Page 195 of These Tears

My eyes drift past him to our clothes, messily hung over the chairs. Beyond them, my camera sits on the table.

The scent of woodsmoke mingles with the soapy scent of the bedsheets as my attention circles around the room and then back to his spine.

‘I didn’t mean for… what happened… to hurt you.’ The words taste wrong the moment they leave me, but that is the closest I can get without making it into guilt I don’t owe him. His demons belong to him. What happened before does not suddenly make this my fault.

Surely, he understands that?

He doesn’t turn. I hear the crack of his knuckles rebound off the wall ahead.

Taking a careful step inside, then another, I stop far enough that he doesn’t have to feel cornered by me. A towel lies on the table. I take it and wrap it around me before the cold takes a bite of whatever is left of me. The rug beneath my bare feet hushes them to silence as I dare to walk closer.

‘Elias—’

‘No.’

One word. Hoarse. Final enough to land with the snap of fire-bitten wood in the stove.

His shoulders rise with a breath that never becomes another word.

I wait, watching the decision move through him. His head lowers another inch, and whatever I’d managed to reach inside him earlier retreats beyond my grasp.

‘We can’t keep doing this,’ I murmur, crossing to the window and bracing my hip against the sill. His gaze flicks towards the fire, brows drawing together in a vicious strain.

His jaw is set so hard it’s clear not another word will leave his mouth tonight.

The stove sputters out heat strong enough to blister the air as I put on my clothes, sharply aware of my own skin. Every inch of it feels too exposed. Overstimulated. Too awake.

As I slide beneath the covers, my knees knock once against the bedframe, then again. I clamp them together, but the trembling simply moves into my core and hands. It’s not just from the cold – my body doesn’t know what to do with itself after all that. I still feel his hands, the water, my mind is still twisting and slipping sideways into a raw kind of darkness.

The blanket smells faintly of detergent and pine, and it mercifully wrenches me out of my own head.

I open my mouth, a question already forming into something that might make the silence less harsh. But this kind of silence is too tender. Too loaded. A wrong word would break it open and spill everything we’ve both been pretending is not there.

I’m beginning to understand the patterns, at least.

It’s the war in him. The way he locks his body down as if the smallest movement might become something larger once he makes it.

This silence is not really punishment.

Or… perhaps it is.

Just not only meant for me.

I lie on my side where my gaze follows the slope of his shoulder from the other side of the room. His fingers curl and flex. Even now, he keeps his back to me as though looking my way might start something he no longer trusts himself to stop.

In the quiet, I gather the pieces of myself and turn towards the wall. I don’t let the shadows become questions. Because the moment I ask myself what this is, my insides turn. There is no safe word for it. Nothing I can hold up to the light without seeing the teeth marks in it.

We are not anything, I reason with myself.

He took me. Dragged me into this frozen wilderness.

So why is my mind scrambling for meaning? Why is my chest aching with questions whose half-answers bring more questions?

The ugliest thought yet crawls in: if Melody were still alive, would I even be here?

I know she hurt him and used him, but her presence still looms, suddenly making me wonder whether I’m simply standing in a place she once occupied.

Nausea climbs my throat as my chest draws in.