25
The stars just above the black cut of the treeline look like sparks trapped by all that darkness. I’m lining up a new shot when the cabin’s kitchen light explodes on my right.
It burns straight through the colours reflected off the snow and shatters the illusion.
A moment later, the back door slams open and Elias storms out as if the nightmare followed him awake. My finger stills over the shutter, the camera still raised and aimed as my gaze finds him halting mid-stride.
No jacket. Just the navy jumper hugging his broad chest, a dark patch of sweat between his pecs.
My attention catches on his hair, damp at the roots, as though he’s been exercising since I last saw him.
His breath bursts out in thick, almost dragon-like clouds.
I half expect fire to come out of his nose.
His head whips frantically left and right until his eyes lock onto me. Then his shoulders square. Lips press tight.
The mask is back on.
I give him a second of my attention before turning back towards my camera and – click – capture the stars caught in the branches.
He stands there in his soft slippers with the snow soaking the edges, breathing hard. His gaze fixes on me as though finding me here has hurt him more than the thought of me running away again would.
As I lower the camera, his eyes follow it to my stomach, drop to the boots swallowing my feet, then travel over the stretch of snow between us.
Whatever word tries to come out of him dies before it can become one.
My fingers tighten around the camera. If he is waiting for me to look ashamed, afraid, obedient, I give him none of it.
‘Thought the wolves came to get me again?’ I ask, arching a brow in challenge. The cold makes my voice snappier than I intend.
He clears his throat. ‘Those are my boots.’
I zoom in on his frown – click. My camera finds his outrage worth preserving, it seems.
Flashing a theatrical smirk, I lift my arms wide as if delivering a line onstage.
‘At last!’ I say, keeping my tone low out of respect for the wilderness – Shelley would understand my lack of grit there. ‘The creature finds its voice!’
His mouth doesn’t so much as twitch. Shoulders remain rigid. Arms hanging tiredly at his sides. He keeps staring at me as though he can’t decide whether I’m a mirage or still actually here.
I wrench my gaze away, point the lens aimlessly at whatever catches in the frame. Click. Click. The shutter sounds obscenely loud now that he’s close.
No crunch of snow follows. No shift of fabric. When my nerves can’t take any more of that, I hazard a glance – and damn…
The aurora folds around him until he seems cut from the same piece of sky. A kaleidoscope of light ripples across his face and over the crystals of his eyes.
With a pulse of memory, heat chooses that moment to stir low in my belly.
The taste.
The ache.
The broken sounds he left against my ear.
I let my throat drag it all down in a hard swallow.
He looks like a myth torn out of some northern folktale, carved from ice and grief as he glares at one of my footprints in the snow.
The perpetual sadness hanging off his lashes dissolves some of that heat, though.
I take a picture of him standing like that.
‘Elias,’ I say behind the lens, ‘did you think I ran again?’
His face changes. Something darkens the pale slopes of it.
Click.
‘Or because you thought I was going to get hurt if I did?’
The air crackles.
Click. Click.
He leaves the question hanging. The only sounds are the faint rustle of branches in the soft breeze and the nearby cluck of one stubborn chicken refusing to sleep.
Then his grey slippers drag through the snow, already dark with meltwater. He walks as if one wrong word might set off the fragile peace between us in this minefield of silence.
He stops just shy of touching me.
And devours me with his gaze.
Then he looks down at his feet.
My thoughts flare in every direction, as violent and impossible to separate as the colours overhead. I don’t know whether to scream or push him or pull him into my arms.
The expected apology never comes. I search his face for some sign of it, but the longer I look, the more the events of this night intrude on my thoughts.
Click.
‘Those demons, huh?’ I ask, almost conversationally, but with a bit of taunt still threading my tone.
His face flattens somewhat, his mouth closes. I circle him, the crunch of snow keeping time with the hard beat in my chest.
‘Demons…’ he echoes. ‘I… may have crossed a line.’
