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It was the fear in her eyes that set my heart racing. What was she so afraid of? She’d never looked this terrified in all my time knowing her.

I kneeled at her feet, pulling her sweatshirt back down. “Why ‘no’?” I asked softly, looking up at her. Her hands squeezed my shoulders, and she tipped forward.

“Because,” she whispered.

I let my thumbs slide along her skin just above the waistband of the boxers she wore. “Because why, Whitney?”

“Because you…” She lifted a hand to my head, threading her fingers in my hair as her brows furrowed, like she was confused by what she was doing. “You see too much. I don’t want you to see.”

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against her navel, my fingers flexing into her hips as I shuddered. Her fingers in my hair felt like heaven, and the way she wasn’t pushing me away, wasn’t arguing, had answered me honestly for once…

Fuck.

I was losing my goddamn mind.

“Why don’t you want me to see?” I asked, kneading my thumbs into her hip bones. I tilted my head back to look up at her. What didn’t she want me to see?

“Because…it will make me feel terrible,” she whispered.

“Mm. And what if showing me made you feel better?”

She shook her head, having already convinced herself. “It won’t.”

“What if I promise you it will?”

She traced a finger down my nose, and, like any touch from her, it spread through my entire body like electricity. She pressed her finger against my lips, softly tracing them like she had my nose, her eyes riveted to what she was doing. “Promises are a gamble, not a guarantee.”

Even drunk, she was so good at guarding herself.

“What, you don’t want to bet on me?”

“I already did,” she said, the tiniest smile curving the corners of her lips.

Now that piqued my interest. I wanted to know more, to know just what she’d bet on with herself. What kind of gamble she’d made.

“Then do it again,” I urged. I could see that I was slowly breaking her down, and when I gripped the hem of the sweatshirt again, she didn’t make any move to stop me. “You can trust me, Whitney. Bet on that.”

There was a deep well of want in her eyes, a desire that went far past anything physical. They were a desire for basic human needs; validation, trust, safety, security. Things I was slowly discovering she’d never had, things I wanted desperately to give her.

I lifted her sweatshirt again, watching her closely, and when she raised her arms to let me pull it off entirely, my heart pounded. I threw it to the ground, captivated by what she was giving me right now.

She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her breasts were small, her nipples a dusky rose color. They hardened under my stare, but she didn’t try to cover herself. My fingers were shaking when I slid them under the waistband of the boxers she was wearing. She set her hands on my shoulders as I pulled them down, stepped out of them, and that was when I noticed the scars on her arms.

All the breath left my lungs as horror shot through me.

There were countless silvery lines on both of her forearms. More lines marred her upper arms, but the majority of them—and there were a fucking lot of them—were on the pale undersides of her forearms. Some in neat little rows, some longer, more jagged slashes that seemed to have been done in bouts of the most uncontrolled, overwhelming emotion. A few circular outlines overlaid the straight lines, like she’d…twisted bottle caps into her skin.

My stomach dropped, the floor falling out from under me as I catalogued every moment of pain she’d suffered and written into her skin.

All her misery was right there, forever etched into her flesh.

I forced myself to remain expressionless, but my fingers trembled when I wrapped them around her wrists. She’d done this to herself, that much was clear. But I wanted to know what made her want to hurt herself in the first place.

I wanted to know who had hurt her enough that she’d turn around and hurt herself just to make the emotional pain go away.

“Whitney,” I whispered, trying to speak past the lump in my throat. When I looked into her eyes, she was watching me so closely, taking stock of my reaction warily.

For all her bravado, there was so much pain beneath her skin. Behind those angry eyes.