Page 238 of These Tears

‘Don’t stop,’ I complain, my hand coming to thread through his beard as I pull him into me again and take his tongue.

‘Not a name,’ he murmurs ponderously and pulls halfway out of me. ‘Something else then,’ he agrees. ‘Something mine.’

He pushes into me and a muffled cry lodges between my teeth.

‘A name is too small,’ he breathes, ‘and I have two.’ Rocking into me with a slow, devious pressure, he makes the wall disappear behind my back. ‘I don’t want letters on you.’

I make a sound of protest, but it simply comes out too breathless.

‘Something,’ he groans as he pushes in, eyes opening to witness what he’s doing to me, ‘that says the past reached for you and lost its hand.’

His eyes close as the words leave him, his forehead lowering to mine, and then he begins undulating deeply and possessively, lost between violence and worship.

My core clenches around the pressure, thighs tightening as each deep pass pulls another helpless shudder through me.

‘You’ll let me mark you, Leah.’ He slows. Stops, still inside me. And pulls my chin up as he looks down at me with an expression so grave it raises alarms in the back of my mind. ‘Just like you marked me.’

‘Wh—’ I start, but his kiss cuts me off.

The answer moves through me with every slow, devastating sway of his hips.

Mark.

Somehow, it doesn’t throw me back into every warning I have spent months building around his name.

This isn’t Ron who made a promise he had no intention of keeping. This isn’t the hand of a mysterious woman reaching through the past to torment Elias.

This is him and this is me, remaking each other with breath and rhythm.

His mouth slips from mine; his beard is rough against me, and though I can’t see it, I can feel the streak of ink beneath his sleeve when his arm tightens around me: ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’.

My words. His skin.

My mark.

His forehead presses to mine as recognition floods me.

I breathe his name into the narrow space, and it breaks something open in him.

He moves deeper, faster, lost inside me as I’m lost in him. As if all sensation is gone save for the friction between us, my hands on his shoulders, and his hands on my thighs.

I’m taking all his demons. He’s taking mine.

Maybe that is the mark neither of us can see but can definitely feel.

Or maybe the truth is far worse.

Maybe I am standing at the mouth of darkness, holding out my hand, and realising I have been throwing pieces of myself there since the moment I met him – only now realising I never wanted them back.

40

When the snow retreats, the mountains emerge by degrees: charcoal shoulders sprout first, then veins of jagged stone, then the dark earth at their feet.

April does not bloom here. It reveals itself in slow, reluctant sighs, one dark patch beneath the white at a time.

I shift the camera strap higher and hook a thumb beneath my waistband where the unfamiliar ink now covers the last trace of Ron. The shape is hidden beneath my clothes, but I’m still not used to finding something else on that spot.

Still, a strange calm overtakes me knowing it’s there.