Page 142 of These Tears

‘Choose,’ he murmurs close to my ear, ‘the zip of my jeans… or what’s beneath them.’ He barely pushes it out.

My fingers twitch.

Beneath the terror, against every sane instinct, a blistering kind of shame works through me at the realisation that his desire and mine are not entirely separate. Even if the circumstances surrounding it are. But with my pulse stumbling and heat winding up from the base of my spine, whatever distinction there was has begun to rot away.

If I was brought to this frozen hell with the devil beneath an angel’s mask, then a reckless part of me doesn’t want only what he offers – it wants it all.

Because the world has taken too much from me. It has taken too much from us both.

A soft moan strikes my cheek before I reach to the side towards his waistband.

But finally, something snaps in me and I stop pretending I want to pull away.

I push the book aside, twist at the waist and start on the buttons of his jeans. When the first pops open, he pulls me closer against him, both arms enveloping me in a hard embrace.

His arms lock around me so tightly I can scarcely breathe, yet his face turns away as though even this much contact burns. The hold feels less like possession now and more like he simply can’t make himself let go.

The sound of the zipper dragging down is almost damning in the quiet. My knuckles graze the solid shape of him beneath it, reminding me—

—that he never wears underwear.

I don’t stop there. The sides of his trousers part until the loosened denim no longer conceals the hard length of him. But before I allow myself that first look—

‘Stop.’ The word tears out the instant he’s free.

My muscles lock immediately.

His eyes squeeze shut. One breath punches out of him, then another, each one shallower than the last, each landing as though something is tearing loose inside him.

And I do something stupid: I let my arms curve around his broad shoulders, palms spread over the sinewed stretch of muscle at his back. Just to show him where my hands are. That despite the terror he gave me, I refuse to give it back to him.

And I wait.

And wait some more.

‘Read.’ He withdraws, forcing me away and turning me towards the fire, denying me the sight of him.

Warily, I reach for the paperback like his demon did not just frighten us both.

‘The sugar and salt mix as his precum leaks onto her tongue,’ I reread the last part. Give it two beats before the rest comes out. ‘And she drinks him by the drop with each plunge and pull.’

Elias presses his face to my neck, but only one hand slides around my shoulder and down my arm in a slow, obscene drag that makes my skin pebble.

My voice falters when I understand what the other hand is doing.

I wish I could capture him like that through my lens. Beautiful and terrible at once.

Even now, my mind still frames what he won’t let me watch: the flicker of firelight over his knuckles, my pale shoulder cutting him from view, the measured movement of his arm caught only in the shadow across the bearskin.

I reduce it to light and shape and composition.

Anything but what he’s doing beside me.

My eyes stay on the page, fixed with a ferocity that makes the letters swim in my vision. But the knowledge still arrives through every broken breath he leaves against my throat. Through the faint shift of his body behind me. Through the awful, intimate rhythm that turns the silence into something that will forever be carved into my memory.

Need has reached the point where my thighs clench with pain in betrayal of myself.

Why aren’t I sickened by this?