19 #2
He is closer than I realised. His face hovers over mine. His head slants to the side, dark hair falling near his brow as he analyses me with that horrendous stillness.
‘Does the camera let you look at things you’d be too ashamed to look at with your own eyes?’ he asks but then continues humming.
My ribs crack open. He doesn’t ask obvious questions, just the ones that make my own mind turn against me, the ones that strip the artifice from my hands and leave only the ugly truth underneath.
My fingertips press into the hard corners of the camera. I hate that he sees the shame, the old instinct to make myself smaller before a man decides what I am allowed to want.
I start rising slowly as his song dissipates.
‘Did he think you were prudish? Did he leave because he wanted… things?’
I search his face, trying to make sense of his question and attach a face to the he. ‘Ron?’ The name sours the atmosphere.
‘Did he want things you didn’t want to give?’
We’ve been moving in a half-circle without me realising it until my calves hit the bed and I nearly fall backwards.
Breathless, I scramble onto the mattress and snatch a pillow. I embrace it tightly, hold it in front of me like it might make a difference.
Elias sinks slowly onto the bed, slightly too close, but still – never touching.
‘I gave him the things he wanted,’ I whisper thinly.
‘Did you want to give them?’ The words drop rough enough that I feel them more than hear them.
Memory supplies what I don’t ask for: Ron’s hands, Ron’s voice, me giving way.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I did offer Ron everything he wanted.
But the thought doesn’t settle.
It tilts and splinters.
Because I can name loud and clear what he liked. What he reached for. What he asked of me in the dark with that easy entitlement of a man who never had to wonder whether he should give something back.
I gave.
And gave.
Adjusted myself around his appetite until my own body became fluent in his needs and illiterate in my own. There was no single act I could point to and hate outright. He never had to force me. Because I kept giving before he ever had to ask twice.
My eyes flick open.
I meet the devil’s.
He is now inches from me. And the question that burns inside me, he voices aloud:
‘What did you ask of him in return?’
The world disappears.
Silence doesn’t just swallow the room. It swallows every thought save one word that begins to chime inside my skull: Nothing.
At least, nothing I ever asked for plainly. Nothing that didn’t come wrapped in an apology.
I swallow it all down. Steel myself against the ugly things Elias is tearing out of me.
‘What did you?’ I risk.
We gaze at each other. Two wounded creatures staring across a line neither of us seems able to cross.
‘I asked for things,’ he whispers. ‘But my asking didn’t matter.’
My heart climbs up my chest and hooks to my throat.
‘Did Arthur hurt you?’
‘No,’ is the answer he fires off immediately. ‘You wanted to touch but you couldn’t. I didn’t want to be touched but I still was.’
There’s a heavy pause between one moment and the next. Like the last breath before the eyes close and the heart stops.
Elias reaches for the camera.
My fingers tighten on instinct. Too late.
He takes it from me with a tranquillity that feels worse than force.
The strap slides from my neck, the weight leaves my shoulders, and the shivering thing inside me lurches after it. My weapon. My shield.
Anger flashes so hard it nearly steadies me. He’s taken everything – my phone, the road, my sleep. Now he takes the last thing that lets me take in the world by safe fractions.
Without it, there is nothing between us.
No lens or frame.
No distance.
Only him and me.
‘You’re very taken by my chains. Choose,’ he murmurs. ‘Just the chains or the rest of me? Which do you want to touch?’
My fists clench around the pillow. His gaze falls to it, then lifts back to my face. He reaches for it slowly.
I pull it tighter against myself.
His hand stops. He doesn’t try again, just leaves his fingers curved into the corner while the decision sits horribly and undeniably in my grip.
Eventually, I loosen my hold, and he takes it from between us.
‘Elias, I don’t know what you want me to—’
He stills, jaw locking so suddenly the rest of my sentence never makes it out.
His nostrils flare and his eyes go distant for one daunting heartbeat before fixing on me again.
Have I found the edge of him, the one that might turn my refusal into his punishment?
‘You do,’ he says, but it isn’t cruel. It’s not an override. It’s not even force.
It’s the truth.
His eyes hold mine with that hard shape of ruin as he lowers the pillow beside him.
‘This? This is my demon. I choose your touch. You choose where it goes.’
I choose.
It rebounds through me as if it were a bell struck somewhere in my breastbone.
And something about it begins to sculpt itself into a different shape.
He has put the thing he fears between us – touch – and then handed me the boundary.
The horror of it all is that I understand this language.
He is not erasing my pain, yet has found where it bleeds, and he is pressing his thumb against the bruise too tenderly to call it pressure.
And I feel that low and dark curl of decadence inside me. Because the truth is worse than the words that hold it: I don’t want to fight this part.
Not when he wants my hand where hunger starts and mercy lives.
He waits for me. Patience holds him motionless, but it makes the uncertainty in me all the worse.
And though I hate him for this, for tracing the outlines of the truth, for forcing me into the blizzard, for taking me, for keeping me captive—
That wrongness in me still reaches out for that darkness.
I unclench my fist. Lift my hand slowly.
My hand – not my fear.
My choice – not his appetite.
His chin tilts slightly, exposing more of his throat. His shoulders remain rigid.
I don’t touch the skin.
I don’t touch the ink.
I reach for his temple. Slowly, I run my fingers over the warmth of his hair and thread them through the curls.
His body locks beneath my hand. A tremor runs over him, so slight I’m not even sure it’s there.
His eyes snap shut. His shoulders stiffen further.
As if softness is the thing he never learnt to survive.
‘That wasn’t one of the choices,’ he whispers breathily.
My fingers stop moving but remain entangled with his hair.
‘No,’ I respond. ‘But it was mine.’
His throat works. The ruin on his face is quieter for a moment.
Worse somehow.
‘Again.’
The word has the weight of a command, but there’s barely enough voice behind it to carry one.
And I run another slow sweep, combing the thick, soft strands.
His next breath leaves him unevenly, catching once on the way out before his weight sinks a fraction deeper into the mattress. His eyes never open to meet mine.
Carefully then, as if one wrong move might turn this into something wrong, he lowers himself onto the pillow.
The duvet shifts as he pulls it over his hips, then over me too, covering us both in the same quiet motion.
Why can’t I stop touching him?
His eyes open then close again – each blink slower than the last as my fingers move over him and he seems to realise I’m not asking for anything back.
So I keep going. Slow and rhythmic and gentle.
Terrified for him and me.
Minutes pass. His breathing lengthens by degrees. The muscles loosen one after another until the weight of his head settles fully into the pillow. In this moment, he looks nothing like the man who took me and more like the one I used to imagine before I knew what his freedom would cost me.
And isn’t that cruel?
That I should hate him. I should be lying here rigid with revolt and disgust, counting his breaths only so I can know when it is safe to move.
In a single day, he has stripped away piece after piece of me.
I watch him sleep.
The blizzard still lives in my skin. My fingers, however, still won’t leave him.
But none of this changes what I have to do in the end.
I can pity him and still leave him.
I can want to understand him and still want to survive him.
I can want the fantasy of him and still resist him.
My gaze drifts past him to the window, where snow falls in thick, soundless layers, burying the darkness beyond the glass until the world is erased. There are no roads. No lights.
No shape of a path leading anywhere but deeper into the white hell.
And as the storm presses its pale fingers to the window to witness Elias Crane sleeping beneath my hand, I finally understand the true horror of this place: there is no away.