In the quiet of a rainy Sunday morning, Trace offers Breck a sacred, slow reclamation of his own body—tracing the scars he can’t remember and telling the stories behind them. What begins as an archaeology of touch deepens into a tender, emotionally raw consummation, where grief and hope tangle and separate with every kiss. By twilight, Breck sleeps in Trace’s arms, the rings on their clasped hands catching the streetlight, and both men begin to believe that honesty, not memory, might be the truest form of reconnection.
Breck’s Point of View
Sunday came in under a low sky covered with the October gray that doesn’t bother with drama. Just a steady, woolen light pressing against the windows, making the apartment feel smaller and closer than it was. I woke to the sound of the radiator knocking that old, familiar rhythm and the smell of coffee that didn’t smell burned.
I lay there for a minute, letting my body catch up to the day. My shoulder ached from the pull-out couch’s springs, even though I’d been in my own bed and Trace had been the one on the torture rack. Sympathy pain, maybe. Or just the damp. The building held moisture like a grudge.
The bedroom door was open a crack. Through it, I heard Trace moving in the kitchenette. Not fighting with the machine this time. The sounds were orderly. Mug on counter. Spoon against ceramic. The soft click of the espresso machine engaging properly. He’d figured it out. Or practiced while I was asleep.
I pulled on sweatpants and the flannel shirt I’d dropped on the floor the night before. The floorboards were cold. I paused in the doorway, my hand on the frame, that habit I couldn’t shake. Watching.
Trace stood at the counter with his back turned half away from me. He was wearing a different sweater today. This one was charcoal with a rolled collar and his hair was still damp from the shower. He’d used my soap. I smelled it from here, the sandalwood cutting through the coffee. His posture was looser than yesterday and he looked less braced for impact. He was looking at something on his phone, frowning a bit, and then he pocketed it and turned.
He stopped as he saw me. The mug in his hand hovered halfway to the counter.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I’m up.”
“I made coffee. Properly, this time.”
I crossed to the counter and took the mug he offered. The espresso was good. Not great. The cream was thin, and the temperature was a little low, but good. Drinkable. Made by someone who’d paid attention.
“You’ve been practicing,” I said.
“Three tries this morning.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I dumped the first two before you woke up.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want you to see my failures,” he said.
I looked at him over the rim of the mug. There was something different about his face this morning. A resolve that had not been there yesterday or the day before. Trace looked like a man who had decided something and was waiting for the right moment to say it.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” he said.
The coffee was warm in my stomach. Outside, a bus groaned past on the wet street, its brakes sighing. I leaned against the counter and waited.
Trace set his mug down. He did it carefully, aligning it with the edge of the counter as if precision might steady him. Then he looked at me. His eyes were hazel in the ashen light, shifting toward amber, and they were steady in a way that felt deliberate.
“Can I show you what our bodies used to say to each other?”
The question landed somewhere in my chest and spread outward, slow and warm. I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. My body was doing something complicated. My pulse had picked up and my skin grew too tight, and beneath all of that, there was a pull. A wanting I couldn’t name but recognized.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I want to show you your scars. The ones you don’t remember getting. I want to tell you their stories. And I want to touch you, if you’ll let me. Not like last night. Slower. I want to re-learn you, and I want you to re-learn me, and I want to do it without rushing.”
His voice was shy but not uncertain. He’d rehearsed this. I could tell by the way the words came out, measured and clean, no deflection, no charming sidestep. The man who negotiated for a living had prepared an offer and was laying it on the table.
“You’ve been thinking about this,” I said.
“All night. And most of yesterday.”
“On my pull-out couch.”
“It’s a very uncomfortable couch. Gives a man time to think.”
I almost laughed. The sound caught in my throat and came out as a huff of breath. Trace’s mouth twitched with not quite a smile, but close.
I looked down at my left hand. The scar on my palm was pale against the faint pink of my skin, a crescent moon I’d looked at a thousand times without seeing. Yesterday, that customer had pointed at it, and for a split second I’d seen a hardwood floor and a golden dog. The image was gone now, but the wanting it had left behind was still there. A door cracked open. Light spilling through.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Show me.”
He exhaled. I hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until the sound of it left him in a long, controlled release. He picked up his mug again, and I saw that his hand was trembling somewhat. Trace Tucker, trembling. The sight did something to me. Something tender and sharp, like a splinter I didn’t want to remove.
