There was the sound of water rushing—for a while. Then a toilet flushing. Then more with the water. When she emerged, she carried a pleasant scent with her as she wiped her hands on a paper towel, which she pushed into her robe’s pocket.
He expected her to make a pronouncement that that was done. She wasn’t talking about it ever again. But she didn’t.
She came directly over to him, standing tall and much more composed, even though her face was red and her eyes bloodshot.
Her hands were steady as she went to the tie around her waist, and when she removed the robe from her shoulders, she just let it drop to the floor. The t-shirt underneath was a fresh one of the same kind she’d had on throughout the night, plain, white and loose, the creases from it having been folded while warm from the laundry making a pattern down the front.
She lifted it slowly, the hem going up over her belly, her ribs…
Her breasts were beautiful to him, her nipples peaked from the chill—
And there were the scars.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then focused on the healed wounds.
She had been stabbed repeatedly by a right-handed assailant, the wrinkled and knobby pattern located under her left collarbone. He was well familiar with those kinds of injuries and he knew she had to have been penetrated by a blade at least ten times, because there were satellite punctures around the main impact zone.
Her hand lifted, and as she ran her fingertips over the uneven texture, he had a feeling she did that a lot.
“I can’t fix it, you know,” she said in an absent way. “I mean, plastic surgery won’t really make it go away.”
“Why would you?” When she recoiled, as if he’d shocked her, he shook his head. “The scars are not ugly. They don’t detract from how beautiful you are. And what happened is always on your mind anyway. Besides, you probably needed surgery afterward. A couple of times. You’re done with operations, aren’t you.”
She nodded, as if in a daze. “I can’t make it go away just by… you know, trying to get rid of this.”
“We can’t run from our pasts. We shouldn’t even try.”
There was a long silence, and he worried that he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe he needed to—
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Now it was his time to be surprised. “For what?”
“You’re so… accepting.”
I love you, he thought to himself.
“But you’ve been in war, haven’t you,” she said. “This is… what you’ve seen before.”
“It’s true. It’s a part of life. I don’t want you to have gone through what you did. I hate it. I fucking hate it—and if that asshole weren’t under the ground already, I would hunt him down and bring him back to you in pieces. I would ahvenge you and your dead to honor you and your parents. I would see that it was done in the proper way, in the painful way. I would have him suffer under my bare hands and breathe in the smell of his blood and the stink of his cowardly fear.”
He had to stop himself before he got too far into all that. And then he bowed to her from his sitting position on her blue couch.
“Verily, it would be my honor to ahvenge you and your bloodline.”
When he looked back up, she had put both her hands over her mouth and her eyes were shining.
He couldn’t tell whether he had offended her or scared her or—
Erika came forward, came to him. And as she dropped her hands, she whispered, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Is that… good? Or—”
She settled on top of his lap, one knee on each side of him. As her eyes roamed around his face, she ran her fingers through his hair.
“It’s hard to talk about my past,” she murmured. “Because people are interested for reasons of their own and they get emotional for reasons of their own. I lived through it. I don’t want to help others manage my tragedy.”
He ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders. “Makes sense.”
“You’ve been through war,” she repeated. “You’re different.”
Balz focused on her breasts. “May I touch you?”
“Yes.”
Just as she had during the night, she took his hand and moved it onto her tender flesh. And as the weight of her breast filled his palm, he moved his thumb back and forth over her nipple. In response, her hips rolled against his, her back arching, her chest rising up.
Slipping his hands around her waist, his mouth brushed over her sternum, her heart. Then he kissed her scars, gently, reverently.