Chapter 3
Serena holds what she is sure is an unhealthy fascination with Bernie’s scars. Academically, she knows that they are simply lumps of dead skin and tissue; she’d been a surgeon long enough to disassociate herself, when she needed to.
And yet, the first time that she met Bernie, she could not help but catalogue the raw pink line across the right of her neck, a recent reminder of fractures so expertly repaired by her colleague (really, one day she ought to be nicer to Guy Self).
When they became regular colleagues, she noticed other scars; smaller, white marks - across Ms Wolfe’s forearm, burns, obviously from some variant of domestic disaster, the gleam of an old scar across an elbow from what could have been a fall from a tree.
When they became friends, she noted the top of the scar peeking out from Bernie’s shirt, stark against the warm flush the woman’s second whiskey of the night had brought - Serena schooled her tongue and sat on her fingers, resolutely did not reach out to touch the tip of that neat line, determinedly took another gulp of her shiraz even as she caught Bernie’s eyes with her own, an odd darkness in those axinite eyes she could not bring herself to hold.
When they became lovers, Serena lost herself in the mind-boggling marks across Bernie’s torso, across her back - shrapnel and bullets and plain bad luck, stories from two war zones, reminders that her lover needed no medal to prove her valour, her courage, her compassion. Bernie would let her touch them, trace reverent fingers across the old wounds; needed her to know why and how she kept going back; needed Serena to know how badly she had needed purpose.
And the unspoken lay uneasy between them - Bernie has made Serena her purpose now, and sometimes, neither of them are quite sure what to make of it.