Written for an anonymous dialogue prompt on Tumblr: "Take off your shirt." Hope it makes up for the angst in the last one. ;)
She squinted through one eye to watch him through her near-empty goblet. He was squatting in front of the hearth, bony knees akimbo as he stoked the evening fire. Through the crystal it was difficult to discern where his shirtsleeves ended and his sallow forearms began, even with the cuffs rolled to the elbows.
She set the glass down on the little table beside her chair. The shirt was an impeccable white, whereas the skin was a yellow-gray: "death warmed over," as he liked to say, but it seemed to her that the network of veins and wiry muscle surging beneath was the very picture of life.
The pair had become more comfortable with each other of late, enough that he had shucked his jacket to tend to the fire: he disliked cleaning soot out of the wool. Hunched as he was, his shoulder blades jutted out noticeably from beneath his garnet waistcoat.
She tracked a silvery scar that emerged from his hairline to streak down the nape of his neck and disappear into his collar. Her mind was suddenly consumed by thoughts of the man in front of her: not her normal thoughts, the ones about his genius and his music and the dry softness that lurked beneath his sharp edges, but thoughts of him as a physical specimen. A man. What other peculiarities did that wiry frame hold? What had it endured, over time?
"Take off your shirt."
The words spilled from her wine-slackened tongue the moment she thought them. She clapped a hand over her mouth, heat rising in her cheeks, but it was too late: he had cocked his head with delicate caution, and his gaze seared through her. "I beg your pardon?"
"I—you—you have a scar. On the back of your neck."
His head tilted even more. "I do."
"I just…" She could not stop stammering, but now it was her own nerves, and not the wine, that were to blame. "I only wondered how far down it goes, and…what it's from?" The breath began to drain from her lungs at the intensity of his stare. "Forgive me. I—I don't—"
She cut herself off as he stood, his spindly fingers already working at the waistcoat buttons. She knew she should protest, but she did not, entranced as she was by his quiet precision, his amber eyes that never left her face. The firm line of his mouth suggested that he had resigned himself to this task.
She could not help but wonder why.
The waistcoat landed on a chair back. Rangy fingers parted his shirt at the center, revealing a flash of a sunken chest before he turned and lowered the garment to expose his back.
The scar at his neck was one of many scored into his skin at perpendicular angles, distributed unevenly down the length of his spine. She shuddered to consider what unspeakable circumstances might have given way to such severe lashings—and she hoped, fervently, that he did not earn all of those marks in a single sitting.
She was not cognizant of having left her chair to stand behind him, but now her hand hovered at his back. He tensed as though he could already feel the heat of her palm.
"Does it hurt?" she asked, but he shook his head. And so, delicately, she traced the silvery latticework with the pads of her fingers. She did not miss how his breath stopped on an inhale, or how his fingers curled and released at his sides.
It was then—and only then—that she realized just how affected he was by her.
He pulled up his shirt the moment she lifted her fingertips, and it was some strange combination of guilt and mild inebriation and a sudden, fluttering thrill that informed what happened next.
"I have a scar here," she said, trailing a finger along the juncture of right thigh and hip. "My skirt caught on a loose nail." There was only a beat of silence before she added, more quietly, "Would you like to see it?"
His fingers froze where they had been refastening the buttons at his sternum, and his jaw went slack. He did not—could not?—respond, and she chose to believe it was a product of nervousness, not unwillingness.
She smiled shyly. "Help me with these skirts," she whispered, wanting very much to feel those broad hands on her.
His jaw snapped shut, and it was with a newfound fire in his eyes that he reached for her waistband.
