: Chapter 20

When I open my eyes, the room is still dark, but the earliest light of dawn filters through the cracks between the curtains. The scent of sex and salted caramel lingers in the air.

My first thoughts are to replay how we even managed to fall asleep. Both of us were too stubborn to put a stop to it. Bria never used the safe word and I don’t think she ever will, not with how hard I pushed her last night. I untied her only to chain her and fuck her. Then I tied her again. Then untied her for a second time and I think maybe I fell asleep still inside her? Christ, I don’t even know. At some point I was just mindless. Time and reality became trivial concerns for the rest of the world to worry about.

The only thing I don’t like is that I didn’t properly care for Bria afterwards. That thought burns like a hot ember on my skin. When I really take her in, I realize she must have gotten up to do it herself at some point, because she’s no longer wearing her lingerie.

Bria’s back is facing me. Her ribs rise and fall. The blanket covers her from the chest down, leaving her shoulders bare. My cock twitches remembering her words, take what you want when you want it, and I already want it. I start to move closer when my shifting motion pulls the blanket down and I notice something I haven’t seen before.

A long, straight scar, the skin puckered and slightly raised. The start of another scar crosses beneath it, heading down at an angle, hidden by the blanket.

Crystals of ice dance beneath my skin. My heart pounds. My breath catches in my lungs.

I pull the blanket down slowly, revealing scar after scar, crisscrossing her skin all the way down to her mid-back. Interspersed with the long slashes is the occasional circle or small jagged mark. Whip marks. Cuts and Burns.

No impact play unless I say so, she said last night. I didn’t think much of it. I just assumed it was something she didn’t like.

I press my eyes closed for a long, shuddering breath. Bria trusts me enough now to let me see. She doesn’t just accept the darkest parts of me, she embraces them. And now she’s giving me the chance to do the same for her.

It makes me want to not only protect her from her own past, but rip the fucking flesh from whoever did this with my bare hands.

Fury climbs my throat. My finger trembles when I touch one of the lines. I have never felt such a mix of anger and sorrow as when I touch that scar and imagine the myriad of horrors that must have been inflicted on this woman. My thoughts scatter like chunks of mud flying from a spinning wheel. Why? When? With what? Over a day? Many days? Years? How long did they take to heal? Who the fuck would do this? Where are they? I’ll kill them. I’ll find them and bind them and kill them for what they’ve done.

I whisper a curse as I trace another line, my eyes stinging as they land on the widest mark. Bria stirs and her body tenses. She raises the blanket and turns over to face me.

“Hey,” she whispers.

I swallow, trying to keep the flame in my throat from choking my single word. “Hey.”

“You were sleeping so peacefully. I didn’t want to wake you. I should have. I should have told you last night, so it wouldn’t be a shock,” she says, her voice even and untroubled for all my rage, like these are just superficial marks and their history no longer hurts. I don’t know how that could be possible. I doubt it is.

“You don’t owe me any explanation, Bria.”

“You can ask.”

I try to temper the rage that’s burning my guts and setting fire to my blood. I want to know, even though I don’t. But more importantly, she’s giving me permission to learn. “When did this happen?”

“When I was a child.”

“Did Samuel do this to you?”

“God no,” she says emphatically, and I feel a slight measure of relief that I don’t have to march down to Cedar Ridge and murder the old man, though the urge to kill whoever caused these scars still twists my organs into painful knots. “It was long before that, with my original family. Let’s just say they didn’t like an overly inquisitive child. They liked a subversive one even less. But they did enjoy punishing me for it.”

I don’t say anything. I just shift the hair away from her face with gentle strokes and wait. I know she’ll divine my questions again in the prophetic way she always does, and will take them only as far as she’s willing to go.

“Samuel found me when I was fourteen, after the last ties with my family were severed,” Bria says, casting her eyes down. I think I feel the slightest flash of a smile beneath my fingertips as I trace the skin of her cheek, but when her gaze meets mine again there’s no softness in the memory. “Samuel’s never hurt me. Not once. He cares for me. He…”

I wait again for Bria to continue, but it’s as though she’s stuck in a lightless room and can’t find her way out. Her eyes leave mine and she looks beyond me, searching and stumbling in the dark.

I stroke Bria’s hair, bringing her back to me. “He loves you?”

“I… I don’t know if it’s that straightforward.” She pauses for a long moment, her eyes glinting as they shift and take in my face.

“How do you mean?” I ask.

Bria lifts her uncovered shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess it depends on how you define love. What is it?”

My caress lurches to a halt on the sweeping line of her jaw. The bluntness and sincerity of her question crushes me, adding another surge of flame to the rage still boiling my veins. “Are you asking because you don’t know?”

“I’m asking because I want to know what it is to you.”

I take a deep breath. How do I describe something so expansive? One feeling that has so many facets, that’s imbued my life with both meaning and pain, how do I distill that into a few words that come even close to capturing it?