“Not here,” he said. “The light’s better in the bedroom.”
I led him there. My bedroom was small, barely large enough for the bed and the dresser and the stack of paperbacks I’d been meaning to shelve for six months. The window faced the alley, and the gray light came through it soft and diffused, the way light comes through water. The sheets were still rumpled from my body. The pillow still held the shape of my head.
Trace stood in the doorway for a moment, his hand on the frame, mirroring my habit. Then he crossed to the window and drew the curtain partway. Not closed. Just adjusted. The light shifted, falling across the bed in a long rectangle the color of old silver.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight. Trace kneeled in front of me. The movement was graceful, unhurried, but I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way he was holding himself back. His hands rested on his thighs, palms up, waiting.
“Can I take your shirt off?”
I nodded. My voice had gone somewhere else, retreated behind my ribs. I lifted my arms and let him pull the flannel over my head. The air was cool on my skin, raising goosebumps along my arms and across my chest. Trace folded the shirt and set it on the dresser, a small, deliberate act that made my throat tight.
He looked at me. Not at my body but at me. His eyes were wet at the corners, but he wasn’t crying. Just brimming.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You know that? You’ve always been beautiful.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I looked at my hands instead. The ring on my finger caught the light.
Trace reached up and touched my right collarbone. His fingers were warm, the pads of them slightly rough. He traced the line of the bone, following it outward to the shoulder, and then his thumb found the scar.
It was a thin line, maybe three inches long, faded white against my skin. I’d seen it in the mirror every day, but I’d never asked where it came from. It was just there. Part of the geography.
“This one,” Trace said, “is from a swimming surgery. You were fifteen. A shoulder stabilization. Your rotator cuff gave out during a meet. The state semifinals. You finished the race anyway. Came in fourth. Your coach said you were an idiot. Your mom said you were brave.”
His thumb moved along the scar, slow, like he was reading a line of braille. I watched his face while he did it. He wasn’t looking at the scar anymore. He was looking at something I couldn’t see. A memory, maybe. A version of me who was fifteen and reckless and willing to finish a race with a shoulder that wasn’t working.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“I know.”
“I want to.”
His thumb stopped moving. He looked up at me, and I saw the grief in him, the hope, the tangle of both. “I’m giving you what I have. It’s not the same as remembering. But it’s true.”
My eyes were hot. I blinked hard, but the heat didn’t go away. It spread down my throat, into my chest, settling somewhere behind my chest like a stone that was also somehow a bird.
Trace leaned forward and pressed his mouth to the collarbone scar. His lips were warm. The kiss traveled through me, a current finding its way along nerves I didn’t know I had. My breath caught. My hand came up without my deciding and rested on the back of his head, my fingers threading into his damp hair.
He stayed there for a long moment, his mouth against the scar. I could feel his breath, slow and even. I could feel his pulse in his lips, or maybe that was my own pulse hammering against my ribs.
When he pulled back, his eyes were wetter than before. He blinked and a tear slipped down his cheek, following the line of his jaw. I caught it with my thumb before it reached the scar.
“Keep going,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
He took my left hand. Turned it palm up. The crescent scar sat there, pale and curved, and he cradled my hand in both of his like it was something fragile. Something worth protecting.
“This one,” he said, “is from a bike. You were eight years old. You were riding down a hill near your house. The big one on Thurman Street, the one your mom always told you not to take. You took it anyway. Hit a pothole, went over the handlebars, and landed on a piece of broken glass from a beer bottle. You needed seven stitches.”
I stared at the scar. The story settled over it like a sheet of glass, fitting perfectly but somehow still transparent. I could see through it to something else. A flash of sunlight through leaves, the smell of hot asphalt, a woman’s voice calling my name from a porch.
Not memories. Not quite. Echoes. The shape of something that used to be there.
“My mom,” I said. “Elaine.”
Trace nodded. “She kissed it better. She told you scars were proof that you were brave. You told me that story the night we met. You said it was why you weren’t afraid of small pains.”
My eyes spilled over. I didn’t try to stop it. The tears ran hot down my cheeks and dripped onto my bare chest, and I didn’t wipe them away. Trace was still holding my hand. His thumb was tracing the scar back and forth, a slow, steady rhythm.
