Beneath the Scars

“Oh, Zachary.”

“I caught her writing up her story on her computer. I was still pretty bandaged up, so the pictures didn’t show how bad things were, but with her terrible, over-the-top story, it was enough to bring it all back into the public eye again. The whole tragic story of the leading man who lost everything.”

He looked around the room. “I had bought this place a few years before this happened. It was always my sanctuary when that world became too much. I severed ties with my agent and came here. Disappeared from the world I had known. I made a different life—a new one. No cameras or fame. No one using me anymore for what I could do for them.” He sighed, the sound forlorn. “I’ve forgiven myself as much as I ever will, Megan. I even had some counseling. I still live with what I did, though. I think there are some things a person can’t ever really recover from. I thought maybe being alone was part of the penance I had to pay for the person I had been.”

Tears poured down my face at his words. He was so broken and used, yet in the face of all the ugliness of the story he told, he was still beautiful to me. He had lost everything. Lost himself in a world where the only thing he was taught, that defined him, was taken away. He struggled to find the real Zachary and he did it all alone, assuming that was how he had to be, because it was all he knew.

A sob escaped my lips and Zachary looked up, his pain-filled gaze meeting mine. I was shocked to see the tears in his eyes. I had never seen him cry.

“Then I met you,” he rasped. “You, with your sweet words and loving soul. You didn’t care about my scars or my past. You saw me. You saw the pain I put on my canvases and all you wanted was to make it go away, to understand it.”

His hands twisted and clawed at the fabric of his pant legs as he bared his soul. “I know you think you forced me, but I had to tell you the truth, even though I knew there was a chance you’d walk away, too. I was a bastard, Megan. I still am in many ways. I always will be.

“But I love you. God help me, I’ve tried to fight it, to fight you, but I can’t. I love you so much it scares me.”

I gasped at his words, my heart hammering in my chest.

He loved me?

He lifted his hand, shaking, reaching out to me. “What frightens me even more is how much I need you. I have never needed another person in my life. You’re like the air I breathe. I can’t be without you now, Megan.” His voice was beseeching. “I can’t.”

I fell to my knees in front of him, my arms pulling him close as he buried his face in my neck, his emotions so strong he shook with the force of them.

I held on as tight as I could, his hands clutching at me in his desperation to be closer. “You don’t have to be, Zachary—ever. I’m here. I’m staying right here.”18MeganWe were huddled under the blankets, a mass of twisted limbs. Zachary trembled so violently it seemed to take forever to get him upstairs and into bed. His grip on me was tight, as though he was afraid if he loosened his hold, I would disappear.

Given what he told me earlier, I could hardly blame him for thinking that. Everyone in his life, up until now, walked away. Proved to him what he already felt about himself: he wasn’t worth sticking with unless he had something to offer.

He still couldn’t see the greatest thing he had to offer anyone was himself.

I had no intention of repeating that pattern he had seen over and again. I wasn’t sure, though, if I could ever convince him of his own self-worth.

He pressed into me, warmth beginning to return to his body as I held him, stroking my fingers through his hair, up and down his back while my foot ran over his calf, letting him feel me tight against him everywhere. I needed to feel him as much as he needed to feel me.

The shock of hearing his story had been great. His reaction to letting it out, even greater. Watching him cry, elicited a deep need to protect and care for him, causing me to brush my own tears aside. I was sure I witnessed a side of Zachary no one had ever seen: him at his most vulnerable.

He had expressed so many emotions: grief, torment, pain. And then, in the last few seconds of his tortured confession: a declaration of love.