My fingers curled around his sweater as my heart revved up to a ridiculously speed. “Hayden… no oneyou wouldn’t want to see this.”

“I don’t think you give me enough credit.”

“It’s not that. I do give you credit, but thisthis is different.” I stared down at his fingers. They were perfect, a far cry from what I looked like. “I… I died in that accident, Hayden. It wasn’t my imagination. I was dead and there was a reason for it. I must’ve been really messed up.”

“Do you think I’ll look at you differently? That it would somehow change how I see you?”

He sounded kind of offended, and I had to look up; I had to see him. Our eyes met. There wasn’t a challenge in them anymore. I don’t know what I saw in them, but I felt my fingers relax and then let go.

Needing no other invitation, Hayden gathered the hem in his hands and began tugging it up and up. He pulled the hoodie over my head, exposing almost all my secrets.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

I could feel his eyes traveling over my arms and across the swell of my chest. Hayden was checking me out, but not in a way I’d ever wanted a guy to look at me. I knew what he saw.

Angry lines slashed across my upper arms, and faint scars spread across my chest and disappeared under my tank top. They’d originally been red, but they’d now faded to white. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror, I thought the scars looked like someone had dropped a spiderweb over my body. The only parts of me not scarred were my legs.

A minute went by before Hayden spoke. “Does it… does it hurt?”

Opening my eyes, I stared into the dark corners of the cabin. I felt vulnerable, exposed. “No. It never hurt. Not when I… came back.”

He let out a stilted breath. “But before?”

I forced a casual shrug and glanced at him. He wasn’t staring at the scars, but at my face. “Yeah, it hurt. Can I have my sweater back now?”

“No.” Hayden dropped it on the floor. “You shouldn’t have to hide yourself.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

He frowned. “Why would it bother me?”

“Because… because it’s ugly. I look like Frankenstein.”

“You don’t look like Frankenstein,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

“Trust me, I know how I look.”

“Okay. What do you want me to say? That I see those scars and wonder how badly it had to hurt to end up that way? Or how wrong I think it is that you let those scars take away from everything else?”

“Take away from what?”