Page 104 of These Tears

The muscle rolls beneath the spray as he leans into it. His back narrows towards his waist, but the rest dissolves into the steam and whatever my imagination insists on supplying.

I watch the torrent track down his spine and can almost feel the way it trembles against his skin before gravity claims it.

My eyes flit to the camera again. I blink hard.

The power of Christ compels you.

The glass doesn’t show any of it. That’s all me. My depravity. My hunger that I’ve been ignoring for a long time.

I fight the old instinct that is trying to turn terror into fucking composition. Make a frame out of the thing that should make me recoil.

But I look again.

He shifts to the side.

This must be what watching a wild animal through reinforced glass feels like. Except I know the glass isn’t really protection – because it’s just a frame.

The water shuts off with a hiss that dispels everything. I jerk away from the sight, flip quickly towards the fire for the second time.

But the buzzing in my ears doesn’t stop. My heart drones, frantic. Every step he makes back into the room echoes between the walls.

Like a countdown.

To the promise I made.

To the horrifying knowledge that captivity hasn’t killed the desire – only taught it to hide its face.

19

His feet pad across the room towards the wardrobe.

My curiosity pulls at me. Tilting my head just enough, I catch the furniture in the sliver of space between my arm and my ribs.

Fabric rustles. He’s wrapped a towel low on his hips, exposing the dimples at his lower back. What I saw in the glass is now painfully clear.

When he lifts a tube of cream from the shelf, he smears it over the skin where the protective tattoo film had been. He’s peeled it off.

The tattoo. I’m burning to see it. The stark black against the alabaster.

I had mine done years ago on my hip, and I remember the film stays on for up to five days.

My attention catches on the tube in his hand, then flits to the black lines on his forearms.

He must have had it done after he was released from prison because it wasn’t there last time I’d seen him.

That pocket of time between then and the airport raises a question in my mind. But then the news report about the death of his half-brother and his wife resurfaces unbidden, and suddenly I don’t want to know what he’d been doing. Where he’d been.

Why he hadn’t made contact.

Dragging an old long-sleeved T-shirt over his head, he takes the almost-memory of his naked torso away from me. The fabric clings in some parts, sags in others. A black symbol sprawls across the back – something like a pentagram bent into the shape of a heart.

I squint. It looks familiar.

Does it mean something to him?

And then he snaps off the towel.

There they are – the damning angles and perfect hollows at the top of his thighs. The firelight clings to them ravenously, outlining him in a way that feels unholy.