Page 77 of These Tears

With Ron, it had always been predictable. Careful and soft. Lights off. Quiet kisses. Bodies going through the motions as though following a script. It never made me feel like this, as if I were standing on an edge, wanting to jump.

Elias’ vow claws at the rawness inside me and throws sparks.

Him dragging me back into that stall, his hands framing my throat, his voice commanding, do this now…

It should be repulsive.

And I almost… almost want him to follow through. Just to see – at least for once in my life – what it would feel like to be broken by someone like Elias Crane.

Minutes later, every clack of my boots against the narrow boarding stairs coats another layer of frost over my insides. The cabin door yawns open ahead, the interior bright and ordinary and irrevocably final.

This is it.

He’s done it.

I’m gone.

I’m lost.

God, I wish I were sharper. Braver. Wish I had a scrap of that devilish recklessness that my family keeps attaching to me – the one that lets people bolt without thinking. But I do not. No matter what they think.

I’m just a coward.

I watch my boots cross the threshold of the aircraft as if they belong to someone else. My heart fights to stay in my chest cavity instead of clawing its way out my gullet.

For the duration of the flight, my rebellion is invisible. Tears spill when no one is looking – caught in the crook of my sleeve, soaked into my scarf, swallowed back with bitter breaths.

Every time, his hand closes around me in warning. Sometimes my thigh. Sometimes my wrist. Even my shoulders, as if we’re nothing more than a couple navigating turbulence together.

The cabin hums. The lights dim. Time loosens its grip.

At some point, exhaustion wins. I drift in and out, then wake to the noise.

With the soft rasp of fabric, the zip of a bag, the shuffling of bodies shifting in the aisle, the world crawls back into focus. Almost unreal.

People are standing, stretching and reaching for the overhead compartments.

My gaze flits instantly towards the window where the world vanishes beneath a blanket of thick snow. White upon white. Nothing but the snare of sun over it. The mountains loom closer, their jagged silhouettes dulled by frost and distance. Every slope is powdered in silence, the valleys choked with drifts that look soft but promise ruin.

No colour for miles.

No warmth.

Just an unforgiving hush of early winter.

The trees below are brittle black lines etched into the landscape, scattered like splinters across the white sea. There are faint rectangles in the distance, and I almost make out the roofs atop them.

This is another world entirely, not just a different place. A white desert designed to swallow sound and heat and people.

Behind the glass, the plane we arrived on is already dusted with snow. The terminal is squat, but functional, its windows glowing against the early winter gloom.

Even the air smells different. Cleaner somehow. As if the cold might bite even indoors.

We follow the sparse arrivals corridor into the baggage reclaim area, where I see my luggage circling lazily on the belt.

For a second, it doesn’t compute.

Then it does.