Page 26 of Slashed Bonds

And the eyes are the thing.

They’re pale. Not gray, not the diluted almost-blue that people call icy when they mean forgettable. His are the blue you find at the bottom of a crevasse, backlit and impossible, ringed darker at the edges so the color reads as though it’s been cut out and set into his face.

Cold eyes.

They’ve never once looked at me coldly.

He has freckles too, heavy across what I can see of him, scattered up over his cheekbones and down his shoulders. Across all of it — the freckles, the ink, the whole map of him — run patches where the pigment has gone. Pale islands with soft borders, one spilling down the side of his throat, another across his ribs, another over the back of his hand.

I’ve seen this man naked more times than I can count.

Fuck.

I’ve assumed for two years it’s some form of vitiligo, and I’ve never asked, because asking is a question and questions are how the wall comes down.

It doesn’t bother me. Which undersells it.

I love a man who looks like nothing else.

Because I do have a type, and my type is trauma with a haircut.

I used to be the good girl. Braid in, grades up, yes ma’am, home by curfew. Four good boys who held doors open and carried my bag and got photographed doing it.

We all know how that went.

Now I’m drawn to men who wouldn’t fold themselves into a shape society approves of at gunpoint.

“I’m going to be around more often,” he says.

His scent shifts as he says it, and I catch the change before I catch the words.

He runs cold. That’s the first thing. Frozen juniper and blackcurrant, crushed mint underneath it, and beneath all of that the specific mineral smell of clean ice — the exact note that comes up off a fresh sheet in an empty rink at six in the morning.

Which should be a coincidence, in a facility full of hockey players.

When he’s amused, the blackcurrant lifts and the whole thing sweetens. When he’s competitive, the mint and juniper go sharp enough to sting the back of my throat.

And right now the white musk under it warms, hot rising through cold, the contradiction that makes my knees unreliable.

Possessive. That’s his possessive.

Worst of all, it does something to my own scent. My cherry and plum have carried a winter-air note since the night they severed me — a cold thread that came in when the bond went out, and no one has been able to explain it.

His scent finds that note and settles into it like a hand into a glove.

I hate noticing.

He absolutely notices me noticing.

“Are you?” I toss back.

Then I catch the movement. His arm going behind him, reaching for something out of sight.

Every muscle in my back locks.

Don’t flinch. Do not flinch.

I hold it. I’ve gotten good at holding it. Five years of practice in not letting a room see what a sudden movement does to my spine.