I felt myself getting hard from her words, and I wrapped her in my arms. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes,” she promised.
I lifted her up into my arms and headed upstairs to my bedroom. When we reached the room, I hurried and got Ham out of there, closing the door behind me. The bonus to living a life like the one I lived? I knew no one was going to barge in on us that night.
I placed her on my bed, and I stood in front of her. She looked up at me with doe eyes wide with wonder, and I watched as she studied my body, her eyes scanning up and down.
“Nervous?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“You still want to?”
She grasped the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head, tossing it to the side of the room. “Yes.”
She went to remove my shirt, and I paused, tensing up. “Wait, Chick...” I hesitated. I shut my eyes. I took in a sharp inhale, and she stopped.
“What is it?”
“I, um...” I turned away from her, and my hands formed fists. I could hear Monica in my head, shouting at me.Has she seen your scars?“It’s just...”
“Hey. It’s OK. You can talk to me,” she said, her voice so reassuring.
I nodded once, knowing she meant it, but I knew words wouldn’t fix it. It wasn’t something that had to be said; it was something that needed to be shown.
I kept my back turned to her, lifted the edges of my shirt, and pulled it over my head. I revealed the markings that sat against my chest. The scars over my heartbeats. Cuts from my past panics. Cuts from my messed-up brain. Cuts from my pained heart.
Her gasp was loud and clear. “Oh my gosh, Landon. What happened?!” she said, moving over toward me to examine the marks on my skin. Each mark stood for a time I lost myself. Each mark showed my pain and struggles against my skin.
After Lance passed away, I would have such bad panic attacks that I’d claw at my chest, feeling as if my heart was going to explode. All I wanted was for it to stop hurting. I wanted to rip it out. I wanted to claw my way out of the hurting. The more I drank and did drugs, the deeper the claw marks grew. It wasn’t until I stopped my bad habits that I stopped trying to rip my own heart from my chest.
My scars were healed, but still they were permanently placed against my skin. They raced in different directions. Sideways, up and down—slices of me exposed for Shay to see.
I closed my eyes, knowing they probably terrified her. Each day I showered, my fingers would brush against the memories of my mind.
She probably thought I was the worst kind of damaged goods, unworthy of love, unworthy of anything and anyone. Who could love someone with a mind as heavy as mine? Who could want someone with such ugly markings of their pain resting against their skin?
“My, um...” I took a breath, still unable to voice it—my truth. “Look, I get if you don’t want to hook up after seeing this, after seeing how fucked up I am in my head, but I figured I should show you before just freaking you out and taking off my shirt and—”
A chill raced down my spine as her fingers moved across the markings on my chest. My shoulders hunched as she traced the scars. My head lowered and I shut my eyes. I’d never felt so weak, so exposed... so real.
“Landon?” she whispered.
“Yes?”
“Are you sad all the time?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “All the time.” That truth was the hardest to tell. “My uncle was sad, too. He kept his hurting to himself. I saw it sometimes. I saw it, and I didn’t do anything about it. Not that I could. But I should’ve tried harder. If I’d tried harder, maybe he wouldn’t have...” I took a breath. I lowered my head. “I found his journals after he passed away. He had a lot of dark thoughts. He was so lonely... but the scariest thing about reading his words was how much they match my own mind, and that scares me. It scares me how much of my uncle I see inside of myself.”
“You’re not him, Landon,” she whispered, and I nodded slowly.
“Yeah... but what if I’m worse? What if my pieces are so messed up that I won’t ever be able to pull myself together? What if I end up like him?”
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I won’t let that happen.”