May have? As though the line itself had simply relocated beneath his feet.
I press my teeth together. ‘Well, there is really only one thing you can do to redeem yourself.’
I’m already behind him when I open the aperture another stop and fire a short burst as he meets my lens, that familiar darkness settling back in his eyes.
Click. Click. Click.
‘Well?’ he prompts. ‘Are you going to make me wait in the cold?’
A wicked, terrible thought takes shape as I continue in a half-circle until I emerge on his left side. His eyes follow me along the way as much as his body allows.
‘In the words of a semi-famous, slightly mental philosopher, “I can make this so much worse.”’
A brow lifts; so does his chin. Whether it is defiance or preparation, I’m not entirely sure. But the light washes over his marble cheek, and my finger is compelled to answer at the shutter.
‘Define worse,’ he says.
Click.
I deliberate for a moment. But I know very well what I’ve been keeping my own demons from.
The words are already there. His words: hem, top or bottom, chains or the rest of his body. They writhe on the tip of my tongue.
If he can turn obedience into intimacy, then I can make it look like punishment.
‘Take the jumper off.’
I’m not sorry for saying it. I’m aware of the implications. I know where some of his wounds are, and I use mine as permission to press on them anyway.
And that is the ugly excuse my demons have to offer.
I take it. Because I want to.
I know it’s not justice. Or healing. It’s me using the same weapon he used and pretending it’s different because it changed hands. I tell myself he needs a taste of his own medicine. That if I make him feel the edge of it once, perhaps he’ll remember where mine is next time.
His nostrils flare. First with that shared darkness that lives in both of us, but then with alarm. ‘It’s minus twenty.’
I keep my tone soft and sweet and even. ‘It felt like minus twenty when you kicked me out in the blizzard, too.’
His jaw clenches, the muscles working hard on the sides, but his irises gleam with memory.
Click. Click.
‘It was minus twelve. You have to start paying attention to the weather.’
Completely bypassing that, I say: ‘Start with the hem.’ His words resound in my own voice. ‘Do it slow,’ I add.
He narrows his eyes, the lashes aglow with the phantasmagoria of the surroundings.
His hand moves towards the edge of his jumper on instinct, stops, then closes over it anyway.
His fingers hover there for a second. Knuckles whiten against the fabric, jaw slackening as the breath that leaves him steams between us, torn in two by the cold.
‘Leah…’ he warns low.
Click. The camera answers for me.
His mouth thins.
‘Your choice: slow or quick,’ I offer as I lower the camera.
His jaw realigns at that. His eyes drop to my hands holding my weapon, then back to me. Recognition settles over his face.
He gathers the hem. The navy peels away from his waist, revealing a strip of pale skin. The muscles of his abdomen tense against the touch of night air.
That familiar heat crawls up my throat.
Click. Click.
The lens drinks in the line of him. The way the light from the cabin and the aurora kiss his skin differently – the warm orange along his left ribs, the spectral green tracing the ridges of the stomach.
He pauses with the jumper bunched at his waist. A shiver cuts visibly through his body.
‘It’s freezing,’ he grits out.
‘You still have five minutes before the hypothermia sets in.’ My voice remains steady as I keep my weapon aimed at him.
His mouth hardens, but colour climbs his throat despite the cold. He looks away for half a second, then back at the lens.
Every contradiction I have ever tried to catch in a photograph is standing in front of me: violence and restraint, beauty and ruin. And beneath it all, a man I still want regardless of everything that happened.
His hands move again. The jumper rides higher, revealing more of his torso. There are old scars; faded silver lines that catch the light like thin, raised wires. Some I recognise from medical reports in his file.
Air slows through my lungs. Click.
‘And the rest,’ I murmur.
He huffs out a bitter laugh that fogs between us.
‘The rest, Elias.’ My voice is low but sharp.
He studies me – eyes shadowed, jaw rigid.
