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Reading me.

“Then we fell in with wrong crowd during high school, after losing both of our parents. One night, he asked me to tag along to a meeting he needed to go to. Told me he owed someone money and wanted backup, just in case things got out of hand. I always had his back. Always looked out for him. So it was an easy decision.”

My heart raced with every word as Reed gently fused the bandage over my palm, and I held back another hiss of pain.

“Turns out, he owed someone a lot of money,” he said, teeth clenched and grinding. “Some drug dealer. He was older, massively built, covered in scars.”

“What happened?” I leaned into his touch.

Reed stared at me for a heavy beat, pain creasing his brows and flickering across his face.

Then he let go of my dressed hand and reached down to lift his T-shirt.

My eyes dropped.

I gasped.

The gnarly, jagged scar shot ice through my veins, and my eyes misted at the sight. I’d seen the scar once before, at his apartment three months ago. I’d figured it was some kind of accident.

But it wasn’t an accident.

“The meeting went to shit,” he said. “Radley didn’t have all the money, so the dealer left him with a final warning. A message. And the message was a knife to my gut that left me bleeding out and near death in a back alley in the middle of the night.”

“Oh, my God.”

I saw his pain.

I felt his pain in the same way I felt mine.

Bloody, exposed, and soul-deep.

“Point is, I’ve been there. I’ve been left for dead, spilled out across cold pavement, wondering how many breaths I had left. How many more moments…how many blips.” He crooked the smallest smile. “And then when I’d survived, I had to figure out how to live through that fear and pain going forward. And that’s the key—living through it, not in it. You recognize it, you channel it, you don’t try to smother it. There is no weakness in fear. You just can’t let it dictate your next move.”

I stared at him, glassy-eyed and mystified, marinating in his words.

“I’ve seen the moves you’ve been making, Comet.” His voiced dipped to a husky whisper. “I’ve been right in the center of them. You get back up every time you’re thrown down. You’re fighting for your life, in every sense of the word…and that’s fucking powerful.”

My breath stuttered.

I nodded slowly, my gaze drifting to his scar. Reed had gotten back up, too. He’d turned his scars into weapons. Into art. Into a story worth telling.

And now he was helping me do the same.

I lifted my hand and reached for him in a slow-motion glide, my fingertips grazing the puckered scar that looked like a small valley torn across the side of his abdomen.

He inhaled a saw-like breath at the contact.

Neither of us moved as my fingers trailed the uneven edges.

Our eyes met through the fluorescent bathroom light, his dark and intense, mine glittering with tears.

Then I pulled back, lowered the towel from my wound, and twisted around until my back was facing him. Until my disfigured spine was in full view.

I waited, chewing on my battered tongue, my eyes closed and heart split open.

He was behind me, shifting closer. And when he slid his hand across my bare back, I trembled from head to toe. I felt his palm splay across my skin as he uncovered my own harrowing secrets and stripes of belt-thrashed scars.

A warm finger traced the length of them, flitting over the borders and healing welts. I let him touch me. I’d let him touch me forever if he wanted to, realizing he’d never erase the evidence of my abuse but knowing he’d lessen the burden of it all.