“She was right,” I said. “My mom.”
“She was.”
“I don’t remember her saying it. But I believe it.”
Trace lifted my hand to his mouth. He kissed the scar not the way he’d kissed the collarbone, with reverence and grief tangled together. This was simpler. A press of lips to skin, a blessing. His eyes were closed. His lashes were dark against his cheeks.
When he opened his eyes, I kissed him.
I didn’t plan it. My body decided, and my mind caught up a moment later, and by then it was already happening. My mouth on his, my hand still cradled in his, the salt from my tears mixing with the coffee on his tongue. He made a sound against my lips, low and broken, and his free hand came up to cup the back of my head.
The kiss was slow this time. Not desperate like last night. Deliberate. We were learning each other again, breath by breath. His mouth was soft, and he tasted like the mint he’d chewed after coffee, and when he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
“There’s more,” he said. “If you want.”
“I want.”
He undressed me slowly. His hands were steady, but the tremor underneath, the effort of holding them back was bleeding into my skin. He took off my sweatpants, folding them the way he’d folded my shirt. He took off my boxers, and I sat there on the edge of the bed, naked in the silvery light, my skin pebbled with cold and something else.
He didn’t undress himself. Not yet. He kneeled in front of me again, and his hands moved over my body like he was reading a map he’d memorized years ago and was afraid he’d forgotten.
“This freckle,” he said, touching a spot on my ribs, just below the left nipple. “You hate it. You think it’s too dark. I used to kiss it every morning until you laughed and pushed me away.”
His fingers moved lower, to my hip. “You carry tension here. Always have. When you’re stressed, your left hip gets tight. I used to rub it while you fell asleep.”
He touched the inside of my thigh. “And here. You’re ticklish. The only place on your body that’s ticklish. I found it by accident, and you kicked me in the jaw, and I had a bruise for a week.”
I laughed. It surprised me, the sound of it in the quiet room. Trace looked up at me, and his smile was real now, not the careful half smile he’d been wearing. Real, and a little crooked, and full of something I could only call wonder.
“I kicked you in the jaw,” I said.
“Right here.” He touched the scar on his jawline. “You felt terrible about it. You brought me ice packs for three days.”
“You told me that’s from a horse.”
“Different scar. Same jaw. You have good aim.”
I laughed again, and this time it was fuller, a sound that came from somewhere deep in my chest. Trace’s smile widened, and then he was laughing too, both of us kneeling there in the gray morning light, laughing at a memory I couldn’t access but could feel, somehow. A shape in the dark. The outline of something real.
The laughter faded. The silence that replaced it was different. Charged. The air in the room hung thick, like the moment before a storm.
Trace was still kneeling between my legs. His hands were on my thighs, warm and still. He looked up at me, and the question was in his eyes before he asked it.
“Can I touch you more?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me if you want me to stop?”
“Yes.”
“And if you want something different?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. Then he undressed.
The sweater came off first, pulled over his head in one fluid motion. His undershirt followed, and then he was bare to the waist, and I looked at him. I really looked at him for the first time since he’d found me. His chest was broad and smooth, with a faint trail of dark hair that ran down from his navel and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. His shoulders were tennis player’s shoulders. Wide and capable. The compass rose tattoo on his left biceps was small and dark, a relic of a younger, wilder Trace. I wanted to touch it.
I touched it. I reached out and traced the points of the compass with my fingers, and Trace went still. His breath stopped. His eyes closed.
“Lisbon,” he said. “I was twenty-two. Drunk. Stupid. I’ve never had it removed because it reminds me I used to be someone who did reckless things.”
“Are you still?”
“I’m trying not to be.”
I let my hand drop. He stood and unbuckled his belt. It made a loud noise in the silent room. His jeans came off, and then his boxers, and then he was standing in front of me naked. My breath left my body in a long, slow exhale.
He was beautiful. I’d known that somewhere in the part of me that recognized his face in the rain. But knowing and seeing were two different things. Seeing him like this . . . erect, the hard length of his cock rising from a dark thatch of hair, his skin flushed and warm, was something else entirely. It was a door opening to a room I’d been in before but couldn’t remember.
“Lie back,” he said.
I did. The sheets were cool against my back. The pillow cradled my head. Trace kneeled on the bed beside me, and then he was over me, his body a warm weight that didn’t quite touch mine.
