Page 133 of These Tears

I can’t think of a single answer that won’t sound like defence, insult, or pity.

Elias looks down at the plate.

‘Last night your hand was on me. Today you ran.’ He holds the moment too calmly. ‘I’m done pretending. I’m done tiptoeing around this.’ His voice lowers as the next words cleave straight through me. ‘Everything in life has purpose. Hunger. Pain. Want. Fear. Damage. This.’

‘What is this?’

His lips remain parted when his blue gaze finds me, but he lets the quiet sit. The firelight reaches his face without softening a damn thing.

He looks at the book in my hands as though he still hasn’t quite decided how badly this is going to go.

‘What it needs to be,’ he says.

Outside, the blizzard throws itself at the windows, one long shriek dragging across the panes.

He steps around the couch, and repeats himself on a darker note, stripped of every pretence he wore for the world.

‘Down on the floor.’

23

Elias sinks onto the white bearskin rug as if claiming his throne, knees spread. He sets the plate neatly at his side. On it, pale, round dumplings sit cold and firm beneath a dusting of sugar. A dark-red spoonful of what can only be lingonberry jam pools beside them.

One of his hands lifts towards me with unnerving patience.

I can’t tell what he plans. He makes obedience look like mercy and turns violence gentle enough to appear like a choice.

And I do make the choice. Because refusing might land me with something worse. Because it’s not really obedience, or surrender. It is triage. It is choosing the lesser wound.

Slowly, I bend my knees and meet the ground several feet from him, but Elias shakes his head once, almost lazily. Then he curls his fingers in a silent command for me to come closer.

I hesitate.

It lasts only a second before his hand closes around me and pulls me in, arranging me between his parted thighs as if my body is his to command. I end up sitting sideways between his knees, one of them against my shoulder. Just as I steady myself, his arm snakes around my back and his scent settles in my lungs. The tip of his thumb appears from the other side and grazes up beneath my chin, tilting my face by a fraction where he can drink my fear in small sips.

His attention slides towards my mouth and stays there. The knot in me pulls tighter as he holds my face angled towards him, then reaches for the plate with his free hand, unhurried, as though anger and patience are somehow made of the same thing inside him.

He lifts a piece from the plate, dips it into the jam and brings it to my mouth.

‘Raspeball,’ he murmurs in crisp Norwegian. His face softens, as if those syllables belong to a gentler part of him. ‘The sweet way.’

It touches my lower lip first. Sticky, with a slight tang of berries. My lips barely part, and his attention narrows to that tiny surrender.

‘Butter…’ Carefully – mercilessly – he presses it in, his thumb following past the seam of my lips until the pad pushes against my tongue. ‘Sugar…’

The taste blooms in slow waves.

‘And lingonberries.’

Beneath my chin, his thumb slides upwards, slow enough to make my throat tense, and gathers the smear of jam from my lip before it withdraws.

He brings it to his mouth and sucks it off, watching me chew.

My heart misfires. I swallow the bite too soon and it goes down hard.

His mouth never comes near mine, but somehow it feels as if it has.

‘Feed me,’ he commands.