TWELVE
WES
I sankonto the couch like gravity had doubled in the last five minutes.
My muscles still held the heat of the shower, my skin prickling with that trapped, overheated feeling you got when adrenaline refused to burn off even after the danger was gone. My hair dripped onto the collar of my T-shirt, the damp cotton clinging to my chest. The TV played something mindless—sports highlights, a commentator’s upbeat voice bouncing off the walls—but it might as well have been static. I wasn’t seeing any of it.
All I could see was steam.
The bathroom door swinging open.
Clara’s sharp inhale.
That split second where her eyes had snagged on me like I was a wreck she couldn’t look away from, even if she wanted to.
My stomach turned hard.
Humiliation sat in my throat like a fist. It had been months since I’d let anyone see me without the armor of clothes, without the clean lines of a prosthetic, without the carefully arranged illusion that I was handling this. The nurses had been professionals, and even then I’d hated it.
Clara wasn’t a professional. Clara was ... Clara. The girl I’d watched grow up, the one I’d scowled at in high school when she got too close to the guys, the one who’d glittered through Star Harbor like she belonged to a different world. Hayes’s little sister. Off-limits. Loud. Bright.
Now she’d seen me naked, half wrecked, and braced against tile.
My jaw clenched so tight my molars ached.
It wasn’t even the nudity that pissed me off most. It was the moment right before it—right before the door—when I’d been trying to prove something to myself like a goddamn idiot.
I’d been stubbornly standing under the spray when I should’ve been sitting on the built-in ledge like my physical therapist had told me a hundred times.
Sit when you’re tired, Vaughn. Sit before you slip. Sit before your body reminds you it’s not the same body it used to be.
I’d ignored all of it.
The water had been too hot, the tile too slick, my balance a little off because my mind had been elsewhere. For one stupid moment, my foot had skidded and my gut had dropped out. I’d pitched sideways and landed hard on the built-in seat with a jarring smack that shot pain up my spine.
It wasn’t a catastrophic fall. It wasn’t blood or broken bones. It was worse.
It was a reminder.
It was the fact that I’d been standing there in my own shower—my own house—and I still couldn’t trust myself not to fall.
Anger had flared hot enough to sting. I’d forced myself upright again, hands splayed on the tile, water hammering my shoulders, just to prove I could. Just to prove the slip didn’t own me. Just to prove I wasn’t ...
Weak.
That was when Clara had come in.
That was what she’d seen.
Not just my body, not just scars and skin and everything I’d rather keep hidden. She had seen the way I’d hauled myself back to standing out of nothing but spite.
She had seen me losing to my own damn bathroom and trying to pretend I wasn’t.
My fingers curled into the couch cushion. The fabric strained under my grip.
I could still hear her voice—too sharp with panic, too close to fear.
I swallowed, my throat rough.