“I’m going to go slowly,” he said. “You tell me if that changes.”
I nodded. My throat was too tight for words.
He started at my collarbone. His mouth found the scar again, and this time he didn’t just kiss it. He traced it with his tongue, slow and deliberate, and the sensation traveled down my arm, into my fingers, into the base of my spine. My hips lifted off the bed. Trace’s hand came down on my stomach, gentle but firm, holding me in place.
“Easy,” he murmured. “We have time.”
His mouth moved down. He kissed the freckle on my ribs and his lips curved into a smile against my skin. He kissed my left hip, and his hand found the tight muscle there, pressing into it with his thumb until something released. A knot I hadn’t even known I was carrying. I groaned. The sound was loud in the small room, but I didn’t care.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. The ticklish spot. I tensed, waiting for the jolt of sensation, but he didn’t linger there. His mouth moved higher, and then his cheek brushed against my erection, and I made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want me to . . . ?”
“Yes.”
He took me into his mouth.
The sensation was so sudden and so overwhelming that I had to grip the sheets to keep from arching off the bed. His mouth was warm and wet, and he knew what he was doing. God did he know the rhythm, the pressure, the exact moment to pull back and the exact moment to take me deeper. His tongue moved along the underside of my shaft, tracing a vein I hadn’t known was there, and I heard myself say his name.
“Trace.”
He hummed in response. The vibration traveled through me, and my hips bucked, helpless and out of control. His hand pressed down on my stomach again, steadying me, and he pulled back just enough to speak.
“I have you. Let go.”
I let go.
My body stopped fighting. The tension in my shoulders released. My hands unclenched from the sheets and found his head instead, my fingers combing through his hair. He took me deeper, and the back of his throat engulfed me, the tight heat of it, and I knew I wasn’t going to last.
“Wait,” I said.
He stopped immediately. Pulled back. Looked up at me with swollen lips and dark eyes.
“I don’t want to finish yet. Not like this.”
“What do you want?”
I reached out for him. My hand found his shoulder and I pulled him up until he was lying beside me, his body pressed against mine from chest to hip. His erection throbbed against my thigh, hot and hard. His heart pounded against my ribs.
“I want you inside me,” I said.
His eyes widened. The control he’d been holding onto slipped, just for a moment, and I saw the want underneath. Raw and desperate and scarcely leashed.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“We don’t have to. We can—”
“Trace.” I touched his jaw. The scar was a thin ridge under my thumb. “I’m sure.”
He exhaled. Then he kissed me, and the kiss was deeper than before, hungrier. His tongue found mine, and his hand slid down my back, over my ass, his fingers pressing into the cleft between my cheeks. I gasped against his mouth.
“I need to get something,” he said. “From my bag.”
“Go.”
He was gone for maybe thirty seconds. I heard him in the bathroom, the faucet running, the click of a bottle. When he came back, he had a small tube in his hand and a condom. He set the condom on the nightstand and kneeled between my legs again.
“Roll onto your side,” he said.
I did. The sheets were rumpled beneath me, and the pillow smelled like my shampoo and his skin. Trace spooned up behind me, and his cock pressed against my lower back. He was trembling. The control was still there, but it was thinner now, frayed at the edges.
He opened the tube. The sound was soft, a wet click. Then his fingers were between my legs, slick and cool, and one pressed against me.
“Tell me if it’s too much.”
“It’s not.”
He pressed inside. One finger, slow and careful, and my body opened for him. The sensation was strange at first. A sense of pressure and fullness, and then it shifted into something else. Something warm. My breath went shallow.
“Okay?” he asked.
“More.”
A second finger. The stretch was more intense this time, a burn that was almost pain and almost pleasure and somehow both. Trace’s mouth was on my shoulder, pressing kisses into the muscle. His fingers moved inside me, slow and patient, and searching for something.
He found it.
The sensation was electric. A jolt of bliss that started deep inside me and radiated outward into my stomach, my thighs, the base of my spine. I cried out. My hand shot back and gripped his hip hard enough that my nails left marks.
“There,” I gasped. “Right there.”
“I know,” he murmured. “I remember.”
His fingers kept working me, finding that spot again and again, and I was making sounds I couldn’t control, my hips rocking back against his hand. The pleasure was building, boiling low in my belly, and I was close . . . too close.
