by Alisha Rai
“His model.”
Well, fuck, she was his model, but she barely believed that stammered explanation.
Rana got up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, tugging on the sheet. It was all kinds of icky to be on the phone with Micah’s mother when she was nude. “Let me see if I can get him. I mean. I’m sure he’s in the house.” She winced. Wouldn’t his model know where her employer was?
“If you two are in his house, he’s probably in his studio,” his mother said, and this time Rana didn’t imagine the thread of laughter in the other woman’s words. “Don’t bother disturbing him. What is your name, dear?”
She swallowed. “Rana.”
“Rana. Leave him be. I’m sorry to have woken you. I know Micah’s always awake at this time, which is why I called. Tell him to call me back as soon as he can. I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
Micah was always awake at four a.m.? Rana murmured her goodbye and hung up. She sat there for a minute before taking a deep breath and coming to her feet, tucking the sheet around her like a toga.
Rana used Micah’s phone as a flashlight to guide her way out of the room, but she didn’t need it in the hallway. The door to the studio was cracked, letting out a sliver of light.
She pushed it open slowly, trying not to startle him. He sat in front of a canvas with his back to her. He’d put on a pair of jeans, but he was naked from the waist up.
She stopped a couple steps in. He hadn’t turned on the brightest of the lights, but there was enough for her to clearly see his back.
She’d felt the scars on him a couple of times but had moved her hand away quickly, mindful of the condition he had placed on their getting together. The last thing she ever wanted to do was trigger some sort of awful flashback when he was with her. Not when he was giving her so many delightful memories to tuck away.
She felt so guilty, but she couldn’t stop looking. She couldn’t count them. Over half a dozen? They were spread all over his lower back and right flank, shiny, two- to three-inch silver scars.
Artist Knifed in Limehouse Studio. Jealous Lover Leaves Rival for Dead.
She clenched her sheet tighter in her fist. Though she’d always preferred working in the front of the house, she’d spent enough time in a kitchen that she could estimate which sized knife could make cuts like this. Her throat went dry at the thought of someone plunging a blade into his back and side, again and again.
“You’re awake.”
She jerked at his low voice. He didn’t turn around but continued to sketch on the canvas.
“Yeah. You working on my painting?”
“Not really. Messing around. I’m sorry if I woke you,” he said absently.
She drifted closer, trying to look somewhere else, but she couldn’t. His back was gorgeous, long and brown and strong, the scars doing nothing to detract from that. They only…made her hurt. To think of the pain he must have been in. How close he had come to dying.
But for those scars, you would have never met him. She shivered. Such a selfish thought, but she’d always been a selfish person. “You didn’t wake me. Sorry I fell asleep.” She’d been so tired after they’d had sex. She had a vague recollection of him readjusting her on the bed and tucking the blanket around her. They hadn’t talked about a ban on sleepovers, but she assumed that went with the whole casual-affair thing. Don’t get attached because he didn’t kick you out of his bed as soon as you both orgasmed.
“It’s nighttime,” he said, as if that explained everything.
She came to stand behind him and placed his phone on the table next to him. “Your mom called.”
“You talked to my mum?” That brought his head up. He looked over his shoulder, eyebrow cocked.
She grimaced. “Yes. So sorry. I was asleep, and the ringer sounds like mine, and I guess I answered it accidentally.”
He picked up the phone, his lips compressed. “Don’t apologize. She likes to call me at unpredictable times.”
“She said you’re always awake at this time.” She paused. “Are you?”
He only grunted, which she guessed meant yes in Brooding Manspeak. “She must have gotten off her shift.”
“Oh. What does she do?”
“Nurse,” he said shortly. “Do you mind, I have to call her.”
“Nope.” She shook her head and tightened her hand on the sheet. “Go right ahead.” To give him privacy, she turned and walked over to the window. Of course, there was nothing to look at but her own bedroom, so she feigned interest in the peeling paint around the windowsill.
“Mum,” came his low voice. “You called?”
A burst of chatter came from the other end, audible even to Rana. She peeked over her shoulder to find him massaging his forehead. “Mum, she’s…no, she’s…Mum. Stop. No. She’s…my model, okay?”
She returned to examining the paint, tucking away the twinge of annoyance that description caused. Stupid to feel annoyed. She hadn’t wanted his mother to think they were sleeping together. Yes, she was his model. Okay. Fine.
“Is there something you needed?” A pause. “I’m good. As you can tell. Everything’s good. Look, why don’t I call you later. Ah…yes. I’ll tell her. Thanks.”
He ended the call and placed it on the table. “Mum says you have a lovely voice.”
“That’s nice of her.” Rana walked back to him, hitching the sheet higher around her. Deliberately, she brushed her arm against his, raising goose bumps all over her.
Would there be a time when this man’s body failed to arouse hers?
She felt a creeping fear she knew the answer to that. You can’t make me fall in love with you.
He hadn’t. He wouldn’t.
“Is this an only-child thing? Parents calling in the middle of the night?”
“This is a parents-of-an-only-child-who-was-almost-killed-once thing,” he said, and the bitterness of his honest response caught her off-guard. A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Sorry. When I said I had to call her back, I wasn’t kidding. If she doesn’t hear from me, she gets anxious.”
