Lise8

“No half measures,” he interrupted her. “I am not, and do not wish to be, your friend.”
(…)
“I refuse to live forever feeling that I make you uncomfortable,” Thorn continued, brusquely.
“If it’s my claws that put you off – I am aware that I am hardly attractive. This leg won’t stop me from - ”
Exasperated he swept his brow with his hand as if enduring a severe verbal challenge.
All Ophelia’s nervousness instantly disappeared.
She removed her gloves as though shedding an old skin. Hard knocks had damaged Thorn, and the harm was greater within than without. She promised herself to protect him from all those who could further flay him, starting with herself.
She approached, ensuring that she was well within his field of vision. It was good that he was sitted, it put them on the same level.
He shuddered when she placed her bare hands on either side of his face. He was an angular being, both in body and character, with never a friendly phrase, or gallant gesture, or humourous quip, preferring the company of numbers to that of people. One had to have a good reason for looking Thorn straight in the face. Ophelia had one. She kissed his scars. First the one cutting through his eyebrow, then the one cutting into his cheek, and finally the one cutting across his temple.
With each contact, Thorn’s eyes widened. His muscles, conversely, tightened.
“56,” he cleared his throat to make his voice less hoarse.
Ophelia had never seen him so intimidated, despite his efforts not to show it.
“That’s the number of my scars.”
She closed and then reopened her eyes. She felt it again even more violently, this urgent call from deep inside her. “Show them to me.”
The world instantly ceased to be a word and became skin.
The gentle shadows of the mosquito net, the lapping of the rain, the distant sounds of the garden and the city, none of all that existed anymore for Ophelia. All that she was acutely aware of was Thorn and herself. Their hands unfastening, one by one, every restraint, every apprehension, every fear. (shyness)
Ophelia had spent these last three years feeling empty. She was, at last, replete.”
― Christelle Dabos, A Winter's Promise / The Missing of Clairdelune / The Memory of Babel