Page 112 of These Tears

I don’t push his hand away.

Over and over, I consider it, but something stops me every time. Because while he says he isn’t comfortable with contact… his body still reaches for it in sleep.

It doesn’t undo what he told me. I don’t even know what it means, but I notice.

Still, his sleep isn’t restful. Not by a long shot. His fingers twitch. Sometimes they clench. Once, his arm tightened as if to pull me right under him. He chokes on air, mumbles words that sound more like damage than language, and then finally buries his face into my neck.

I lie perfectly still because I don’t know what kind of Elias might wake if I try to push him away.

At least now I am grateful for the six months of therapy I had a while back.

The week I broke off the engagement – and set fire to Ron’s things in the back garden with one too many bottles of Riesling at the wheel – Anna grabbed me by the emotional scruff and dragged me to therapy. When the first therapist turned out to be about as invested as a sunbathing sloth, she found me another. And another. The last one seemed to have listened. Pushed, even. I went for six months, long enough to say some of the hard things aloud.

And this is why my mind keeps trying to turn this man into something I can name. Patterns. Fragments. Anything with clearer outlines than the simple fact that I’m lying beside the man who kidnapped me, mesmerised by the way the firelight favours his brow.

Our… ghosts, demons – whatever he calls them – keep catching on the same raw places. Sometimes, they snag so deeply I can’t tell if they’re mine or his.

Rejection. Neglect. Abandonment.

I had to call them out during those sessions, if only to personify the demons enough that they’d start feeling like tangible things. Such things are easier to mould. Easier to break into smaller pieces until they matter no more than dust on a picture frame.

My therapist kept circling back to my need to be indispensable to broken people. And I thought I’d got rid of my reflex to walk into burning houses with the conviction that I was a fire extinguisher. I thought I’d never again confuse intensity for intimacy, chaos for chemistry, punishment for proof that I count in someone’s world.

And here’s Elias – a man who doesn’t just live in a burning house; he built it, set it alight himself, and locked us inside. And some old, wrecked part of me is still more interested in why he needs me than in the fact that he took me.

He’s not like me, circling my own small whirlwinds of the past. Everything in him feels bigger. He’s practically a catastrophe with a centre of gravity.

Unfortunately, I’m perpetually drawn to it.

To the thrill. To the danger. To the ridiculous urge to be the one who finally understands him. Every warning my therapist ever gave me seems loaded into this man, and somehow I’m still standing in front of the barrel.

And as I lie here for hours beside him, I hear that old, familiar echo in the back of my head – the one that whispers I was made for this kind of fire. That I can survive him. That it would prove something about me.

I abandon that thought right there.

When his breathing evens out and the fire dies entirely, I stir – just enough to test if I can.

Not even a twitch from him.

Warily, I ease myself out of his grip. His hand slips from my thigh like a curse landing and a blessing lifting. The moment cold air kisses the fabric of my pyjamas – damp from sweat because I obviously should have listened to him earlier – it stings so sharply, it nearly drags a yelp out of me. But I manage to trap it.

The slippers I find by the hearth do little to fight the night’s onslaught, but I slide them on anyway. My bladder is a furious, pulsing timer as I remove the soaked undershirt and wear just the thin layer of my pyjama top. Then I freeze for a moment, my eyes flitting from my hem to him and back.

I’m not entirely sure I should trust so little fabric to stand between us.

No helping it now – if I went digging into my bag, I’d surely wake him.

As I take a step towards the door, my gaze bounces to his joggers tossed over a chest of drawers. Then to the opposite wardrobe. And finally, to the small, old desk beside it with twin drawers that look far too innocent not to be hiding something important.

I never make the second step.

My phone and passport could be anywhere.

I collect my camera from the foot of the bed and leave it on the desk first. With swift fingers, I start with the bottoms, though find nothing but lint inside the pockets. My gaze darts to the massive swell in the duvet where he sleeps to make sure he hasn’t moved.

Moving to the desk, I slide the drawer out, and it whispers along its wooden runners. Unlike his pockets, it’s brimming. Small hand-carved wooden boxes with trinkets, black-and-white photographs curled at the corners, silver that catches the low light and flickers with something old.

They don’t seem like regular jewellery.