The scar under his collarbone gets her attention.

Skin still raised. Knotty under her fingers. Scar tissue is singular that way, unmistakable. The calluses of her fingers touch his bloodless skin. Not much feeling there, for either of them.

He laughs and picks up her hand. Moves it away from his chest and up to his mouth. Sucks the places where typing and dishwashing and gardening have thickened her skin. She retaliates by kissing the scar. Wet. Blows cool air on it after, just to watch him squirm.

It's a guess-that this of all things will make him twitch. She won't get to know his tics, not the way people learn those things. Her train leaves in two hours, his in three. She hasn't asked for his phone number, his email, his address.

Not a small scar, not a cut or burn. She puts her cheek on his chest to get a closer look, so that it's inches away. An odd, ugly, not-ugly thing, that scar. Her head moves up and down as he breathes. Up and down. Down and up. Barely any hair on him" smooth skin under hers. Hair might hide a scar like that.

"It was in a rugby match," he says, and his big hand goes over the back of her head, down her bare shoulders. "Guy on the other team tackled me." He taps his collarbone. "Bone broke, went right through the skin. I was sixteen."

She sticks her tongue out and tastes the skin there. No different. Just sweat and something sour, maybe the remains of his cologne. His tone is strange when he tells the story, not bragging, not glib, sober enough, but not sad, not sorry. Matter-of-fact. If she asked, he would tell her about the others, the wobbly star lower on his chest and the slash across his bicep. All in that same voice, that serious voice, and she knows he's gotten women into bed that way in the past.

Instead, she grabs that big hand, weathered and rough in her desk-working fingers, and draws it down under the hotel sheet, low on her belly, to her own line of knotty, white scar tissue. What was furious red for months.

"It was a baby," she tells him, and releases his hand. "Doctor took it out right there, right through the skin." She kisses his scar again. That rugby-playing, collarbone scar. "I was sixteen."