Stop staring. What is so fascinating anyway?
You are.
No, I'm not.
On the contrary.
I finally resort to staring back. He is studying my eyes. Maybe waiting for them to change from faded glass-green to washed-out watered-down turquoise and back to green again. They do that, based on my moods. If you look on my bare back there's a switch you can flip to see them do it when you get tired of waiting for them to shift naturally.
All I can think of is those years in between when I was very young and now that have caused my complete and utter disdain for my own appearance. At a glance I'm still pretty, depending on how fast you look or how drunk you are. Upon closer inspection age and time and circumstance and death have cast a slight pall, softening beauty into something else. I still have short legs, no ass and childish hands but now my eyes have lines from squinting, I have black circles under them that just won't quit, my hair is fading to ash and my translucent skin is striking, startling. The road map of veins across my chest, hands and legs precludes looking good naked. Naked, I think I look like a map of the human condition.
Or something small and freakish that belongs in a jar.
And scars. Not sure which ones horrify more, the surgical ones (from being too ridiculously tired and small to give birth to ten-pound babies without help), the permanent marks Cole left on me that he thought no one would ever find (everyone found them) or the little white checkmark directly under my nose from where I tried to impress Lochlan by trying out his skateboard. I hit a rock and french-kissed the pavement. I also broke three teeth during that little stunt, ironically.
(Because, you know, I somehow wasn't smart enough to remember that I had already impressed him walking a wire sixty feet up in the air in front of hundreds of people. Or waking a burning wire eight feet off the ground while hungry, while there was a price on my head.
I can do that. But a skateboard? I can't ride a skateboard, those things are deathtraps.)
Enough, I tell him. Stop looking at me.
Why? I could never get tired of looking at you.
You're so...weird.
You're the one with the checkmark on your face.
Wow, Loch. Pretty good coming from someone who burned all his arm-hair and most of his fingernails off trying to learn to juggle fire.
I succeeded though. You still can't ride a skateboard. Oh and everything I lost grew back. I didn't think your scar would be there forever.
It could still heal. Forever's not finished yet.
EXACTLY MY POINT! THANK YOU!
