The scarring is catastrophic. It’s the strangest pattern I’ve ever seen: a huge grid of puncture marks, each one ringed with mottled tissue, repeated over and over. When I saw him shirtless from across the kitchen in Bordeaux, I thought they were straight lines, but I’m realizing now that it was simply so many repeated stab sites that they blurred into endless mountain ranges. He looks like he was pierced again and again and again by something with deep talons. Shoulder blade to shoulder blade, nape of his neck to the base of his spine, like someone plotted out the exact contours of his vertebrae and kept coming back to extract more and more.
I want to ask so badly. But it’s not the time. It’s obvious from the way his breath freezes that he doesn’t want to discuss it.
So my hands slide l
