Page 15 of The Intimacy of Skin

My body and soul had been in a war for almost my entire life. The intensity came in waves, giving me a few moments of reprieve, though it never lasted for very long.

At around seven years old, I started to itch. Furiously. My parents couldn’t understand that it was bone-deep or that no matter how much I scratched, it wouldn’t go away. I’d scratch until I was bloody, breaking old scabs to create new ones, never able to give my skin a chance to heal.

We thought it might have been seasonal allergies, but my itching was year-round. I went to doctor after doctor, saw an allergy specialist, and got tested for everything under the sun—my only allergy? Cats, of all things.

I was fucking devastated as a kid. Being told I couldn’t snuggle with an animal was the worst thing that had happened to me so far.

If only I knew what would happen later in life. I was prescribed a myriad of different medications to try and curb the need to dig through my skin and crawl out of it. Every night, I’d be slathered with thick creams, swallow a handful of pills, and squirt eye drops into my eyes.

I spent a lot of my childhood wearing gloves and cutting my fingernails down to the nubs. Mom would beg me to stop. Dad would yell at me when I bled through another shirt.

The world was a scary place, I’d found out. Everything terrified me: the dark, loud noises, bugs. There was one thing in particular that scared me the most, and that was social interaction.

Mom homeschooled me right up until I was seven and entering second grade. She had given up, ultimately admitting to Dad that she didn’t have what it took to homeschool her only child. Elementary school was hell for a kid like me.

Thinking back, I could see how obvious it was. The moment my feet hit the school bus steps, I’d feel a sharp jolt of pain that rattled my skeleton and didn’t end until I got home that evening.

The only relief I could find was to scrape away the top layer of my skin, marring it until I got asked questions about my home life by teachers.

“Are you happy at home, Price?”

“Did your mommy or daddy see those?”

“Do Mommy and Daddy ever fight, sweetheart?”

They didn’t at that time. Mom and Dad were still in love when I was in second grade. Maybe my child instinct knew what was coming and had been preparing my body for it.

After a few years of choosing red sheets to hide the stains and wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover my ugly arms, a doctor finally had an answer for my parents. The hives and feeling of bugs trying to nest inside my bones were symptoms of severe anxiety.

I started medication when I was ten. By that time, I had become so desperate for relief that I started looking for any way to stop the need to scratch. The only thing that quieted my mind, eased my worries, and kept my fingers away from the inside of my arms was cooking.

Mom didn’t mind. Dad was too busy snorting cocaine to particularly care, so I started to spend hours throwing ingredients together. I learned how to operate the entire kitchen by myself, letting my parents think I couldn’t hear them arguing in their bedroom.

The walls were thin.

I heard everything.

On the days I didn’t make something in the kitchen, I would stain my nails red and pretend it was fresh tomato puree.

The medication wasn’t helping, so I stopped taking it.

Cooking was my lifeline. When I was cooking, I could pretend the world was good, and I was a good person.

Food couldn’t hate me. It couldn’t turn around, betray its entire family, and abandon me.

By the time I started working at The Arch, I’d started covering my arms with tattoos to try and hide the permanent claw marks there.

Anxiety didn’t plague me as much as when I was a kid.

I wasn’t afraid of every little thing anymore, though I still felt it every so often.

Still, eventually cooking wasn’t enough to ease the urge to rip myself apart.

When alcohol stopped doing the trick as well, I started to panic. But Samantha showed me the world of one-night stands, which helped for a little while.

Then, Samantha and I started fooling around. She was my best friend. The only person I had opened up to. She understood what no one else had before. When we fucked, we spent hours lavishing each other’s bodies until the itching stopped long enough that I felt sane again.

Unlike food, Samantha turned her back on me. She left The Arch, promising nothing would change. My best friend, my shoulder to lean on, the only way my soul could run away from my skin, had left The Arch and left me with it.

Now, I only had whiskey, cooking, and paying sex workers for a night of pretend lovemaking to fill the void.

Getting drunk and making intricate meals at home could only do so much, often forcing me to turn to sex every few weeks to lessen the fire inside of me.

The ink on my skin was far too expensive to fuck up.

