Page 215 of These Tears

My mind conjures us sitting on the bench. Siv’s voice chirping behind the phone camera, demanding a kiss and laughing at the stiffness between us.

I remember how his body had locked up, how his lips felt soft and warm against mine. And everything he had confessed before that.

Then I get to the damn video still from the end of the night.

Elias’ posture is stark even through the display, every line of him taut. But his expression, there’s nothing calculating. Nothing terrible about it. Just strain. Restraint.

And me – I don’t look afraid. I’m entranced.

I don’t see the lie. The pretence. Not in the flush of our cheeks. Not in the way his lips had nearly – nearly – met mine.

My thumb hovers.

I press play.

Steam fills the display first. Then skin. Our mouths opening in soundless moans. His hand. The showerhead gleaming.

My heart jerks so quickly I almost stop the video. Heat and shame crawl through the awful intimacy of seeing us both from the outside – frightened yet visibly wanting parts of what happened.

Bloody hell…

A man has never been in this state because of me. Not like that.

I fast-forward with my pulse kicking hard in my ears.

It reminds me, painfully, how he felt inside me earlier.

That wasn’t pretence either. It wasn’t simple desire. It was him tearing something open.

I skip past the clip, hold my breath, and I see it—

My thumb stills over the play icon.

The progress bar stretches far beyond where it should. Not minutes – hours. The camera had kept recording long after what happened in the shower.

‘Shit, that’s right…’ I murmur aloud. In the haze, I hadn’t thought about checking the camera. It kept rolling until the battery was almost dead. That’s why I had only a few shots left to shoot in the morning before it died completely.

With my heart in my throat, I let the frames unroll.

I see Elias sitting at the hearth at first, naked save for the blanket wrapping him. Shadows ripple across his back as the firelight licks the white of his skin and the black of his tattoos. He’s staring into the flames as if they might offer forgiveness.

I fast-forward a little to where I’m long since passed out in bed. Elias moves along the edge of the frame. A moment later, still wrapped in the blanket, he sinks down beside the bed and pulls the duvet higher around me, tucking it all around.

I stop the video.

My palm catches the gasp from my mouth, but it breaks loose anyway.

I start the video again to see him adding a blanket, folding it over me with care that no one would ever believe of him.

That I wouldn’t believe, if the camera had not caught it.

Finally, he sits next to me and watches me for a while. His hand drags across his face, fingers tousling his curls, and he turns away as if looking at me hurts.

My chest constricts.

That breaks something inside me.

In that brief fragment of captured time, he is not just the man who took me.