Too bad they put me back together wrong.
When her fingers press down on that knot, searching, looking for a single string to start unraveling, holy merciless fuck.
My leg explodes. Pure riptide pain shoots up my hip to my knee, then ricochets back to throb up to my groin.
I let out a low bearish sound, grappling at the edges of the table with my palms, digging my fingers in, spine arching. It hurts too much for me to even kick out, my teeth grinding like I’m trying to fucking crush them down to nubs.
“I’m sorry,” Peace says softly, her touch gentling. “You’re carrying so much tension here. It’s like a land mine. Everything I do will hurt at this stage. I can try to work my way in from the outer edges to let you get used to it.”
Part of me wants to say fuck this.
I don’t know how hurting like this is supposed to help me at all.
My eyes open to slits, watching her as she stands next to my thigh, looking at me with such warmth, such concern, still asking me to trust her.
Kind of like I asked her to trust me that night on the side of the road, alone and frightened and waiting for me to come find her.
Whatever.
Taking several shaky breaths, I nod, digging my fingers in harder to the plush table cover till I feel the wood underneath. “Go ahead, woman. Do your worst.”
She offers me a faint, almost sad smile.
The next time she touches me, it’s farther from the center of the wound. The pain’s more a soft burst versus the supernova blast it was before.
I close my eyes, swallowing hard, trying to endure it, counting out my breaths as her hands work and knead my flesh like it’s putty. She goes in a radial path around the most concentrated bits of the scar.
It’s this weird, rhythmic dance of pain.
Sometimes the pressure of her palms is enough to flatten it into nothingness, before it fights as soon as the pressure eases.
“Hey,” she murmurs, her voice part of the rhythm, soft and low. “Talk to me. Anything to take your mind off it. It’ll help.”
It’s hard to speak through gritted teeth. “Don’t know what you want me to talk about.”
“Tell me about Andrea?”
There’s a warmth in her voice when she says my daughter’s name that nearly undoes me.
I know she only met Andrea once.
That night I came to fetch my daughter, it’d been a hell of a something to see her through the windows, talking to Peace so easy. My Violet has a rare trust she’s been hard pressed to give to many since her ma died.
“She’s a good kid,” I start. “No—that ain’t even right. She’s the greatest. Stubborn as hell, smart as hell, too. Determined to be this wild child artist and I’m gonna let her if that’s what she needs to be, as long as she keeps out of serious trouble.” I smile faintly. “She’s nothing like her ma. I think I’m glad for that.”
Peace doesn’t answer for a long time.
“She mentioned her mother passed,” she murmurs.
“Yep. Abigail.” It’s weird to say her name out loud. When Andrea and I are locking horns, it’s always just your ma. “Four years ago last week. Freak medical condition. We were days away from signing the divorce papers anyway, but she was still Andrea’s ma. I was ready to work with that. Just because things went to hell in a handbasket with my lady didn’t mean it needed to spill over to my little girl. Didn’t want it destroying her.”
Too fucking honest? Maybe.
Hard to help it when I’m lying here under a pretty girl’s gaze, practically buck naked, letting her wonder-fingers torture me back into something resembling a functional human being.
“She seems to still be taking it hard,” Peace says.
“Sure. We manage most of the time, but that’s one subject where we just butt heads. Can’t seem to speak the same language.”
Peace doesn’t answer. I realize her hands are still working, and I’m actually starting to enjoy it, the pain more of a low mellow burn melting like hot wax through my flesh.
“You’re afraid of something,” she says. “It’s making you lock up again. Relax, Blake. Tell me what’s eating you.”
If that ain’t a sucker punch.
How the hell is this young woman—emphasis on the young—reading my body like it’s tarot?
She’s not wrong, though.
And I feel that fear tighten in my throat as I say, “I’m worried she blames me for killing her ma.” Then I move on quickly. “Not that there was ever anything violent! I ain’t that kinda guy. Real coward piece of trash who’d ever put a hand on a woman. Abby would…I mean, she’d hit on me a little sometimes, but that was just the way she was. Never hurt none. I just took it, gave her a look, and asked her if she was done.”