When she draws his portrait at midnight on their two month anniversary, he doesn’t translate into pastels unscathed.

She tries to remember what she’d been doing on her and Roy’s two month anniversary when she was sixteen, as the shape of his arm comes into focus. His fingertips are scarred from all the times he’d touched her and must have burned himself; paper cuts from unwritten love notes.

The slope of his ribcage stretches itself out behind her sketching pencil, and memories from a lunchtime dojo splatter across her eyelids. A bruise blooms across his stomach in blues and purples from where he’d held her close, too close to leave room for denial. Well, almost.

She tries not to glance at the closet where her old bridesmaid’s dress hangs convicted, her sharpened red pastel slicing a swath across his chest, claw marks from where he’d tried to offer her his heart but had to sew it back up, empty. She ticks off little stitches; a two-month old peace offering. She’d have soldered the wound closed with hot coals and deeper confessions, but he’d been a bit too late for that.

She’s grateful that none of these wounds got infected, because emotional injuries aren’t like the physical ones. They don’t heal on some set schedule. She slips the portrait between two others in the very back of her closet.

In the morning she brings him coffee and a doughnut from the bakery down the street and tries to forgive herself as she kisses powdered sugar off his lips.

*

There’s a state of consciousness that they reach, heady with lust as he hovers over her, like they’ve sunk to liquid and are spilling into the ocean as the tide churns them together.

Jim remembers when he’d only been able to see Pam’s skin deep abrasions that had been inflicted by time and disappointment’s careless fists. It’s odd to remember that far back because now he knows there was a layer under that, and then another more below; he’s pretty sure there’s nothing to hide anymore.

So when his hands smooth over the skin on her stomach the motion stretches beyond the physical, like he’s stroking the surface of her soul. It takes him a couple months, but he doesn’t wince anymore as his thumb bumps against the scars that they’d inflicted on each other. It’s the balloon string that keeps him grounded and ties them hand in hand and he’s grateful that it’s no longer wrapped around his neck.

He thinks he can deal with a few cuts if, for the rest of his life, she’s the only one that sees them.