23 #2
He presses his forehead to my temple, almost tenderly, while his thumb begins to circle the joint through the fabric of my tracksuit bottoms.
My skin feels too tight. That fluttering sensation low in my core starts stirring, and shame drags over me like a cold, damp veil.
‘Did you ever kneel between a man’s thighs,’ he starts softly, each word placed perfectly, ‘take something sweet onto your fingers, and use it on him before putting your mouth where your hand had been?’
My mind blanks.
Then it surges with images of skin, old rooms, old versions of myself I thought I had buried in the distance. They rise quickly, stoking something hot and humiliating inside me.
But his voice keeps bending them out of shape, turning them into his breath at my temple. His thumb moving over my knee. His body moving against mine.
Every memory warps until it is no longer someone else’s face above me, no longer someone else’s body in my hands.
It’s Elias.
His mouth.
His eyes.
His touch.
And my mouth… answering.
I shut my eyes.
‘Not like that,’ it comes out of me.
His every intake of air against my cheek is a battle won, every exhale a battle lost.
Then his voice breaks through it. ‘She never had her mouth on me.’
It cuts clean through the fever.
I still.
The heat in his voice still lingers as his thumb keeps drawing circles over my leg, but it has changed shape. As though whatever he remembers has reached through the desire and twisted it.
I realise then… this is not seduction. Not punishment.
It’s confession. It’s a study.
As everything settles into place, my eyes open slowly.
The rest of me doesn’t move. The fire crackles ahead to remind us we’re still trapped in this damnation, and Elias keeps pouring confessions against my skin as if history is trying to claw itself out of his throat and tear straight through us both.
‘She never gave me pleasure without wanting something from me,’ he says, quieter. Almost flat. ‘I was too young to know that wanting her didn’t mean she cared about me. Not in the way she cared, at least.’
My stomach turns over.
The horror creeps in by degrees, then drowns me all at once.
I fix my eyes on the next line of the text to keep myself from falling into his grief.
With his forehead still pressed into the side of mine, the questions begin rearranging themselves.
Mine were never the answers he was after. He is holding them against hers. Against whatever this mysterious woman taught him pleasure was supposed to mean.
My throat works around a swallow, and that familiar reckless surge of sensations overcomes me.
‘Elias…’ I whisper.
His fingers knot tighter in my hair, but they’re not pulling. It’s as though he’s holding on to me, instead. So I relax a little in his grip, let him moor himself to my body.
‘Even later, when she made me love her—’
My mouth closes with a click, and I hold my breath as if afraid even that small movement of my chest might send him retreating into himself.
‘—I always wondered what people found so appealing about seeing someone on their knees for them.’
Silence descends.
He goes rigid beside me. Something in me gives way beneath it.
For a few damning seconds, captor and captive fall away. So do monster and mistake.
There is only the bleeding wrongness, the raw ache at the core of me, the book open across my lap. And Elias, dragging a truth out and burning us both with it.
The answer rises in me before caution can kill it. ‘It only feels good if it’s theirs to choose.’
He bites down on a breath. The hand at my nape loosens entirely before it tightens again.
I lean into it further, then realise what I’ve done and go still with shame.
‘And you?’ he whispers. If he weren’t so close, I would not have heard him.
I give it a beat or two.
Fear still sits in me, because I don’t know if he will take the answer as permission to do something worse.
So I cling to the only solid thing there is: this crooked reality he was given; this poisoned version of want and pleasure and hunger. It’s not to fix him. It’s not to save myself. But I can tell him the truth without letting her have the final word.
‘When you care about someone, giving can sometimes feel better than receiving. Because, for a little while, you get to be the reason for their pleasure.’
The tip of his nose grazes my cheek as he moves lower. Breath shudders in the small sliver of space between his lips and my neck, leaving gooseflesh.
He offers no reply at first. Then his mouth passes my hairline at the back and my body flares like a beacon despite everything.
‘Do I disgust you now?’ he asks.
As if to escape the question, my body starts pulling away from him, but he drags me right back into him.
‘No, Elias. You were taken advantage of.’ I hesitate. ‘Having something dark tangled up in you because of it doesn’t make you disgusting.’
He gives a brief, humourless chuckle.
‘Everyone likes to say that until what’s in the dark looks back at them.’
I lower my gaze at the black ink against the pale pages. ‘Most people like to pretend a lot. Some of us try to believe in it, too.’
He nuzzles deeper into my hair. His soapy scent seeps into my lungs, tangling my thoughts. I let him. One breath, then another, while my fingers slowly blanch around the edges of the pages.
I hate how long I let him. But his arm is still locked around me, its weight etching itself into my muscle memory.
‘Nietzsche had something to say about people who pretend their darkness isn’t there,’ he purrs, the words spilling over my shoulder as he inches towards it. ‘Do you like him?’
‘Not particularly,’ I respond – a little too breathily – though I know only what everyone else knows: that the man stared too long into the abyss and had bad enough manners to make it everyone else’s problem.
‘He said, “One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.”’ He pauses.
Holds his breath. ‘It’s not all flowers and butterflies with you, Leah.
’ And just like that, the confession is no longer his.
I feel his lips spreading against my skin as if he has found the door he was looking for.
‘I’ve seen one of your demons. And where there is one, there are more. ’
The opening is narrow, but I take it before he can make it fully about me again.
‘Who was she?’
He releases my hair as his gaze hooks on the paperback.
The glacial blue of his eyes then finds mine as he grants me reprieve by leaning back against the foot of the couch, both arms spreading along its length.
The strain is gone from his face. What remains is a faint curve at one corner of his mouth as though he has just witnessed something falling exactly where he expected it to.
‘Read on,’ he commands.
That is it. I’m not getting more out of him.
Irritation clears my head beautifully.
‘There’s some jewellery in the drawer,’ I start with a slight tilt of my chin. ‘Was it hers?’
‘It was my mother’s. What were you looking for in the drawer?’
‘A hairpin,’ I lie.
His smile spreads slowly, but without warmth. It’s as beautiful as it is wrong – gentle even – but by now I know it’s designed to keep everything living on the other side of it.
His eyes are fixed on mine, stripping the lie down to its bones before I can even breathe around it.
‘Did you find the hairpin?’
I clench my teeth together, grasping at straws. ‘No. Though I still figured a proficient kidnapper like you might have done this before and kept a trophy or two.’
Laughter erupts from him so abruptly it makes my spine snap straight.
His head falls back against the couch, throat exposed, the sound rolling out of him too deep to be just amusement.
But when his chin lowers again, his eyes do not follow the smile.
‘I’ve only ever had one woman,’ he says, voice still roughened. The smile thins, then breaks at the edges. ‘Or… for lack of a better word… she had me.’
The hush takes over at once. It is not unlike the one at funerals.
His gaze flicks down to the book in my lap. Whatever was left of the false delight fades.
‘Continue reading.’
Hurriedly, I switch my attention back to the page, as though it were a shield against his scrutiny.