Page 84 of What You Wish For

“Duncan—” I shook my head.“What?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want them to tell you. I tried to keep it quiet. Hoping for a fresh start, I guess.”

It was all coming together. “A school shooting?”

Duncan nodded. “The Webster School. One killed, two wounded.”

“I think I heard about that one.”

Duncan seemed to tense up. “Yeah. Well. It’s hard to keep track of them all these days.”

“I just didn’t know you were even teaching there.”

“We really lost touch, huh?” Duncan said, more to himself than to me.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him.

“Yes and no,” Duncan said. “Mostly now it’s just that the scar tissue inside has kind of hardened, and that was uncomfortable… so that’s what this surgery was for. They had to go in lap—” He paused, like he couldn’t make his mouth say the word. “Lap—”

“Laparoscopically?”

He gave an approving nod. “You’re good at that.”

“So, no stitches.”

“The nurse said it’ll feel like a bruise. A really big, bad bruise.”

“Can I take another look?” I asked.

“If you can stand it.”

Duncan lifted his arm over his head. I bent to follow the sight of the scar around his ribs and to the back. It was hard to look—to see theevidence of how badly he’d been injured—and that definitely held my focus in the moment, but I couldn’t help but be aware of other things, too, right there: how close I was to his bare shoulder, his body heat rising toward me; the sound of his breathing as he waited for me to finish looking; his muscles and his smooth skin and his living presence right there, so close, all that energy and movement contained so quietly just inches away.

How had I not suspected something like this? Of course he had a past I knew nothing about. Of course he was full of contradictions. Of course his life contained layers and layers of history. Wasn’t that true of everyone?

“I should have died,” Duncan said, when I stood back up. “That’s what everybody said. They all thought I was going to. I even thought Ihaddied for a little while there.”

I stood back up so I could meet his eyes. “I’m glad you didn’t die,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “Most of the time.”

“What happened?”

But Duncan shook his head. “I never talk about that.”

“Never? To anyone?”

“Nope. Can’t. Not even on all these drugs that cause aphrodisia.”

“Amnesia?”

“Yeah. That sounds more like it.”

He was still sitting on the side of the bed, feet apart, and I was standing between them. He was still shirtless, and now, I really noticed that for the first time.

There he was. Shirtless.

I took in the sight of him—starting up high, at the dip above his collarbones and the square bulk of his shoulders, and then descending down, and to the side, where everything disintegrated into chaos.

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