“Now,” I said. “Trace. Now.”
His fingers slid out and I heard the rip of the condom wrapper.
“I haven’t been with anyone, Trace,” I put my hand on his.
He paused for just a moment and then his hand was on my hip, turning me tenderly onto my back.
“I want to see your face,” he said.
He kneeled between my legs. His cock was in his hand, slick and ready. He looked at me, and the question was there in his eyes again, and I answered it before he could ask.
“Yes.”
He pushed inside.
The first inch was the hardest. My body resisted, tight and unready despite his preparation, and the burn intensified. Trace stopped. His jaw was clenched, his eyes squeezed shut, and I could see the effort it took for him to hold still.
“Breathe,” he said. His voice was strangled. “Breathe, Breck.”
I breathed. In through my nose, out through my mouth, the way you breathe through pain or fear or anything that feels too big to hold. Slowly, my body yielded. The burn softened. The fullness became something else. Something that didn’t hurt anymore.
“Okay,” I said. “Keep going.”
He moved. Not thrusting, not yet. Just a slow, steady pressure, sinking deeper inch by inch. My body opened for him more, and he filled me, and when he was finally all the way inside, he stopped again.
We were joined. Completely joined. His body was inside mine, and his weight was on top of me, and his forehead was pressed against my forehead, and we were breathing the same air.
“Breck,” he whispered. “God. Breck.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re here.”
He kissed me. The kiss was clumsy and desperate, his lips missing mine at first and then finding them. His hips began to move, a slow grind rather than a thrust, and the length and thickness of him filled every part of me that had been empty.
The ecstasy built again. Different this time. Deeper. It wasn’t the sharp jolt of his fingers on that spot. It was a slow, rolling wave, something that started in my core and spread outward into my limbs, into my skin, into the tips of my fingers. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him closer.
“Harder,” I said.
He obeyed. His hips snapped forward, and he drove deeper, and the sound he made was a broken, frantic thing that pushed me higher. I was climbing now. The wave was cresting. My hand found his, and our fingers interlaced, the rings clicking together.
“Your heart,” he said. “Let me feel your heart.”
He pressed his free hand flat against my chest, over my sternum, where my heart was hammering. The rings on our joined hands clicked again, a tiny sound in the gray light, and the wave broke.
I came with his name in my mouth and his hand on my heart and his body inside mine. The orgasm rolled through me, wave after wave, pulling me under and spitting me back out. He followed a moment later, the sharp intake of his breath, the shudder that ran through his whole body into mine, the way his hips stuttered and stilled.
For a long moment, neither of us moved.
We lay there tangled together, his weight on top of me, our hands still joined. The radiator clicked in the corner. The gray light pressed against the window. Trace’s breath was hot against my neck, and I could feel his heart pounding against my chest, or maybe that was my heart, or maybe they were the same thing.
“Breck,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I love you. I know you don’t remember. But I need you to know. I love you more than anything, and I’m so sorry I screwed up.”
I turned my head and kissed his temple, tasting the salt there.
“I know,” I said. “I’m starting to know.”
We cleaned up slowly, taking turns in the bathroom. I stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was flushed. My hair was a mess. My body felt different. It was lighter, looser, like something that had been wound too tight had finally been allowed to relax. The scar on my collarbone was a pale line. I touched it. I thought about hospital lights and my mother’s voice and a race I’d finished with a broken shoulder. I didn’t remember any of it. But I believed it.
When I came back to the bedroom, Trace was lying on the bed, the sheet pulled up to his waist. He was looking at the ceiling, but he turned his head when I came in. His eyes were soft around the edges.
“Come here,” he said.
I lay down beside him. Our shoulders touched. The sheet was cool against my skin, and the room smelled like sex and sandalwood and the faint ghost of coffee from the kitchenette. Outside, the rain had started again, a soft pattering against the window.
My eyes went to his jaw. The scar was there, white and thin, half hidden by stubble. I reached up and traced it with my fingertip.
“Tell me about this one,” I said.
Trace’s expression flickered. Just for a moment. The old instinct, the muscle memory of deflection. His jaw twitched under my fingers. Then it passed.
“I was eight,” he said. “I fell off a fence.”
“A fence?”
