Page 192 of These Tears

His pupils dilate further when he recognises it on my face.

My fingers loosen around the metal before they tense up again. I don’t recognise my voice when it comes out of me. ‘Touch yourself.’

He goes as still as the ice beyond the walls.

For that single, suspended moment, he looks stuck in a hollow that lives deeper than desire. The shadows pull at his face. A window opens into a room he never wanted to enter. His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

‘Please,’ I offer.

He stares at me for too long.

Nothing about Elias is soft when it breaks. But when it does, the violence drains from him entirely and leaves something else in its place.

As pressure coils low in my stomach, I twist away the spray, hating the loss even as the reprieve gives me one clean breath.

His eyes stay on mine when a shudder breaks loose from him, as though the word please has stripped him of everything.

I hold his gaze because looking away would feel too much like loss.

Because I’m starving, too.

His shoulder flexes. His hand leaves the controls. It drops into the narrow space between us. Knuckles graze the inside of my thigh on the way down. I can barely call it a touch, but it still sends my body into vicious unrest. The darkness in me lifts its head at the sight of him obeying.

Triumph.

Hunger.

An ugly kind of thrill.

I watch his face change as his hand begins to move. I witness restraint turning into ruin by fractions.

And with my pulse hammering between my ribs, I guide the nozzle back where he wants it.

Even the water bites into me harder this time.

His hand keeps moving. His jaw sets rigidly. And my control comes apart.

In the next heartbeat, his grip leaves my leg and his palm slams against the wall above my shoulder.

I don’t lower my knee. I keep the inside of my thigh pressed to his, and his eyes drop just long enough to take in the sight.

When they meet mine again, they burn brighter.

His forehead nearly touches mine.

And as droplets cling to his lashes, his gaze tears through all my barriers.

I stop fighting myself.

My eyes close. My chin tips towards the white glare of the lights overhead and I let our demons devour me.

My back bows off the tiles as it crashes into me. The light splinters behind my lids into a million colours. My body detonates. My mouth opens, and this time I don’t keep the sound from him. I give it to him in one shaky moan that leaves my throat raw and my pride in pieces.

Elias makes a rough, wounded noise against my cheek, as if I’ve hurt him somewhere where fingers can’t touch.

Dropping the handle, I hear it clink against the tiles, spraying everywhere. It startles me, because nothing in me has properly returned yet. My skin is still lit from the inside, every nerve too close to the light, every breath working through the wreckage he has just forced me through.

His eyes fall to my mouth. It reminds me what he’d told me… that he never…