He could pull the jumper down. He could turn away. Instead, he holds it at his sternum and stays where I put him, the camera between us holding the line neither of us wants to cross.
‘I guess your demons need to get even with mine.’ He exhales in acquiescence.
And strips off the top.
The camera in my hands lowers slightly as if even the lens can’t quite make out what’s real and what’s not on this man.
Ron did not look like this. He was neat and lean, someone who followed simple routines and consumed protein shakes. A safe kind of fit.
But Elias looks carved rather than built, every scar and hard plane thrown into relief by frost and light.
His chest rises unevenly, each inhale growing slower, the cold biting at his skin until it blooms with a pale, mottled flush. Against it, the black chain seems almost alive as it winds around him as if it might drag his heart straight through his ribs.
I take a breath that barely reaches my lungs.
Then I move closer. The camera high again.
He watches the approach with his throat working around everything unsaid. When I stop in front of him, close enough that the heat of his bare body radiates into the chilled air between us, he lowers his head and lets his arms rest beside him, as if offering himself up.
I start to bend at the knees.
His breath catches.
The tension draws taut over his hard stomach as he follows that descent. The snow complains lightly beneath my knees. The cold punches through my pyjamas almost at once, while I balance between gravity and dark… dark thoughts.
After what happened earlier, this position should be damning. It also makes something vicious in me smile.
At eye level with his lower parts, I angle the camera as though it were an extension of him. Click.
A still of his torso from below, the chain tattoo, the twitch in his stomach as the cold violates him, his gaze suspended between horror and want.
I shift. Click – the other side where the light of the aurora grazes his hip, catching on the sheen of his skin and the fine dusting of dark hair trailing down towards what he’s barely concealing.
The camera lowers further, and I adjust it tighter, capturing the suggestion of his length. The shape he hides beneath fabric. The swell, softened by light and turned to art by shadow.
The depth of field falls away around him until only the forbidden detail remains sharp.
‘Bite your lip,’ I murmur.
His eyes flash at that. But he does.
Click. Click. Click.
The muscle in his jaw jumps, teeth sinking into flesh, eyes locked on mine as if he wants to know exactly what I see through the lens.
‘Hook one finger into your waistband.’
He pauses long enough that I almost stop shooting. Then his finger slides beneath the elastic.
He tugs just enough. The dark curls of his V appear. I zoom in. Extreme close-up, strong bokeh on the decadence. No one but me would know what it was if they looked at the picture.
Click.
‘Lower,’ I rasp.
He hesitates for a moment, then pushes the fabric down another inch.
Not enough.
Almost enough.
The line appears between us – the root of him. The rest is implied. Half seen. Imagined.
Through the lens, flesh becomes line, shadow and negative space.
I sink further with the view, but keep my gaze fixed. I don’t avert it even as he exhales. Even when that final shiver wracks through him. And even when his pupils swell into something wild.
His hand leaves the waistband. His shoulders square. One instant the camera is in my hands; the next, he tears it free.
I watch him stalk back into the house, leaving me blinking in the dark with my hands still wrapped around something that isn’t there. The cold that had been gentle turns predatory, crawling under my coat and down my spine, but it isn’t the temperature that makes me shiver.
I tell myself I should be disgusted by the hunger that lives in me. And yet what I feel most is something humiliatingly close to relief.
Maybe that’s the hook between us: he puts his hands around fear until he can call it control. I put a frame around mine until I can call it art.
Somewhere between his hands and my lens, we keep mistaking arousal for safety, power for intimacy, punishment for confession.
Was taking the camera his way of destroying the evidence? As though the photographs are where the truth lives. The proof that it doesn’t is in the part of me that didn’t run when the kitchen light turned on. The part that stayed. Watched. Wanted. Punished him right back.
Because some dark, reckless fragment of me has begun building a bargain I hadn’t meant to: if I tame him, perhaps I can make him stop taking this road of destruction. And if he can keep making me want him, perhaps one day I’ll mistake wanting for a reason to stay.