45 #2
The weight of him becomes mine; the shaking of his body transfers to me; the need he can no longer hide seeps into my skin between the stolen breaths.
‘I want the wild in me—’ he moans against my lips, ‘—to live in you.’
It locks around my soul as my legs lock around his waist and our pulses merge.
‘Yes!’ I yelp, grasping for air my body bowing beneath him, the cry leaving my mouth caught between his name and a rawness too pure to survive a language as the climax takes me.
He watches every crack in it, eyes black with need and bright with something worse.
Then his body seizes over me, his growl smashing over the frantic beats at my neck.
And for one suspended moment there is no now. No world beyond the weight of him in my arms.
Only the wild he imprinted into me.
For several moments, we don’t move. Elias remains braced over me until I touch his cheek and find him still open. He doesn’t withdraw into the past. He remains with me.
Kisses me.
Slowly and carefully.
In the next breath, he rises, eyes roaming over me as he turns at the waist and switches off the first camera.
He moves to the next, red lights dying one by one. Finally, he reaches the recorder and removes the memory card, scribbles something on it, and places it into one of the small compartments beneath the desk.
For later.
I watch this ritual with interest.
My eyes flick to the projector sheet overhead, now devoid of image or light, waiting for our demons to possess it again.
Then, gloriously bare, he stops at the door and holds out his hand to me. I wish he’d let me photograph him like this.
We leave the equipment dark and move to the shower room upstairs, where warm water carries the remaining oil away from our skin. He owns my mouth there again, and I own every tremble he no longer tries to hide.
By the time the dogs begin to howl outside, the day has slipped from our grasp.
Separating from him feels almost unnatural.
My neck already misses the rasp of his beard, my thighs miss the rough surface of his hands.
We busy ourselves with dinner, care for the hens and let the dogs claim their usual spots on the floor. Later, Mary Shelley keeps us pinned to the bearskin until the last page closes between us.
When the moon climbs, Elias is lying beneath me, the dense fur below us warmed by our bodies, and the candlelight throws shifting shadows across the stone hearth.
Like always.
Our wine glass reflects it from the coffee table, the kaleidoscope of colours washing his eyes in shades too soft to drown the azure.
‘I still can’t wrap my head around this,’ I rumble, moving to the side as I give his chest a few light taps. ‘They steal me, you come get me, and then what? Prove you’re worthy of me like I’m some… Sámi reindeer bride token?’
‘It’s not a Sámi tradition,’ he reminds me, raking a hand through his hair until the curls tousle deliciously.
‘It’s my mother’s family’s twist on the old courtship stories and reindeer-herding trials.
It became a Halvorsen family ritual. Anders isn’t Sámi – the old beliefs never attached to him, so Sunna never got to experience it, which is why she agreed to participate. ’
I shift away, frowning, incredulity souring into embarrassment. The more he explains, the more made-up this whole thing sounds – and the more foolish I feel for having believed I was being hunted by something darker.
‘So your family invented ritualised abduction and blamed the spirits.’
He narrows his eyes ponderously. ‘More or less.’
I stare.
‘Right,’ he says, sensing everything that doesn’t come in the shape of words as he pulls me back into him. ‘“Custom is the principal magistrate of man’s life.”’
‘Please do not tell me that’s Nietzsche.’
He chuckles briefly. ‘Francis Bacon.’
I sit up and he follows. His arms close tightly around me until I can feel his heartbeat, and the hard waistband of his jeans scrapes at the base of my spine.
‘In the old days, two families chose a pair they wanted joined. The couple were separated, tested and expected to find one another through hardships and trials of the night. If they completed the trials, everyone called it fate and gave them permission to marry.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ I echo, glancing over my shoulder at him with a cocked brow. ‘So kidnapping and catastrophic judgment run in your family.’
He laughs softly, pinching my thigh.
I let out a squeak as I squirm, but he doesn’t let go – just pulls me tighter still, his chin resting atop my shoulder.
‘It’s an old tradition. It stopped with my mum.’
