Chapter 30 Elle
Elle
The next evening
I can hear the rain outside. Drops tapping onto the tin roof protecting us. Sterling and I have been stuck inside the shack because of the wet autumn weather. But it’s the perfect excuse to be right by his side the entire day.
On the nightstand, I look at Stan’s wristwatch resting there. I haven’t been wearing it. I noticed how subtly upset Sterling gets whenever I wear it. So I stopped. But I do look at it from time to time, merely for the fact that there aren’t any clocks in the shack.
At this moment, it’s seven in the evening, in the middle of a brisk September. The bed is warm with the memory of dinner, of smiles that felt so soft that my heart feels full.
Sterling sits against the headboard, half in shadow, his skin kissed by the firelight. The way he watches me, steady and unblinking, makes the rest of the world fall away until there’s only this moment.
I crawl toward him without thinking, drawn the way I always am when it comes to him. I press myself to his side, feeling how he breathes deeply when he pulls me even closer. The quiet between us feels like it could last forever if we let it.
His hand drifts over my spine. I close my eyes, sinking into his touch. I could stay like this. I want to. But I know what’s coming. He offers more than himself on nights like this, when the world feels far enough away that it’s easy to pretend we’re the only two people left breathing.
His fingers still briefly against the small of my back, then start moving again, slower this time. “I’ll tell you,” Sterling murmurs, low and rough, like the words cost him. “Whatever you want to know.”
I feel it in my chest first. This quiet breaking of something I’m not ready to name. The offer tempts me more than it should. It always has. But lately, it’s been harder not to take it.
Still, I hesitate. Because the truth doesn’t feel safe.
It feels rather unforgiving. And I’m afraid if I remember it all, I might lose moments like this with Sterling.
Where Sterling’s arms are my shelter, where the past can’t touch us, where I’m his and he’s mine.
And he won’t leave me because he thinks that’s what’s best for me.
That’s the possibility I’m terrified of the most. That he’ll ask me the way Stan said it to me back in the cabin. If I wanted it, he’d disappear.
But just as Stan was wrong, Sterling would be too, because all I want is for Sterling to stay. I can’t part with him. Not now, not ever. Not even if the truth is a harsh reality where the world won’t welcome us with the same warmth.
I tuck my face into his chest, breathing him in. “You don’t have to,” I whisper, the words slipping out before I can second-guess them.
He doesn’t answer right away. He continues to trace circles against my skin. “I know,” he says, quiet and certain.
I tilt my head up and find his gaze already on me. Heavy and steady, so full of things he’ll never say unless I ask him to. “I’m scared,” I confess, barely breathing out the words.
He brushes his fingers along my cheek. “Be scared,” he whispers. “But stay.”
His mouth finds mine a moment later, slow and devastating, kissing me in this fleeting, fragile moment. But I want to stay lost in the dream a little while longer.
When he slides over me and peels away the layers between us with careful hands, I let him take me deeper into the only kind of memory I want to keep. The one we’re making now, where I move before I can lose my nerve, feeling the raw strength of him inside of me.
He waits, head tilted low, letting me decide how this goes. He’s offering himself without reservation. The sheet is soft in my hands, trembling slightly from the beat of my heart.
I guide us so that I’m sitting on his lap, taking in his entire length, and shivering in a way that’s frightfully far too delightful for the tension behind his gray eyes.
I slowly move my hips, drawing out the time passing through us. My fingers thread through his hair, tugging until he’s breathing unevenly.
“Sterling,” I whisper, my voice trembling with a feeling bigger than fear. “Can I blindfold you?”
He lifts his head slowly, the dim light catching the sharp line of his jaw, and the storm brewing behind his eyes. But he doesn’t question or hesitate. Instead, he reaches for my hand, pressing it to his chest, right over his heart. “You can do anything you want to me,” he says. “Anything, Elle.”
The weight of his trust, his surrender, is so unguarded. I take it, leaving my palm on his beating chest. I feel his pulse race and see his pupils dilate.
I reach for the sheet. The edge of it comes free in my hands with a quiet pull, worn cotton giving way without a fight. I tear a strip with fingers that don’t feel steady, don’t feel sure, but keep going anyway.
