20
The fire crackles away until the small hours, snickering in the dark.
As though even this place finds me ridiculous.
Each sharp snap of a log feels like it’s slicing through another fraying nerve; each hiss where sap meets flame shrieks me back into consciousness just as sleep dares to reach for me.
The light fades slowly, ember by ember, until the fingers of early winter begin creeping across my cheeks.
Elias is asleep.
I haven’t been able to drift off, mainly because at some point, he pulled himself closer and grasped my hair gently.
One broad palm lies sprawled over my upper thigh, anchoring me as if I’m the thing preventing his body from drifting off into nothingness.
I don’t push his hand away.
Over and over, I consider it, but something stops me every time. Because while he says he isn’t comfortable with contact… his body still reaches for it in sleep.
It doesn’t undo what he told me. I don’t even know what it means, but I notice.
Still, his sleep isn’t restful. Not by a long shot. His fingers twitch. Sometimes they clench. Once, his arm tightened as if to pull me right under him. He chokes on air, mumbles words that sound more like damage than language, and then finally buries his face into my neck.
I lie perfectly still because I don’t know what kind of Elias might wake if I try to push him away.
At least now I am grateful for the six months of therapy I had a while back.
The week I broke off the engagement – and set fire to Ron’s things in the back garden with one too many bottles of Riesling at the wheel – Anna grabbed me by the emotional scruff and dragged me to therapy.
When the first therapist turned out to be about as invested as a sunbathing sloth, she found me another.
And another. The last one seemed to have listened.
Pushed, even. I went for six months, long enough to say some of the hard things aloud.
And this is why my mind keeps trying to turn this man into something I can name. Patterns. Fragments. Anything with clearer outlines than the simple fact that I’m lying beside the man who kidnapped me, mesmerised by the way the firelight favours his brow.
Our… ghosts, demons – whatever he calls them – keep catching on the same raw places. Sometimes, they snag so deeply I can’t tell if they’re mine or his.
Rejection. Neglect. Abandonment.
I had to call them out during those sessions, if only to personify the demons enough that they’d start feeling like tangible things. Such things are easier to mould. Easier to break into smaller pieces until they matter no more than dust on a picture frame.
My therapist kept circling back to my need to be indispensable to broken people.
And I thought I’d got rid of my reflex to walk into burning houses with the conviction that I was a fire extinguisher.
I thought I’d never again confuse intensity for intimacy, chaos for chemistry, punishment for proof that I count in someone’s world.
And here’s Elias – a man who doesn’t just live in a burning house; he built it, set it alight himself, and locked us inside. And some old, wrecked part of me is still more interested in why he needs me than in the fact that he took me.
He’s not like me, circling my own small whirlwinds of the past. Everything in him feels bigger. He’s practically a catastrophe with a centre of gravity.
Unfortunately, I’m perpetually drawn to it.
To the thrill. To the danger. To the ridiculous urge to be the one who finally understands him. Every warning my therapist ever gave me seems loaded into this man, and somehow I’m still standing in front of the barrel.
And as I lie here for hours beside him, I hear that old, familiar echo in the back of my head – the one that whispers I was made for this kind of fire. That I can survive him. That it would prove something about me.
I abandon that thought right there.
When his breathing evens out and the fire dies entirely, I stir – just enough to test if I can.
Not even a twitch from him.
Warily, I ease myself out of his grip. His hand slips from my thigh like a curse landing and a blessing lifting.
The moment cold air kisses the fabric of my pyjamas – damp from sweat because I obviously should have listened to him earlier – it stings so sharply, it nearly drags a yelp out of me. But I manage to trap it.
The slippers I find by the hearth do little to fight the night’s onslaught, but I slide them on anyway. My bladder is a furious, pulsing timer as I remove the soaked undershirt and wear just the thin layer of my pyjama top. Then I freeze for a moment, my eyes flitting from my hem to him and back.
I’m not entirely sure I should trust so little fabric to stand between us.
No helping it now – if I went digging into my bag, I’d surely wake him.
As I take a step towards the door, my gaze bounces to his joggers tossed over a chest of drawers. Then to the opposite wardrobe. And finally, to the small, old desk beside it with twin drawers that look far too innocent not to be hiding something important.
I never make the second step.
My phone and passport could be anywhere.
