Page 70 of These Tears

I know that rhythm. He’s doing that breathing exercise, only this time he’s not calming me but containing himself.

Shit. That recognition is somehow worse – that he’s on the brink of something devastating.

I sway, disoriented, but the clock in my head screams that I have seconds left.

Faster, clumsier, I do what I must while my pulse thunders in my ears.

It’s over just as his eyes open.

The look that meets me is blistering.

His gaze sweeps down until it catches my still-bare thighs like a physical touch.

The muscles at his neck work as he swallows. He doesn’t pretend not to look. He doesn’t soften the moment.

I drag my trousers back up with shaky fingers.

As soon as I am done, I lunge past him and snatch the camera from where it hangs behind his shoulder, my hand colliding briefly with it – fucking solid as brick.

‘Ten,’ I grind out in a dare.

I don’t know if what’s driving me is rage or the raw, crawling aftermath of violation.

Because beneath the nausea and fury, my body is brewing a response I neither asked for nor know what to do with.

For a fraction of a second, he stands there.

Then his fist slams the door open. He’s on me again – guiding, blocking, herding me out of the stall and towards the basins, as if we haven’t broken into pieces and barely held them together.

Women in the lavatory stare as we wash our hands and walk out in silence.

The terminal arches wide above us in panes of glass and steel, letting the light and the cold through, but my skin still carries the heat of that stall.

A burst of motion catches the edge of my vision – a businessman with carry-ons, children swinging plush toys, airport staff in navy uniforms rushing about.

The moment slows. Freezes.

We stop just shy of Gate A2.

Elias reaches into his coat and pulls out a set of boarding passes. Beneath the ones we scanned in London are two more.

New destination.

My mouth parts.

He separates them with his thumb, squinting at the print, and I catch my name across the top one.

My name.

I stare at it, my mind refusing to do anything with that information.

But suddenly the pieces start dropping into place.

I never booked another flight. I never checked in for it. I certainly never gave him the details he would have needed.

Yet he’s holding that boarding pass with my name between his fingers.

Everything since the last gate has become a jumble of hands, threats and corridors, each moment blurring into the next. I’ve been so dazed by everything that it hasn’t even occurred to me that he must have planned this.