Lately she’s been borrowing things out of his apartment. She never returns them, but he never considers them stolen. She just forgets until he needs something back and brings it up. He only has himself to blame since his door is never locked and most of the time it’s hanging ajar. Besides, she is far from the only one who goes in and out as she pleases whether he’s at home or not. But she pays her rent on time and always shows contrition when he asks for something back. Usually it’s a pot or pan, maybe a book she pulls off the shelf in his cramped office. Even so, this is how she comes to be wearing a T shirt he’d almost forgotten owning when she knocks on his doorframe just before midnight.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah. Sorry it’s late, but...”

Then she’s standing in the open double-doorway to the living room in the borrowed T shirt pulled on over the top of an improbably short dress. The shirt looks like a hasty concession to modesty, hiding the rest of the dress. He has only ever seen her in baggy clothes until now and there’s a vital synergy in the play of sinew and bone he never knew she had.

Her head tilts to the side and she winces. “Can you look at something?”

He splays the book he was reading upside down on his thigh. “Look at what?”

She comes around the coffee table and turns one leg to the side. She brings her hands to the hem of her dress, lifting it up and protectively cupping her mound in one gesture. Across the inside of her thigh are two bloody scratches about two and a half inches long. The scratches are slightly welted and there’s the violet blush of an oncoming bruise surrounding them. He looks up at her face and frowns. She’s looking at him past his expression. He figures she’s so used to his curious frowning she probably thinks it’s his default setting for everyone.

“Take a seat.” He doesn’t mean to sigh but it comes anyway. He goes into the bathroom and searches the cabinet for gauze, tape and peroxide. In the living room he kneels between her bare feet and sets the items from the bathroom on the cushion next to her. Her thighs are open and luminous, which makes the scratches all the more glaring. They probably won’t leave scars but they make him think of scars just the same. Everything is scarred. The furniture. The T shirt she took from his bedroom. Himself, perhaps, more than any of it, but he is making a silent wish she will swim fast away from anything that leaves such permanent flaws.

He grabs a couple of tissues from the box on the table and presses them to the flesh just below the scratches, then he pours peroxide over the wounds.

“Oh. Stings,” she says.

The peroxide fizzes and he blows on her skin.

“Ahhh.”

He pours on more peroxide and her hands lazily flop onto the couch on either side. She’s not wearing panties and the half distended lips of her shaven pussy are in his face beside the glaring scores in her skin.

“It’s gross, isn’t it?”

He knows she’s talking about the scratches. His frown brings a smile to her lips.

“It won’t leave a mark,” he says.

“Not on the outside.”

“Lucy...” He feels the urge to tell her everything he knows because he has so many more years behind him of being kicked by mules, but who is he to ruin the next part of the movie that is the rest of her life? And as he glances at her pussy beside the wounds he gets another urge to say there can be just as many flowers as scars, but he stops short on that, too. He’s tired and the only reason he believes this just now is that he’s got a head filled with the scent of a girl. He just shakes his head and she says, “I know,” but she doesn’t. She’s taking an educated guess.

He places the gauze over the scratches and carefully tapes it down.

“Thank you,” she says, softly. “Probably coulda done it myself. Just needed someone to take a little care of me tonight. Ya know? You were the first one I thought of.”

“Lucy, I…” Again he thinks better of saying the truth he knows and gives her the moment to believe there is something decent or caring inside him. Nor does it feel wise to try showing her the scarred afterimage of himself from a time when those things were natural to him. One of them is likely to break apart at the jolt of the contrast.

“George, I know you think I’m young, but there are people who can love people like us. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do.”

He places his hand over the gauze on her upper thigh and presses into the bruise.

“Ohhhh,” she says. Her eyes close and her hips move against the couch. After the sound fades, her lips remain in the shape of the word until he presses the tender spot again. “Nnnnnnn.”

He begins pressing into the wound over and over. Each time she utters a sound until the sounds turn to moans and then into whimpers. Her ass moves closer to the edge of the couch until her dress rides to her hips and her pussy opens to him like a heart in love with its own breaking.

He kisses her nether lips and a sound somewhere in the ether between breath and a word pushes out of her throat. Soon, he can taste the sweet flush of confusion and he buries his tongue in the deepest part of its core. Her name is Lucy, and she is like drinking the sunrise.

“Ohhh, George. Don’t ask me how I know,” she sighs. “I just do. I just do. I just do.”