Page 65 of Our Secrets and Scars

“You should have let them burn.” I sniff.

But he only shakes his head. “Never.”

“Why?”

“Look at me, Kinz.” And though it hurts so much to do so, the desperate plea in his voice has me blinking up into the sad silvery gaze that meets mine. “Your letters were my lifeline. They’re the reason my heart is still beating. They are the reason that I’m still here. This very moment is only possible because of the life your letters breathed into me. I’d have done fucking anything to keep them.”

Tears fall harder, and I shake my head, refusing to accept what he’s saying. “No, no, no.Nothing is worth going through that, Holden.”

“You think she wouldn’t have just found something else to hold over my head if I’d refused?” he says, his voice harsh but kind at the same time. “Abusers don’t accept defeat, little one. They keep going and going and going until their roots are so deep inside you, it’s almost impossible to find a way out. So, it may sound like she was giving me a choice, but she wasn’t. She was simply letting me pick the weapon that she’d end up wielding against me.”

I hear him. I get what he’s saying, but still, the bitter sting of his secret is almost too much to bear. I can’t handle thinking of him that way, vulnerable and violated. It shatters me. It fills me with a rage that won’t be sated until all the abusers in existence have burned to the ground.

“I’m so sorry,” I choke. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he rasps, his thumb swiping across my wet cheeks. “I’m not.”

We stay that way for a long time, tears running tracks down my face and Holden’s thumb stroking them away.

My mind is a mess. I don’t know what to think or what to feel. Our letters are the most sacred thing in the world to me, yet now I can’t help but feel like they’re tainted. It’s just, how can I ever look at them again without thinking about what he had to go through to get them?

“We should talk about something else,” he says after a long period of silence. “Like your tattoo.” He rolls me onto my back so he can find the words he inked into me on the other side of my ribs.

“Scars are stories,” he reads, tracing the dark line and making goose bumps erupt all over my body.

“You wrote it,” I whisper. “In one of your letters.”

“I remember.”

“Scars are stories scribed on the skin to remind you of what you’ve survived.”Warmth floods my heart at the sight of Holden’s lips, silently making the shapes of the words as I recite them, proving that he really does remember.

“You got it for me?” he asks.

“If you remember correctly, I wasn’t going to get anything,” I tease him. “But you baited me into getting something, and I don’t know, I guess that’s the only thing that felt right being forever written into my skin.”

He presses soft little kisses to my tattoo, lingering longest on the tinyhhe used to sign his work.

“Do you really sign your initial on every person you tattoo?”

His face instantly flushes, his eyes dipping in the clearest display of guilt I have ever seen.

“You don’t, do you?” I half yell it, half laugh. But still, he doesn’t answer. I don’t need him to though, I already know. “Was it even on the consent form like you told me it was?”

He looks back up at me, guilt swimming in his eyes. But there’s a notable absence of shame and regret in his expression. Rather, it’s oddly proud.

“Yeah,” he nods, “but I added it as an additional clause when I realized it was you looking at my designs in the shop.”

“But you didn’t even know me then.” I gape. “Why in the hell would you want to write your initial on me and then, days later, tell me to stay away from you?”

He shrugs. “I just had this crazy carnal need to mark you in some way. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but yeah, it was like my biological instincts were forcing me to do it. Are you mad?”

“A bit,” I admit.

“I can cover it with something else if you want me to,” he offers, though it visibly pains him to do so. I can see it in the way his jaw tightens as he speaks and the clenching of his fists.

“No.” I shake my head. “No, it’s okay.”

“Really?” He grins, wide and bright as a summer’s morning.

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