Page 189 of These Tears

A shudder rushes over my body, tightening every muscle in its wake. It rolls over me in an almost merciless streak, and Elias watches it travel, his face shadowed in the steam ghosting between us. From the bedside table beyond the open shower-room door, the red light on the camera blinks once. Then again.

His humming stops. Somehow the silence after it is worse. It makes the pipes too loud, my breathing too harsh, the spray too severe.

‘People always think filth is something that gets on you,’ he says quietly, his gaze still following the water down my throat as if he weren’t speaking to me at all, but to something old inside himself.

‘Mud. Sweat. Blood… that’s external. Just dirt.’ The spray drifts from my collarbone and moves lower. ‘Dirt can be washed away.’

My muscles seize briefly as the stream tracks over my breast. I push against his chest in a futile attempt to move him.

‘Enough—’ It croaks out of me.

His eyes lift to mine, catching whatever fractures in them when my nipples tighten helplessly beneath the water.

‘Filth is something else.’ His voice lowers as he moves the spray over my thighs. It pools warm around my feet.

‘Filth is what people put inside your head.’ His gaze holds me there, pinned more thoroughly than his body. ‘Until you start believing wanting something makes you twisted. Surviving something makes you—’ He pauses as he puts his lips flush against my ear. ‘—Dirty.’

Heat slams through me. But also… his pain.

‘Stop this.’

It comes out too low to carry over the roar of the shower. Too low to reach the hallway or be useful in any way.

‘Now, Leah,’ he murmurs, the showerhead dipping lower and lower as my breath sticks to my tongue, ‘which one are we washing off you?’

My hands push harder against him. But the muscle remembers what pride forgets: the world narrowed to his grip, his voice, the snow under my back and the image of him flipping the damn snowmobile on his damn own.

So I hesitate for half a second.

And half a second is enough for an idea to catch.

‘Is this because I kissed you?’ I blurt out. ‘Or because you made me taste you and you wanted more?’

Nothing changes on his face, as if I haven’t said anything at all. Then his hand begins lifting my knee higher while I brace both palms more thoroughly against him, just hard enough to feel the refusal in my own muscles.

‘Is that what you want? A kiss?’ I hurry, try to squirm out of his grip. ‘Come closer then. I’ll kiss you.’

His head angles to the side as if he’s intrigued by the shape of the taunt stretching across my lips.

But then—

The water hisses at the inside of my thighs.

My voice is thinner as I whimper, ‘You proved your point. Enough…’

He just holds my leg, locking me open.

A frantic beat passes. Long enough for the red blink of the camera to become something unbearable.

My mind buries it behind steam, behind the hiss of the spray, behind the sickening fact that my body is answering him.

‘Take the showerhead.’

I hear him, but the words don’t make sense at first. The ringing in my ears is louder, the indignation burning hotter.

He guides the chrome nozzle to my palm. My fingers close around it slowly, and the weight of it becomes mine.

Elias leans against the wall, flattening his forearm above my crown and dipping his lips closer to mine. He gives a soft squeeze at my thigh in punctuation.