"I don't care."
"You should."
"Well, I don't. So."
Her palm is still on my jaw. The ruined jaw. The jaw where her fingertips rest against bare bone and the seam of a graft that didn't take.
She's not pulling away.
I want to throw up.
I want to throw up and then die and then throw up again, because the self-hatred is so total and so ancient that it has its own gravitational field, and every good thing that gets close enough gets sucked into the event horizon and crushed.
But her eyes won't let me go.
Gold. Steady and relentless in the way that only Bells is relentless. The same force that dragged me out of the graveyard, that handcuffed herself to my wrist, that practiced ripping my stunt mask off while impaled on my knot because the woman has never met a problem she couldn’t solve through sheer psychotic determination.
My throat works.
"It's going to feel wrong," I rasp. "On your… against your skin. It won't… there's no?—"
"Rex."
"Like kissing a fuckingcorpse?—"
"Rex.Shut up and kiss me.”
She closes her eyes and tilts her face back, puckering her lips slightly in advance, because even now, even in a cage, she has to be fuckingcute.
And she waits.
The light strobes.
Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
I lean down.
Slowly. So fucking slow my body has the chance to scream at me to abort with every millimeter of closed distance.
My mouth finds hers.
The left side connects first. That side works. That side is normal. For one half-second it's just a kiss. Simple and warm, and her lips are slightly chapped, and she tastes like blood and salt and that artificial strawberry from her weird fucking energy drinks.
Then the right side makes contact.
The scar tissue drags against the corner of her mouth. The edge of exposed teeth scrapes her lower lip. There's no cushion, no give. She can feel it all, including the hard ridge of damaged tissue and bone pressing against skin that is soft and whole and everything mine isn't.
Ifeel it all.
Every point of contact where the ruin of my face meets the perfection of hers.
A sound comes out of me that I don't authorize. Low and broken and buried in the space between our mouths. The kind of sound a beast makes when it's caught in a steel trap and has stopped fighting.
She kisses me back.
Not the good side. She presses her lips against the scar tissue deliberately. Against the place where my cheek should be and isn't, against my fuckingteeth.
My hands fly up and close around her upper arms, tight enough she makes a little gasping sound, and I force myself to loosen my grip.