Living in Shadow(68)
“Sane is a debatable term.”
“Well, you’re certainly not mad,” she said fiercely. “You were a child made to do terrible, terrible things. Like I told you before, you don’t come out of something like that without scars.” Closing her fingers around his wrist, she pulled it up between them, the fabric cuff sliding down his forearm. “Like this. This is a scar, Luc.”
He dropped his gaze to the cuff and stared at it for a long time. “I had to keep that,” he said quietly. “I had to carry something with me. I had to keep it to remember. Because I was afraid of forgetting what I’d done. When you’re…numb, it’s easy to forget.”
“But scar tissue is numb, Luc. That’s why you can’t feel anything. And I don’t think it’s forgetting you’re afraid of. It’s remembering.”
His gaze remained on the material around his wrist. “You’re making me feel, Eleanor. That’s the thing. I’m…waking up. I’m feeling things and it’s…dangerous. That’s why I had that flashback. I haven’t felt anything for so fucking long and now…Jesus, it’s all coming back.”
Her throat closed up. “I want to apologize for that, but I won’t. You can’t live your life pretending it didn’t happen. That it didn’t affect you. Take it from me, I know how well that works.”
Luc’s gaze lifted to hers all of a sudden, the look in his eyes sharp, piercing. “No,” he said softly. “I’m starting to think that too.” With an abrupt movement, he shifted, getting off the bed and going over to his bag where it lay in the middle of the room. Crouching down, he took a long, black shape out of it.
A knife.
Pulling it out of its sheath, her breath caught as he came back over to the bed, handing the weapon to her, hilt first. He didn’t speak, only held out his wrist.
“Oh, Luc…” There were more tears edging down her cheeks.
“Cut it off, mon rayon de soleil. I don’t want it there anymore. Because…I don’t think I’m numb anymore.”
She looked up at him, her heart too full to say a word. And she could see the certainty in his eyes. And the pain. Wordlessly, she took the hilt and put the blade of the knife against the threads, cutting through the strands in one movement, the cuff falling to the ground. Then she bent her head and kissed his wrist.
His hand spread, his fingers cupping her chin and lifting her gaze to his. “You can leave, soleil. I’m giving you this one chance. Because, if you stay, it’s going to be forever. I don’t think I can walk away from you again.”
“Well that’s good,” she croaked. “Because I didn’t come here intending to leave.”
His thumb moved, stroking away the tear that had fallen down her cheek. “Eleanor…”
She moved her head, rising onto her knees on the mattress, taking his face between her hands, pulling him down for a kiss that was sweet and said everything there weren’t words for.
Except he said them anyway. Whispering them against her mouth. “Je t’aime. Tu allume mon coeur.”
I love you. You light up my heart.
“So are you going to tell me about your tattoos?”
It was hours later and she was in his arms, her hair spread out on his chest as she held one of his hands in hers, tracing the lines and dots inked into his skin.
He watched her pale finger move, struck suddenly by the similarity to the way he’d touched her as he took the pain away from her that night. Had it felt like this? As if she were taking away something heavy? Erasing sharp edges of the anguish and leaving gentleness in its wake?
His arm felt strangely light without that cuff on it. Like it could float away.
“Inza tattooed all the boys in the child squads,” he said. And how fucking weird it was to be able to explain, to not feel like he was choking when the memories came. “His symbol on our hands so that if we ran we’d be easily identified and caught. No one wanted to hide a deserter. I tried once, to escape. I thought they were going to kill me when they caught me, but they didn’t. I spoke English, which made me valuable. I was whipped instead.” She was still touching him, stroking his fingers. “Squads used to get tattoos after a big victory. To celebrate. We’d drink, smoke weed if we could get it, listen to loud music. I wanted that fucking symbol off my hands that night so I got another boy in my squad to do it but he couldn’t draw. All he could do was bars and dots. I didn’t care, I wanted Inza’s symbol gone.”
“Didn’t someone notice you’d tattooed over it?”