Unsure of what to say, she leaned against his side. His muscles relaxed for an instant. Then he straightened, his body snapping to attention. She watched his eyes dart furiously from side to side, as if he was looking for something.
His shirt. Which he’d left on the floor of the bedroom.
Her heart almost exploding, Rana loosened her hold on the sheet and let it slip from around her body. “Since we’re both awake, maybe we should work?” Without waiting for a response, she dropped the fabric over his shoulder and strode naked to the couch. She sat down and curled her legs up under her. It seemed to be the position he liked best.
He stared at her for a long minute. He was facing her now, but she could see the reflection of his back in the mirror. The sheet hid his scars.
He wasn’t stupid. She knew that he knew what she’d done.
If she’d expected him to take the easy way out she had offered, she would have been surprised. He stood and stripped off the material covering him. Holding it in his hands, he walked over to her and dropped it in her lap. “I don’t need this. You’ve already seen it all.”
* * *
Rana worried her lip between her teeth. She didn’t move to conceal her nudity. Her nipples were perky, erect in the cool air of the room. “Don’t be mad,” she said quietly, instantly making him feel like a monster.
Scratch that. Like more of a monster. “I’m not.”
Bone-deep tired, and not the kind that resulted in restful sleep, he dropped down on the couch next to her. The scars on his side were facing her. She could touch them, if she so desired.
“I’m not mad at you,” he repeated, partially to reassure her, but mostly to remind himself. Rana wasn’t the problem. She could never be the problem.
He was the problem, forever and ever, amen.
She took the sheet and smoothed it over her until it covered her thighs, her breasts. “Okay.”
She did
n’t believe him. He rolled his lips in, trying to figure out how to reassure her when he could barely articulate anything anymore. “I don’t like anyone seeing my back, but especially not you.”
“Did you think I would find it unattractive?”
She’d asked him that before, and his answer hadn’t changed. No. Not the way she meant, at least. He shook his head.
He didn’t want to talk about this. But then he thought of the way she so sweetly trusted him with her body. The way she made goofy jokes to make him laugh. The way she’d just pretended to want to be naked so he wouldn’t feel ill at ease.
The way he had inadvertently hurt her earlier in the evening because he couldn’t do something as normal as take a girl he liked out to dinner. “You know what happened, right?”
“Someone stabbed you.” She paused. “A lot.”
The words crawled up his throat. Everyone who had been close to him had known what happened. The news articles had rehashed the story a million times. His therapist had encouraged him to talk about it, claiming he would feel empowered if he could choose the language to describe it himself. He’d scoffed.
But right now, right this minute, with Rana curled up next to him in his sad house, he wanted to tell her. A first. “I had a model. A sweet girl, Paige. I liked her a lot.” He gave her a sideways glance. “We never… It wasn’t like that. She was a student at uni. The modeling was purely a job.”
She nodded, her expression open. “Her boyfriend was the dickhead who did this.”
Of course she had managed to piece that much together, even if she hadn’t read the articles.
“Yes.” He thought back to the week or so before the attack. The things he could have said or done to avoid it. “I noticed a bruise or two on her wrists. One on her thighs. We had become friends, but I didn’t think to ask her if she had a problem at home.” His chest expanded and contracted. “I used to rent this space in a warehouse for my studio. I’d left the door open downstairs. I was looking through some sketches. Paige was wearing her robe, taking a break, playing with her phone. She saw him first, screamed.
“I was even bigger then. But I didn’t have a chance to so much as turn around before he stabbed me the first time.” He was aware of Rana sitting next to him, watching him with her deep brown eyes. But in his head, he was back in that cavernous warehouse, falling face forward, his nose smashing against the concrete hard enough to break it. After the first couple of wounds, his body had checked out, all of him going numb, even when the bastard had kicked him over to lie on his back. He’d played dead, but still his attacker had sliced his face.
He’d opened his eyes long enough to see the smaller man hoist Paige over his shoulder. As much as he’d wanted to, he couldn’t move a single muscle, though he was certain she was dead or dying too. He’d discovered later her boyfriend had knocked her unconscious when she’d heroically tried to stop him from hurting Micah.
He came back to the present to find Rana’s hand resting on his shoulder. Grounding him. “I don’t remember much else of that day. Except I knew the wounds in my side and back were going to kill me, but I was insanely upset over this.” He fingered the scar bisecting his lip and gave her a wry smile. “I was a vain man, you see. Quite proud of the way I looked. I could feel the blood running down my face.”
“Your model…”
“Barely a scratch. She managed to escape and get help. Smart girl.” Paige’s eyes had been haunted when she’d stood in his hospital room and emotionlessly told him of how she’d manipulated her boyfriend so she could get someplace safe. The man had killed himself before the authorities could find him.
“Thank God for that. I don’t know how you survived.”
“Neither do the doctors. I should have died from the blood loss, if nothing else.” He shrugged, still boggled himself. “They called me a miracle. If you didn’t know, that guarantees more articles will be written about you.”
She ignored the quip. Her fingers skated over his arm. “Would it be bad if I touched you?”
