“Come on,” I smiled, reaching around to tickle her ribs. “Everyone’s gotta start somewhere. You can’t expect to be as awesome as me on your first time out.”
She squealed, squirming in my arms as I continued to tickle her. She was extremely ticklish. I added that to the short list of things I knew about her. Eventually, I gave her a reprieve and she stopped wriggling with a sigh.
“Is it because you’re scared of what might happen if you get dumped again?” I asked carefully, laying my palm flat against hers and comparing the size of our hands.
She sighed. “Yeah. That’s part of it, too.”
“Have you had any more visions, or hallucinations or whatever?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” That could mean anything at this point, but I was going to take it as a positive. “I’d like to take the credit for that.”
“Yeah, I bet you would.” She dug her fingers into my ribs, getting her own back as I squirmed away from them with an unmanly yelp.
“If it’s good for the goose…” she giggled, but she stopped and we settled into each other again.
“Do you want to see my scar?” she asked, out of the blue.
I smiled. “You make it sound so sexy when you say it like that.”
I thought she’d laugh, but she didn’t. I looked down at her, meeting her gaze. She was serious, and she was anxious.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, the smile vanishing. “I didn’t mean to make a joke out of it. Of course I want to see it.”
We both sat up. She took her ponytail down and let her hair fall around her shoulders, climbing off the couch to kneel on the floor.
“I’ve never showed anyone before.”
I laid my hand on her shoulder and she held my gaze. She felt so small, so fragile. I couldn’t imagine what she’d been through, the kind of heartache she’d suffered and continued to suffer. She was much stronger in spirit than she was in body, that much was obvious.
“Sometimes, I look in the mirror, and I see her,” she whispered, dropping her gaze to stare at the elastic band that had held her hair up.
“What do you mean?”
She sighed heavily, looking back at me again. “When I was in hospital, I used to look in the mirror and wonder who the hell this face staring back at me was. I thought I was going crazy. She was a complete stranger to me. I named her, because I didn’t know who she was. I called her Jane, as in Jane Doe. Unknown, unclaimed. That’s how I felt.”
My heart felt like it was too heavy for my chest, like it might fall out of my body and smash into a million pieces on the floor. Never had I felt such a strong sense of wanting to fix something, to save someone.
“And sometimes, even now, I look in the mirror, and it’s Jane’s face I see. Shaved head, ugly scar, bruised cheek, huge eyes. Sometimes, if it’s a while between mirrors, I forget what I look like and she shows up instead. I suppose she was the first image I had of myself, after.”
She sniffed back tears, shrugging, as if there was nothing that could be done. It is what it is. God, I hoped she was wrong about that. We had to find out who she really was. I couldn’t bear to think of her standing in my bathroom, staring into my mirror, and seeing that.
She reached up and parted her hair, angling her head towards me.
“It starts here,” she said, pointing to an area just above her ear. “And it goes all the way back here.”
She guided my fingers to the raised line on her scalp. I followed it over her head and around to the back, just below her crown. I was gentle, afraid of hurting her.
Christ almighty – that wasn’t a scar, it was a railroad track. It wasn’t clean and straight, like a surgical scar. It was ragged and bumpy and it made my chest ache. How the hell had she survived something like that? What the hell had done it?
“Jesus,” I whispered, as my hand fell away from her head.
She let her hair fall down over her shoulders. I wanted to wave a magic wand and take all the heartache away, but all I could do was take her into my arms and hold her tight.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured into her hair.
She nodded into my shoulder, lacing her arms around my back. I couldn’t imagine what she had been through, or how she’d been living with this. It seemed so far outside real life that if I didn’t personally see the pain she carried inside of her, I would’ve thought she was lying, that nobody could live that way.