Love Untouched (Unexpected) by Anne Leigh

too late. He tried but he couldn’t.”
    “Couldn’t?” I was full of repetitive questions but there was no other way for me to satisfy my curiosity. My body was as close to her as I could get without making her feel like I was crowding her. The sound of someone mowing the lawn was faint in the background, the sun was slowly setting in the West, and it was just the two of us. So much has happened within the space of eight and a half hours. The long drive from Arizona to here, with limited stops in between, the undeniable attraction between us was palpable, especially in the car. Me telling her about Ace, and her almost fleeing from me before finally agreeing to stay, this was a turning point, I realized. In swimming, it was coming off a turn, kicking back from the wall, and trying to get to the finish line.
    She reached for my hand and guided me towards her body. Her back was facing me when she had stripped off her clothes earlier. I was not able to fully appreciate what was in front of me until now. Her breasts were perfect, not too big, not too small. Most likely a 34C. I was acquainted with women’s bra cup sizes. I had three brothers. Two older, Zachariah and Jonas, both perverts, who used to order Victoria’s Secret catalogs under my father’s name when Zach was thirteen, and had a revolving subscription to Sports Illustrated, Playboy, or Maxim. My younger brother, Matthieu, was a jackass and a caricature of my older brothers. He was a typical football player, a jock and went after all the cheerleaders. I should send him to Zander so he could learn the right ways of being a pro football player. One who stuck with one girl and didn’t stray.
    Brynn opened both of my palms up and glided them from her neck down to the lower part of her ribcage. Her eyes didn’t stray from mine, as she asked, “Do you feel it?”
    Yes, I felt it. This stark, naked feeling of desire for a woman I was not supposed to have.
    “I feel it Brynn.” My eyes flared with unmitigated desire. I dipped my head down to reach for her mouth but she lowered her face to look at our entangled hands.
    “No Kieran,” she responded, determinedly. “Feel my skin.”
    I refocused on her words, and I felt them. One, two, three of them. She guided my right hand to rest a few inches below her heart, and I felt another one. They were of varied textures - undulated, hardened, fibrous tissue against my skin.
    “Can I look?” I asked, wanting to verify what I had felt with my hands.
    Since we were standing in the shallow part of the pool, the tops of our bodies were above water. I sank down, almost to my knees, and lowered my head to look at what I had felt. The underwater swimming pool lights had switched on so I was able take in with my eyes what I had roughly felt with my hands.
    There they were. Sitting on the lower part of the right side of her stomach were white scars, hypo-pigmented against her fair skin. They were raised, about one or two inches in diameter, and situated closely together, forming an imperfect circle.
    “I couldn’t eat so they had to put a feeding tube through my stomach.” Her voice was calm as she explained what I was seeing. “I had them for months and when one of them got clogged and infected, they removed it and started another one... and another one.”
    “This?” I asked, still trying to make sense of what she was revealing to me. My hand was now below her heart. A long, scarred tissue marred her perfect skin.
    “They opened me up there because I had a bacteria that grew on my skin and it almost killed me. It was months before they could close this.” I could tell she was not sad. She was making me understand what the scars were from without even a hint of melancholy. “My body’s not perfect Kieran. I am all scarred up, but I am not ashamed. I can’t swim and not because I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I was too weak in the hospital to even stand on my own feet during chemotherapy. While my brother was