Prototype by Brian Hodge Page B

anyway. "I noticed that."
    "Yes. They caught my eye."
    "What did you think of them?"
    "I don't know as I thought anything about them , per se." Which was a lie, a little professional white lie; allowable, even expected. She had continued to see those pale, thin remnants of past slashes long after his sleeve had gone back down, wondering how they would feel beneath her fingers. There was nothing sexual about it; just the imagined tactility of hardened ridges. If there were enough of them, intersecting, they might feel like a chaotic web in which he chose to protect himself.
    "Scars are benign, of themselves," she went on. "Where you're concerned, what interests me is the story behind them. The events and emotions that put them there."
    "We've been over that before."
    Nodding toward him, very slightly, with upraised eyebrows. Body language, when the words themselves might have been too harsh: You brought it up. He appeared almost sheepish.
    "Twinkle, twinkle, little scar," Clay said. "You hadn't seen any of them before. I just wondered." Biting his lip then. While he usually seemed to resent it when she left him to stew in his own silence, he was handling it better with every session. "It was sport, I told you that, I think. Didn't I? Sometimes it was just endurance. Sometimes it was a rehearsal for something worse that I never ended up doing to myself."
    "Suicide, you mean."
    "I thought about it a lot."
    "But not anymore."
    He sat back against the couch. "It's been a few years." Contemplation, like shuffling through a photo album with nothing but grim black-and-whites: crime scenes and accident victims; his young life. "Maybe it just didn't seem romantic anymore. You can get jaded about anything." This struck him as amusing. "Self-destruction can get kind of old and pretentious if you keep after it long enough. If you don't eventually off yourself, you're just a poseur."
    Adrienne found herself tracking down an intriguing line of thought that Clay would, naturally, be too blind to see about himself. "So you put down the knife one day and decided, No more ."
    "More or less."
    "Yet you've received several scars since then."
    Clay raised his head fractionally, wary — somewhat amused but tempered with something grimmer, as well, some spiny little paranoia. "So?"
    Tightroping over the session once again, hoping instinct still served her well — that he was ready to be confronted with the obvious and could deal with it.
    "So is it possible that you put away your knife, but turned the same task over to others … one of whom might be willing to do a more thorough job?"
    Sun at her back and the soft, soft sound of the cassette. She was never more aware of it than at moments such as this, when words and eye contact and even the air in the room congealed.
    "Death wish, huh?" Clay's grin was shy and menacing by turns, depending on the tilt of his exquisitely contoured head. Biting his lip as he watched her with narrowed eyes, as if one moment hating her for finding him out, congratulating her for it the next. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe I decided I liked feeling other people's skin give way under my hands instead of my own?"
    A lie. No, not exactly, more a rationalization. A defensive barrier thrown up hurriedly, enough to block her but not sturdy enough to fool her. Clay would know that, wouldn't he?
    "That sounds like something that would come from a predatory outlook. From what I've seen about you, what I know about you, and the incidents that have gotten you into trouble, you don't fit the predator mold."
    He stared down toward his casts. After three weeks they had gotten dingy, the pristine white given way to a more lived-in look. "I guess," he said, and looked at her in surrender, even embarrassment, "I just overreact."
    Gently, Adrienne nodded. She had been sitting with one knee draped over the other, leaning back, relaxed or trying to at least give that impression, but now she dropped both feet to the floor and slid