Page 55 of Born Reckless

Sneaky, sneaky Elena.

Elena walks in, flanked by two women who have piles of dresses in their arms. She steps up onto the platform with me and unzips her dress. Without hesitation, she peels it off. Oh, to have her level of self-confidence.

"If you don't find anything you like today, there's probably time for them to make something custom. We really should have gotten on this a few weeks earlier, but work has been busy."

The two attendants hang the dresses on a rack, one on either side of us. The attendant hands Elena the first dress and helps her slide into it.

The attendant beside me looks at me expectantly. And I realize that she is waiting for me to strip down as well.

It isn't that I'm necessarily shy about my body. It's just that the evidence of my past is written all over it.

But I swallow my hesitation and my embarrassment. I pull my shirt off over my head and shimmy out of my jeans.

The attendants’ eyes go straight to my scars. There is a big one just above my right hip. Two years ago, during the middle of class, I gripped the edge of my desk as pain ripped through me. By the time the class was over, I started screaming because it was so unbearable. Being in a class full of med students, it didn't take us very long to figure out that my appendix was bursting. I'd had it removed an hour and a half later.

There is a series of scars spreading up the outside of my right hip. When I was fourteen, I had stolen some food from a grocery store. There wasn’t any food at the house, and I was starving. I’d run out of the store, the owner chasing me. I had aimed for the back fence as my escape. Too bad I hadn't noticed the barbed wire at the top of it. It had chewed up my skin. No one had bothered to take me to the hospital. I wasn't exactly bleeding out. But the scars formed, heavy and obvious.

And then there is the strip of burned skin that stretches up the left side of my rib cage. It's maybe six inches high, and ten inches wide. When I was seven, I was in the car with one of my foster placements. I'm honestly not entirely sure what it was he did, I was young, obviously. But somehow, his car caught on fire. He got himself out pretty quick, but he left me to fend for myself. It had taken me an extra minute to get out of that burning vehicle.

I spent five days in the hospital while they attended to my burns.

The attendant stares. But Elena's eyes don't flicker to them. Not even once.

She knows my history. Every bit of it. She knows that my childhood wasn't sweet or calm or stable.

She doesn't judge me, and for that, I will always be loyal to her.

But this is the difference between Elena and Mason. Mason has never asked about them. He’s seen them, but I think he thinks he’s giving me privacy by not making me relive the past.

Sometimes I’m not sure if I want to talk about it or not.

Guiana takes a dress from a bag and unzips it. She holds it open for me to step into and it glides up my body, soft and smooth. Once in place, she zips it up.

"No," Elena says, shaking her head. "Definitely not this one."

I stare into the mirror across from me. "What's wrong with this one? It looks pretty."

Elena glares at me like I'm stupid. "The shape of the dress is all wrong for your hips. And besides, no one ever picks the first dress they try on."

I chuckle at how ridiculous she is and shake my head. But the attendant doesn't hesitate. She unzips the dress and practically claws it off my body.

"The black of this dress is too matte," Elena says as she peers at her reflection in the mirror. "I'm looking for something with a little more…spark to it."

She hardly even has to lift a finger. Her attendant unzips her dress and slips it off her body.

My attendant brings forth a new dress and like a good little dolly, I climb into it.

"Can we be done being mad at each other?" I ask. It comes out a little tight. I hate to be the first one to wave the white flag, but when you only have a few people in this life that you care about, having even one of them isolated from you is painful.

Elena looks over at me and studies my expression for several long moments. "I don't want to fight with you, Juliet. You are my best friend. I miss you."

"But you are still wearing that expression," I observe. "One that says you're not happy."

Elena climbs into the next dress and lets out a hard breath. She stands straight as she steps in. "I think that what you and Mason are doing is a bad idea. I think in the end, both of you are going to get hurt. You two are the people I care most about in this world. I hate the idea that in the end, you two might hurt each other."

I shake my head as I, too, climb into my next dress. "I don't think that what is going on between Mason and me is what you think it is."

Elena makes a noise that kind of sounds like a snort. "Are you trying to tell me this is all just about sex? That's not exactly what I want to hear about my best friend and my twin brother."