Touched his injuries, she meant. She’d brushed them before, brief glances while they were having sex. He hadn’t been triggered, though he’d worried over that possibility. After a brief moment, he nodded, but caught her hand before she actually could.
“I don’t have to,” Rana said. It was amazing, how she knew exactly when he needed her to be aggressive and when he needed her to be gentle.
“No. Just…let me control it.” He dragged her hand down, until her fingers rested against a scar. Holding his breath, he let go. He was braced for flashes of pain and fear, but there were none. Only the touch of her calloused fingers stroking over him.
He relaxed one muscle at a time. This wasn’t different from any other time she explored him.
This is fine. This is good. He repeated those words in his head as she traced the white lines. “It must have hurt so much. I’m sorry.”
No, he’d been in shock through most of the attack. The pain had come afterward. The pain of recovery, and then hearing the story rehashed, again and again. The pain of realizing his parents couldn’t look at him without fear in their eyes because they were suddenly aware of his mortality in a way they never had been before. The pain of feeling like an outsider amongst his friends. The pain of secluding himself away, unable to share himself with anyone. “I didn’t want you to see them because…well, like I said, I didn’t want the memories to intrude and ruin our time together, but also because you’re the only person who…who doesn’t watch me and carefully gauge everything I do.” His laugh was humorless. “God, everything’s a step. A step forward or a step back. No one lets me simply exist anymore. Except you. You see me. Not what happened or what I need to do to get over what happened. Not the scars. Me.”
Her fingers stilled against him.
Her voice was matter-of-fact when she spoke. “Micah. That’s because you’re so much more than a bunch of scars. You know that, right?”
A bunch of scars.
His attack, reduced to a few meaningless words. A weight he wasn’t aware he was carrying lifted. They were only scars, were they? But his life had revolved around them for years. Even people who couldn’t see his back looked at his face. They read the papers. They compared his old art to his new art. They studied him with a mixture of weariness and pity and sympathy. No one else thought they were only scars, some marks he had happened to pick up on his body over the course of many years on the planet.
You can’t fall in love with me.
For the first time, he doubted his cocky reaction to her condition. How would he be able to stop himself?
Micah knew he should be unnerved, but he couldn’t bring himself to be, not when the two of them were sitting together so comfortably. Besides, his feelings didn’t matter.
Tomorrow. He would panic tomorrow.
He tugged her closer, coaxing her legs to stretch out until he could grasp her foot. He ran his thumb over the arch. He’d noticed the way she sighed when she kicked off her shoes after work.
Her nails were painted a cheerful turquoise with a frivolous white flower decorating the center of each big toenail. Micah focused on that flower, counting each petal as he savored the feel of her slender foot in his hand. Then he dug in, massaging.
She groaned and instantly slipped her other foot into his lap. “Be warned,” she said playfully. “I’m on these puppies all day, every day, so if you don’t want to get into a habit, you should probably stop right now.”
He didn’t mind a habit like that.
He pushed the thought out immediately. This wouldn’t continue much longer. He’d realized that today, while going through his sketches of her. The preliminary work took him the longest. Another couple weeks, tops, and he wouldn’t need her modeling for him at all.
Her stomach rumbled, and his head came up. He was used to missing meals, but Rana hadn’t eaten anything for dinner after their aborted attempt to sit down for a meal.
“I ruined dinner,” he sa
id. He had quickly paid for the food and drinks after Rana had stormed out. He would have had the pub pack up their burgers, but he’d been eager to track Rana down.
She wiggled her feet, and he obligingly moved to her other foot, rubbing the tender flesh. “That’s okay.”
He looked at her. Her hair was tousled and her makeup long gone, save for a bit of black liner smudged under her eyes.
It was the middle of the night, she was naked, and he had just bared his soul to her. This wasn’t the time for them to recreate their failed attempt at dinner. And yet… “Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere.”
* * *
Micah didn’t miss the way Rana eyed him skeptically as they slid into the cracked vinyl of the diner booth. He was a true hermit, but one night he had gone out wandering and stumbled across this restaurant.
“I’ve lived here all my life, and I didn’t realize this place existed,” Rana remarked. Her tone was carefully neutral.
He glanced around. He liked this booth, where he could sit with his back against the wall and study everything. It was a ’50s-style diner, not due to theme, but because the decor had stopped being updated sometime in the ’50s. The lighting was harsh and garish, everything painted a bubblegum pink or a bright yellow. A dented jukebox stood in the corner, its lights off. Somewhere in the back, an AM radio station was playing, giving traffic updates. Only two other patrons sat at the long counter.
“I think this place looks exactly like I always imagined an old American diner would look,” he confessed. “Like a diner in Back to the Future, only more rundown.”
She squinted at him. “You watched Back to the Future?”
“Why do you sound so surprised? We do get American movies in England. Plus, I visited America often enough. Back to the Future was a staple amongst my cousins.”
“I’m not surprised English people have seen Back to the Future. I’m surprised you have. You’re so…”
“What?”
“Artistic?” she ventured.
He was equal parts amused and insulted. “Are you calling me pretentious?”