“A wooden one. At my grandparents’ place in Connecticut. I was climbing it to impress a neighbor boy, and a board cracked, and I went down hard. Caught my jaw on a nail on the way. Eleven stitches.” He paused. “For a long time I told people it was a horse. Riding accident. Sounded better.”
“Why?”
“Because I was embarrassed. I wanted a better story. I wanted people to think I was the kind of person who fell off horses, not fences.”
I traced the scar again. The skin was smooth under my fingertip, a little raised, a little warmer than the surrounding skin.
“It’s a good story,” I said.
“It’s not.”
“It’s true. You were eight. You were trying to impress a boy. That’s a good story.”
He looked at me. His eyes were wet again, but he wasn’t crying. Just brimming. Just letting himself be seen.
“No old tells,” I said. “No deflection. You told me the truth.”
“I’m trying to.”
I leaned forward and kissed the scar. Just a press of lips, light and quick. When I pulled back, Trace’s eyes were closed, and his breath was slow and even, and I thought about the man who used to lie about a scar and the man who was lying in my bed, and the difference between them was a year of searching and a year of therapy and a year of sitting with the worst thing he’d ever done.
“I like the fence story better,” I said. “It’s more interesting.”
Trace opened his eyes. He smiled a real smile, crooked and unguarded. “You always said that.”
“Did I?”
“The first time I told you. You said the horse was boring. You wanted to know about the boy.”
“What boy?”
“Jamie something. He had red hair. I don’t remember his last name.”
“Did you impress him?”
“No. He laughed at me. Then he helped me up and walked me back to the house. I bled all over his shirt.”
I laughed. The sound surprised me again, and Trace’s smile widened, and we lay there in my narrow bed with the rain tapping the window and the radiator clicking in the corner, laughing about a red-haired boy who’d walked a bleeding Trace Tucker back to his grandparents’ house thirty years ago.
The laughter faded. I settled against him, my head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest. His heartbeat was slow and steady under my palm.
“I want to ask you something,” I said.
“Anything.”
“The collarbone. The swimming surgery. Was there a hospital?”
“Yes. Portland General.”
“Were there lights? Fluorescent lights? The long kind on the ceiling?”
Trace was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. Probably. Most hospitals have them.”
I closed my eyes. I could see them. Long white tubes of light sliding past overhead, one after another. A gurney. The squeak of wheels on linoleum. But I didn’t know if I was seeing a memory or constructing one from Trace’s story, from every hospital scene I’d ever seen on television, from my mind’s desperate need to fill the gaps.
“I can’t tell,” I said. “If I remember it, or if I’m making it up.”
Trace’s hand found my hair. His fingers combed through it, slow and gentle. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“The lights. Did they feel real?”
I thought about it. The white tubes. The squeak of wheels. “They felt like something.”
“Then maybe that’s enough for now.”
I didn’t answer. The lights were still there, sliding past behind my closed eyes, and I didn’t know if they were a memory or a dream or something in between. I didn’t know if it mattered. I didn’t know if I wanted it to matter.
After a while, Trace’s breathing evened out. His hand went still in my hair. He was asleep.
I lay there for a long time, listening to the rain. My body was sore in places I’d forgotten could feel sore. My chest was full of something I couldn’t name. A strange kind of grief and hope and a new, quiet peace, all tangled together.
I thought about the townhouse. The red brick. The chandelier. The kitchen that was bigger than my whole apartment. Trace’s watch was on the nightstand, a heavy silver thing that cost more than I made in a month. I’d seen it when he set it down, the brand name I didn’t recognize but understood the weight of. I didn’t know what to do with that information yet. I didn’t know if it mattered. But it was there, a thing to be dealt with another day.
For now, there was this. The rain on the window. The warmth of his body beside mine. The ring on my finger, catching the gray light.
I looked at my left hand. The crescent scar was pale against my skin. I knew where it came from now. A bike. A hill. A piece of broken glass. I didn’t remember it, but I believed it. The desire to know was still there, but it was quieter now. Softer. A question that could wait.
I closed my eyes. The hospital lights slid past behind my eyelids, and I didn’t know if they were real, and for the first time, I didn’t need to know.
I fell asleep with my hand on Trace’s chest, feeling his heartbeat under my palm, and the last thing I thought before the dark took me was that some things didn’t need to be remembered to be true.
