Author's Note: Sorry for the long wait, everyone. I was visiting family last weekend so I didn't get around to finalizing the chapters until this weekend. On the bright side, here's the last two chapters of the story!

Chapter 2: Another kind of intimacy

The next night, they continued in their bedroom.

Yor was feeling her way from Loid's shoulders down his back when she found a scar on his left shoulder blade—a miniscule, puckered crater whose tendrils radiated from outward. The ridges here were raised and well-defined.

"Where is this from?"

Loid hesitated. He didn't want to mention the tennis match.

"It's...a sports injury." Which was not entirely a lie. He said no further on the subject and Yor didn't press him.

"Stay there," she told him. Rising from the bed, Yor sat down on the other side of Loid, facing his back. She gasped.

Loid's heart constricted. Surely it wasn't that bad?

Pursing her lips, Yor's fingers brushed against the lilac skin, tracing the length of each ridge all to the point where it tapered off and disappeared into his skin. That scar, however, was not the reason for her gasp.

From the scar on his left shoulder blade, Yor followed an interconnecting network of scars that crisscrossed all over his back. Most of them were slight, the scar tissue sitting level with the rest of his skin and the pigmentation so delicate that it was nearly invisible to the naked eye. Nearly. This was where Yor's eyesight had the upper hand. Her eyes jumped from one scar to another, following the notches and nicks as they branched across Loid's back.

"Oh, Loid."

"It's not what you think!" Loid said suddenly, unable to bear the weight of her gaze on him. "It's not like I usually let women scratch me up like that! Some of them got carried away, but—" He felt Yor's hands stutter to a halt and he realized that he said the wrong thing.

"Are you telling me that women did this to you?"

Loid's throat closed up. Oh no, oh no. He had said too much. Worse, he needn't have said anything at all. Would it have been so bad if he had left Yor to her own assumptions?

"What kind of women? Did they take you by surprise? Ambush you?"

Well, of course they must have, Yor thought. How dirty of them, attacking Loid from behind like that!

Then again, what kind of attack involved scratching someone's back?

Yor imagined someone strapping Loid facedown to a table and then lashing him with a whip, but that wouldn't have made such shallow scars...

"Ambush me?" Loid started uncertainly. Then a light clicked on. He almost laughed at Yor's conclusion. "No, no, no, these women didn't ambush me. It wasn't an attack. This was..." How to explain?

"It's okay, Loid. Remember, we don't have to explain any of these scars. I just wanted to know...they didn't hurt you too badly, did they?"

"No," Loid admitted, breathing a sigh of relief. She was right. He didn't need to explain. Yet somehow, he wanted to explain anyway. Something about the way she touched him, the way she spoke, it made him want to tell her everything: the story behind every scar, every cut, every wound, painful or otherwise. "This was something done to me in bed," he said finally, even after he had acknowledged their second rule.

"They hurt you...in bed?"

"Yes. No! I mean, they did this to me while we were being...intimate."

Yor drew back. WHAT?! How could someone do such a thing during intimacy?! Whatever that meant.

The last thought made her take pause. That was when Yor realized she was completely out of her depth. She had never been with a man, after all. She had never done anything intimate with anyone and this was one of those bewildering moments when she came face to face with the sheer, sobering truth of it. What did intimacy entail? Back scratches? Scarring someone? A mild form of violence?

Yor gulped. She didn't know how to ask about it, but the next words seemed safe enough. "Being intimate in bed...like what we're doing now?"

"No, not exactly like what we're doing now. Another...another kind of intimacy."

"How many kinds are there?"

Loid smiled softly. "As many as there are people and moods and situations and emotions."

Yor was aghast. THAT MANY?! But...but that meant hundreds! Thousands! Millions of combinations! How would she learn it all? Where would she even begin? The mere possibilities made her head spin.

As with all things unfamiliar, Yor compared it to something she knew, and what she knew well was how to kill people. Or paralyze them. Or render them unconscious. Whatever the situation required. She had been trained in several dozen forms of them, but even that number paled to what Loid had indicated for intimacy.

If there were that many forms of intimacy, how could she keep up with it all? She was already 27! And married! To an experienced man! Is this why Loid was so much better at being a spouse? How could she possibly hope to keep up?

Despair gripped her insides, liquifying them as she spiraled into a funnel of desolation, imagining all the things she did not know. And had not learned.

"Y-Yor?" After his last words, Loid felt Yor's hands leave him entirely. Instead, he felt her slump forward onto his back, the side of her head resting on the expanse of skin and scar.

While Loid enjoyed the feel of Yor leaning on him like that, he sensed that this was not an intimate gesture. As a matter of fact, after what he said, he felt the mood shift and the intimacy drain from the experience completely. Something was wrong. Yor was being too silent.

"Yor, are you...?" Loid didn't know how to finish the question. He was also afraid to move, in case it would cause Yor to lose her balance and fall forward. After weighing his options, he decided to take the most direct route. "Yor, can you sit up for a minute? I need to turn around."

Yor obeyed wordlessly and Loid felt the tickle of her hair lift from his skin, leaving behind a strange coldness. And a distance. Once he turned to face her, his heart plummeted and his stomach twisted in a strange, sick knot.

His wife had curled into a ball, her arms wrapped around her knees and her head buried into her chest.

"Yor? Yor! What's wrong?!" Loid reached out a hand, but stopped just before he touched her. Would she lash out at him? Would she withdraw even further? He couldn't fathom what he had said that was so offensive, but whatever it was, it was enough to completely ruin what they were doing, what they were building. "Yor, please. Please tell me what's wrong. Was it what I said? I promise, the intimacy I had with those women is not like the intimacy I have with you. Nothing close."

Yor lifted her head. When she finally spoke, it was barely a whisper. "But they knew how to be intimate."

"What?"

Yor faced him and the look on her face, the tears pooling in her eyes and threatening to spill, was enough to shatter him.

"Those women. They knew how to be intimate. They knew to scratch your back and...and..."

Yor growled in frustration. "I don't even know what else is involved!"

"Involved?"

"Yes!" Yor said, almost shouting. "I don't know what intimacy involves! I don't know how to do this! I don't know how to do anything intimate for you! I never knew it required so much!" Her voice dropped to a whisper again, hopeless, defeated. "Where do people even learn this stuff?"

She picked at a loose thread on the bedsheet, and the forlorn gesture made his chest tighten. It felt like the very threads in their relationship unwinding.

"Is there a school? Or a book you read?" she asked finally.

"No, there isn't," Loid said. His voice was not harsh, however. Nor cold or condescending. If anything, it was almost a whisper itself, a quiet admission to the truth of the statement. Had he learned how to seduce women? Yes. Had he learned how to gain their trust, extract what he needed from them, and then leave them behind? Yes. Had he been in bed with women whose faces were just another face, whose bodies was just another body, whose name was just another detail he needed to remember whenever they were together? Yes. Many times. So many times.

But had he ever learned intimacy? Real, true intimacy? The kind that involved trust and respect and vulnerability? The kind that required opening up and facing his fears and letting go because it was finally safe enough to be all of that with someone? To be honest and emotionally raw and a raging mess because he didn't have to hold anything in any longer?

Yet there was another side of intimacy that he had never fully experienced, either. The gentle kind. The quiet kind. The patient kind.

While he had faked these qualities quite convincingly in his previous roles, it was still faking. Those relationships were built on lies, after all. It could never last. It was never meant to last.

But this was different. Yor was different. He did not need to fake anything in front of her. Not anymore, anyway, and he was ready to fully revel in the freedom of that fact. But only if Yor was willing to participate as well.