Page 87 of Roped

His eyes flare and I know it’s because of the endearment that so casually slipped out of me. And for the millionth time tonight, I realize how foolish I’ve been to withhold myself from him. From the man so love-starved. So hungry and thirsty. For me.

He takes a deep breath, and still keeping our eyes locked, he opens the top button of his drenched shirt. My heart starts slamming in my chest and by the time he gets to the third button, showing a sliver of his bronzed hairy chest, wet from the rain, I want to tell him to stop. I want to tell him there’s no need for him to do this. It’s okay. I don’t want his hands to tremble like they’re doing now, and I don’t want his shoulders to twitch and tense with every breath he takes. But I don’t because something in my gut, in my pounding heart, tells me this is important.

This is him baring himself, being vulnerable, and I need to be his safe space. Like he’s mine.

Finally, all buttons are undone, but since the fabric is soaked, it’s sticking to his body, to the arches and ridges of his torso that I can see a tiny glimpse of. So he has to push the shirt away himself. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, that he has control of it. If it’s cruel to make him go that extra step of peeling his shirt away from his body rather than simply shrugging it off. Whatever it is, he goes ahead and does it.

He grabs the front of one of the shirts I bought him and takes it off, letting it fall on the floor with a wet thwack, and my heart drops to my stomach.

It keeps dropping lower and lower as he unbuckles his belt and snaps his jeans open at the same time as he toes off his boots. He unzips it before pushing the jeans down, along with his black briefs. He bends, the great big muscles of his body rippling and twitching as he shoves them all the way down, even his soaked socks, before stepping out of them. And stands in front of me, all bare.

I try to keep my breaths even as I stare at him. As I take in the sheer magnificence of his body. I knew he was large and muscular. I’ve not only seen him but felt those muscles against my body on many occasions now. But it’s an entirely different thing to behold them bare, without frills and strappings. Without his clothes to hide behind. That’s what he does, doesn’t he? He hides behind his clothes like he hides behind his bandannas and Stetson.

Swallowing, I ask, “Is that why… you didn’t want me to dress your wounds? Because you didn’t want me to… see.”

His massive chest, looking even more massive now that I can see those arched pecs and the dark dusting of hair, moves up and down with a breath. “Yes.”

I nod. “It got you, too, then? The f-fire that killed your father.”

I watch the muscles of his torso tense. He has a six-pack, clear and defined, the slopes of his hips sharp and defined, too, all also covered by a dusting of dark hair. They all flutter and tense up at my question. “Yes.”

I told myself I wouldn’t do it, that I would stay calm, but something about his second yes, like he’s so ashamed of it, gets to me. Like he’s so ashamed that the left side of his obliques, starting in the middle of his torso and back, going all the way down to the top of his thigh, is covered in scar tissue from the fire in the car accident. Like getting burned because he was trying to save his family is a bad thing. Like it’s anything other than brave and heroic and so goddamn tragic.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me. He told me one side of the car had caught on fire and that he pulled his family out of it. He kept going back to pull his family out of it. Of course that fire got to him too. Of course he was burned, too, and dear God, he was only fifteen.

Fifteen.

I open my mouth, my question all ready to go, but all I can get out before I trail off is: “What…”

He picks up my thread, though. “Third-degree burns.”

I flinch.

“They told me I was lucky it wasn’t worse than that. Worse than third-degree or hadn’t spread to a larger area. Or they’d have to give me grafts. Took a few months to heal and then about a year for ’em to look like they do now.”

Raised and puckered skin, he means. Shrunken and pink, raw all over.

I swallow again and ask, “And what are those?”

“Tattoos.”

I mean, I knew that. They’re very clear to see. His tattoos don’t cover the entire burn site but most of it. They also go around the area, going up to his ribs and down to his mid left-thigh. But it’s not a design or a sketch or whatever it is that most people get. It’s words. I don’t even think it’s sentences. Just plain, random words.

I try to read them, to make sense of them. I start with the ones on the scarred area. I notice his sister’s name several times. Lakelyn. Then there are names I don’t recognize, but I’ll bet anything Willa was his mother and Clive, his father. Those are the only names, though, the rest are words: inside, outside, fast, calf, walk, and so on. So random.

“Why do you have these words tattooed on your body?” I ask, still looking at them, my eyes jumping from one to another.

“’Cause at one point, those words were hard to say.”

I look up.

He breathes deep, shifting his eyes away from me for the first time. “They ain’t particularly difficult, but…” He swallows. “They were for me. They’d bang around in my head, would get real loud, so I… I put ’em somewhere, purged ’em. Gave ’em a place to go.”

“Did you do these?”

“Not the ones on my scar,” he says, shaking his head. “The skin’s… less elastic. It ain’t like the healthy skin. It’s ain’t dead either. Just… different. So you need an expert.”

“But you do do them,” I go on. “I saw the tattoo station in your room.”