38
Elias stays at the door with his hands braced against the frame, listening until even the echo of the last snowmobile is gone.
Then he closes it slowly. The latch settles with a soft click that, for some reason, sounds louder than all the locks in the forbidden room.
I turn from the table, wrapping cloth still crushed in my hands, and find his face stripped of every trace of dry humour and softness.
The silence pulls my skin taut. Heat answers anyway, as it always does when his eyes turn cold, but all that attention settles on me.
I edge backwards on instinct until the counter catches against my hip.
His eyes hold mine as he crosses the sitting room, each measured step tearing another piece of the space between us. Behind him, everything we’ve lied about tonight recedes into nothing.
‘The ring,’ he says, lifting his palm between us.
Panic spiderwebs up my neck. My mouth opens, but I swallow the refusal back and reach instead for the anger I have kept under a lid all evening.
‘You want me to take it off?’
His fingers curl once in soundless demand.
I tip my chin up at him. ‘Then those chains never come on you again.’
A shadow passes over him. His open hand lowers barely an inch.
I almost regret saying it when his throat works around the answer and his lips part. ‘Fair.’
We hold each other’s eyes for a moment longer.
His gaze shifts to my hands.
A tremor passes through me so hard my fingers curl around the ring.
No, the word is already climbing my throat.
Ten years have polished a pale groove into my skin.
It has been there, festering, becoming part of the wound.
I wore it while I hated Ron. Wore it when I hated myself more.
Wore it through every visit to Stonebrook and every moment that required proof I had once been chosen.
Even badly.
Now I’m expected to slide those ten years off my hand as though they hold no weight.
My lip quivers, but briefly.
Elias closes his hand around mine before the refusal has time to set in. He traps a shudder with his thumb as it passes once over my knuckles.
‘Here,’ he murmurs.
Not there. With Ron. Not in the hospital corridors where he worked with that woman, where I imagined them laughing at me. Not in the life I kept carrying because admitting it was dead meant admitting how long I had carried its corpse on my back.
Here.
In this room. In this breath. With a man waiting for my hand to open instead of him opening it for me.
He touches the ring so slowly it cleaves right through me. His fingers brush mine, then stop. Wait.
He does it the way I touch him when his darkness rises.
My throat burns. Pressure builds.
I don’t pull back even as my hand loosens.
The ring catches on the swell of my knuckles, as stubborn as the past it carries. Panic lashes through me one final time. Elias twists it delicately, but the last pull is mine.
It slips free.
My hand feels too light. Wrong. Exposed. Indecent. As though he has stripped away the last visible piece of a woman I once was.
‘Hey,’ he prompts.
My eyes snap up to his. He studies my face with the recognition that darkens his own – the look of someone watching another person finally step out of a cage but already missing its bars.
And then his chin dips. A different kind of darkness takes over.
‘I was surprised when you pointed your camera at me the first time,’ he says, drawing me back into us. He places the ring on the iron ledge beside the range, where the firelight catches in the stone and makes it briefly look alive.
My shoulders roll, if only to feel that my spine is still capable of holding me upright. My hand never breaks contact with him. And I spread my weight to both feet and face him fully.
‘Surprised?’ I ask shakily.
‘That it felt good when you took photographs of me.’ He exhales; a crooked smile threatens his mouth before shame pulls at it. ‘I felt… seen. I was always second best – when they considered me at all.’
I touch his chest as he drags me closer to him, but my gaze doesn’t settle. It roams. Drinks him in. The flushed lips, still parted. And his eyes…
God, his eyes.
It’s always them that unmake me.
His irises hold the blue of glacier melt beneath twilight. Too clear for the shadows gathering around him. Even my camera has never caught it properly – and nothing ever will.
Firelight moves over the hollows of his face and traces the slopes, making him look more severe somehow.
And then I recognise his demon before it’s even fully out.
My breath sticks to the base of my throat just as pressure swells low in my core.
He reaches for the little iron latch and opens the firebox. Heat rolls over us as the flames climb hungrily into view. Then, ever so slightly, he takes my hand and brings it closer to the metal bar. With both our fingertips, he nudges the ring into the fire.
Barely a movement.
It doesn’t make a sound.
It does nothing. Even as I feel it burning in my sternum, scorching away whatever it had left behind.
Elias offers me his hand.
