Page 188 of These Tears

My body obeys. His hand trails up my arm as I do, leaving heat where there shouldn’t be any.

When the last of my clothes falls, he hooks them with his foot, scraping them across the tile until they shoot out of the space and land somewhere on the bedroom floor.

Then his other hand plants on the other side of me against the wall. I hear the same metallic shift of the showerhead just as it appears in my vision.

‘Now me.’

My lashes flutter. Somehow, the syllables won’t arrange themselves into meaning.

Then they do.

And my breath cuts into my throat.

The part that leaves me nowhere clean to stand, though, is that his want and mine are not entirely different. It doesn’t make the threat disappear, just makes the wanting harder to separate from it.

I have wanted to see him since a prison table kept him safely on the other side of me. Wanted to know whether the body beneath all that control was as severe as the rest of him – and not just through my lens.

My hands rise, catching the hem of his jumper and dragging it up. The sleeve snags on the showerhead, but he tears free the rest himself and throws the jumper backwards, muscle rippling through the effort.

Then he steps in, crowding me until my chin nearly brushes the hard plane of his chest where the inked chains plunge viciously into the middle.

I reach for his trousers slowly, fingers unsteady on the fastening.

It gives.

As I pull the fabric down, my knuckles graze the unmistakable tension at the centre of him, and my throat works around a swallow.

His eyes drop to my collarbone and stay there as if he felt the movement against his own mouth.

Rough and impatient, he strips off his socks.

Just as my heart is about to splinter, his hand closes around my knee. He lifts it and air leaves me in a sudden rush when he sets it high against the warmth of his thigh, opening me to the shock of cold air.

My hands push against him, desperate for a sliver of space, air and mercy, but the effort is laughable. And still, I can’t make them push him away completely.

‘Why do you keep punishing me like this?’ I ask. No answer comes. ‘If you hate me so much, you can just send me away. You can leave me in the snow.’ I keep feeding the space with worse possibilities, if only to stop my body noticing how close he is. How the rigid size of him grazes my thigh.

His eyes hold mine, his lips are pressed firmly shut, but his hand only slides down the length of my shin in a slow, measured line until it reaches my ankle and peels the first sock away. He lowers that foot, takes the other, and does the same.

A low hum rises in the back of his throat. It might be startling if I didn’t remember the tune from that first night in the cabin. That same fractured melody he offered to the fire while keeping me close.

My skin draws taut as he leans past me, one hand reaching for the mixer control while the other keeps hold of the showerhead.

The pipes groan inside the walls.

The first splash hits the floor between our feet.

Steam begins to curl around us, softening the world.

And somewhere, drowned out by water and his voice, I hear myself whisper, ‘Please…’

The worst part is that I don’t know whether I’m begging him to end this by stepping away.

Or by finally giving me what he keeps holding back.

32

Warm water strikes me.