32
Warm water strikes me.
A shudder rushes over my body, tightening every muscle in its wake.
It rolls over me in an almost merciless streak, and Elias watches it travel, his face shadowed in the steam ghosting between us.
From the bedside table beyond the open shower-room door, the red light on the camera blinks once. Then again.
His humming stops. Somehow the silence after it is worse. It makes the pipes too loud, my breathing too harsh, the spray too severe.
‘People always think filth is something that gets on you,’ he says quietly, his gaze still following the water down my throat as if he weren’t speaking to me at all, but to something old inside himself.
‘Mud. Sweat. Blood… that’s external. Just dirt.’ The spray drifts from my collarbone and moves lower. ‘Dirt can be washed away.’
My muscles seize briefly as the stream tracks over my breast. I push against his chest in a futile attempt to move him.
‘Enough—’ It croaks out of me.
His eyes lift to mine, catching whatever fractures in them when my nipples tighten helplessly beneath the water.
‘Filth is something else.’ His voice lowers as he moves the spray over my thighs. It pools warm around my feet.
‘Filth is what people put inside your head.’ His gaze holds me there, pinned more thoroughly than his body. ‘Until you start believing wanting something makes you twisted. Surviving something makes you—’ He pauses as he puts his lips flush against my ear. ‘—Dirty.’
Heat slams through me. But also… his pain.
‘Stop this.’
It comes out too low to carry over the roar of the shower. Too low to reach the hallway or be useful in any way.
‘Now, Leah,’ he murmurs, the showerhead dipping lower and lower as my breath sticks to my tongue, ‘which one are we washing off you?’
My hands push harder against him. But the muscle remembers what pride forgets: the world narrowed to his grip, his voice, the snow under my back and the image of him flipping the damn snowmobile on his damn own.
So I hesitate for half a second.
And half a second is enough for an idea to catch.
‘Is this because I kissed you?’ I blurt out. ‘Or because you made me taste you and you wanted more?’
Nothing changes on his face, as if I haven’t said anything at all. Then his hand begins lifting my knee higher while I brace both palms more thoroughly against him, just hard enough to feel the refusal in my own muscles.
‘Is that what you want? A kiss?’ I hurry, try to squirm out of his grip. ‘Come closer then. I’ll kiss you.’
His head angles to the side as if he’s intrigued by the shape of the taunt stretching across my lips.
But then—
The water hisses at the inside of my thighs.
My voice is thinner as I whimper, ‘You proved your point. Enough…’
He just holds my leg, locking me open.
A frantic beat passes. Long enough for the red blink of the camera to become something unbearable.
My mind buries it behind steam, behind the hiss of the spray, behind the sickening fact that my body is answering him.
‘Take the showerhead.’
I hear him, but the words don’t make sense at first. The ringing in my ears is louder, the indignation burning hotter.
He guides the chrome nozzle to my palm. My fingers close around it slowly, and the weight of it becomes mine.
Elias leans against the wall, flattening his forearm above my crown and dipping his lips closer to mine. He gives a soft squeeze at my thigh in punctuation.
‘Place it between your legs,’ he murmurs.
A gasp escapes me. A thin, furious haze blurs my vision.
The showerhead feels different in my grip, its weight somehow grounding.
Before I can dress it up as courage, I lift the chrome and turn the spray straight into his face, shoving at his chest with my other hand.
And he?
He merely closes his eyes. The water batters his face, flattening his lashes and streaming through his dark hair. He endures it as if pain, shock and heat belong to a language he learnt before he’d learnt words. Absorbs it. Turns it into penance.
My breathing falters. My pulse misfires.
Because I understand then…
He won’t flinch when the water fills his nose. Not when it lashes his closed eyes. He will stand there and take it for as long as it takes.
Almost reluctantly, my hand with the nozzle falls away, and the spray slips from his face.
Elias drags a palm over his forehead, eyes and mouth, then squeezes water from his hair, bracing himself back against the wall, caging me in with that same abysmal calm as though nothing had happened.
His eyes open.
‘Between your legs, Leah.’
Mortification takes me first. Then indignation. His gaze holds mine captive. He knows I won’t look away, because if I do – he wins. I hate him for knowing that.
The thumb at my knee moves once. Twice. A mockery of tenderness.
‘Slowly,’ he says. ‘Find that little spot… You know the one.’
My grip tightens around the nozzle at my side. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I plead, despising the crack in my voice. ‘I tried to help you through the night, I—’
‘Because you keep looking at me like I’m the only filthy thing in a room.’
