With concerned fingers she traced the wounds on K’s back. What happened?
…
He made up his mind some time ago to stop lying to women, even to the ones who lied to him and to the ones who lied to themselves.
So he told her about the woman who had evil in her skin, the woman who dug her fingernails–always immaculately manicured and long enough to make Trent Reznor jealous–into his back whenever they groped and pawed at each other. The marks the woman left always turned into festering sores that gave way to sinewy scars. He saw a doctor once. A woman did this? He never went back.
He told her how he stopped taking his shirt off in hot yoga classes or going to the beach or otherwise appearing half naked in public (men like to do all those things). He told her how intimate moments with subsequent women ended before they began because his refusal to take his shirt off when he fucked them bespoke serious mental problems.
…
I like this scar the best, she said, and bit into it.
K jerked away, but by then it was too late; she had already disappeared into his wound.
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