I nod, getting to work.
For about ten minutes she lets me look over the material—bones of the hand and arm as well as muscles of the arm. She uses Post-it notes to hide the answers from me, pointing at the figures and having me name what she’s pointing to. She starts out easy and then it gets more difficult.
“Triquetrum.”
Shit, where is that again?
I look at the figure, blanking. I look down at my own hand, thinking maybe somehow that will help. When I don’t know it, I take a wild guess.
“Not quite,” Olivia says, correcting me. “Abductor pollicis longus.”
The what now?
I look at my arm, trying to envision where the hell it would be. When I come up short, I look up at her helplessly. “I have no clue.”
She bites the inside of her cheek, looking pensive as her eyes shift from mine to my arm. “Can we try something?” she asks.
“Is this where our Friday night starts to get wild?” I tease with a grin.
She shoots me a bland look, but I can tell she’s biting back a laugh. Grabbing some highlighters and a pen, she stands and walks over to my side of the table. She takes the seat next to me, pulling her chair closer to mine, and tucks one leg under her.
I’m suddenly hyperaware of her presence, how close she is to me. I get a whiff of her vanilla perfume when she loops her arm through mine, using both of her hands to position my arm. When she has my hand flat on the table, she grabs a pen and starts drawing and writing on my hand.
She looks up at me through her long lashes, her face so close to mine I can almost feel her breath on my skin. “Is this okay?” she asks, her voice small and sounding almost nervous.
“More than okay.”
She gets back to drawing on my hand and eventually moves up my arm.
When she’s finished with the bones, she flips my arm over to start on my forearm. Pink highlighter starts at my wrist, slowly traveling upward, but then she stops.
I look down to see that she’s stopped at a small, pink, risen circular scar on my arm, and my blood instantly turns cold.
I have similar scars scattered all up my arm from one of my mom’s ex-boyfriends. He was a drug addict and a drunk who didn’t like it much that my mom had a kid. He despised me, and whenever I would act up, or when he was just angry in general, he would grab me by the back of my shirt, hold me down, and stub his cigarettes out on my arm.
Just thinking of the pain makes my hand involuntarily clench into a fist.
Olivia stares for a moment, a flash of sadness and knowing in her eyes.
Normally, whenever I catch someone staring at my scars, I get angry, defensive, but with her I feel ashamed. I don’t want my miserable past to tarnish her image of me.
I’m used to people staring at my scars and asking about them, and every time I snap or immediately shut them out. It’s not like they care. They just want to know the sob story behind them so they can rub it in my face and belittle everything I’ve fought to overcome to get to where I am today.
But with her, somehow, deep down, I find myself wanting her to ask, to care, even though I don’t want her to know the truth.
Olivia blinks slowly a few times, composing herself before running the highlighter up and over the scar, like it’s not even there, passing all the others just the same.
When she’s finished labeling my arm she silently stands and moves back to her seat across from me.
“All right, let’s get started,” she says, and just like that, it’s like my scars are forgotten.
Weirdly enough, I can’t tell if I’m more relieved or disappointed that she didn’t ask about them.
>> <<
I let out a low whistle. “I think that’s one of the wildest Fridays I’ve had in a long time,” I joke, stuffing my hands in the front pockets of my jeans as Olivia and I walk out of the library together.
Olivia laughs, pulling her phone out of her back pocket and typing out a quick text.
