Page 74 of Near Miss

“You’re not bad,” he tells me. It’s all he says. He just sits there, patient and waiting.

“This”—I pluck at my shirt where it sits right above my scar—“it fixed everything. Him. Fixed them. Fixed us. Our family. But I don’t think—I don’t think it fixed me. Who does that?” I hold up a hand, waving it around, like we’re there in the operating room over a decade ago when a surgeon leans over my draped body, getting ready to cut me open, and I’m pointing to the whole thing, waiting to demonstrate the dissolution of the person I could have been. “Who gives away a piece of themselves, regrets it, and then dedicates their whole life to doing the thing they wish wasn’t done to them? I thought it would make me uniquely compassionate, but it just made me a lying hypocrite.”

A muscle feathers in his jaw, and he drops his hand to my knee. “It probably hurts—a lot—when he forgets to pick up his meds.”

It’s another simple statement, but not really. It seems easy, logical even, but it’s something I can never make my father and sister understand no matter how hard I try.

He says I see right through him, but I think he sees right through me, too.

“Yes.” I inhale, and my lungs feel lighter than they have in a very, very long time. Like it wasn’t real oxygen before, but it is now because he sees me. “It makes me feel like—”

“It doesn’t matter?” Beckett offers, voice low.

I nod, sniffing again like some sort of child.

But he leans forward, one thumb swiping across my cheek before he tips my chin up. His other hand finds the hem of my T-shirt, fingers brushing over my scar. The lines of his jaw look unfairly beautiful up close, stubble peppering all those sharp edges. “I don’t think you need to be fixed.”

My eyes close, and I feel the way his fingers trail over that allegedly healed, raised part of skin. I think, maybe, I can feel them on those old striations in my rib cage, over the ghost of a scar on that liver that healed itself. They tie new sutures, and they whisper that they could help—that maybe they could erase all those old scars permanently, maybe they could love me if I just let them.

But when I love people, I can’t help but give myself away.

Blinking, I shift back slightly, just out of reach. If Beckett notices, he doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me intently, sharp set to his jaw and eyes dark.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek and give a little shake of my head. I take out my invisible marker and I start scribbling in all the lines that we just blurred. “It’s why I don’t—won’t—date. I don’t even know how I ended up where I am. All my lines and my boundaries distorted, and somehow, I’ve ended up dedicating myself to this thing that hurt me immeasurably.”

I don’t tell him he scares me. That he’s wonderful and lovely and he does things to my heart and my body I can’t quite make sense of—but I can’t be just another heavy thing he carries, either.

He studies me for a minute longer, like he’s steeling himself to say something, to refute that idea, but he swallows, before he grins and says, “So, the Red Wedding is pretty intense, huh?”

“Shut up.” I wipe my eyes, but my shoulders shake with laughter.

Beckett’s grin grows wider, those lines around his eyes deepen. He stretches out his arm across the back of the couch and jerks his chin towards the crook of his shoulder.

I give him a pointed look; he rolls his eyes before holding up his hands and dropping them firmly to his thighs.

“Better?” he asks, voice dry.

“Friendlier.” I tip my chin up in confirmation.

Beckett cocks his head, one wave tumbling down over his forehead. “Didn’t you kiss me last week?”

“No,” I say, crossing my arms in a pathetic gesture of petulance. “That must have been someone else.”

It was someone else, I think. A girl who forgot who she was for a minute when she looked at a beautiful boy through a brain with fuzzy edges.

He considers, lines of the dimple faint in his cheek. “Huh. Don’t think so. Can’t imagine a world where I’d mix you up with anyone else.”

I look pointedly towards the opposite end of the couch, like maybe I’ll go sit down there.

I don’t.

I sit back. My shoulder brushes his, and my thigh presses up against the muscled expanse of his leg.

We turn on the TV, and even though I can’t see him, I can tell by the way his body moves, his shoulder upwards or his leg stretching out, when he’s relaxed or smiling.

It’s an entirely too intimate way to know someone, what movements of their body give away something as innocuous as a smile.

But I inhale all that clean, beautiful, light, and free oxygen he poured into the room when he opened up the door and saw me, and I beg my head to shut up, that it is friendly.

---