Page 17 of Fallin' for You (The Echo of Love)

“That’s not important. You’ll just have to trust my word for it, okay?” she whispered while looking down to her tightly squeezed hands.

“Trust me, once you see me in all my glory you will want nothing to do with me.” she whispered sadly as all the fire from before seemed to have left her body.

She then looked at him with so much sadness in her eyes that it made him want to hug her and never let her go because Aria should never look like that. She should be happy and smiling and not crying in a dirty bathroom.

“Try me.”, William said, taking her by surprise, as her eyes widened a fraction.

“Because I know that you are wrong, Aria. There is nothing that will make me change my mind about you. You are beautiful in my eyes, and if anything, I am the one that should be feeling unworthy of you. So, try me.”

She looked at him for a few long moments, the silence around them broken only by the sound of her harsh breaths, before she suddenly nodded to herself reaching a decision.

He waited to hear what she would tell him, already preparing what he would say in objection to whatever her reasons for thinking like that of herself would be, but then all thoughts flew right out of his mind at the sight of her hands pulling her shirt over her head.

He blinked a few times, feeling completely confused at the sudden turn of events when his eyes fell on the marks carved into the pale skin and he thanked all the deities out there for giving him enough strength to catch himself before his knees had the time to give up under him.

The Scars

She could feel Will’s eyes traveling all over her naked form, and every ounce of her being screamed for her to cover up and run away in shame, but she persisted.

Will needed to see why Aria was doing all of this; why she had pushed him away. Maybe then he would realize that she had been right all along, and leave her alone.

So, she continued to stand there in silence and tried to think about something, anything, other than the fact that this was the first time since her escape that anyone had seen her like this. Not even Nura was allowed, seeing as Aria always went into another room to change when they spent time together.

Which was possibly highly hypocritical of her, as she knew everything that had happened to her friend in her equally challenging past, but even though Aria knew that Nura would never think badly about her, for whichever reason something still stopped her from sharing everything. And yet, here she was, sharing this hidden, shameful part of herself with a man she met barely a month ago.

There were exactly five scars on Aria’s chest and abdomen. Two were long, perfectly-symmetrical slashes across her breasts, starting at her collarbones, disappearing inside her bra and ending just before the nipples. One of the two on her abdomen was a compliment of a knife, its ridges jaded and uneven, the other a patch of burned skin just beneath her belly button, and the smallest and yet the one that Aria hated the most was lying over her heart. The name ‘David” burned into the skin, left there to remind her every day of exactly whose she was and will always be.

She stared at Will’s face, waiting for the signs of disgust, but they never come as the man just stood there as if frozen in time, his face so white that Aria worried he would black-out.

When he did finally raise his eyes to her face, all she could see in them was pity, and that, perhaps, hurt her more than any words of disgust ever could.

“Jesus, Aria… what…I don’t know what to say.” Will finally managed to say, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to say anything.” Aria said quietly, desperate to be done with this whole situation and just go home.

“Who did that to you?” he suddenly asked, just as she reached down for her shirt, the material slipping from her hand and pooling back on the ground. Aria closed her eyes for a moment as his face appeared at the forefront of her mind, praying away the anxiety attack that was dangerously close to the surface.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter!? Are you insane!? Of course, it matters! The monster mutilated you, for fuck’s sake!”

The silence after his outburst was deafening, the only sound in the room, Will’s harsh breaths as he tried to calm himself.

Aria kept her eyes closed, vowing to herself that she was not going to cry even as tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. She felt silly for reacting this way, as his words were what she had expected since the moment she took of her shirt. But it turned out that there has still been a tendril of hope somewhere deep inside of her that thought that Will would see behind the scars.

“You think I don’t know that? You think that I don’t remember every single thing he did to me? Jesus, even if I tried to forget, these” she said while moving her hands in the air in front of her body, “will always be there to quickly remind me.”

“Ari, I am sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“Yes, I know, Will.” she quickly interrupted him.

“I know what you meant, but I also know that it was me who had to go through all that, and I say that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he was or where he is, the only thing I care about is that it is over. Maybe that makes me insane, or a coward but I don’t care.

After everything, I just can’t make myself care anymore about the opinions of others. Because they didn’t have to live through all that, I did, and I just want it to be over.” Aria said, feeling more tired than she ought to be as she slid down the wall and sat on the ground, pulling her knees close to her chest and hugging them.

Her eyes were tightly shut, unwilling to look at him any longer, but she still heard him shuffle around and a thought that he was about to leave crossed her mind. The feelings of both relief and deep loneliness descended upon her until she felt a presence beside her. Then there was skin, warm, soft skin pressing against hers and just like that she was in his arms.

“I just want it to be over.” she mumbled, her voice breaking under the weight of her emotions.

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