There was a fragile kind of beauty about her, Matt decided
as he watched her tip-toeing around his prone form draped across the battered
leather couch they owned. Her hair, wet with rain that pattered continually
outside their three room apartment and clanging noisily around in the gutters
was a deep, warm amber hue that changed as she moved, the tendrils of it
sticking to the sharp planes of her cheekbones that people sometimes said were
signs of anorexia.
He was supposed to be asleep or so she thought. He continued
to watch her from beneath half closed eyelids that hid those hazel brown eyes
she said were the colour of her first pet cat’s eyes. He wasn’t sure if she was
complimenting him considering that the cat itself was the most precious thing
in her life till it conked off five years back. That was when she met him. That
was also when he realized that she was beautiful. Despite the scars that ran
along the insides of her thighs and the brutal marks that scored her lower
back. He could feel every one of them each time he helped her undress in the
dark. The smoothness of her shoulder blades as he slipped off her favourite
coat and thin work shirt. The sigh of his hands, his rougher skin rasping
against the softness of hers. Till he reached that hollow. The ridges of the
scars bit into his palms and he would wince. Thankfully in the dark. It did not
disgust him the way it did her exes. With the touch of the scars, there came a
quiet sorrow, almost mourning. For innocence lost. And he would draw the folds
of her shirt away from her back as if they remnants of her past still bled
crimson into the gossamer fabric.
They would go to bed, together, as they did
for five years now. And he would make a pillow of her hair. Breathing in the
scent of her. The smell of the diner’s across the street tinged with the
shampoo she used earlier that morning. Always that sweet musky scent that
relaxed his muscles till he fell asleep, dreaming of looking into her eyes
across the diner’s red check tablecloth and seeing her drowning in her dreams.
He would clutch her tighter to him and she would mumble quietly in her sleep.
By morning, everything would be forgotten. Except the scars.
~Rei Shiori
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