Page 228 of These Tears

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.