He was perfect. That was the single thought that resonated in her mind as she listened to him, absorbing his kind words and those little kisses that really were helping to make things better. Each of them helped to spread a calm through her that had started with his words, and by the time he finished speaking, she was settled enough to be able to give him the answer they both needed.

"I want this," she decided, her voice firm and steady. "I love you, and I want to be with you. We're talking forever and I'm being silly worrying about this. I love you," she repeated, leaning up to press a kiss to his lips before turning to give him access to the zipper at the back of her dress. She even moved her hair out of the way, gathering it up and draping the curls over one shoulder.

What Steve would see when he decided to unzip the dress wasn't pretty. Because her mutation was in her skin, it had been a regular practice to 'harvest' strips of her skin - long ones, short ones, thick and thin. Mutants with healing factors had been kept on hand for after each experiment, because she could absorb them and be good as new for the next day's rounds. But the last of them had died (at her hand) before the final round of harvesting, and so her back was covered with long strips of still-healing scars, each around two inches wide and running from her shoulder blades down to her hips.

She wouldn't be wearing bikinis anytime soon.