Without a second thought, I lace my fingers through his and follow him into the bedroom, my heart jolting with every step.
Lifting the camera from the desk, he turns the display towards me. The bed fills the frame with the flames from the fireplace falling across one side of it.
‘Is this right?’ he asks.
I adjust the exposure instinctively without taking the camera from his hands.
‘Depends…’ I manage, ‘on what you need it to do.’
His gaze flicks from the screen to my face. He doesn’t reply, but I can read the silence that begins to simmer low inside me as he walks away and towards the bed.
‘Slippers off,’ he orders.
My pulse trips over itself as I realise what this is, where his intentions lie.
I cross to him, the floorboards cool beneath my feet when I slide out of the slippers one by one. I look up at him from beneath my lashes, and the camera clicks. Then settles between us as natural as breath.
‘Your top,’ he says.
My fingers find the hem.
‘Slowly, Leah.’
Inch by inch, I draw it up, letting the fabric whisper over my ribs, my bra, my throat, until it leaves me and falls in a soft heap beside my feet.
The camera lifts again.
Click.
His eyes never leave me. Yet every time my hands stop, so does the shutter. He waits for the next movement before taking another frame.
‘Bottoms.’
When the cool air washes over me, he stops pressing the shutter and simply observes through the viewfinder. Holds motionless.
And then he lowers it.
His thumb flips to video mode and a quick pulse of recognition moves through me – I know what comes after this.
He sets the camera on the desk, angling the lens towards the bed, and he is guiding me towards it with nothing more than his body and that steady, dark look. But there’s a difference now – he moves slowly enough that I could step aside if I wanted to.
If I wanted to.
The steam at Nielsens’ house resurfaces unbidden.
He is close enough that I can feel the pull of him before he touches me.
‘Will you let me kiss you?’ he murmurs.
My attention drops to his mouth, to the restraint there, remoulding itself into a question. Words fail somewhere behind my teeth. I incline my head instead.
His breath changes just as the backs of my knees meet the bed.
‘And touch you?’ he asks, reaching for the fastening of my bra and undoing it.
My teeth clench tight. ‘Yes—’
One hand seizes my waist; the other catches the back of my neck, and he pulls me into him with a force that burns straight through me.
His mouth crashes over mine – no longer careful or uncertain, but the mouth of a starving man. All the things he had been holding back turn into the brutal pressure of lips and breath.
I clutch him close as the room tilts, fingers digging into his T-shirt, and he kisses me like there are no more walls left between us.
When he climbs onto the mattress, his body bends over mine until my knees give and the mattress accepts us both. He follows, pushing me back with the slow pressure of his front until my spine meets the wall and the mattress complains beneath our knees.
He catches the hem of his top, pauses long enough for my eyes to follow the movement, then pulls it over his head. His ink blooms over muscle, and I curl my fingers to keep from following it across the warm planes of his chest. The sweats follow, pushed from his hips and kicked aside.
He strains hard and flushed, and I can barely hold myself back from reaching for him there.
‘Touch me,’ he says, quietly.
His ribcage expands as he braces for it. The amber light of the fire spills over the bare lines of him, turning scars and muscle and ink into a perfect kind of damnation. He is breathing as though he hurts. As if standing still for me is the hardest thing he has ever done.
So I touch his cheek first.
My thumb brushes the edge of his beard, then my palm slides down the strong column of his throat, over the uneven rhythm beneath his ribs.
Lower. Across the tense plane of his stomach.
Something flutters in mine as my hand travels sideways to his waist. When it reaches his hip, my thighs attempt to draw together.
Suddenly, he goes rigid. And I stop.
His forehead comes to rest against mine, and his hand leaves my neck to cradle my cheek instead.
For several seconds he only breathes against me, as if every part of him is learning the shape of permission.
‘We can stop,’ I remind him as I wrap my arms around his neck.
‘No,’ he whispers. ‘More.’
It detonates in me. The words. The breath. The command.
My eyes close as I run the tip of my tongue along his lips before I claim them.
My hand starts moving again until the soft tickle of dark hair at the base of him brushes my fingertips, and his entire body pulls taut when I reach below his shaft and cup him.
He hardens further and a shiver of satisfaction slinks through me so sharply I bite his lower lip to keep from smiling.
That turns his hold tighter, and he rakes his fingers up my thigh, coaxing a tremor out of me.