Andrea was dozing with the sheets bunched up around her waist. Slowly, she woke to the feeling of fingers running from the edge of her shoulder blade, to her spine and down the long channel that it carved in the center of her body to the small of her back, and up across the curve of her hip.

"You are insatiable," she mumbled, rolling towards the source of the touch.

"Hardly," he replied.

"Oh, feeling quite satisfied with yourself are you?" she replied, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him.

She looked at him lying there on his side, noticing the burn scars that ran along his back and the backs of his arms. She hadn't seen them earlier, in the dark, although she had felt them as they'd explored one another. But feeling and seeing were two different things. She felt a strong urge to reach out and touch the marks, but she refrained from doing so. Instead she ran her forefinger and middle finger absentmindedly across the stitches on her own upper thigh.

"We all acquire scars along the way," he said, reading her mind. "But it's all in how you choose to frame it. The roots of mariner's tattoos come from the idea of a sort of battle scar, or making flesh the notion of survival. The marks on their bodies were meant to symbolize the fact that they had gone to sea, experienced peril, and survived, changed by the experience. But they controlled the way they saw the experience, and chose to be proud of it, to display it on their bodies. Your scars show your resiliency."

"At this rate, I'll be covered in them before long. You won't be so eager to get me into bed then," she replied jokingly.

"No, Andrea. Your skin is like marble, and your scars are like veins in the stone; they highlight the beauty of the sculpture by drawing attention to its curves, crevices, and plains," he replied, tracing his fingers across her skin with utmost delicacy.

She had no reply to that. It was somehow the greatest and most genuine compliment anyone had ever paid her, in spite of its highly poetic language and metaphor. Yet, the look in his eyes… they were eyes steeped with such sadness, a deep sadness that nothing could ever shake or get at.

"It's funny, the way we admire the beauty of marble, all white and sun-bleached on those ancient statutes, when the Romans took such pains in their day to paint them bright colors," she said, remembering a fact from an Art History class she'd taken as an undergraduate. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

"It's your first time in Rome, isn't it?" he asked.

"My first time in Italy. I meant to go, before. I had a plane ticket. My bags were packed."

"What stopped you?"

"I got a call in the middle of the night. They were dead. I had to go home," she said with a shrug. "Sometimes, I wonder what my life would be like if some things, some of the big things, hadn't happened. Or maybe if they'd happened differently. Who would I be? What would I be doing?"

"Sometimes, I wonder, too," he said, stroking her long auburn hair, suddenly struck with the memory of another auburn, in another place, another time and the smell of her perfume…

"But then, I wonder, what good does wondering do? We are who we are now," she added, noticing the far away look in his eyes. "What good does it do to imagine otherwise?"

He said nothing, just put his hand on her cheek and pulled himself up to kiss her, slowly and deeply. And then, he pulled away, with no explanation and began to dress himself. He turned back to look at her, nestled among the crumbled sheets, a vision of perfection whose future he'd undoubtedly ruined. The good it did to imagine otherwise, he thought, was to allow him to pretend, even for a moment, that the misfortune he brought into people's lives could be undone.

"Breakfast?" he asked, at last, breaking the silence.