53 #2
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asks, making a face as though life had handed him lemons again.
He reads the printed email for the n-th time. His jaw tightens when he reaches the dates, but he does not tell me it’s impossible. He does not ask where he fits into the itinerary or begin inventing reasons why it would be unsafe.
Progress occasionally looks like a six-foot-six man saying nothing while his teeth attempt to grind themselves into dust.
Brute’s head appears from behind the bed, one ear folded and his expression mildly offended by me not paying attention to him first. The rest of him follows in a slow stretch before he squeezes between the boxes of old letters from Elias, trots over, and presses his broad skull into my palm.
I scratch between his ears, receiving one wet huff of approval, then step around him and lower myself beside my man.
‘Still can’t believe you kept all these,’ he murmurs as his gaze travels over the boxes, the faint smile on him deepening into something almost boyish.
‘They’re important to me.’ The mattress sinks beneath me. Elias turns onto his side, one arm sliding beneath my neck until I settle against the heat of him.
‘More important than this, I hope.’ He lifts the paper in his hand and lets it flutter to the floor, as his palm flattens over my spine.
‘You know I wanted to go north before I ever met you,’ I say gently, looking at the photographs overhead. ‘The Sámi project – the people and communities I’ll be working with, the landscapes…’
His fingers stop moving against my shoulder blade.
‘The work will take me away for a week at a time.’
His molars grind again.
‘But I’ll come back,’ I reason. ‘Every time.’
His eyes search my face.
‘I promise I’ll always be trying to get home to you.’
The tension loosens. The word home hooks into both of us and pulls us closer.
His hand leaves my back and slips into his pocket. When it returns, Frida’s ring lies in his palm. The metal catches the afternoon light and holds it alive.
There’s a long silence at first. Just his breathing evening out and the hard beat of his heart so close to mine that, for a moment, I can’t tell which one is which.
‘You know what I am,’ he says. ‘What I’ve done. What I’ll probably still get wrong.’
‘Frequently,’ I agree.
His thumb strokes once across my bare ring finger, but he doesn’t rise to the joke.
‘I won’t promise I’ll be harmless.’
‘I’d hate to see you bored,’ I murmur with a smile.
When I realise I’m not able to rattle the seriousness out of him, my shoulders settle.
‘I can promise, though, that no one will take you from me.’ He finally meets my eyes. ‘Not even you.’
The air in my lungs turns molten. Everything inside me melts clean off. Perhaps it’s the way his voice roughens around the promise. Or the naked certainty in his eyes.
I nearly open my mouth to remind him that I am not a possession to lock away. But a traitorous sensation spreads through me, because underneath all that darkness is a man still grateful that I came back.
And a man still terrified that I might not stay.
He lifts the ring towards my finger, then stops before the silver touches my skin.
And waits.
For someone who has spent his life taking first and surviving the consequences later, that small pause feels larger than any vow.
‘Leah.’
My name. A question stripped of philosophy, jokes, threats and excuses.
‘Leandra Nottingham, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’ he whispers.
I close my fingers around his wrist and guide his hand forward.
The ring slides over my ring finger and settles against my skin as though Frida herself has reached through the lost years to place it there, holding both our hands with her blessing.
And I give her a soundless promise she will never hear: I will not let him disappear into the dark again.
Elias stares at the rock, his thumb moving across the braided silver band before his fingers close tighter around mine.
He rumbles, the sound barely human. ‘I want everyone to see it there. Don’t you ever dare take that off, woman.’
Possessive and overprotective, as usual.
But still… learning the difference.
I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to his scarred knuckles. ‘So am I going to be Leandra Crane or Leandra Halvorsen?’
His eyes darken, but the smile that follows is almost unbearably soft.
‘Barbarous woman.’
‘Scruffy bear.’
His lips spread into an easy smile as he smacks my hip tattoo lightly and presses me into him. I burrow closer, tucking my forehead beneath his chin. I breathe in the soapy scent of his skin while his heat seeps through me and softens everything that still held rigid inside my chest.
My fingertip drifts across his palm, tracing idle paths until it trails over the black chain links winding on his skin.
A memory of bare forearms resting on the prison table shifts loose. His hands curled in front of him. Pale skin interrupted by veins, scars and the cold bite of institutional light.
‘When did you get the tattoo?’
His eyes follow my fingers over the links as his chest rises slowly beneath my cheek.
‘Mm,’ he simply says.
After I went home and listened for every car slowing outside, wondering if the doorbell would ever ring. I kept checking my phone until the screen blurred, hating myself for still clinging to him, telling myself he needed time.
But he never came.
I lift my head and chase the answer across the ivory cheeks.
‘Is this what you were doing? When you got out?’
His gaze drops to his wrist, and he twists his hand gently as if only now remembering he has the tattoo.
‘I didn’t think they would let me go,’ he says quietly. ‘Even when they opened the door, I was still waiting for someone to drag me right back inside.’
I run my fingers through his hair and keep them there as the memory settles between us.
‘I had been in chains…’ He stops. And I know he’s slipped into the philosophy of his own thoughts. ‘For so long,’ he murmurs. ‘I felt like a dog kept on a leash its entire life, suddenly unfastened and expected to know where to go.’
‘You knew where I was.’
His mouth flattens. ‘You know why I didn’t come, Leah.’
Yes. Cromwell was still out there, waiting for the smallest thread he could pull. Elias turning up at my door the moment he was free would have tied us together neatly enough for him to see – and handed him another way to hurt Elias.
He looks at me for a long moment. Quietly. Too long for it to mean nothing. One finger lifts and traces slowly along my brow, smoothing over the present and banishing the past.
‘I’ve been through many things.’ He keeps his voice low. ‘Things I thought would be the hardest I’d ever have to go through.’ His fingertip drifts towards my temple. ‘But listening to you cry on that plane…’ A muscle jumps in his cheek.
The flight to Narvik. I remember the tears disappearing into my sleeve and scarf while his hand kept finding my thigh. I’d thought he was warning me to stop.
He pulls me beneath him before I can say anything else, and Brute abandons the bedside with a disgruntled sound. Elias buries his face into my hair. His mouth finds my pulse, marking the promise with a kiss.
And I hold him there.
Whatever was before has shaped him. Scarred him. Me, as well. It has taken years neither of us can get back.
But it doesn’t get to keep him.
Not while there is someone left to reach for him now that he’s finally started coming out the other side.
‘By the way,’ he whispers, ‘I love you.’
The words hook into my ribs and detonate.
I draw his face closer until his forehead rests against mine, smiling before I’m even aware of it.
‘I love you too,’ I whisper back.