Trace’s Point of View
I woke to rain, light, and the smell of him.
The apartment was quiet. The quiet that follows a storm, when the air has spent itself and everything is still damp. Breck was asleep beside me, his head on my shoulder, his hand still resting on my chest. His breathing was slow and even, the rhythm of someone who had finally, truly let go.
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay in this exact moment forever. The warmth of his body, the weight of his hand, the way his hair smelled like my soap and his own skin. I’d spent a year imagining this. A year of empty beds and cold coffee and the sound of my voice asking questions no one could answer. And now, here he was. Breathing. Sleeping. Trusting me enough to fall asleep in my arms.
I didn’t deserve it. I knew that. But I was going to earn it anyway, one day at a time, for as long as he’d let me.
His collarbone scar was visible above the sheet. I’d kissed it. I’d told him the story. I’d watched his eyes fill with tears, and something in my chest crackede open. Not painfully, but cleanly, like a door that had been stuck finally swinging free. He didn’t remember the swimming surgery. He didn’t remember the race or the coach or his mother kissing his forehead in the recovery room. But he’d listened. He’d believed me.
The scar on his palm was pressed against my chest, the crescent curve of it a pale moon against my skin. I’d kissed that one too. I’d told him about the bike, the hill, the broken glass. I’d told him what his mother had said. Scars were proof he was brave.
He was brave. He was the bravest person I’d ever known. He’d walked into a life he couldn’t remember and built it from air. He had let me back in, inch by painful inch, even though I was the reason he’d needed to rebuild in the first place.
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at the nightstand. My watch was there, heavy and silver and expensive. Patek Philippe. A gift from my father when I made partner. It cost more than Breck made in a month. More, probably, than he made in three. I’d never thought about it before. It was just a watch. But now, in this small apartment with its secondhand furniture and its sticky banister and its café schedule pinned to the fridge, the watch looked obscene. A monument to everything Breck’s life wasn’t.
He’d said he didn’t know what to do with the information yet. The townhouse. The money. The life we’d built that he couldn’t remember. I didn’t know what to do with it either. I only knew I’d give it all up—every dollar, every asset, every piece of the Tucker inheritance—if it meant keeping this. Keeping him.
The rain picked up outside. A gust of wind rattled the window, and Breck stirred against me. His hand tightened on my chest, and then his eyes opened. Gray blue, still soft with sleep. He looked at me and for a moment there was no recognition in his face, just the blankness of someone surfacing from a dream, and then he blinked, and I saw him come back to himself.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You’re still here.”
“I’m still here.”
He smiled. It was a small smile, sleepy and unguarded, and it hit me square in the chest. I’d missed that smile. I’d missed it so much that seeing it now hit like a physical blow.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“Good answer.”
He settled back against me, his head finding the hollow of my shoulder. His hand stayed on my chest, and his fingers moved, tracing the lines of my ribs. The touch was idle, thoughtless. The kind of touch you give someone you’ve been touching for years. The kind of touch that doesn’t need a reason.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For telling me. About the scars. For being honest about yours.”
I pressed my lips to his hair. “I should have been honest a long time ago. About everything.”
“Yeah. You should have.”
The words were simple, no anger in them, but they pressed into me like a thumb into a bruise. The ache bloomed outward through my chest.
“I’m going to keep being honest,” I said. “Even when it’s hard. Even when it makes me look bad. I’m done with the old tells.”
Breck lifted his head and looked at me. His eyes were clear now, awake and assessing. “The jaw thing. Touching it when you lie.”
“You noticed that?”
“I noticed it the first night. In the rain. You touched your jaw when you said you’d searched for me for a year.”
“I wasn’t lying about that.”
“I know. I think you were lying about something else. Or not lying. Omitting.”
I thought back to that night. The rain. The streetlamp. The way he looked at me like I was a stranger who might also be a threat. I’d told him I’d searched for him. I’d told him I was sorry. I hadn’t told him why I needed to be sorry.
“I was afraid,” I said. “I was afraid if I told you the worst part straight out, you’d walk away before I could prove I was different.”
“And now?”
“Now I think you get to decide what you can handle. Not me.”
He kept looking at me for a long moment. Then he nodded and lay back down.
“The jaw scar,” he said. “The fence. That was the old tell, wasn’t it? The thing you used to lie about.”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you tell me the truth?”
