Page 186 of These Tears

The memory flashes, his face holding everything in while telling me about his past – and it pulls my focus elsewhere before I say something stupid.

‘I can sleep on the floor.’ It comes out of me quickly. I busy myself with the blankets. ‘I’ll sleep on these.’

I don’t catch the movement until the blankets are gone from my hands.

They crumple beside us as he steps in. It isn’t violent, but it’s close enough that I flinch.

His gaze catches on my mouth, then jerks away. Something passes over his face and hardens before I can catch it.

‘You kissed me again,’ he rumbles, almost accusingly.

Our eyes meet. The wound opens between us with vicious clarity. The kiss Siv demanded trembles in the space between us.

‘And you kissed me back,’ I counter, but soften it halfway through. No matter what had occurred up until now, I don’t want to hurt him further.

‘That’s the third time you’ve done that without meaning to.’

I blink.

Blink again.

Oh…

The remembered taste of vanilla cake floods my tongue – the first time I kissed him in that prison yard. Then the time at the airport. My face flushes with mortification as now I’ve seen some of his torn edges. And I wish I hadn’t done it then.

No.

I’d still have kissed him in the prison.

My face burns as the shape of his pain settles over all those memories.

But in this room, there is more than one wound bleeding. And he doesn’t get to yank me back and forth between wanted and unwanted, then make me feel ashamed. I’ve been there before. I’m not going there again.

‘That’s rich coming from someone who jerked off beside me and fed me what came after that. Who chased me in the woods and threatened me with more filth!’

The muscle in his jaw ripples. But in the next breath I watch the hurt go someplace worse. His eyes shutter. Darkness folds over his brows.

I see his shoulders tightening before he takes that first step towards me.

‘Is that what it did?’ he asks in a darker tone. ‘It made you feel filthy?’

The image of him defiling my mouth fades beneath a flare of white-hot panic.

He continues walking, and the room shrinks around the breadth of him.

I step back. Once. Twice. His hand catches the strap of my camera and slides it over my head with a care that seems misplaced beneath his punishing gaze.

He lifts it and fiddles with the settings. Buttons click. The screen lights up his face.

The path his fingers took tells me he’s switched it to video mode.

My gut folds in on itself before he has even set it down.

‘Elias…’ I try, warily glancing down at the lens, then back at him as I try to understand what kind of weapon he intends to turn my own camera into.

He gives me nothing. When he looks at me, his mouth falls open, then closes again, gaze locking on my lips like a man trying not to drown.

Reaching again, he angles the lens—