Page 160 of These Tears

It doesn’t happen. Because he’d put himself inside them rather than against them.

My hand moves on its own.

Halfway there, I remember what he is. What I am. What he has done. And how quickly softness can turn in him.

Still, I brush my fingertip beneath his chin, so lightly it barely counts as a touch.

He looks at me, almost startled.

‘You’re just as good at making fiction sound certain,’ I say.

His expression turns thoughtful as he looks away from me towards the fjord.

The camera comes up quickly, capturing him as he is in this moment – his expression solemn, light teasing every hard plane and old scar while he sits motionless against the impossible brightness of the beyond.

Then he locks eyes with me – the cold reserve slipping back into his – and takes a long, sobering breath.

Whatever had softened in him withdraws by inches. When the balaclava drags over his face, the man I photographed has already disappeared.

‘I trust you know better than to talk to anyone in town about us,’ he reminds me, shifting upright on the machine as the leather complains beneath him.

He doesn’t raise his voice. The threat isn’t delivered in anger, but as a reminder – as though I’d briefly forgotten my place.

The camera lowers in my hands. I look down at it and cover the lens harder than necessary.

The coast remains ethereal. The sun still washes it in gold. The mountains still stand like sleeping giants around us. But the world has snapped back into place with that single damning line.

And I remember, all at once, that I was not brought here to witness beautiful things.

After he tucks the camera safely into the storage hatch, I climb back onto the snowmobile without a word, easing my legs around him. He pulls me closer, replacing the blindfold, then lowering the goggles with the same care he had just threatened me with. My arms close around his waist because there is nowhere safer to put them.

I nearly laugh at the irony.

The roar of the engine devours whatever is left between us.

Sometime later, when the snowmobile grinds to a stop, Elias remains in my arms with tense shoulders, breath moving slowly beside my cheek, as if he’s listening for something only he can hear.

I’m still wrapped around him, arms locked around his middle, my thighs stiff around his waist.

It’s not until he loosens his grip on the handlebars that I realise the cold has started to nip at me. He removes my goggles first, then the fabric around my eyes, revealing me gently to the brittle air.

Our eyes meet. Only for a heartbeat. Then he drops his gaze, quick and sudden as if the contact stung him.

He’s doing this a lot lately. And not in a flustered, shy kind of way.

No.

This is something else. Every time our eyes meet, he breaks first. Does he see too much in mine? Or is he afraid I’ll see too much in his?

Or is it because of last night?

For some reason, it probes the tender part of me like a bruise that I didn’t know was there.

‘You can lose the blindfold and sit behind me now,’ he murmurs, voice gruff.

I wait several beats to give him grief, but ultimately slide away from him and off the machine. My boots crunch lightly in the packed snow.

‘We’re here.’ He jerks his chin past my shoulder.