Page 194 of These Tears

When he looks down at me, a warm kind of darkness streaks his face first. Starkly male. Almost victorious.

It reaches that hidden place in me that stretches in satisfaction and makes me want to do it all over again.

But just as quickly, his eyes lose me without him looking away. Pleasure collapses, leaving his face blank. He opens his mouth, but no breath follows. His hands lift, stop halfway.

A sick weight drops through me.

I had thought I was giving something back to him. But it seems memory has taken him somewhere else entirely.

He steps back. Rubs at his face until both hands press against his mouth. His chest stops moving as his lids flutter closed.

Oh no.

I fumble to push away the shower spray, wiping water from my brows as I shoot to my feet.

‘Elias—’ His name breaks out of me, but he is already turning.

Reaching for him, I try to calm him down, but he shoves me away.

Air surges in where the warmth of his body was.

He bolts from the shower room as if something inside him has torn free. His knee clips the bedside table beside the doorway. The camera rocks once, tips and strikes the floor with a crack that makes my heart stop.

He snatches it up and slams the door behind him.

My hands hang at my sides. The door is still shaking from the impact, and I can’t decide whether to follow him, scream after him or be sick at what my own desire helped us do.

I keep forgetting the hurt in him does not make him harmless. It makes him unpredictable. A man can be terrifying and breakable at once. Elias has made a religion of both.

Curling into myself, I allow the trembling to take over me. I’m slick with steam and need he’d coaxed out of my body. Limbs ache from too much of everything. My pulse is still galloping in my throat, but the moment is already bleeding into a ruined kind of aftermath.

I rub my face hard, trying to wipe away the heat. The water. The shame. Whatever’s crawling across my skin like fingerprints I can’t scrub off – and maybe don’t want to.

The silence echoes when I cut off the water. It winds around many truths and dares me to break the lies that mask them.

But I stand there, naked and dripping on the tiles, staring at the skewed shape of my reflection in the chrome nozzle.

I don’t know whether that last fragile thread of common sense has snapped and whatever happened just now has simply crawled into the space it left behind.

Somehow, my heart doesn’t know whether to mourn or demand more. But tonight, it no longer matters.

Because I can feel him just behind that door.

Trapped on the other side of the same thing that has me sitting here.

The blizzard may have locked down the house, but the past has locked down the rest.

Together, they will make us face our demons again – or we will keep ignoring them until they rise anew.

33

Opening the bathroom door feels worse than that first walk through Stonebrook. At least then, the danger had been waiting behind steel and procedure. Here it is laid bare and wearing my choices.

I ease the door open as if there were a frightened animal on the other side that might lash out if I breathe too loudly. The hinges give a faint creak, and tension coils low inside me as though I’ve stepped onto thin ice.

He’s sitting right in front of the fireplace with his back turned, a blanket draped over him like armour. His head hangs between his shoulders, elbows braced on his bent knees, hands clasped loosely between them – as if keeping them in sight might make them harmless.

The flames throw restless light over the cut muscle along his neck and his damp hair. He doesn’t move even when the door stops crying and comes to rest wide open against the wall.