Small beads of blood were dotted along my forearms where my nails had broken the skin. I didn’t care much, but I knew the sight upset her, so I pulled my arms off the counter and tried to hide them.
“I’ve been doing everything you said. I promise.”
“I know, bud.” Her eyes fell closed, and I watched her chest rise and fall beneath her scrub top. “You’re doing good. I think you’re just having a flare-up. Let me see.”
I flopped one arm on her counter, and I couldn’t help but grit my teeth when she reached for it. My hand twitched with the need to scratch but I held my breath and let her look at my scars.
Her nails were sharp, but her touch, like always, was soft when she traced along each one of them, studying the raised tissue. Her jaw hardened the longer she looked, and I knew by the stiffness in her shoulders that she was getting angry.
Shealwaysgot angry when she looked at my arms.
“How are your calves?”
I tightened my toes on the rung of the stool I sat on, flexing the muscles in my lower legs. “They’re fine. They don’t bother me much. My arms are worse.”
“That’s because there’s more here. That son of a bit—”
“Thea, it’s okay.” I yanked my arm from her grasp and shook it until my sleeve fell and pooled around my wrist. “He’s gone.”
“It’s not okay, Silas!” She slapped the counter, and a growl left her throat. Her puffy cheeks were almost as red as my arms. “What that man did to you isnotokay.”
That manwas our father, and I often referred to him as Satan but even that felt like too nice a name for a man who made money off child abuse.
“Are you going to cry, Thea? Please, don’t cry.”
Tears confused me, and I didn’t like when she cried. Sometimes she even did it when she was happy and that made no fucking sense.
“I’m not going to cry, Silas. I’m just pissed off.” A breath left her, and she violently batted her short hair from her face, tucking it behind her ears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin our afternoon. You’d think after ten years of seeing those scars, I’d be numb to it.”
A laugh left her but it was shrill, and a little too loud. She sounded like a broken music box, and I kind of wanted to plug my ears but I thought that might be rude.
“Can we talk about something else?” My scars were stupid. “Will you tell me about all the gross stuff you saw this week?”
Thea was a trauma nurse. She worked the midnight shift in a high-traffic ER. Before I found Daddy, I used to spend my nights watching her patch up gunshot wounds and pull weird stuff out of people’s skin.
“A man came in with a screwdriver in his ear.” She pivoted and started grabbing stuff to make us lunch. “The guy was a total moron. He was using the thing to scratch an itch. One wrong sneeze and he’ll never be able to hear out of that ear again.”
“Did it bleed?”
She peered over her shoulder. “Yes, Silas. The manshoveda screwdriver in his ear. He had blood all over himself. It was disgusting.”
I laughed. “What else?”
She talked as she cooked, telling me all about the victims of a car accident and a chef who accidentally chopped off the tip of his thumb. It was mostly lame stuff, but I liked her stories. My favorite one was about a guy who’d sliced himself open and filled jars with his blood.
He was in jail now.
“How was your week, bud?”
Thea pulled open a drawer and slid a fork across the counter. I caught it and put it on top of my napkin the way she’d taught me years ago.
Steam rose from the pot beside her, and I watched her struggle to open a box of noodles with her ridiculously long nails. The plum colored lipstick she favored smeared across the top of her chin when she sucked her lips into her mouth with a frustrated grunt.
“It was… interesting.”
Slim eyebrows rose up her forehead and disappeared behind her bangs. “Interesting? How so?”
I started to fidget, grasping at the ends of my sleeves while I swung my legs back and forth. My teeth gnawed at my lip while I tried to rearrange the letters in my head.