24 #2
Elias’ body locks around mine, shaking once, then again – harder – as if every part of him is trying to hold back something already tearing through.
His breathing turns rough and broken, dragging in heavy, helpless grunts against my neck.
And as his grip at my nape turns near-punishing, he unravels with a low, fractured sound that tears out of his lungs like desperation itself.
His fingers tighten against me, loosen – each flex weaker than the last.
I stop reading.
The book remains on my lap.
The fire burns beside us, inside us, and around us.
I remain rigid in his arms, every nerve treacherously awake after bearing blind witness to what I should have hated – and feeling pleasure answer anyway.
I can’t make out how much time passes whilst we sit close to each other, letting the ruin take hold of us both.
Then, from the corner of my eye, I catch the hand he used on himself reaching for the plate. Two glistening fingers drag through the jam. He brings them to my mouth and, without asking or waiting, pushes them between my lips.
The sweetness moves against my tongue first, the fruit stark upon it. But as Elias’ breathing begins to slow against me, his eyes intent on my mouth… something changes.
The taste turns salty. Slightly bitter.
Before my mind can make sense of it, my thoughts collide, my body explodes, and I go… utterly… still.
‘Swallow it,’ he rumbles beside me.
As if my demon has finally risen to meet his, I let the taste of him slide down my throat.
Once. Twice.
The flavour of the jam has long faded.
Only the taste of him is left.
He doesn’t move away until it’s all gone.
And then he releases me.
I feel his eyes burning into my side.
I don’t know what’s happening now. Don’t understand what follows.
The heat takes my cheeks, takes my chest, takes me whole.
And he waits. Watches it happen.
Then stands.
He walks away from me without a word, trailing the scent of musk and regret.
I turn my chin just enough to see him heading for the door.
Three different locks slide and click-thunk.
Only the wind keeps me company.
That, and the growing frost in my chest that no amount of fleece or fire can thaw away.
It’s not the absence that stings.
It’s the way the walls keep handing me back the silence, as if he has left me to carry everything that happened between us. All on my own.
It’s about midnight when I decide to stop trying to fall asleep.
Glancing sideways, I find his side of the bed empty.
I get up, throwing a few more logs into the fire to keep it burning longer into the night. The quiet is almost eerie.
The house smells of woodsmoke and detergent from scrubbing at the chicken-shit stains until my knuckles threatened to split. I made pancakes I had no appetite for – because stopping would mean letting my skin remember where his fingers have been.
But as I approach the table, the meal still sits there beneath the aluminium foil, cold and soft with trapped condensation.
Curiosity gets the better of me.
I walk quietly to the door at the back of the house.
There’s no sound from the other end. I lean in, rest my ear against the wood.
Silence.
I stay there for a minute, listening and hoping to hear something that might give away what he’s up to.
He may not even be inside any more. He might’ve just slipped into the night while I was scrubbing the kitchen.
Or he might just be sleeping in a Leah-free zone.
I sigh, moving backwards until my back hits the chest of drawers by the wall and rattles the clutter there.
The instant I close my eyes, his breath returns to my neck. My tongue remembers salt. My thighs tense beneath the pyjamas, and I open my eyes again before the memory can finish unfolding.
The fear in me has changed frames. I glance at my pale reflection in the window while my body replays his touch.
I hate that my thoughts keep rounding back to that. Not just the threat and the shame and the absolute obscenity of it. But the sensation it left me with – which is not what it is supposed to be.
He wasn’t only violating me. He was dragging himself into it too, forcing me to witness what he could not bear alone. And somehow, in the space he allowed me, I found enough strength to reach back.
It wasn’t enough to make it right. His pain did not cancel what he had done, but my response made me equally responsible.
And now I see the place he has carved out for me: witness. Subject. Confessor. A living surface onto which he can empty everything he cannot bear alone.
A green shimmer catches against frost coating the back-door window. I wipe a circle clear with my sleeve – and my body locks at the sight beyond it.
At first, it looks like a bruise blooming across the night – an impossible smear of green bleeding into the black, faint at the edges and brighter at the centre, as though the sky has been torn, and the shine is trying to seep through.
Then it strengthens, unfurling in slow, sinuous ribbons that ripple above the treeline.
In this small pocket of time, I forget the locked door on my right. Forget the taste still haunting my mouth.
The frost on the pane fractures the aurora into crystalline veins, turning the window into a stained-glass mosaic of winter.
The snow reflects it all, glowing softly. And the whole wilderness looks absolutely bewitched.
I can hear nothing but my own breathing, too loud in the hush.
I need to capture this. The magic of this side of the world. It’s what I’ve come here to do in the first place. To get the colours of the north.
After retrieving my camera, I’m back behind the door.
Elias’ boots sit beside it. I pull them on – a million sizes too big and loose at the heels – then snatch my coat and shuffle no further than the porch, one hand gripping the frame until I find my footing.
I tuck my chin into the collar to trap the warmth I barely have, but the cold doesn’t matter tonight. Not after everything.
Above me, the aurora coils and loosens like a serpent unspooling across the dark expanse.
My bare fingertips ache against the camera body. I tuck one hand into my sleeve between shots, working the controls with the other before the cold can lock them both. The shutter snaps through the quiet.
The sky exposes itself to me – green and violet bleeding into blue, the horizon stitched with stars.
Each time I lower the camera, I see something new painted across the snow. A ripple. A whisper of movement. As if the night dances just for my eyes.
I know I won’t be able to develop the photographs. There’s no equipment here, no darkroom or chemicals.
But still, some part of me hopes. That one day, if I ever survive this, I’ll have proof that the cruel north is as beautiful as it is harsh.
That even inside a cage made of snow, fear, and one man’s twisted need, the sky still opened for me.
And for a few stolen clicks of the shutter, so did I.