27 #2
The coast remains ethereal. The sun still washes it in gold. The mountains still stand like sleeping giants around us. But the world has snapped back into place with that single damning line.
And I remember, all at once, that I was not brought here to witness beautiful things.
After he tucks the camera safely into the storage hatch, I climb back onto the snowmobile without a word, easing my legs around him.
He pulls me closer, replacing the blindfold, then lowering the goggles with the same care he had just threatened me with.
My arms close around his waist because there is nowhere safer to put them.
I nearly laugh at the irony.
The roar of the engine devours whatever is left between us.
Sometime later, when the snowmobile grinds to a stop, Elias remains in my arms with tense shoulders, breath moving slowly beside my cheek, as if he’s listening for something only he can hear.
I’m still wrapped around him, arms locked around his middle, my thighs stiff around his waist.
It’s not until he loosens his grip on the handlebars that I realise the cold has started to nip at me. He removes my goggles first, then the fabric around my eyes, revealing me gently to the brittle air.
Our eyes meet. Only for a heartbeat. Then he drops his gaze, quick and sudden as if the contact stung him.
He’s doing this a lot lately. And not in a flustered, shy kind of way.
No.
This is something else. Every time our eyes meet, he breaks first. Does he see too much in mine? Or is he afraid I’ll see too much in his?
Or is it because of last night?
For some reason, it probes the tender part of me like a bruise that I didn’t know was there.
‘You can lose the blindfold and sit behind me now,’ he murmurs, voice gruff.
I wait several beats to give him grief, but ultimately slide away from him and off the machine. My boots crunch lightly in the packed snow.
‘We’re here.’ He jerks his chin past my shoulder.
I follow the direction with my eyes, turning towards the gap in the trees.
Beyond the last scatter of spruce, the land falls away in a clean, breathtaking slope, and a small town reveals itself, tucked so tightly against the water it looks as if the hill is possessive of it.
Through the glare, I catch the pieces first: yellow and red houses, salt-stained sheds, thin piers needling into a lake, fishing boats nudging against broken plates of ice.
We’ve been travelling for almost half an hour since the break at the fjord.
Half an hour; mostly downhill. Two long bends I felt through his body. A flatter stretch near the end.
I file away every scrap.
Because yes – his eyes have the power to hold me here, but freedom has never stopped pulling harder.
The sun’s as high as winter seems willing to allow, its blessing turning the town below into something otherworldly.
‘Camera…’ I say, unable to look away, as I yank the face cover off and my hair spills in messy curls. ‘Please…’
I hear him shuffling, and the hatch beneath the seat creaks twice. A weight presses gently into my palm – my magic object. I lift it with reverence, fitting it to my eye as muscle memory takes over, and click off a series of shots.
The foreground blooms into solemn bokeh – snow turned to pearls – and beyond, the town pours into focus, basking beneath the sun like something newly blessed.
‘What’s so special about this?’ he asks curiously. I catch the genuine interest in the notes.
‘A dream that became real,’ I say.
Through the lens, everything softens.
‘The town sits like a handful of lights placed with care along the shoreline. The lake looks like a sheet of hammered silver. Endless. Precious.’ Click.
Click. ‘It makes the boats look weightless.’ I adjust the focus, hold my breath.
‘Almost like…’ A deep breath, another shot of the boats.
‘The world below is floating instead of being anchored.’
I glance over the camera with my naked eye, absorbing the unfiltered view.
The silence that drags over the space is so complete it feels holy.
I blink back into the moment as I turn towards him.
He’s not looking at the town.
Those sharp sapphire eyes that have always made my knees shudder are fixed on me, burning through whatever frost was left in the air.
Heat creeps to my cheeks, blooming unwelcome and unrestrained.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘I get carried away.’
He hums, gaze dropping to the snow near his boots. ‘You said you only hunt for the heavy kind of emotion. Wasn’t that why you were at the prison?’
I glance sideways at a tree, its shadow cleaving the space between us.
He’s right.
Before I started coming to the prison, I hunted damage. Cold concrete, bruises in the sky, faces that looked as if they had learnt things without asking to know.
I scroll backwards through the photographs in my mind.
Lately, my lens keeps turning to the northern lights loosening over the sky.
To snow caught in the hush before it lands.
To this little town curled against the lake as if the world has finally gone soft.
To ice preserving the present on our bedroom window.
And to Elias Crane.
My thumb grazes the edge of the lens frame.
He doesn’t belong in that collection – he isn’t safe.
Yet when I picture the last couple of days, there he is, among the aurora and snow and frozen glass, occupying shot after shot.
The flashback hits me again – the moment his body pressed against mine, the kiss at the airport that wasn’t a kiss.
The taste of him back at the cabin.
Need sparks low inside me, and I force my eyes to look back towards the town before my body makes another confession my mind can’t defend.
Even after everything, something in me still looks for a reason to let him into the frame.
But what happens when he’s sick of this game?
‘It doesn’t matter what pictures I take now, anyway,’ I say aloud, tightening the balaclava around my face, then slipping the goggles over my eyes. The wind bites harder. As if the cold is deliberately after my skin.
‘Why’s that?’ he asks, still staring forward, his breath suspended.
I hand him the camera, and he tucks it beneath the seat, then settles onto the machine.
‘I don’t have anything to offload them to or back them up with. Can’t print them either. Once the card is full, I either stop shooting… or start deleting.’ I barely push the word out.
He huffs at that.
Slotting myself behind him this time, I pull on my gloves and curl my arms around his waist, careful not to injure him further. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he almost leans into me.
‘Like memories,’ he murmurs. ‘Old ones disappear. New ones are made.’
‘Memories don’t always disappear. And I don’t want these photos to disappear.’
He says nothing for a beat.
His own goggles come down with a hard tug, and he sets his gloved hands on the snowmobile’s grips. But he doesn’t start the engine.
‘Well… you could always delete mine,’ he says, voice oddly light. Casual, except nothing in the set of his shoulders is.
His hand shifts towards the ignition.
‘Not a chance.’
He stops. His chin angles slightly.
I hesitate to clarify. Not because I don’t know the answer, but because I’m still not sure if this demon of a man would even understand it.
Yet it spills out anyway. ‘When I first started coming to you,’ I begin, ‘people told me I was mental.’
‘You are mental,’ he mutters, but it’s too soft to bite.
I snort. ‘I told them the truth – that Elias Crane has everything my camera needs.’
His hands tighten around the handlebars until the bulky gloves pull taut across his knuckles.
But when his back flattens and he starts the engine, that’s the topic closed.
His fists remain tight around the grips regardless.
Though he gave nothing back, my chest feels lighter for having said it. The truth changes nothing about how we got here. Nothing about what he did.
But this truth was mine.
He didn’t take it from me.
I gave it.