She closed her eyes again, leaning so her forehead was against my chest.
“What?” I asked, worry filling my heart.
She shook her head.
My hand ran up and down her back, trying to soothe her. I twisted my fingers in her hair, gently pulling, forcing her face up so I could examine it once more. She kept her eyes closed at first, and I scoured her beautiful features. Smooth and strong. Quiet and brave.
“Tell me,” I said, knowing it sounded like a demand. A demand that would normally have Dani whipping out her fingers and tongue to give me a lashing, and it only worried me more when she didn’t. She seemed to be fighting emotions, and I didn’t want her to fight them. Just like last night with her body, I wanted her to give in. To surrender to the feelings like I was. So we would surrender together.
She finally opened her eyes, searching mine before saying, “You going to run away again, Otter?”
The Otter let me know she was trying to be flippant, as if it wouldn’t bother her either way.
“If we’re being literal, I wasn’t the one who ran,” I taunted, knowing it would cause her to react, and it did.
Her face flashed with annoyance. She pushed against my chest, but I refused to let her go. She groused at me, “I didn’t run. I left—after you asked me to leave.”
The hand still tangled in her hair tugged again, and my free hand trailed over her cheek and onto her lips, tugging at the bottom one. Full and luscious and red from the amount of kissing we’d done the night before.
“Are you sure I did?” I asked. “It sounds like a rookie move.”
She rolled her eyes, but in many ways, I was a rookie. A rookie to these feelings that bound us together. Emotions I’d never given any woman. I’d never given them to Angie even when I’d dated her the longest. I’d practically moved in with her, and she still hadn’t had the pieces of me Dani now owned.
She searched my face and must have seen the truth there, because she relaxed back into my embrace. Her hand on my chest returned to the slow twirl which had woken me, her fingers tracing the tattoos and scars.
“What does this one mean?” she asked. I glanced down at the ancient knife tearing its way into a book.
“Turn your wounds into wisdom,” I told her.
She looked up at me as if surprised. “It’s a quote? Who said it?”
I laughed. “Oprah Winfrey.”
A smile curled her full lips upward.
“Okay, what about this one?” she asked, landing on a mirror that reflected the word “live” written in sand.
“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward,” I told her. The words had meant something different when I’d had them scored on me, and their meaning slammed into me in a new way in the morning light with Dani in my arms.
“Is that Confucius?” she asked.
I grinned. “Soren Kierkegaard.”
“Don’t know him.”
“He was a philosopher.”
She landed on the branch of a lemon tree. The fruit was surrounded by vines that were squeezing, but the liquid dripping from it was tears instead of juice. “This?” she asked breathlessly, as if knowing it would cause me pain. And it did. More than when it had been etched with needles and ink.
“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” My voice clogged on the emotions. “George Elliott.”
“You’re pretty smart, Otter,” she said, the tease of the words not matching her tone. I didn’t respond. She continued to run a hand over each tattoo, taking them in and memorizing them like I memorized so many things in my life—strategies, numbers, words, mission plans. She asked me about many of them; others she didn’t.
She finally landed on the chess piece near my heart, the knight so similar to the one in the library downstairs, but this one was nailed to its board with thorns.
She didn’t ask about the tattoo, but Kierkegaard’s words, “This piece cannot be moved,” still echoed through my brain. She smoothed her hand on the small scar that twined into the piece. The scar was jagged—not quite round, not quite straight.
There were so many scars on my body—some under the tattoos, some over them—that they seemed just another way of telling my history, each one a learning moment at the academy, or at BUD/S, or on a mission. And it was strange that she’d focused on that one little scar both the night before and this morning.
“Did you get this at the same time?” she asked, moving from the small scar to the huge one along my shoulder and collarbone.
“No,” I said, and I would have stopped there, except Tristan’s words were haunting me. Tell her everything. Anything. It required a different sort of bravery to give the things inside me and trust, like my SEAL brothers who looked after my body, that she would look after my heart. “That’s from my blood wings.”
“Blood wings?” she asked, a confused frown appearing on her face that I attempted to rub away with my thumb.
“The day you pass the Trident board and they finally give you your bird, the team congratulates you by pinning it on and then proceeding to pound their hands on it. All of them. Repeatedly. Over and over again until it’s embedded into you as it should be. A way of life. Something you can’t ever change. You are a SEAL whether the actual piece of metal is there or not.”
Her eyes widened, and her fingers ran over the scar softly again, as if she could sand it away with a gentle touch. But she couldn’t. It was me.
“That must have hurt.”
There was nothing to be said to that.
“I’ve played with the idea of getting a tattoo,” she told me.
“Why haven’t you?” I asked.
“It seemed so… clichéd. Getting a tattoo to remember that you… survived.” She said the word survived as if it
