Page 124 of Tears of Gold

“Sunshine.” My full and heavy heart flickers as he calls me. “Open your eyes.”

“I can’t. Aiden, h-he… he was going to rape me. I tried to protect it. I did, I promise.”

“I know. Please look at me.”

Slowly, I blink my eyes again. This time instead of the brightness I’m met with the clinical cleanliness of a hospital room. Turning my head, I find Eli. His eyes are swollen, his skin pale.

“Don’t look at me.” I turn my face away. “Please don’t look at me.”

“Faith.” His fingers turn me back. “Why are you a monster?”

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk, not now. Not now I’ve lost the thing I never thought I’d have. “Because I don’t deserve good things. I’m a killer.”

“Faith, you didn’t kill that baby all those years ago. You were young and you were scared. Abused and broken. Is this why you didn’t tell me, because you thought I wouldn’t understand why you didn’t want it?”

I nod, tears sliding down my face, into my hair and onto the pillow. “I didn’t know how I could let him plant that inside me.”

“You didn’t.”

“I’m so scared you will think I let it happen to me.”

“Why would you think that?” The blues are intense; they won’t relinquish their hold. “I love you like I’ve never known was possible. I’d give you the world.”

“Because it’s what I think. Until you, I never let myself enjoy intimacy. I’d want it so bad, I’d crave it, but then it would happen and I would lay there motionless the whole time.” I drag in a deep lungful of air. “Until you. You made me feel, but I didn’t want you to know how I’d always been, in case you thought it meant…”

“In case I thought what?”

“In case you thought it meant I’d been like that with Aiden. That I’d laid there and just taken it.”

“Did you?”

“No. I was scared. I was so scared, Eli. It haunts me. It’s why I’ve done what I have with my skin. I went through every tattoo I have, after you and I broke up. I tell myself it’s all my mistakes, but it’s not. It’s so no one can see the real me. No one can see the little girl who doesn’t know how to feel.”

“You feel with me?” He looks like I might be able to break him with my next words.

“Only with you. You’re the only one who can see through the ink.” I sob, my chest heaving. Even the pain in my fingers can’t erase the pain in my heart. “Eli, I’m so sorry about our baby. I tried to save it. I did, I did.”

“Faith.” His fingers cup my face. “I won’t ever forgive myself for what happened to you tonight. I should never have left. You are my everything. All of it. Ink, glass, and gold. All the things that challenge us, all the things that defeat us and hide us, all the things that hold us together. Since Peter died everything has been a mess. I hate myself for not being the man that walks down the river and helps at the soup kitchen anymore. I don’t want my life to be complicated. I want to be happy with you. With you two.”

“What?”

“Faith, you saved our baby. You loved so hard and so deep you gave yourself up to protect it.”

He holds up a black and white image. My baby. Bigger then it was the other week. Still growing. Still beating. Still fighting.

I cry. Nothing else. I just cry.

“You are going to be the best goddamn mother out there. Because you will never let that child not know what love and affection is. You will live and breathe it every day. Mother told me what you said to her today. It was why I was on my way over.”

“It was you shouting.” I know it. His shout echoes in my head… I can hear it over the terror of the moment.

“Faith, I will always save you, if you will save me.”

“Our baby is okay? Lift the picture up.” He does, grinning, as he perches on the bed. That moment of fear on the pavement under Aiden’s body fades away, washed away with a love so fierce it’s uncontainable.

“It was turned around. Like it knew your hands were there to shield it and it was hiding under your grasp.

I nod, tears still streaming.