His eyes do not soften. If anything, the question strips something in him.
He almost seems offended that I’ve asked it.
My lips part. ‘That’s not true…’ I whisper.
‘Oh, it is,’ he says, ‘and I am. Filthy. So now, I’ll show you what that really feels like.’
Rage climbs my throat so fast I almost choke on it.
I consider throwing the showerhead at his skull. Screaming the house down. Running into the blizzard and letting it take me this time.
But he won’t let this go. It’s in the patience, in the hunger… as if he already knows the end to this and is simply giving me the courtesy of letting me get there on my own.
Nonetheless, there’s one thing that still feels like mine to decide: I slow it down. Make him wait. Lower that damn nozzle by degrees as I hold his eyes.
That barest twitch of his hand feels like a meagre triumph. Because he knows what I’m doing.
Regardless, I own the pace now.
When the pressure hits, my teeth lock together so hard my jaw clicks. A relentless burn devours me instantly, stealing the strength from the leg I’m standing on before I can even hate it properly. My knee buckles, and I’m suddenly grateful he still has my other leg hooked against his waist.
I try to make my body silent, but a shiver breaks loose anyway.
Another.
Gooseflesh races over my skin in small, treacherous waves beneath his gaze as the stream delivers exactly what he wants.
Elias watches each one ripple across my face. And for a damning space of time, he is so still, his breath warm against my mouth.
I don’t notice his free hand leaving the wall above me and shifting to the shower’s flow control. The pipes groan in rhythm with my ragged breathing.
‘You’re too quiet,’ he says. ‘That’s not right.’
The meaning reaches me one broken breath too late.
The handle shifts.
The pressure strikes harder, and I jerk. A startled sound tears from my throat – too sudden to be swallowed, too broken to be called anything dignified.
The water drowns most of it. The walls take the rest.
His nostrils flare. My face stings with fury and burns with desire.
The spray can muffle my voice, but it cannot silence the part of me still determined to turn this back on him.
‘Too much…’ I gasp, trying for modesty, but modesty doesn’t live here tonight. Not with the spray hard against my core while his gaze unravels me.
The handle moves again and I pull away with a shameful squeak. He’s already shaking his head.
‘We’re not coming out until you… finish cleaning,’ he rumbles.
Has his voice changed? As if the roar he swallowed managed to rip his throat to shreds.
‘It’s too strong,’ I say through my clenched teeth.
And I can’t believe I do. As though I’ve given him permission to do this. It lands hard and batters my pride harder.
The control handle complains as he moves it again, softening the onslaught of the spray further.
He doesn’t take his eyes off me.
I let a shameful breath fall, but I can’t tell if it’s from exasperation or wrath.
It feels like an eternity has passed before I gain enough courage to angle the spray again.
My lids fall shut upon contact and I bite down on my lip to keep the moan from leaving my mouth.
‘Look at me,’ he whispers. Shakily.
I meet his eyes.
A sharp gasp invades me, but not just from the pleasure.
A soft sound falls out of him before he locks his jaw, his throat working around nothing. The hand beside my head curls against the tile until his knuckles whiten before he forces it flat.
I almost drop the nozzle.
His jaw trembles once before he locks it down.
The thought that comes over me is rotten, but it comes anyway.
Some damaged, decadent fraction of my soul starts to reach for his to drag it down with me.
I want him ruined by his choice – I don’t want to take it from him in the dark and name it his fault afterwards.
I want to prove pleasure can be chosen even inside a nightmare – even while he is taking that same choice from me.
I convince myself it’s to save him from that awful chain of the past.
His pupils dilate further when he recognises it on my face.
My fingers loosen around the metal before they tense up again. I don’t recognise my voice when it comes out of me. ‘Touch yourself.’
He goes as still as the ice beyond the walls.
For that single, suspended moment, he looks stuck in a hollow that lives deeper than desire. The shadows pull at his face. A window opens into a room he never wanted to enter. His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
‘Please,’ I offer.
He stares at me for too long.
Nothing about Elias is soft when it breaks. But when it does, the violence drains from him entirely and leaves something else in its place.
As pressure coils low in my stomach, I twist away the spray, hating the loss even as the reprieve gives me one clean breath.
His eyes stay on mine when a shudder breaks loose from him, as though the word please has stripped him of everything.
I hold his gaze because looking away would feel too much like loss.
Because I’m starving, too.