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Jess thought, at first, that she’d just seen too many terrible movies. That sure, it might look like a stab wound, but how the hell would she know the difference between a knife and window glass, which Sam assures her this wound is?
Still though. Bullet wounds, she thought, are pretty distinctive things.
She pushes. Sam evades. His excuses get worse. She knows how to work the damn internet. She can see what she wants there, make her comparisons.
“Sam, what happened?” she asks, gently tracing something she is sure is a long, ugly, poorly healed stab wound in bed one night.
“Hm? Oh, nothing. Stupid. Kid shit. Went through a window.”
She freezes. “I thought this one was going through a window,” she says tracing the stab wound on his opposite shoulder.
“I…yes?”
“Is that a question or an answer?” she asks.
“Yeah. I did.”
“More than once?” she asks.
“I was a clumsy kid.”
She snorts, because if there’s one thing Sam isn’t, is clumsy. The guy moves like he’s made of water, flowing and silently moving from place to place.
“Sure.”
“Before i grew…yeah. It was like my body was just waiting to get tall.”
If there’s one thing she can say for Sam, it’s that he’s a damn good liar. Not quite good enough, though.
“Sam,” she says, voice quiet and serious and probably lost, hurt, too. “Just tell me the truth. Please. The truth. I need–can you trust me that much?”
Sam doesn’t respond right away. “I’ll be here,’ she promises. “I already know, some part of your childhood must’ve been awful, I figured out that much. Will you…tell me about it?”
“I wasn’t clumsy,” he admits after five minutes. “But it’s…not what you think, either. Dad was…it was survival training.”
She wants to ask. How old were you? What did he make you do? What parts of the story am I missing? Is he still a free man? How’d you turn out so wonderful?
She doesn’t interrupt. He’ll tell her. She’s confident in that now. Maybe in his own time. But he’ll tell her.