Origami Heart (Book 3 - DP series - COMPLETE)

16. Rattled

I nod in his direction, signaling 'just a minute' with a lift of my finger. Turning, I snag a Mountain Dew from the cooler before twisting my face into a pleasant smile and heading for the outdoor sitting area.

"Lindsey," Mike greets, a fake cheer in his voice—though, that could just be my imagination.

"Hey," I respond, taking a seat on the chair across from where Mike's sitting with a pair of long, smooth legs in his lap.

That's when I turn my attention to the woman beside him, prepared to be devastated by the sheer, breath-taking beauty staring back at me. I am devastated, but for an entirely different reason. I blink, consciously forcing myself to keep my expression from faltering as my eyes sweep over her face. She's stunning, no doubt, but the plasticy flesh on the entire left side of her face makes it look as if it's melting, the smooth scars shining against the flicker of the above ground, cast stone fire pit between us.

"Hi," I say to her, not letting my surprise show.

"Hello," she smiles, the warmth in the single word somehow weakening my defenses. "Mike's been talking my ear off about you for the past two weeks. It's nice to finally put a face to the praise."

"Praise, huh?" I laugh, brows lifted as I shoot Mike a look.

"I'm Michelle, by the way," she says, leaning out to shake my hand. "I'd get up and greet you properly, but I got a bum leg."

Ice swooshes from the roots of my hair all the way down into my stomach. To think I'd been judging this woman from the moment I saw her when, in fact, she's injured—quite seriously, from the looks of it.

"What happened?" I ask, concern lacing my words as I let my eyes swoop over her dark legs and notice for the first time that she has burn scars down her left thigh and into the middle of her calf. Michelle runs her well-manicured hand down the scars, drawing my attention away from the injury and toward her face where I try to wrap my head around what she must have been through.

"Pretty nasty, huh?" she says, her tone light.

For a moment I wish I knew her better. I wish I knew how to read her facial features so I could tell if she actually felt as nonchalant about her appearance as her voice made her sound. She somehow looks so comfortable in her own skin... her mutilated skin. A sadness settles in my chest, a self-loathing that exist not only because I judged her before realizing what she'd gone through, but because I'd judged her at all. Even if she had been flawless in every aspect of the word, even if Mike was irrevocably in love with her, I had no right to judge this woman. I don't need to be blindly criticizing others when I've got enough problems of my own.

"Funny enough," she starts to say, "the burn is from an incident that happened back in high school. We had a house fire that sent me up in flames and this was the result." She motions down her body. "This though," she says, bending her left leg just enough to point out a jagged, pink scar near her knee, "is my newest form of bodily art."

I hadn't noticed it before because it blends into her burn so well, but now I can tell that it's rather fresh and raw and very sensitive looking.

"That looks... really painful." I shudder, unable to find a more appropriate word to describe the spine-tinglingly unpleasant sight.

"Eh," she waves me off with a chuckle. "Just call it as it is. It's ugly."

Her fingers slide over the tender injury, eyes not bothering to follow the movement as she shrugs and keeps her attention on me.

"I was in Afghanistan," she starts to say, "and our convoy was taking an ambassador back to the base when a suicide bomber literally threw himself in front of our tank."