surely not today

Tamsyn’s gaze was pulled back to Resin’s when the gray and black woman spoke, surprised when she encouraged her to speak freely. Maybe if she knew what Tam’s request had been she would think differently, but she appreciated the meaning all the same. Somehow even with the encouragement she still found her words caught in her throat. Something about holding Resin’s intense, but surprisingly warm gaze made her even more tongue tied than before. This certainly wasn’t how she had expected this conversation to go when Resin first approached her, but she felt herself giving the outwardly intimidating woman a small but genuine smile all the same.

Before she could overcome her embarrassment and ask her question, Resin seemed to throw her a life line in the form of breaking the silence and telling her where the scars across her shoulder had come from. Tamsyn’s ears perked with interest and her eyes fell to the long, thick scars that wrapped her well muscled shoulder. She couldn’t help but giggle softly at the deceleration that the bear had lost, having no doubt at all that the statement was true. She couldn’t think of many creatures that could stand a chance against someone of her stature. Tamsyn’s eyes made it back to Resin’s face in time to see the amusement cross her expression and that alone made an unexpected flutter of butterflies fly though her stomach.

There wasn’t much time to dwell on the unforeseen reaction though as Resin opened the floor for her to explain one of her scars in turn. Tamsyn looked down at her foreleg as her ears flicked back for a moment. She had many smaller scars all over her body that perhaps she could speak about, but none of them were really visible unless she parted her fur to show them. The only fully visible scars she had were the ones that were scattered around her leg and the one that lied where her neck and jaw met. They were easier to think about now that she had laid out her entire story for Zee, but she almost felt ashamed of them compared to Resin’s heroic story behind hers.

Not wanting to disappoint Resin by refusing to join in on the sharing she had started, Tamsyn lifted the paw of her unmarred leg to point to one particularly jagged scar on the inside of her opposite leg near her elbow. It was obviously in the shape of a wolf’s bite, one that had sunk in particularly deep. ”This one is from when my father caught me trying to convince one of the boys in the pack to teach me how to fight. He grabbed me here and drug me back to the den.” There was no real emotion in her voice as she spoke, but she still wasn’t quite able to meet Resin’s gaze again until after she was finished. She was able to smile softly when she did look back up at her again, but it didn’t have the same kind of amusement as it did before. Tamsyn was slowly beginning to understand that she had done nothing wrong in these instances and that at the end of the day she was the survivor in these stories, but it was a slow road and she still struggled with her perception of it. ”Your turn again.”