He woke early, and tried not to remember anything.
As he breathed, the morning sun filtered through the curtains. It was like gold spilling through the air in slanted columns, bathing everything in warmth. His mind was full of night-time, and with a half-asleep reflexive movement he pulled the blankets up a bit higher over his shoulder. He shifted and turned over. His eyes opened involuntarily.
There was a pale back sloping gently down under the sheets, one visible wiry arm and a head defined in short-and-choppy dark hair. Before he closed his eyes again, he saw her arm rise and fall ever so slightly in the motions of sleep. There was a moment in which her form was weaved into his dreams, and then he pulled himself closer to her and rested his face in the hollow of her neck.
He traced a lazy arc across the skin of her back with his free hand, a little more awake now, and let his fingertips create her again in his mind. He knew every mark and dip, every rise and fall. Put simply, he knew her. Though they were young, she had already gathered definition; there were places where her skin wore thin and places where it broke and had been broken. Eyes still closed, he named the shapes of her piece by piece.
Though her skin was silk-smooth like a soft pelt from the slight refinement with which the night had graced her, each individual scar grew tough and tight-knit. They were like words, he thought, words on a blank page. They gave meaning to her being, reality to her existence. In perfection there was nothing, but in old wounds there was truth. If that was the case, then she was the truest thing of all – her back was criss-crossed with slashes of hardened flesh and sunken welts from which her blood had once run freely. With his finger he navigated an impossible maze, taking care to not more than brush the broken skin. He touched a new one he hadn't yet mapped only to start at her flinch and unconscious hiss. He trod more carefully after that. Most of the scars were old and didn't hurt so much, he knew, but recent wounds taken yesterday or the day before or the day before that stung with a raw pain. That sharp electric cutting sensation tended to break out of joint with the duller ache in her bones so that she felt a disharmonic chord of sorrow striking through her core as if her spine were a tuning fork.
There were two places on the noughts-and-crosses board of her back that assumed particular prominence, two thick-thin raised lines extending from the edges of her shoulder blades. He ran his hands along them now, the familiar rough cartilage and twisted bone gently pushing through the skin.
He knew the origin of every other scar of hers, every other bruise or fracture or irregular circle scored into her flesh, but these two she had always refused to explain. He had asked twice; the first time he was met with a flat silent stare and a disturbing silence, the second with cold wordless anger and a swirling flare in the depths of her dark eyes. He hadn't asked again. He didn't want to push his luck.
Nonetheless, he had an idea of what they might be. They were more like words than the other scars – like an ancient alien scrawl carved sideways into her being – but he'd seen the same shape on birds, the same twist and push out of the muscle to arc away in great curves of feather. He was sure, almost sure, that they were the torn stubs of wings, where perhaps she had once been cast from on high and hurled beneath with divine dispassion.
She did exude an aura of pride from time to time, a sense of age beyond her years; sometimes when they were close he'd see that her pupils formed deep chasms opening down into a bottomless abyss. She shone with a dark exuberance, leaving rainbow-oil singing tracks in the world, and it drew him to her. But, he thought, she was also kind. Despite her overt tallness and her wickedly humorous spite, when she took him into her arms he felt safe and loved and loving in himself and it was like he'd come home. It was a special kind of home, too, that two-people-becoming-one, and he wouldn't give it up for the world.
He found her perfectly capable of crimes others would look upon with horror. She was always justified, always certain in her actions, but nonetheless duller minds would cry out in indignation at some of the things she did. She found society not softened by inaction, but hardened in it, passion long since tempered to a cold steel. So many people ignored life in favour of becoming a gear in the beige trudge of that machine called capitalism. Prudish, she would have called them. They didn't appreciate it when she stepped in between them and the man with a knife in the alleyway, smirking in anticipation with a simultaneous 'get behind me' and 'come on then', because the joy with which she saved them was something they derided as 'bloodlust'. Maybe it was. Maybe she did take pleasure in violence against those who perpetrated heart-wrenching wrongness. So often she'd stumble back in through the door to where he waited worriedly and display with pride a weeping gash in her side. You should have seen the other guy, she'd say, face flushed and hair dishevelled. She couldn't have stopped grinning if she'd tried. He'd try to patch her up as best as he could, she wincing in bittersweet exultation as he dressed the wound, and then she'd sort of fall on him and breathe that shining sense of life into his lungs.
That's what it was like with every new scar. With every new mark anchoring her firmly to reality. So despite himself he found that he shared her excitement those times she returned to him with dark blood on her side and the two bone nubs in her back twitching slightly as if still held by long-lost tendons. He shared that excitement because, he told himself, it made the impossibility of her seem real. It let him believe that someone or something like her could love him. It made him believe that he could love the devil better.
She used to lie awake, pretending to be asleep, in the early hours of the morning, and wait for the trailing finger to skip across her scars. Whether they were right or wrong didn't matter, she thought, whether they were sick or twisted or just in love despite everything didn't matter, because they could lie here now in the coffee-filter morning light and be close.
He shifted closer, and rested his head behind hers so his lips brushed the nape of her neck through her coarse hair.
When he touched her, she spread her wings and took flight.