16 #2
After gathering the rest of the ingredients, I’m back in the kitchen.
The cheese is grated, spices lined up, and caps go into the broth until they soften.
Then I lay them out and dress them with cheese and seasoning before sliding them into the oven.
The door shuts with a dull thunk, underscoring the rural hell that keeps closing in around me.
The sound dies slowly, intent on leaving one last thread of unease behind.
Elias is still outside when dinner is ready. I can hear the indoors settling around his absence – the occasional creak, the low hush of the fire, the faint whistle of wind worrying at the seams.
I take advantage of it.
In the bedroom, I pull on a jumper and warm joggers. My skin aches as it remembers what the cold taught me on the porch.
When I start for the kitchen, my eyes catch on the camera sitting atop the desk, and it reels me in.
Like a flower turning towards the sun, I reach for it – its weight familiar. It irons out the edges of the world by a fraction. Enough to breathe and pretend – for one minute – that looking through a lens is the same as having distance.
‘I thought you didn’t know how to cook.’ The words spill from the doorway, followed by the clean, wintry scent of the outdoors.
I hadn’t even heard him come in.
Twisting at the waist, I look back.
He’s braced with his arms hooked high above the frame, too big for the doorway, as if the house itself is trying to hold him back and failing.
I don’t step into the cosy little bubble his tone invites. Not after the lashing. I meet his gaze without a smile and offer no response.
His mouth presses into a thin line. His gaze drops from mine and stays on the floor a guilty little second too long.
That drives some semblance of hope into my bones. Hope… that he’s still human.
After I flick the power switch of the camera with my thumb, I pop off the lens cap and bring it up while correcting the exposure. The firelight needs special treatment. Especially on a body like that.
The first shot resounds in the quiet. And my obsession floods me with a warm but restless sensation.
As always, he goes perfectly motionless, letting me take from him.
The part of me with some sense left recoils at the idea of him letting me do anything as if things between us can still be offered innocently. As if he didn’t drag me here, freeze me, frighten me. And now stands in the doorway like a subject for my lens waiting for direction.
But in that moment, I decide he is one. In this moment – my moment – when he stands so still, he is mine to instruct.
I hazard one slow step over the floorboards, the shutter stealing fractions of him in small, quiet bites. His eyes track the lens. Those curls fall loose over his forehead as his head dips a little with my approach – an instinct, almost courteous.
‘Those demons again?’ he whispers.
‘Look up,’ I say.
He does it slowly. The beard catches the firelight, dark bristles drinking the glow and throwing it back in broken copper. Through the lens it looks almost warm. Almost safe. And my mind does that treacherous thing where it wonders – if I threaded my fingers through it, would they come away singed?
I zoom in. The rest of the room and pain and soundless screams dissolve into a blur as his jawline fills the frame.
My heart does the stupid lurch it always does when light starts flirting with me.
It traces the edges of him, skims the delicate shadow under his lower lip and pools in the shallow dip at the corner of his mouth.
There’s a softness that doesn’t fit his violence, and that contradiction is what hooks me.
It’s beauty and threat layered on top of each other until I can’t tell which I’m reacting to.
Click. Click. Click.
I follow the line down, letting the lens graze his throat. Fire paints him in gradients – amber along tendon, charcoal where it curves into shadow. Winter and heat in the same place, refusing to blend.
His Adam’s apple rises, falls – as if he’s swallowing words too delicate for the moment.
I remember the candles in the studio I used to rent, the way wax dripped and hardened over the models, and how they never quite understood why the moment just before it stung mattered more to me than the pain itself. That in-between.
‘Pull at your collar,’ I whisper, the shutter catching every flex of his thick forearm as it descends and obeys.
The world shrinks neatly to frame and focus, to light and shadow and the soft mechanical sound of the camera that drowns out everything else.
It’s always been easier this way – when I’m not required to be a person, only an eye. When I let sensation devour me.
His chin lowers, throat tightening, eyes tracking me with that exact shade of winter ice even as the firelight tries – and fails – to soften it. The camera reads the contrast in all its perfection.
‘Run your fingers through your hair,’ I murmur.
He reaches too quickly; too practical, too intuitive.
‘No.’ My voice cuts low. ‘Do it slow.’
His hand freezes mid-air. For a heartbeat he’s still life: tension suspended, intent laid bare. His gaze doesn’t falter; it bores right past the lens, past the space between us, straight into the part of me that I keep boarded up.
The camera shutter moans for him.
‘That’s good,’ I breathe.
He swallows – a small quake in his neck. I can’t tell if he’s still following my demons, or if his have risen to meet them.
His fingers finally comb through the curls, dragging them back. The strands spring free and fall into ordered chaos.
‘More of that,’ I hear myself say, as if I’m speaking to the fire, not the man.
The habitual pull starts – the urge to push him further, to chase the moment where guilt turns into something raw, more desperate. I want to tell him to stretch the jumper, bare his ribs, let me frame the damage and call it control.
My mouth opens. The next instruction already forming—
But as the scent of pine reaches the back of my throat, my tongue tangles and blocks the air.
I lower the camera before I start the war with myself and jerk back.
I hadn’t noticed the space between us narrowing. He angles his head, eyes on mine, his gaze settling on me with the patience of a wild beast.
And reality rushes back in.
The little clock ticks my sense away in the sudden, oppressive silence.
‘Demons gone?’ he whispers after two intakes of breath.
I clench my teeth together as I look down and stare at the off button of the camera, pressing it slowly.
I nod solemnly even though I know they’re far from gone. They’re writhing. Screaming. Enraged that I’ve cut them off in the climax of their need.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘My turn.’