He doesn’t look away. He watches the whole time, silent and still, as if the waiting itself is part of his offering. He sits up without needing to be asked and lowers his head.
I wind the cloth around his eyes, not tight but firm enough that no light could slip through. His breath grazes my wrist while I knot it behind his head. When I’m done, he stays still, waiting.
I straddle his lap, knees on either side of his hips, and let my hands trail down his chest, tracing the hard muscles that ripple under my touch.
“You trust me,” I murmur, more thought than statement.
“I do,” he says with so much certainty.
I feel his answer everywhere. In his voice, in his hands resting on my waist, in how he lets me guide him without the smallest hint of resistance.
I reach down between us to bring his hand where I need him most. It’s slow, intentional, and claiming.
He groans low in his chest. He lets me set the pace, lets me take what I need from him.
And I do. I sink onto him, over and over, so slowly, savoring every stretch and every inch of him.
The blindfold on him makes it easier. It makes it feel like no one can see me falter, not even him. I rock against him, the exhilaration filling me when everything else threatens to spin apart.
When I find my voice, broken and breathless, I ask the question I’ve been running away from for so long. “Tell me, Sterling,” I whisper and moan. “Who was I before you saved me?”
Sterling’s hands tighten on me in his silent response. He’s blindfolded, helpless to do anything but feel every slow, dragging roll of my hips against his and every shuddered breath I steal from him.
His jaw clenches under the weight of his restraint returning. I can feel it, even though he isn’t speaking. I set the rhythm. Torturously slow. A rhythm meant to tease the truth out of the both of us.
He’s hesitating again. So I lean in, brushing my mouth against the shell of his ear. “I remember…a fire,” I whisper, my lips moving to the side of his throat. “A house. My family’s home. It was burning.”
I roll my hips some more, swifter this time, dragging a broken groan from his throat.
“Was that because of you, Sterling?”
For a while, there’s only the sound of our breathing in the growing dark. His fingers flex against my skin when he says, “Yes.”
The word lands deep in me, deeper than I expected. It cracks open an old wound that’s been festering in the back of my mind.
I move again, slower this time, hovering before I take him back in.
I groan. He gasps. My hands run over his shoulders.
He shivers as I press my breasts onto his chest, seeking friction.
His heart beats so hard against my touch.
He loses his breath, lips parted and panting.
His body says what his words don’t. Regret’s stitched into every rigid line of him.
The next question tears itself free from me before I can stop it. “And the people inside,” I whisper. “My parents. Was it you who I saw…kill them?”
For a long time, he doesn’t speak. Then a breath leaves him, dragged out of him as though he’s carried the ugly truth for far too long. “Yes.”
It’s a gut-wrenching confession. An unbearable truth lying bare between us.
I press my forehead against his, breathing him in to steady myself even as the memory claws through—smoke choking my lungs, my younger brother sobbing into my shirt, the sickening crack of bodies breaking, and the harrowing howls of pain that followed.
And all the red I saw, from my parents’ spilled blood sliced out of them and from the flames engulfing the home I only knew then.
I’ve made plenty more homes with Sterling ever since.
“Did you know I was there with my little brother?” I ask, moving over him like the rhythm might keep us both from breaking apart.
His hands tighten at my waist, trembling now. “No,” he grinds out. “I didn’t know. Not until after.”
He lets out a broken breath. It’s another crack in the armor he’s worn so long. “I saw you,” I murmur, almost to myself. “Through the closet slats. You were wearing all black and an older mask.”
Sterling shudders beneath me, the tension radiating off him. “I didn’t see you,” he says, voice shaking. “Not until later. When you were running. I was outside. Saw you carrying him out of the place. Both of you were…burning.”
The rawness in his voice splinters deep inside me. But I keep moving against him, slow and relentless, forcing us both to stay in this moment.
“I never forgot you,” he rasps.
My eyes close, tears slipping hot and silent. Even knowing he tore that life out from under me, he’s still here, still holding on.
I move again, deeper this time. Sterling’s head drops back. My lips brush his, featherlight despite the heaviness between us. I don’t mean to ask, but it falls out of me anyway. “Should I hate you for it, Sterling?” I whisper.
He stops breathing for long enough to worry me. “You should.”
Wrong. He’s wrong.