Crew was testing the long-lasting war that constantly raged.

The second day he worked with me, he reiterated that he was serious about my not going to the streets for sex.

I told him I was serious, too, mentioning it was only fair.

Of course, I left out the part that I hadn’t planned to because all I wanted was him.

We were nearing the end of the second week of working with each other.

I knew from the beginning that Crew would be great at the job, but he was blowing my mind with how true it was.

He was efficient in everything he did, rarely needing to ask questions and taking initiative on stuff I found challenging.

That pretty boy of mine’s mind was breathtaking.

He didn’t offer up much in conversation, mostly giving snark in response to any probing or teasing.

I hadn’t cornered him again like I did the first day. I’d also gotten rid of all the gum I had stored in my office. Crew was settling in just fine, it seemed, though he often took breaks outside the back exit.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so well. Today, I’d taken a page from Brandt’s book and hid out in my office for most of the morning. I checked in with the kitchen often, making sure nobody was on fire or fucking anything up too bad. Otherwise, I was a self-proclaimed hermit.

My entire body was burning, charring to a crisp.

Every hair on my arm stood at attention, an invisible danger lurking around every corner, making my skin tighten and tighten until I felt like I was suffocating.

The familiar tingle started right at my wrist joint, traveling up to the inside of my elbow, wrapping around the entirety of my arm.

I couldn’t stop shaking my legs, desperate to rid the feeling of nonexistent fuzz dusting over them.

Two days ago, I realized this was coming. I tried to prepare for it, making my house a home to ridiculous amounts of food, some of it burnt from when I was too drunk to tell the difference between two minutes and thirty.

Fuck me, it wasn’t enough. I was out of my element.

Just as I was about to throw my phone in pure frustration, a knock came at my door. After a much-needed deep breath, I called out to whoever was on the other side.

“Hey.” Crew shuffled inside with a stack of papers in his arms. “I’m not sure if I should take this to Brandt or you, to be honest.”

I waved him in, motioning for him to shut the door. “Probably me. What is it?”

“You’re not gonna like this. The company y’all get your produce from hasn’t confirmed shipment like they usually do, so I looked into it more. Looks like they’re shutting down.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to take in what he had just said to me. My fingers twitched, a distinct need to scratch my skin off coursing through me. The front of my skull began to pound, exhaustion creeping up the back of my neck. “What?”

Crew nodded slowly. “Bankruptcy. I tried going through all the alternatives, but…” He sighed heavily, not bothering to finish his sentence. He looked tired. Worn out. Was he losing as much sleep as I was?

“Fuck. What’s our next best option?”

“There’s City Farms, but they’re organic.”

Organic meant expensive. Our budget was already stretched thin. “I’ll have to take it up with Matt. What are these?” I pointed to the papers.

“Huh?”

“These.” I pointed again. “The big stack of papers you came in with?”

Crew seemed to take a moment to catch up with my words.

Something was off with him today, though I couldn’t figure out what or why.

“Yeah, sorry. They have lists of different places we can start a contract with, how much deliveries cost, and stuff like that. City Farms would have the fastest deliveries. If we go with another option, we’d have to switch up our whole damn inventory routine unless we ordered more quantity.

If we do that, there’s a chance the produce will spoil before the next shipment. ”

I was nodding along like I understood, but I couldn’t focus.

The entire time Crew spoke, I was watching his body.

His shoulders were hunched toward himself, and his sleeves were rolled down, covering his arms completely.

It wasn’t unusual for Crew to wear a jacket, but the only time I had seen him keep them rolled down all day was when he was in the walk-in, or the time he noticed me staring at his scars.

Instead of stressing him out further, I picked up the papers to flip through them. “Did you handwrite these?”

“Well, yeah.”

All the words were written in a neat, swoopy penmanship that made mine look illegible.

Every letter was evenly spaced, each one a carbon copy of the next.

Why the fuck did I like that so much? I imagined the way he’d hold a pen, wondering what his grip was like.

How far down the pen was comfortable for him to hold?

And how did he manage all this in pen without a single word marked through due to a mistake?

“We have computers and printers, you know.”