33
Opening the bathroom door feels worse than that first walk through Stonebrook. At least then, the danger had been waiting behind steel and procedure. Here it is laid bare and wearing my choices.
I ease the door open as if there were a frightened animal on the other side that might lash out if I breathe too loudly. The hinges give a faint creak, and tension coils low inside me as though I’ve stepped onto thin ice.
He’s sitting right in front of the fireplace with his back turned, a blanket draped over him like armour. His head hangs between his shoulders, elbows braced on his bent knees, hands clasped loosely between them – as if keeping them in sight might make them harmless.
The flames throw restless light over the cut muscle along his neck and his damp hair. He doesn’t move even when the door stops crying and comes to rest wide open against the wall.
My eyes drift past him to our clothes, messily hung over the chairs. Beyond them, my camera sits on the table.
The scent of woodsmoke mingles with the soapy scent of the bedsheets as my attention circles around the room and then back to his spine.
‘I didn’t mean for… what happened… to hurt you.’ The words taste wrong the moment they leave me, but that is the closest I can get without making it into guilt I don’t owe him. His demons belong to him. What happened before does not suddenly make this my fault.
Surely, he understands that?
He doesn’t turn. I hear the crack of his knuckles rebound off the wall ahead.
Taking a careful step inside, then another, I stop far enough that he doesn’t have to feel cornered by me. A towel lies on the table. I take it and wrap it around me before the cold takes a bite of whatever is left of me. The rug beneath my bare feet hushes them to silence as I dare to walk closer.
‘Elias—’
‘No.’
One word. Hoarse. Final enough to land with the snap of fire-bitten wood in the stove.
His shoulders rise with a breath that never becomes another word.
I wait, watching the decision move through him. His head lowers another inch, and whatever I’d managed to reach inside him earlier retreats beyond my grasp.
‘We can’t keep doing this,’ I murmur, crossing to the window and bracing my hip against the sill. His gaze flicks towards the fire, brows drawing together in a vicious strain.
His jaw is set so hard it’s clear not another word will leave his mouth tonight.
The stove sputters out heat strong enough to blister the air as I put on my clothes, sharply aware of my own skin. Every inch of it feels too exposed. Overstimulated. Too awake.
As I slide beneath the covers, my knees knock once against the bedframe, then again.
I clamp them together, but the trembling simply moves into my core and hands.
It’s not just from the cold – my body doesn’t know what to do with itself after all that.
I still feel his hands, the water, my mind is still twisting and slipping sideways into a raw kind of darkness.
The blanket smells faintly of detergent and pine, and it mercifully wrenches me out of my own head.
I open my mouth, a question already forming into something that might make the silence less harsh. But this kind of silence is too tender. Too loaded. A wrong word would break it open and spill everything we’ve both been pretending is not there.
I’m beginning to understand the patterns, at least.
It’s the war in him. The way he locks his body down as if the smallest movement might become something larger once he makes it.
This silence is not really punishment.
Or… perhaps it is.
Just not only meant for me.
I lie on my side where my gaze follows the slope of his shoulder from the other side of the room. His fingers curl and flex. Even now, he keeps his back to me as though looking my way might start something he no longer trusts himself to stop.
In the quiet, I gather the pieces of myself and turn towards the wall. I don’t let the shadows become questions. Because the moment I ask myself what this is, my insides turn. There is no safe word for it. Nothing I can hold up to the light without seeing the teeth marks in it.
We are not anything, I reason with myself.
He took me. Dragged me into this frozen wilderness.
So why is my mind scrambling for meaning? Why is my chest aching with questions whose half-answers bring more questions?
The ugliest thought yet crawls in: if Melody were still alive, would I even be here?
I know she hurt him and used him, but her presence still looms, suddenly making me wonder whether I’m simply standing in a place she once occupied.
Nausea climbs my throat as my chest draws in.
I press my face into the pillow, as if the cotton can wipe the thought clean, erase the stupid, irrational sting inside me.
I remind myself that I was brought here against my will.
That he’s playing with me. Tormenting me.
Turning my fear into something that feels like want and then watching me hate myself for it.
I am the medium to his reckoning with intimacy.