I collect my camera from the foot of the bed and leave it on the desk first. With swift fingers, I start with the bottoms, though find nothing but lint inside the pockets. My gaze darts to the massive swell in the duvet where he sleeps to make sure he hasn’t moved.
Moving to the desk, I slide the drawer out, and it whispers along its wooden runners. Unlike his pockets, it’s brimming. Small hand-carved wooden boxes with trinkets, black-and-white photographs curled at the corners, silver that catches the low light and flickers with something old.
They don’t seem like regular jewellery.
One piece makes me pause – a heavy brooch shaped like a sun, its stamped rays flaring out from a dark-polished centre. I lift it carefully. The dangling plates suddenly chime with the faintest but most damning sound that I’m not entirely certain doesn’t come from inside my own head.
I still until the sound dies, my gaze shifting from Elias to the silver as I trap my breath behind clenched teeth.
Nothing. He doesn’t stir.
Returning the brooch as though it might bite, I move on to a bracelet of tin-silver braid worked into dark reindeer leather. The pieces are old, but well-kept.
These aren’t trinkets. They’re keepsakes. Or maybe even trophies?
I don’t like that last word my mind sputters out.
Trophies mean other people. Other stories. Other hands that might have worn these before they ended up in his drawer.
Whatever I thought I knew before, I’m beginning to realise I have no idea how deep Elias’ darkness goes.
My camera whispers to me atop the desk like it always does, its hunger reaching me all the way from there.
Not now. Not now.
I close the drawers quietly and pivot towards the wardrobe as I keep my eyes on him.
Mum used to hide our CitizenCards when we were teenagers, convinced it would stop Anna and me from drinking when we planned to go out: no ID, no booze. We became masters at sniffing out her hiding places.
I know how to read creases in fabric and how to feel for foreign weight where none should be.
Sure, a wardrobe is the obvious choice, but at least I can’t say I haven’t tried.
So my fingers do the work, ghosting through Elias’ shirts and jumpers. I do my best to ignore his earthy fragrance that hits the back of my throat in an instant.
God, even his scent is an ambush.
And then—
The tip of my ring finger grazes something solid.
My pulse flatlines, eyes darting to the duvet where the bulk of him rises and falls with the slow rhythm of his breathing.
It can’t be this easy, can it?
Pushing my hand deeper, I grip. Pull.
Fuck yes! My phone!
A low, trembling laugh threatens to break free, but I bury it as I check the side-switch by touch. It’s silent – vibration off.
But then the reason it’s hidden in plain sight sits stark and smug in the notification bar – no signal.
Why would there be signal?
This is hell.
The devil doesn’t install antennas.
Grinding my molars, I scan the room in jerky sweeps, desperate for a place to hide this thing. Not somewhere obvious. Not somewhere he’ll brush against in a morning routine.
My eyes fall to the empty picture frames. And hold.
Thick wood, deep backs.
Neglected.
I snatch one as I sneak out of the room and towards the toilet – hoping it’s inside the house and not one of those outdoor boxes where I might freeze my arse to the toilet seat. I can’t even imagine Elias trying to prise me off it.
That sets off a whole new wave of panic, because I realise he hasn’t yet made good on the joint-lavatory-sessions threat from the airport.
Or at least not yet.
I need to stop thinking about stupid shit.
Purpose. Time. Movement.
Without daring to touch the lights, I surrender to the silvery sheen of moonlight slipping between retreating clouds, casting strips of ghost-light through the windows across the sitting room floorboards – as if the sky itself pities me, wants me to see the way out even if I can’t reach it.
On my way, I loosen the hinges on the back of the picture frame, and I clutch it to my chest as I make my way down the corridor that offers no reprieve. The cold, rough grain of the log walls becomes my only tether to direction. I trail my fingers along them, each knot and groove a countdown.
And then—
Crack!
The board beneath my foot gives with a long, drawn-out wail.
My heart lurches, my stomach rolls. The blood leaves my head as if I’ve been yanked out of a cold sea. I hold in place, not even breathing. The skin along my spine prickles as my ears strain. I wait. Every cell inside me screams for silence to speak back to me.
No footsteps.
No fabric rustling.
No voice slicing the night with my name.
Frantic, I shove the phone between the backboard and the white paper lining, tucking it with quick fingers into the narrow space, then bury the frame beneath two others on the cluttered chest of drawers where it can wait until I return.
Exhaling quietly, I spin in search of the toilet.