This is something that’s been with him for years.

“How long have you been fighting?” I ask, my arms no longer able to hold the open alcohol still enough not to shake drops on the floor. I set it down on the sink, leaving my hand on the counter to brace myself, my arm shaking with my own weight and need for balance.

“You see my scars there, Emma?” he asks, stepping closer. I try to move back, but I’m in a corner, the bathroom small, and my back already against the sink.

“I do. Andrew, how long have you been fighting?”

I answer him and repeat my question fast, thinking it will make him pause. It doesn’t. He keeps moving forward, his eyes down on his own skin, and the closer he comes, the faster my lungs fight for air. When he reaches for my right hand, the one now gripping the corner of the counter so hard that my knuckles are white, I refuse to let go. Andrew leaves his hands on mine, though, waiting for me to surrender. I eventually loosen my grip, and he picks my hand up in his, his touch tender, slow, sweet. My lip quivers at the memory, but I hold it in. He places it on the line of four small circles on his side, holding it there against his bare skin, his eyes unflinching as he watches his hand cover my hand as it covers his wounds.

“This isn’t from fighting, Emma. These scars…they’re from surviving,” he says. His body shakes under my touch.

He never looks up. Several seconds pass in silence, and the tiny room begins to stink of the opened alcohol bottle. I look over his face, his arms and hands and body—so much of him covered in bruises. It’s like he was stolen—taken by someone, tortured, and returned half the boy he was—only to grow into a man with holes and broken pieces.

“What happened to you?” My voice cracks when I ask, my eyes still on the look of his hand on mine.

His hand. On mine.

“You have no idea, do you?”

I feel my brow pull in tight, my stomach binding as my mind begins to run through the thousand of possible things that means. I shake my head, my eyes moving up his body, gazing along his long torso, his golden skin, his curved muscles and neck and chin—his face so much older, but still the same. His eyes the ones I waited for, the only ones that ever looked at me that way before a kiss. Even if I didn’t realize it, I was waiting for him. I was in love with Andrew Harper the first time he held my hand. I’ve just been waiting to see him again to fully fall. I can’t fall now. Not when he’s…like this. But I fear I may not have control over any of that—over…feeling.

“I’m afraid, Andrew,” I tell him. When his chest fills with a deep breath and his head drops to the side, I know he understands.

“You have no idea…” he says, this time not asking a question.

His hand lets go of its hold on me, but I leave my hold on him a little longer, noticing his eyes close again as I do. When he opens them, he keeps his gaze down and away, his thoughts lost somewhere else entirely.

I let my hand slip away carefully, like a child trying to balance two cards in a pyramid. I watch him for a sign, waiting for him to say something more. I don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what I don’t know. But I’m starting to think it’s a lot—and it might mean the difference between the man standing here in front of me, and the boy I once thought I loved.

“I should stitch you up,” I say quietly, my lip pinned between my teeth to keep me from saying more. A shift happened just now—I hold the power. I can feel it. I’m not sure I want it, or am ready for it. Andrew only nods, his movement small, his eyes still at the corner of the room.

I slide the small drawer at the edge of the counter open and pull out the medic box from our hours at the clinic. Tech believes in teaching the basics early, so all pre-med students are trained medics before they begin their four years of med school. I’ve stitched maybe a dozen lacerations. I’m a better sewer than Lindsey. But I wish…oh how I wish it were her hands doing this now.

I flex my fingers, rubbing the tips against my palms, working the nerves through them. I pull the thread and needle out, readying it before preparing the alcohol and tape and gauze.

“I’ll need you to sit,” I say, expecting Andrew to use this, to take my request and turn it into a challenge, to defy me just for the sake of watching me suffer. Instead, he nods with the same lethargy he’s had since I touched him, his legs moving to the edge of the bathtub where he sits, holding on to the side, his eyes still lost.

I’m careful with every movement at first. And when I finally puncture his skin, I move my hands swiftly, repeating to myself that this is only a patient, that this is just like the other times, and that I can move smoothly. My hands work fast, closing the wound on his brow before the shaking settles in. I don’t feel it until I bring the scissors up to cut, and I have to pause before finally slicing the ends of the thread away.