How can I feel jealousy over this at all? How can I feel anything but disdain?
Minutes unroll. The fire crackles.
Eventually, fatigue does what mercy can’t: it takes away the room in pieces. The fire goes last.
I don’t dream.
Many hours later, somewhere beyond the walls, when the wind finally dies down and the house stops groaning beneath its force, the cold begins to nibble up my shoulder too harshly. I stir, eyes dragging open as if the lids are made of lead.
He’s by the stove, sleeping on the floor, wrapped in two blankets.
My heart kicks as if it knows sudden movement might shatter the fragile spell of his peace.
A single curl at the crown of his head catches the dull sheen from the October night beyond the window.
The fire has long since died. The air has cooled, creeping quietly into every corner of the room until warmth is but a quiet negotiation between the body and the blanket.
His naked shoulder is exposed, pale against the dark cover, skin pebbling in the chill.
With a breath held tight in my chest, I ease myself out from under the covers.
Early winter bites instantly through my clothes, finding every gap at my wrist and throat until my teeth threaten to chatter.
Before I lose my nerve, I stand upright and lay one of my warm blankets over him, then tuck the sides in as far as his weight allows.
I can’t do much more. He wouldn’t let me.
My eyes stay on that single curl lying stark against his forehead.
What are you doing? I ask myself in Marina’s voice.
The little clock on the wall wrenches my gaze from him.
It’s nearly four in the morning, the hour he said we’d leave. The hour that belongs to routine and animals and the pretence of survival. Somehow, this morning, I don’t resent either.
I look down at him. If he wakes up with me standing above him like this, he might panic again.
But as I shift one leg, his lungs drag in a deep breath. His brow pinches briefly, and then – without opening his eyes – he rolls onto his back. One arm falls over his eyes, as if even in sleep, he’s shielding himself from the world.
The blankets slip lower with the movement.
I reach down quickly and pull one back over him, careful not to wake him.
My gaze latches on the ink winding along the arm thrown above his face. My eyes shamelessly begin to follow the stretch of the links. Up over the hard curve of his bicep. Across his shoulder. Into the cluster spreading over his chest, where they ripple with every slow rise beneath his ribs.
And then my gaze travels lower, over the ridged planes of his abdomen—
The blanket has settled obscenely low across his hips.
Low enough that the dark curls beneath his stomach peer over the edge. Low enough to reveal the beginning of him before the wool mercifully – or cruelly – hides the rest.
I straighten my back but let my eyes roam.
Heat blooms at the base of me. The room disappears and wet tile shimmers into my vision, his thighs straining beneath my hands.
The weight of him against my tongue. The way he looked when control finally deserted him – beautiful and severe and unbearably perfect. And he isn’t even aware of it.
My mouth remembers the taste of him before shame can creep higher.
And I refuse to regret it.
Whatever else happened between us, I chose that. I chose him last night.
The memory leaves a kind of pressure behind as my eyes climb back over his stomach and the ink travelling towards his beard, until my eyes zero in on the script on the inside of his upper arm.
The one I’d glimpsed a fraction of in prison and tried not to stare at too long. The one I’ve been aching to decipher ever since, as though the words might explain the man.
I lean over him, squinting in the low light, heart hammering softly. My hair slips over my shoulder, brushing his chest, but he doesn’t wake.
At first, the lines are just fragments in the dark. I blink and bend closer, following one word into the next—
—and it hits.
My lungs forget what they’re meant to do.
The line attributed to Rumi – the one I’d scribbled on the back of the first photo I ever sent him. It sits there in stark black cursive. Etched into his skin.
‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’
I can’t move. I can’t even think.
He didn’t just keep the photo. He took something from it into his skin.
Something from me.
In that instant, as my eyes sweep over his beard and find the false peace of his sleeping face, the monster blurs. The kidnapper fades. My mind rushes to fill the space with meaning.
That I’m his weakness. The one thing he clung to when there was nothing else to grab onto. The one thing he let in. The one thing he wants to burn away, but still keep.
I mattered before I knew I mattered. Enough to mark himself with my words. Enough that some treacherous part of me wants to believe I was the light—
No.
My hand covers my vision. I let the coolness of my fingers banish the spiral I always fall through.