Page 162 of These Tears

The flashback hits me again – the moment his body pressed against mine, the kiss at the airport that wasn’t a kiss.

The taste of him back at the cabin.

Need sparks low inside me, and I force my eyes to look back towards the town before my body makes another confession my mind can’t defend.

Even after everything, something in me still looks for a reason to let him into the frame.

But what happens when he’s sick of this game?

‘It doesn’t matter what pictures I take now, anyway,’ I say aloud, tightening the balaclava around my face, then slipping the goggles over my eyes. The wind bites harder. As if the cold is deliberately after my skin.

‘Why’s that?’ he asks, still staring forward, his breath suspended.

I hand him the camera, and he tucks it beneath the seat, then settles onto the machine.

‘I don’t have anything to offload them to or back them up with. Can’t print them either. Once the card is full, I either stop shooting… or start deleting.’ I barely push the word out.

He huffs at that.

Slotting myself behind him this time, I pull on my gloves and curl my arms around his waist, careful not to injure him further. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he almost leans into me.

‘Like memories,’ he murmurs. ‘Old ones disappear. New ones are made.’

‘Memories don’t always disappear. And I don’t want these photos to disappear.’

He says nothing for a beat.

His own goggles come down with a hard tug, and he sets his gloved hands on the snowmobile’s grips. But he doesn’t start the engine.

‘Well… you could always delete mine,’ he says, voice oddly light. Casual, except nothing in the set of his shoulders is.

His hand shifts towards the ignition.

‘Not a chance.’

He stops. His chin angles slightly.

I hesitate to clarify. Not because I don’t know the answer, but because I’m still not sure if this demon of a man would even understand it.

Yet it spills out anyway. ‘When I first started coming to you,’ I begin, ‘people told me I was mental.’

‘You are mental,’ he mutters, but it’s too soft to bite.

I snort. ‘I told them the truth – that Elias Crane has everything my camera needs.’

His hands tighten around the handlebars until the bulky gloves pull taut across his knuckles.

But when his back flattens and he starts the engine, that’s the topic closed.

His fists remain tight around the grips regardless.

Though he gave nothing back, my chest feels lighter for having said it. The truth changes nothing about how we got here. Nothing about what he did.

But this truth was mine.

He didn’t take it from me.

I gave it.