's one I've seen before but not in a long damn time. I'd burn the world just to keep it lit. "Besides. I've got three other guys to kiss the normal way. A little variety is nice."
A sound comes out of me, my rough approximation of a laugh. She should be horrified by that, too, but instead, she grins up at me, my mask still hanging from her free hand like she forgot she's holding it.
For one blissful second, the night doesn't have a wrecked car in it or a monster who needs to die. All that exists is me and her, the one person who's ever looked at my face and… smiled.
Yeah, she's crazy.
My kind, apparently.
She sets the mask on the counter behind me, deliberately, and stays crowded in against my chest. Somehow, she doesn't seem to plan on going anywhere.
Her hands slide down from my scarred face, her fingers bumping against the scars and my torn mouth, and my teeth.
I flinch again, but I can't keep my eyes off her as her hands travel my throat, down the front of my shirt, slow, and my brain short-circuits somewhere between her fingers finding the hem and the look she gives me when she pulls it up over my abdomen.
I have to be misreading this.
Are you sure? I sign, wary, even as my breath gets stuck in my throat because her hands are now sliding up my torso beneath my shirt. I look like a zombie. You don't have to pretend—
"I'm not pretending anything," she whispers, pulling me down for another kiss.
I have to be fucking dreaming.
She wants me.
But the lights are on. It's too fucking bright in here and—
She hops up onto the counter's edge, and pulls me in between her knees by my belt loops, and the last thing I think, before thinking stops mattering entirely, is that the boy who almost bled out in a junkyard should have died there.
For the first time, I'm so fucking glad he didn't.