Page 150 of These Tears

I sink further with the view, but keep my gaze fixed. I don’t avert it even as he exhales. Even when that final shiver wracks through him. And even when his pupils swell into something wild.

His hand leaves the waistband. His shoulders square. One instant the camera is in my hands; the next, he tears it free.

I watch him stalk back into the house, leaving me blinking in the dark with my hands still wrapped around something that isn’t there. The cold that had been gentle turns predatory, crawling under my coat and down my spine, but it isn’t the temperature that makes me shiver.

I tell myself I should be disgusted by the hunger that lives in me. And yet what I feel most is something humiliatingly close to relief.

Maybe that’s the hook between us: he puts his hands around fear until he can call it control. I put a frame around mine until I can call it art.

Somewhere between his hands and my lens, we keep mistaking arousal for safety, power for intimacy, punishment for confession.

Was taking the camera his way of destroying the evidence? As though the photographs are where the truth lives. The proof that it doesn’t is in the part of me that didn’t run when the kitchen light turned on. The part that stayed. Watched. Wanted. Punished him right back.

Because some dark, reckless fragment of me has begun building a bargain I hadn’t meant to: if I tame him, perhaps I can make him stop taking this road of destruction. And if he can keep making me want him, perhaps one day I’ll mistake wanting for a reason to stay.

26

Several hours later, I’m taking off my snow-caked boots and walking over to the fireplace to warm myself after cleaning the path to the smokehouse. I can’t feel my toes, my fingers might have fallen off from the cold, and the sun has already climbed over the white glare outside. The clock stares back at me with its ten-a.m. accusation.

A red apple catches my eye, sneering from the wooden bowl in the middle of the table, and though I remember the tart sweetness of the last one, I also remember what came after it.

My stomach doesn’t care about trauma, though. As I approach the table, reaching for the fruit—

Elias appears at the entrance and tosses a bundle of keys onto the table. They strike the wood with the finality of a guillotine blade.

He’s already suited up with his balaclava on and goggles atop his forehead.

‘What are those for?’ I ask, eyeing the silver.

He then flings a piece of cloth and another pair of goggles right over the keys. ‘We’re going into town.’

My shoulders pull back as a chill slithers down my back.

I glance up at him.

My heart flips. The road beyond him flashes in my mind. The cabin shrinks behind me. No locked doors. No Elias. Hunger forgotten. Freedom.

Then he looks from the keys to me, and the frame collapses.

Searching his eyes for the tell-tale glint of a taunt or warning reveals nothing. Just the stubborn, glacial blue.

‘Don’t tell me one camera session made you so self-conscious you decided to let me go.’

‘No one’s holding you down,’ he says flatly, pushing the bundle of cloth, goggles and keys across the table towards me. ‘You’re driving.’

He turns and opens the door like he hasn’t just put both our necks in my hands.

I look at the keys, then whip my head up so quickly pain bites through the side of my neck. ‘The snowmobile? I’ve never driven a snowmobile!’

‘Not a factor.’ He jerks his chin towards the outside and stalks out.

My mouth drops open.

Is this another punishment?

The red book winks at me from the bookshelf through the open bedroom door. My jaw sets.

I should have skimmed it ahead to brace myself in case decided to re-enact something from it again.