She was in a car accident, once. She was never able to remember exactly what had happened.

She had been in the passenger seat, watching the countryside roll by. She'd been sitting on a curb a kilometre away from the wreck with her knees pulled up to her chest and blood dripping from her forehead to her jumper. Everything in between had only been a brilliant, shrieking crush of sound and motion. She had to be told later how she'd let herself out of the car and started walking, walking, walking, too small and quiet for anyone to notice until she was already gone.

John settles his hands on her arms like he doesn't know what to do with her, and she feels the same glossy, bubble-headed shock she did then. She feels like fingers right before someone lets go of the rubber band stretched tight around them. Her hands' pressure against his chest through the pillow loses its directed force. She leans into his touch and his breaking voice with a hard, shaking exhale.

"You're not the only skin guy," she says, in disconnected bafflement, "There are - 'skin guys'. In the plural."

Her throat bobs in a swallow, which she distantly regrets, the taste of a fluid she hesitates to call amniotic copper-sweet on the back of her tongue.

"Walk me through it," she tells him, like she has a thousand times.