The last trace of amusement leaves his voice. His hand slips from my thigh and settles on the floor.
I twist and look up into his eyes as they flick towards the candles. Turning and straddling his hips, I wind my arms around his neck when his shoulders prove too broad to wrap around fully.
Somehow, the more I learn about him, the louder a memory resounds: People always said I’m more of a big scruffy bear.
‘Your cousins told me a little bit about her,’ I hazard, dragging my mind away from harsh beginnings.
His gaze drifts past me to a place in memory I can’t reach.
‘When we’re young—’ His focus travels across the floor to the bear fur beneath his hands, fingers closing slowly around it. ‘—we live in the illusion of things. Things we want. Things we are made to believe.’
My ribs pull taut. I hear the age he gave me during the gathering at Anders’ house. Sixteen.
His gaze remains on the floor, but one hand has closed more tightly around the fur.
Whatever his eyes are showing him is not the family Hunt.
‘We were all stupid once,’ I say. ‘Age has nothing to do with it.’
He looks at me then.
‘Whatever you were made to believe, that wasn’t your stupidity. You know that, right?’ I add.
His eyes hold me for several breaths, then he inclines his head.
A single curl falls over his brow.
I reach up to tuck it back, but it dances furiously away from my fingers.
Suddenly his face darkens as he averts his eyes and fixes them on Brute, whose mild snoring startles Menace. But it’s not the sound that drags his attention away.
‘You’re going to see Inga tomorrow?’ he asks.
The curl slips from my fingers at long last. Elias follows a shadow across the floor, then looks past me towards the dead fireplace.
He has always been adept at keeping doors shut. Yet there is a coldness lingering in that question, something hidden in the breath he releases afterwards.
‘I’m learning how to knit something for Sunna’s birthday,’ I say, but my focus is on the deepening lines of his face.
‘I’m going early with Anders. It’ll take a couple of nights to check the livestock down south. Make sure the traps are good before you leave?’
I’m nodding as I follow the stern gaze he has affixed to the iron grate.
‘The dogs know the perimeter,’ he continues. ‘Also, check the shed battery before you leave.’
His eyes drag over my hip, where the bear paw hides beneath the fabric, then his gaze returns to my face.
‘Things like this are what we’ve been training for. You’ll be alright here?’ he asks.
He doesn’t do it like a man asking a woman whether she can manage the stove, the animals and the thousand problems a homestead might have.
The hairs at my nape rise, and I study the hardness of his mouth, the way he refuses to blink first.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I murmur.
His gaze roams my face in a silence that feels everything but ordinary. It pauses at my hip, the door, then my face again. As if cataloguing each one before speaking.
I let him look because my own travels unbidden over his mouth, the tension beneath his beard, the pressure gathered in those glacial eyes.
‘I have a confession,’ he says.
A slight tilt of my chin is all I allow myself as I hold my breath.
‘I don’t know what to do with kindness,’ he says quietly. ‘Cruelty makes sense to me. Fear. Pain. Punishment. I know what they demand. But when you gave me the opposite, I didn’t know where to put that. When you defied me, it brought up all the wrong in me. It still does, Leah.’
My palm settles against his rough cheek. And I remind myself that comforting him isn’t rescuing him from the truth.
‘We are what we are.’
‘I made mistakes,’ he continues. ‘With you. Around you. Against you. Because of you.’ He starts pulling away from me, rearranging his long limbs until he’s kneeling over me. My body tenses as I sit up straighter.
‘I’ve been thinking.’ He looks towards the bearskin between us and rubs his thumb repeatedly over a tuft of white. ‘Forgiveness is not just a thing you ask for because you are sorry. It’s something another person may choose to give you.’
His eyes return to mine, stripped of the harshness I once attached to his name.
‘I don’t expect it – don’t deserve it.’ He stays on his knees, his hands nowhere near me. ‘I just… need you to know I would understand if you never gave it.’
My brows pull together until it feels as if my skin might crack and all my thoughts might bleed out.