Page 271 of These Tears

His hand leaves his waistband and reaches for mine. My shutter starves for the flick of his fingers as he undoes my jeans.

Then his hand closes around the camera and takes it from me gently, leaving it on the floor as he comes back over me with nothing between us.

As his desire meets mine, he holds my gaze as if looking away would be a sin. And the pleasure is no longer in being taken, stretched or possessed, but in the sounds he lets escape freely when my core tightens around him; in the way his eyes devour every arch of my body, every broken breath, every helpless tremor until we both unravel.

In the aftermath, with him still shaking against me, there is a damning kind of clarity that washes over me: neither of us is healed. We’re simply learning how to stand inside the hurt together, without building another cage from it.

And I could spend an eternity doing just that.

46

The shriek of birds outside the window left ajar brings the morning. The dogs bark somewhere beyond the house, chasing each other through the clearing.

As my body begins to wake, the exquisite ache Elias has left behind blooms all over.

I reach blindly across the sheets, needing to feel the heat of him, the hard slope of muscle, the soft undulations of his chest when sleep begins to loosen around it.

My hand finds only rumpled linen. The cold patch beside me registers right after. Then the silence creeps in.

I crack open my eyes, pushing myself up from the mattress and listening past Brute and Menace, past the hens muttering in the shed and the ordinary sounds of a northern summer saturating the world.

I can see the new truck still sitting outside. He hasn’t taken it, so he must be home still.

‘Elias?’ I call, but silence responds.

As I dress, the pressure in my breastbone refuses to shift away. I make my way through the house and towards the shed. The door is closed, its bolt seated firmly in the latch. Nothing is wrong enough to name.

As I release the chickens into the outer enclosure, I keep listening for him between the sounds.

The house holds a silence too thick to breathe through. Nature whispers slyly against my ear.

I don’t find him in the darkroom, or our room.

I give up the search somewhere between the empty pantry and the back door, one hand pressed to my forehead as memory finally catches up with panic.

The goats. Anders. Trip south to a place I can’t pronounce.

Perhaps they took Anders’ truck?

The house feels arranged too neatly around his absence, every sound made shriller by the fact that none of them come from the rustle of his clothes, the grunting after his axe strikes wood, the sighs when he finds another one of my domestic mistakes.

The quiet sits there until even swallowing feels difficult.

‘Get hold of yourself, Leandra,’ I say aloud as I step out, the creak of the door stopping Menace and Brute mid-sprint as their heads turn back towards me and their pointy ears spring upright.

‘Proceed.’ I wave them awkwardly away and they scatter across the grounds again.

I’m still afraid of these creatures, but at least they haven’t tried eating me, which makes me cautiously confident they may never attempt it.

Pushing a fragment of unease out on a breath, I look inwards and do what any woman pretending at emotional stability would do – I make myself useful.

After feeding the chickens, I push them back into the henhouse and return indoors, have a quick breakfast, and grab my leather jacket Inga insisted I needed to own. I check all the doors twice, then lock up behind me.

Making sure the dogs have enough food and water, I leave them in the clearing Elias walked them through yesterday, with the front door flap left open for them.

The scent of new leather sits heavy in my lungs as soon as I climb into the truck.

Before I can close the door, Brute launches himself into my lap. With yelps and grunts and whines, I scramble his tremendous weight off me, and he sprawls across the passenger seat as though the registration came with his collar.