Page 133 of Stolen Kiss

He’d said he didn’t care about my missing leg. Perhaps he was telling the truth.

I didn’t know. I sniffed, and Jensen looked up and met my eyes. “Is the pain the reason you’re crying?” he asked.

I looked away, and instead of answering him, I asked, “How… how is Elodie?”

I didn’t realize he was tense until I caught sight of his shoulders relaxing. “She’s good. She’s been asking about you, though. She misses you.”

I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the emotion in them.

“Don’t you think she would be better off without me?” I asked.

“What the fuck? Who gave you that idea?”

“What? No one. But look at me. I can barely take care of myself. How am I supposed to take care of her? I’m not whole, Jensen.”

He didn’t say anything for a while; he just went back to massaging my thigh.

Finally he looked up. His gray eyes almost looked silver with some unnamed emotion.

“You think not having a leg means you’re not whole?”

I looked away, because when he said it like that, it sounded silly. I was still me, with or without the leg. But this had been my identity for the last three years.

It was the first thing I noticed when I woke up in the morning.

“Why are you so inflexible when it comes to your identity?”

My eyes jumped to his. “What?”

“Even before the amputation, you were Emilia the dancer. And how tightly you held on to this identity, even when you didn’t want it anymore.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. I would move away and not let him touch my leg anymore—if it didn’t feel so good. “How would you know?”

“I’ve kept tabs on you over the years, since that first night we met and you stole a kiss from me.”

“What? No, you didn’t.”

There was no way he had been as affected by that kiss as I had been. My first time seeing Jensen here in New York six years after that kiss, he had looked at me like a stranger. He never brought up the kiss, and I didn’t either, because I didn’t want him to know how much weight I had put onto it.

“How would you know?” he asked.

“You didn’t even remember me.”

“Didn’t I?”

I looked off to the side. Had I gotten the memory wrong? Had he given me some sign that he’d remembered, and I was simply too obtuse to recognize it?

No, that wasn’t it.

“You never said anything,” I said.

“You weren’t ready for me to say anything.”

What the hell did that mean?

“But that’s not the point I am trying to make,” he continued, as if he didn’t confuse the heck out of me. “The point is you always think you’re either one thing, or you’re something else. And how possessive you are about it. You fought tooth and nail to keep being a ballerina, when it had only taken me that one time to come see you dance to realize you didn’t love it anymore.

“And now that you can’t be a ballerina because of your leg, you decided to give yourself a new identity. The cripple.”

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