How do I describe to Bria what she already means to me?

My heart ricochets off my bones. Fuck. Fuck. It’s true. I am falling in love with her. There’s no one in the world like Bria Brooks, and every moment I spend with her just crystallizes this knowledge deeper into my brain, sinking into every cell. I am falling in love with her and I can’t stop myself. Nor do I want to.

I clear my throat and try to calm my pulse, resuming the caress of my fingers across her skin. “As a feeling, for me, it’s like a warmth, even a burn in my chest, something so bright it feels like it could destroy me and I would welcome it. Sometimes it’s a desperate need to be around that person, or to care for them, or to spend time with them. Some love is calm and comforting. Or it can be a raging sea that I just want to jump into. But it’s somehow fragile too. It gets tangled up with fear. It’s a feeling I’m afraid to lose, because that warmth is like fuel. Like I could live off it. For it.”

“I don’t know if Samuel has ever felt any of those things,” Bria says plainly.

“Well, I don’t think it’s just a feeling, or a collection of emotions. Love is action. Love can be in the smallest details, like trying to make someone laugh, or comforting them when they suffer. It’s putting the effort in to make things right when they go awry. Love is about taking action to make the other person’s life happier or more joyful, not just once but consistently. In little ways. In big ways. Love is empowering someone, putting their well-being first. And sometimes it’s having the bravery to let go when you know you can’t. That doesn’t mean giving up when things get a little rough. It means trying to be a better person so you can be a better partner. I guess love is wanting to enrich someone else’s life, and in the process, you enrich your own.”

Bria is silent for a long while. It’s already on my lips to tell her how I feel about her. It’s a confession I’m burning to let go of. I want to, desperately. But I’m afraid it will run her off. A thought occurs to me then, and once it’s there I know it won’t ever leave. Maybe she’s never been told.

“Samuel taught me how to swim,” she says into the dark, jarring me from my thoughts with her abrupt statement. “I took to it quickly. I wanted to swim competitively, but Samuel said no, because of the scars.”

I swallow a sudden dryness in my throat, trying to keep up with her when I’m still caught on thoughts of confessions and love. “He was worried about you being bullied?”

Bria huffs a laugh. “Something like that, I guess,” she says, her cheek moving beneath my fingertips as she smiles. After a long moment, her smile fades. “Samuel installed the swim trainer in the house so I could practice against the current. Once a month he’d rent the public pool or he’d take me to his cabin during the summer where he put distance buoys in the lake, and he’d time me. He learned how to coach me to dive more efficiently at the pool, or how to do drills or improve my strokes. By the end of my second year, I was beating the state’s best times for girls my age. I could have entered any state championship and won.”

“Didn’t you have the urge to defy him and try? Go to a coach and show them what you could do?”

“No. I learned the logic of Samuel’s philosophy on life and purpose very quickly. He taught me to balance what would benefit my progress versus what would only benefit my ego. I learned that there would be instances where cultivating the positive opinions of others wouldn’t hasten my progress toward my goals. Some accomplishments, the ones that meant the most to me, had to be for me alone. So I only swam for him and myself.” Bria’s fingertips ghost across my chest, unaware of the fire she lights beneath her touch. Her eyes follow the movement as she slips into distant memories. “The first time I beat the championship record, Samuel made a fist and said, ‘Yes, Bria.’ That night, he took me to my favorite restaurant. We went to a movie. I felt like I had made him proud. What did it matter if anyone else knew?”

I trace a line down Bria’s neck and warm her shoulder with my palm. “Why do you think he went to all that effort?”

“Maybe to ensure I could stick to something and not give up until I was the best. Or maybe to teach me those lessons about hubris so that I could learn to enjoy my success without putting it on display for everyone to see. But now I think maybe it was also the closest he could come to loving me. Maybe he can’t feel it, but he can live the actions of it.” Bria’s eyes flash as they reflect the dim light from the window, bounding between my own. Her voice is quiet when she speaks again. “Do you think that’s enough, to live the actions of love even if he can’t feel it the same way other people do?”

I know without asking that Bria is peeling back a scab to show me a bloody wound. A piece of her suddenly falls into place. Bria is afraid. Everything about love is foreign to her. It’s a painful mystery. She believes she’s never had it, isn’t capable of it, can’t feel it or see or sense it, not in herself or others. She knows she doesn’t understand, and it scares her. “Is it enough for you?” I ask, bringing my hand to her face to trace her bottom lip with my thumb.

Bria is still and quiet for a long moment. “Yes. I think so. It’s the best thing I’ve ever had.”

“Then it’s enough, Bria,” I say as I draw her against my chest. “It’s enough to be love.”

Bria says nothing more, just nestles closer until she presses her ear against my heart. After a while, her breathing slows. I have so many questions, but they dissolve with every breath that warms my skin. I fall back to sleep with Bria’s warmth tucked into mine, dreaming of everything I feel but have left unsaid.