45 #3
‘You want me to forgive you for kidnapping me?’ I ask, trying to separate all the tangled threads of the last few months I’ve spent beside this man.
‘Everything, Leah. For the blizzard. For treating you poorly. I didn’t know how to—’ He grimaces at himself and bends slightly forward where he kneels, his hands coming down to his knees. ‘No excuses. I’m rough round the edges. A thing never finished and unmade all at once.’
Before he spirals into philosophy, I capture his face in my hands.
‘I know what you did. I know what it cost me. I know what it saved.’ My thumbs rest against his strong jaw. ‘And I can hate the way you took me and still want the man kneeling in front of me the same way I wanted him when he was in chains.’
His mouth closes. His gaze rakes from my brow to my chin until it settles back on my eyes.
‘That’s slightly concerning, you know.’
‘I do know.’ Both our mouths draw into a weak smile. ‘That’s what life has made of us, I suppose.’
My amusement fades almost instantly. A wicked something slips through the ache before I realise with a startling clarity that he has not just wounded me.
Between the blizzard, the chains and the hunger, amidst all the terrible lessons he forced into my bones – he split something open too.
All those wants I’d buried beneath shame, manners and the colourless version of love someone else instilled in me have crawled out snarling.
And now I don’t just want Elias with all his seams torn. I want to know every ragged edge and still put my mouth there. Teeth, if necessary.
‘“To live – that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm,”’ he says.
Even the dogs have grown weary of the damn philosopher and get up to relocate to the back of the house.
I narrow my eyes. ‘Isn’t that the bit Nietzsche immediately calls ancient babbling?’
He tilts his head with slight amusement. ‘You have been reading too much of my bookshelf.’
‘Occupational hazard.’
His mouth slackens by degrees. ‘The words still fit.’
The moment breathes between us as I roll them in my head and keep my attention on his mouth inching closer.
‘Warm?’ I echo his words quietly.
My hand drifts towards the camera on the coffee table.
He halts his movements and his eyes follow my reach, pupils dilating as my fingers curl around it.
His breathing changes as I lift the lens between us, and my pulse turns bright and vicious in my chest.
‘What are you willing to do to be warm again?’ I ask.
The words change him. The blizzard flashes before us; my knees sinking into the white, his shadow over me while he forced the world to narrow down to breath, pride and survival.
He peers at me through the lens as I press the shutter.
‘Will you beg, Elias?’ I whisper. ‘Will you show me how badly you want to be forgiven?’
A shudder moves through him. Worse than fear, more decadent than shame.
‘Forgive me,’ he says, tilting over his knees, invading my space until his hands hook over the edge of the sofa that supports my back.
He looms, broad and glorious as he peers down at me with a punishing gaze despite the words that come out of his mouth.
‘Forgive me for taking you. Frightening you.’
Click. Click.
‘For every time I made you small because I didn’t know what to make of you being brave.’
The shutter clicks again. Barely. My jaw tightens. He doesn’t look away.
I trace the ice in his eyes and the fire they keep. I let the lens travel down his strong chest. Then it stops where his length strains against his trousers.
‘Show me what you’re willing to do for forgiveness,’ I murmur.
A twitch of his mouth. I notice it and stop, waiting to see if it will slip into the dark or continue burning.
But then he shifts the weight to one arm and reaches slowly for the zipper.
‘Are you watching?’ he whispers.
All day I’ve been indulging in him, but it’s not enough. I don’t think it ever will be.
‘I’m watching.’
The zip sounds indecently loud. Through the camera, I follow the flex of tendon in his wrist, the motion of his shoulder and the tension of his abdomen as the fabric loosens. Cruelty and elegance in one. Desolation given symmetry.
His hand leaves his waistband and reaches for mine. My shutter starves for the flick of his fingers as he undoes my jeans.
Then his hand closes around the camera and takes it from me gently, leaving it on the floor as he comes back over me with nothing between us.
As his desire meets mine, he holds my gaze as if looking away would be a sin.
And the pleasure is no longer in being taken, stretched or possessed, but in the sounds he lets escape freely when my core tightens around him; in the way his eyes devour every arch of my body, every broken breath, every helpless tremor until we both unravel.
In the aftermath, with him still shaking against me, there is a damning kind of clarity that washes over me: neither of us is healed. We’re simply learning how to stand inside the hurt together, without building another cage from it.
And I could spend an eternity doing just that.