Reading inadvertently.

I trace my fingers over your body. The stretch marks, purple, around your stomach, the white, rippled, almost invisible scars around your wrists. Coarse patterns under my fingers. Your skin doesn't lie.

What has he done to you? Your gray, brooding eyes, thin lips that have forgotten how to smile, but are finally learning to again. What has he done to you? Your skin, it tells a candid story.

But this is like Braille, a foreign language to me. I am ignorant of even the letters, never mind words, sentences. The meanings don’t register. I am blind, illiterate, a goddamn fool.

And you become an accidental storyteller. Unspoken words, so forthright, that no words said out loud could match their honesty.

Silent sentences, more honest than those I craft painstakingly. As honest as scarred skin.