Page 108 of These Tears

My throat works around nothing as he stops in front of me and I angle the camera low to capture the length of the ink winding across his arm.

‘And what do they do to the heart?’ I ask, glancing up where the tattooed links plunge into his chest.

He starts humming without answering me. So low it seems tuneless almost. The song crawls into the gaps where fear lives, slipping between the crackle of fire and my frantic pulse until the room bends around it.

Every hair along my arms rises.

I lower the camera.

When I look up, my breath cuts short.

He is closer than I realised. His face hovers over mine. His head slants to the side, dark hair falling near his brow as he analyses me with that horrendous stillness.

‘Does the camera let you look at things you’d be too ashamed to look at with your own eyes?’ he asks but then continues humming.

My ribs crack open. He doesn’t ask obvious questions, just the ones that make my own mind turn against me, the ones that strip the artifice from my hands and leave only the ugly truth underneath.

My fingertips press into the hard corners of the camera. I hate that he sees the shame, the old instinct to make myself smaller before a man decides what I am allowed to want.

I start rising slowly as his song dissipates.

‘Did he think you were prudish? Did he leave because he wanted… things?’

I search his face, trying to make sense of his question and attach a face to the he. ‘Ron?’ The name sours the atmosphere.

‘Did he want things you didn’t want to give?’

We’ve been moving in a half-circle without me realising it until my calves hit the bed and I nearly fall backwards.

Breathless, I scramble onto the mattress and snatch a pillow. I embrace it tightly, hold it in front of me like it might make a difference.

Elias sinks slowly onto the bed, slightly too close, but still – never touching.

‘I gave him the things he wanted,’ I whisper thinly.

‘Did you want to give them?’ The words drop rough enough that I feel them more than hear them.

Memory supplies what I don’t ask for: Ron’s hands, Ron’s voice, me giving way.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

I did offer Ron everything he wanted.

But the thought doesn’t settle.

It tilts and splinters.

Because I can name loud and clear what he liked. What he reached for. What he asked of me in the dark with that easy entitlement of a man who never had to wonder whether he should give something back.

I gave.

And gave.

Adjusted myself around his appetite until my own body became fluent in his needs and illiterate in my own. There was no single act I could point to and hate outright. He never had to force me. Because I kept giving before he ever had to ask twice.

My eyes flick open.

I meet the devil’s.