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They’re making out on James’ couch when it happens. He slips his hand under the back of Juliet’s shirt, and she pulls away involuntarily.
It’s been months, but it’s still sensitive.
“What’s wrong?” James asks.
Juliet sighs. She doesn’t really want to do this right now, but if this is headed where she thinks it’s headed, he’s going to see it, and she’s going to have to explain.
She faces away from him and lifts up her shirt.
James doesn’t say anything at first, and since she can’t see his face, she has no idea how to interpret it. It’s an inconvenient spot to check, but she doubts it could look worse than it did when she first got it.
Then she feels his fingers brush the skin around it. “Who did this to you?”
Juliet pulls her shirt back down and turns around. “The Others,” she says. “They marked me.”
“Marked you?” he repeats. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You haven’t been in many cults, have you?”
“Guess I haven’t,” James says, but there’s more shock than humor in it. “You gonna tell me about it?”
Juliet smiles a little. Usually she’s the one coaxing him into opening up. She supposes it’s a two-way street.
“It was after I killed Danny.”
“Who’s Danny?”
“Pickett. The guy who had it out for you on Hydra.”
James scowls at the memory.
“They were going to execute me,” she explains, and it feels so strange saying it out loud that she has to take a second to process it. “Ben commuted my sentence, but he ordered them to mark me.”
She still remembers how it felt. Isabel staring down at her stoically. Tom in the corner looking uncomfortable, but not doing anything to stop it. How she tried so hard not to cry. How ashamed she was when she did.
Juliet can see the wheels turning in James’ head. He has his own bad memories of Hydra, and some of them involve her. If the mood wasn’t ruined before, it certainly is now.
“So it was ‘cause you saved me,” he says at last, and it’s the last thing she expected.
She knows she doesn’t deserve that word — saved. “I only did it because Ben told me he would let me go home if I helped you escape. It was selfish.”
“You still saved me,” James insists. “Hey, you wanna hear about selfish?”
He rolls up the sleeve on his T-shirt to reveal a scar a few inches long on the underside of his arm. It doesn’t look old — he must have gotten it on the island.
Juliet reaches out, gingerly running her fingers over it. “How’d you manage that?”
“I was a stubborn son of a bitch who’d rather get tortured than tell the truth.”
“You were punishing yourself,” she says plainly.
He lowers his arm, and his eyes. “Yeah, well … I deserved it.”
Juliet doesn’t argue with him. She’s done things she’s hated herself for, too, but they don’t need to rewrite history — even the history that hasn’t happened yet.
“What other scars do you have?” she asks, because she knows he has them.
He rolls up his other sleeve, a little higher than the other one, to reveal a puckered bullet wound on his shoulder.
“Got shot when they took the kid off the raft.”
Juliet winces, because she knows who they are. She’s just glad he didn’t say your people, although he would have every right to.
“Pulled the bullet out myself.”
“Of course you did.”
“Didn’t stop it from getting infected,” he says, tugging his sleeve back down. “They had to carry me through the jungle like a damn corpse.”
She can’t believe she never noticed it before — she’s certainly seen him shirtless enough.
It makes her realize just how much she doesn’t know about him. She’s read his file, knows his height, his weight, his darkest secrets. But there’s still so much to learn.
“Then there’s this one,” James says, and pulls up the front of his shirt. He points to what looks like a small incision scar, near his heart.
Juliet looks at it, trying to figure out what it could possibly be from.
He seems surprised by her confusion. “What, they didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“The fake pacemaker? Dead bunnies?”
Juliet just stares at him.
“Ben,” he says simply, and she doesn’t even need to hear the details to know it was some twisted mind game.
Then she remembers running into the aquarium, desperate for Jack’s help with Colleen. He thought the blood on her shirt was from James. Said he could hear him yelling.
“Guess I was busy that day.”
She was honest when she said they didn’t tell her everything. In some ways, it made her feel even more isolated, but she thinks that might have saved her in the end.
“What about you?” James asks.
Juliet pulls herself back to reality. “Hm?”
“Got any other scars I don’t know about?”
She smirks. “If you’re trying to get me to take my shirt off, I’m sorry to disappoint.”
He puts his hands up innocently. “Hey, fair’s fair.”
Juliet thinks about it for a minute. Getting your shoulder pulled out of its socket four times doesn’t exactly leave a mark you can brag about.
Then something comes to her, and she lifts her hand to show him the pale pink blotch on the outer edge of her palm.
James runs his thumb over it. “What’s this from?”
“I burned myself taking muffins out of the oven.”
He barks out a laugh, and Juliet raises an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” he says, still chuckling. “It’s just … I was expecting something a little more dangerous.”
“We can’t all be as cool as you, James.”
He glances down with a smile, the way he always does when she teases him, and it suddenly strikes Juliet just how safe she feels, for the first time in a long time. She can sense their marks starting to fade, and she has a feeling they won’t be getting any new ones for a while.
Well, except for the one on her neck that she has to cover with her hair the next morning.