Page 48 of Maybe You

Just do it!

My fingers tremble while I fumble with the edges of the sleeve. It takes me two tries before I manage to pull up the sleeves of the sweatshirt he gave me.

Finally, I hold my arms out in front of him.

My heart is pounding in my throat, and it’s starting to feel like I might vomit it out if I’m not careful.

I don’t have to look down to know what he’s seeing. I’ve done plenty of staring at myself over the years, so I’ve memorized the sight.

There is no untouched skin. It’s all scar tissue. Scars, scars everywhere, as far as the eye can see. I’m a human patchwork quilt because no two parts of my skin are the same, even if the many, many skin grafts have a certain pattern to them.

Sutton studies me calmly before he looks up and meets my gaze.

“It’s not just my arms,” I say.

The network of scars starts on the backs of my hands and moves up my arms to the collarbones, with fainter scars tracing up the side of my neck. The ones on my face are hardly visible if you don’t know what you’re looking at. A patch of my hair is missing from the side and will never grow back, but it’s a small sliver and it’s hidden well, so it’s not visible unless I part my hair just so.

From my neck the scars stretch out all over my chest and back, down my right butt cheek and hip. My left nipple does not exist anymore, so I only have one. Instead of the nipple, there’s just a small patch of darker skin where it used to be. My left thigh is, by some weird coincidence, pretty untouched. My right one not so much. From there, the scars run down both of my calves and my right foot.

“Burn scars?” Sutton asks almost absently, as if confirming what he already knows, his eyes now moving up and down me like he’s seeing through my clothes.

I nod. “Seventy-five percent of total body surface area, fifty percent of them third-degree burns.”

He opens his mouth.

“A house fire,” I say. “I was fifteen.”

He nods slowly, and I pull the sleeves back down because I feel uncomfortably vulnerable like this.

I don’t know what I expect him to do or say exactly, but I don’t expect him to be all business in a snap.

And he is.

“Right,” he says. “How does having sex with me play into this?”

His tone is light. Curious again. And I’m grateful.

“It’s a lot of scars.” I hesitate, trying to think of how to explain what exactly my hang-ups are. “I’ve… It’s been… People haven’t always reacted the best. To the scars.”

“You wanted to see what I’d do?” He’s not asking, really. Nor is he angry nor annoyed at me. He’s just stating a fact.

I lick my lips and give a slight nod. I sound like an asshole.

“And… because nudity has always been… an issue, I don’t… I don’t have a lot of experience,” I say. “With sex. There have been a few times… Some people…” I let out a frustrated breath at the stuttering explanation and my inability to sound like a normal person.

“I’ve tried before. Sex,” I clarify. “It didn’t go well. There were a few… instances where the scars freaked people out. And there was this guy I was seeing for a little while, and he said he was cool with them, but then when we… when we’d… get down to business, I couldn’t…” I huff out another breath because this is seriously turning out to be the most humiliating experience of my life. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t relax.”

Sutton is still just looking at me wordlessly.

“I just… I… I want to be normal,” I blurt and rub the back of my neck. “I want to be normal. I want to go out and pick somebody up from a bar and have sex and know what I’m doing. Or, scratch that. I want to know I can do it at all. That would be a good first step.” I take a deep breath. “I just thought… I’m already not the most appealing prospect for getting naked with, but if I get past that stage and then I just end up…” I wave vaguely to somewhere in the general direction of my lap. “Not performing. I mean, it’s not a physical issue. I can get hard. It’s just that then I…”

I make some sort of hand gesture and shrug, thoroughly done.

“Get too in your head?” Sutton says.

I nod miserably.

This is the most awkward seduction carried out by any person ever. I sound downright idiotic. Has anybody ever slept with another person because they felt sorry for them? Because I feel like that might be my crowd.

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