“Because you asked. And because I’m tired of carrying lies. They’re heavy.”
He was quiet for a moment. His fingers traced the scar on my jaw, light and slow. “Heavy,” he repeated. “Yeah. I think I know what that feels like.”
The rain kept falling. The apartment was warm despite the chill outside, the radiator doing its best against the drafty windows. Breck’s breathing slowed, and I thought he might have fallen asleep again, but then he spoke.
“I keep seeing things. Images. Like the dog yesterday. And just now, before I fell asleep, I thought I remembered hospital lights. The kind on the ceiling. But I don’t know if I remembered them or if I made them up from your story.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I want them to be real. But wanting something to be real doesn’t make it true.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“How do I know? How do I tell the difference?”
I thought about it. I thought about the therapy I’d been doing for the past year, the sessions with Dr. Okami where I’d learned to sit with uncertainty instead of trying to buy my way out of it. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I can help. If you want. I can tell you when you get something wrong.”
“And if you don’t know either?”
“Then I’ll tell you that too.”
He was silent. The rain tapped against the glass. The radiator cracked and settled.
“Okay,” he said. “That helps.”
I held him. I didn’t promise anything I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t try to fix what couldn’t be fixed. I just held him, and listened to the rain, and let the gray light fill the room.
After a long time, Breck spoke again. His voice was barely above a whisper.
“Trace?”
“Yeah?”
“Did we have a dog? A golden one?”
The question hit me somewhere deep. I closed my eyes and saw it. The golden retriever my parents had when I was a kid, the one Breck had met exactly once at a family dinner in Greenwich. The dog had been old by then, arthritic and gray around the muzzle, and Breck had sat on the floor and let the dog rest its head in his lap for an hour.
“Not us,” I said. “My parents had a golden. You met her once. She was old. You liked her.”
“That’s not the dog I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“A dog on a hardwood floor. Young. Happy. Tail thumping. I don’t know if it was ours.”
“We didn’t have a dog.”
He was quiet. I felt him process that. The image he’d seen, the story I’d just told him, the gap between them.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither.”
“But you told me the truth.”
“I told you the truth.”
He exhaled. His body relaxed against mine, the tension draining out of him. “That’s what matters,” he said. “Right now. That’s what matters.”
I kissed his forehead. He closed his eyes. The rain kept falling, and we lay there in his narrow bed, and I thought about all the things I still had to tell him. The first infidelity, the one he didn’t know about. The way I’d sabotaged us from the beginning because I was too scared to be loved. The work I still had to do, the person I was still trying to become.
There would be time for that. Not today. Today was for this. The rain, the warmth, the scar on his palm pressed against my heart.
I looked at the ring on his finger. The platinum band, the faint wear where his thumb had rubbed against it for four years. He hadn’t taken it off. Even in the fugue, even when he didn’t know his own name, he’d kept the ring. I didn’t know if that meant something. I hoped it did.
I closed my eyes. The rain was a steady rhythm now, a lullaby on a breeze. Breck’s breathing had evened out, slow and deep. He was asleep.
I didn’t sleep. I stayed awake, listening to him breathe, feeling his hand on my chest, watching the gray light shift toward something darker. Evening, maybe. Or just heavier clouds. I’d missed a year of this. A year of his breathing, his warmth, the weight of his body beside mine. I would not miss another minute.
At some point, I heard the café downstairs close . The faint thump of the door, the jingle of keys, Rosa’s voice saying something to someone on the street. The sounds of Breck’s life, the one he’d built without me. I wondered if Rosa knew what was happening up here. I wondered if she’d approve.
Probably not. But she’d come around. Or she wouldn’t. Either way, I’d keep showing up. I’d keep making terrible espresso and sleeping on the pull-out couch and telling Breck the truth, even when it made me look bad.
Especially when it made me look bad.
The light faded. The rain softened to a drizzle. Breck slept on, his hand still on my chest, his ring catching the last of the gray light.
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay here forever, in this small apartment with its chipped mugs and the sticky banister, holding the man I’d broken and was trying, one day at a time, to put back together.
The radiator snapped. The rain dripped. The streetlight outside the window came on, casting a pale yellow glow through the curtain.
And still, Breck slept.
And still, I held him.
End of Chapter Five.