Take a Shot

Scars

Emerald squinted as she stared at my abdomen. She was focused on my least favorite thing, my scar, but it was what I had to exchange for seeing hers, and I wanted that more than life right now.

"It's such an interesting shape." She reached out, finger stopping just shy of my skin. "Can I?"

"You wanna touch it?" I asked. She nodded, not looking up at me. "I mean...yeah, sure."

Her thumbnail traced the long, puckered scar from its start at the bottom of my ribcage to its end near my hipbone. This was super embarrassing. I sighed, looking towards the ceiling. If I was patient, she would be done soon, then I could look over hers.

I was familiar, maybe more than a friend should be, with Em's body. I'd seen her many times as close to naked as a person could reasonably get without actually being naked, whether because her missions tended to involve some hand-to-hand combat that left her clothes in disarray or because some of the outfits she wore in her free time were absolutely skimpy. I fully believed she was the perfect woman, body included. No reasonable, functioning man who was interested in women would be able to take his eyes off her for even a second in some of her less-dressed moments. So, like any man, she would occasionally catch me staring, and today I had blamed it on her newest, scariest scar: a long, curved, pale line that traced from below her jaw on the right all the way into her chest on the left.

She had blown me off about it, like she always did, and so, trying to redeem myself, I'd asked if she had any scarier ones. I had seen many different shapes and sizes and colors of scars on her over the years, but that one had been the scariest for me. And I'd stuck her on that, because she either had to say no and admit that her newest scar was the scariest and I wasn't hysterical for no reason (thus absolving me of the sin of staring at her), or she had to say yes and let me see the scarier one (which would put her in a vulnerable position). I didn't, of course, want to see a scarier scar, but it was a win-win argument for me, so I'd stuck to my guns. Unfortunately, I'd overestimated how touchy she was about her scars, as she'd also stuck to her guns and told me she had scarier ones and I was free to look them over as long as she got to see the scar I'd gotten as a teen.

So here we were.

"Tell me what happened."

"Oh, nothing, nothing exciting," I lied poorly. She cut her eyes up at me in annoyance before looking back down. That lie had been so bad she didn't even want to tell me how bad it was. Just looking at me was enough. I sighed. "I got in a fight."

"What kind?"

"The...physical kind?" I tried. I really didn't want to say. I had gotten in a fight, true, but with the world's largest alley cat, trying to protect a small, blind dog I'd befriended. The scar was a weird shape because it had healed badly, and it had healed badly because of how dirty it had gotten, and it had gotten dirty because it was my first wound after being tossed out of my parents' wealthy estate and onto the streets; I'd conveniently forgotten that I no longer had access to good medical care.

"If you don't want to tell me, that's fine." I breathed a sigh of relief. "But I'll either figure it out myself, or my guesses are going to get progressively more embarrassing until you tell me."

"What?" Guesses? What was this, 20 questions?

"Let's see...it's old, so before I joined Harmony. Certainly before we were friends..." she mused, tapping along the flesh. My eyebrows pulled together. She wasn't kidding. "You were just a regular grunt up until recently, so I don't believe you would've gone on any mission dangerous enough to do this to you. Not to mention Harmony's wound care is top tier, so the wound would've been properly maintained and not scared so...oddly." I frowned. Was she really serious about just trying to nitpick it out of me? I doubted even she would be able to place the timeline just from looking and feeling. But she continued, "You had money as a child, and no large pets, so there's no reason something should have been improperly maintained enough to scar, especially not like this. This is...between 30 days with Harmony and being a child. That leaves a span of about 4 months. It looks...hmm. It's not a knife wound, so you probably weren't mugged. Maybe an animal attack?" I was once again reminded why she was Geechis's number one pick for interrogations. The minutiae that she picked up on was second to none.