"I'm not the one who's going to leave," he said.
"Cash, I know you."
"I need to tell you something."
Her phone's screen winked off, and darkness folded around them. "We've been friends for three years. Anything that you haven't told me by now isn't important."
"Yes, it is. I don't talk about this."
"Do Arthur and Maxence know?"
"They saw the aftermath. No one else here knows about it."
A sound like Velcro ripping apart whispered through the dark.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Our first time, out on the deck, we stayed out there in the dark because I had taken the bandage off my face before you came out. I couldn't find it to stick it back on. I couldn't walk through the lit house."
"Is the wound-" she chewed her tongue, searching for a non-stupid word, "-closed?"
"It's scarred over."
"Then it's just a scar."
"It's on my face."
"Yeah. So?"
"It's quite bad."
"I'm quite sure that I won't care."
"Someone as beautiful as you are will find it repulsive."
"I don't even know where to start with that. I know that I won't find you ‘repulsive.' What a horrible word. A little scar is not going to chase me off."
"It's not little."
The air in the room began to gray. Outside, the horizon must be turning dark red and blue, the beginnings of sunrise.
His wooden blinds wouldn't keep out the sunlight. In just a few more minutes, she would be able to see what he meant.
"The scar doesn't matter." she said.
He paused, and Rox held her breath.
He finally said, "In the accident, glass went through my cheek, ripping skin and muscle. The surgeons couldn't do anything yet, but I'll have some work done on it soon."
"What kind of work?"
"Plastic surgery. Fillers. Dermabrasion. Laser resurfacing. It will reduce how visible it is."
Rox leaned toward him in the wisps of morning light. "It sounds like you know a lot about that."
He was silent for a moment in the quiet darkness. "Yes."
"You knew a lot about the work that Josie has had done, too."
A whisper in the air sounded like he had sighed. "Yes."
"Can you tell if I've had plastic surgery or not?"
A puff of air escaped his lips in a laugh. "If you have, it was done brilliantly. I think you were born absolutely beautiful."
She chuckled because she hadn't had any plastic surgery. "I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
Cash paused. A few streaks of light from the pale glimmerings of dawn touched the auburn in his hair and the point of his chin, but a strip of darkness lay across his cheek. "No, I don't."
"Of course you do."
"I don't. There's a lot that I don't say to anyone, that I've never said to anyone."
"Everybody does that, holds parts of themselves back or shows facets of themselves to certain groups, compartmentalizing." Sometimes, the twenty-dollar words came to her. "It's normal."
"This is different," he said. "There are things that happened to me when I was a child that I never told anyone."
He was a very private person, Arthur had said. "You don't have to tell me."
"I think I do." He sighed and looked at the wall across the room. "Yes, I need to tell you."
Pencil-thin lines of light rode across his face from the dawn's glimmerings shining through the horizontal slats, but she couldn't really see his face yet. "We've been friends for three years, and we've been okay with it this way."
He took both her hands in his and inhaled a deep breath. "When I was six, I was in a car accident."
"A car accident? Jesus, no wonder this accident freaked you out, even beyond the almost-dying part."
"The car that I was riding in flipped over the safety barrier and rolled down the side of a mountain.
"Oh, Lord." She gripped his hands more tightly in the dim light.
He said, "The seat belt didn't fit me right. I was too small. I went through the windshield."
She tightened her fingers around his. "Oh, God. Cash."
"The glass scraped me up. I had cuts all over my body, crisscrossed, like I had gone through rollers of knives. Some were worse than others." He let go of her hand, and through the darkness, she could see his arm lift as he ran his fingers down the tattoo that covered his left shoulder and ribs under his tee shirt. "This side went through the window first. The tattoo is to hide the worst of the scars. Here. Feel."
He guided her fingers under the soft cotton of his shirt. His ribs were long lumps under his flesh, but the skin over them was rougher than the skin around the tattoo, thicker, like leather.
"The plastic surgeons sanded down the scars, so you can't feel much."
She ran her fingers over his skin, finding that odd texture under more of the tattoos. "Didn't that hurt?"
"A bit."
"Like sandblasting a few layers of your skin off?"
He shrugged. "That's pretty close."
"When you were six?"
"No. When I was eighteen and nineteen, during my undergraduate degree."
"Wow, Cash. I'm so sorry. At least it didn't mess up your face, huh?"
He held her other hand more tightly. "Actually, it did."
"They must have done an amazing job with the sandblaster."
"There weren't a lot of cuts on my face."
"Oh. Well, that's good."
"The bones inside were smashed. My cheekbones. My nose."
Rox covered her mouth with her hand.
"For most of elementary and high school, I was disfigured, rather badly. They couldn't do major reconstructive surgery until I had stopped growing." He lifted her fingers to his cheekbones, his jaw. "This is all plastic and cement. It's like I'm wearing a mask."
She ran her fingers over the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw, trying to feel any seams or scars, but everything felt normal. "They did an amazing job. I can't feel anything that doesn't feel perfectly natural. Is this what you should have looked like?"
"It's probably close. They used pictures of my father when he was that age and of my younger brother Willem, who was seventeen at the time, to make the casts. They also did some age-progressed photos of me that had been taken before the accident, but I look more like my father, I think."
"I've never seen pictures of them. You don't have any pictures of them around."
"I've got some, somewhere. There's more than a familial resemblance."
His dry tone made her smile.
Early tendrils of sunlight leaked through the slats that covered the window.
In the dim light, something began to form on his cheek, something twisted.
Rox kept her hand cupped on his cheek on the other side of his face, the uninjured side. "Does the scar hurt now?"
"No."
Her fingers drifted around to the other side of his face. On his other cheek, hard lumps and pits puckered his skin. A crease and ridge ran under his cheekbone. "This feels like it must have hurt."
He shrugged. "It wasn't so bad. It was over with quickly."
The sunlight strengthened, and a dark rose glow infiltrated the blinds.
Under her fingers, gnarled skin marred Cash's cheek like wood knots growing under his skin in an area just below his cheekbone.
Even though she had felt it, seeing the damage on what had been perfection was shocking, like seeing someone slash a painting in a museum. "Oh, Cash."
His voice was quiet as he asked, "Are you going to leave?"
She glanced at the window. Scarlet light trickled though the blinds. "It's five in the morning."
"That's not what I meant."
She looked at him, startled. His green eyes almost glowed with the red light staining his face. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He was watching her eyes very closely. "I mean, me. Are you going to leave me?"
Good Lord.
Heat flashed on her skin. "Do you actually mean, would I break up with you because you have a silly ol' scar on your face?"
Cash still didn't say anything. He just watched her, his emerald eyes wary in the brightening sunlight.
Righteous country anger began to simmer in her blood. "Are you saying that you think that I am so damn shallow that I would see a little scar on your face and take off for the hills?"
Confusion creased the skin between his eyebrows, and his lips opened.
Her voice hardened as the anger boiled up. "Casimir Friso van Amsberg, I have never been so insulted in all my life!"
His eyes widened. "I did not-"
She yanked her hands out of his and held them up by her shoulders, fingers splayed to strangle him. "You think that I am so damn superficial that I would give a fig-no, that I would give a nit on a gnat's ass-about that little pucker on your face and that I would walk out on you, that I would take my cats and depart as if you were a leper or an atrocity."