I do.
I turn my face slightly, so she can only see the good one.
"I know," she says with a soft smile.
But she's waiting.
She knows there's something else.
The words are lodged in my chest like the bullet in my back. Foreign objects that my body has been trying to reject for weeks, pushing them closer and closer to the surface until the pressure became unbearable.
"I… love you."
The fluorescent light flickers like even it can’t believe what I just gritted out.
Bells stares at me, her lips slightly parted. The wicked smirk and the dark humor she wears as armor are gone.
She’s just staring at me.
I fucking hate being stared at. I'm about to beg her to stop looking when she closes her mouth, swallows, and finds her voice.
"Stop apologizing."
"Bells—"
"You can make it up to me."
She steps forward, close enough I feel the air she displaces in front of me, and reaches up toward the bad side of my face.
I flinch again when her palm cups my jaw and when her thumb brushes against the bare muscle, I screw my eye shut and try to pull away.
But there's nowhere to fucking go.
My back is against the bars.
"Kiss me," she whispers.
“What?” I choke out, not understanding. I feel her breath on the exposed muscle of my cheek, warm and steady.
"Kiss me," she says again, softer.
My stomach heaves.
The destroyed side doesn't work right. The lips are gone on that half. There's no seal, no softness, only the ridge of scar tissue and the permanent exposure of teeth and tendon. When I drink, liquid leaks down my chin. Kissing is?—
Kissing is for people with faces.
This is fucking cruel.
Cruel toher.
"Rex." Her thumb strokes across the scar tissue. I feel it as pressure, not sensation. The nerve endings there are dead or scrambled, translating touch into something muted and wrong. Even hers. "Stay with me."
"I can't—" The words grind out of me. "You don't understand what you're asking."
"I'm asking you to kiss me."
"Withthis?" I gesture angrily at the carnage that used to be the right side of my face. "This isn't… it doesn'tworklike?—"