I knew very well Thrax’s issue with littering and how his fingers ache to put scattered things back into its place. He was the guy that would not let my plate sit another hour after I was done eating. So seeing chaos—a heap of torn, crumpled and empty sheets— spill across his kitchen was wrong and suspicious.
“Please put me down,” I said, my eyes fixed on the litter, desperate to see what it was.
When Thrax noticed what I was looking at, he threw his head back, closing his eyes. “Oh, no. We’re not going there.”
That only made me want to see it more. I wiggled out of his arms, and in hesitation, he let me go. I wasn’t sure my legs had fully regained their strength, and they trembled the moment they touched the floor. But with Thrax’s hand steadying me, I didn’t fall. I forced them into movement, dragging myself slowly towards the kitchen. Thrax followed close, shadowing me like he was ready to catch me the second I gave in.
I’d told him in the car that Winifred had put something in my water to make me easier to handle, and I'd been paralysed from it. I was yet to tell him about the twins, or that they were the ones who kidnapped me from the station. He thought Winifred was the one who’d been keeping me since yesterday, and he’d cursed himself like it was his fault he couldn’t feel that I was in Nimorran. He had kept glancing at the bruises on my wrists and ankles from where the twins had tied me up, and to say he was enraged was putting it lightly.
When I got to the kitchen, I picked a crumpled paper from the heap on the counter, unfolding it with hands that barely wanted to work.
I didn’t miss the way Thrax quietly placed his palm on my lower back, either to support me or because he just wanted to touch me.
When the paper unfolded, I was thankful he was holding me from behind or I would have lost my ability to stand. I thought I was not going to cry anymore after shedding my heart out when he found me in that room. But I guessed I’d always be too fragile when it came to him.
On the paper was a sketch of my eyes.
The drawing was so good that I didn’t have a doubt it was mine the second I saw it fill the page in my unsteady hands. Emotionsurged so fast I felt dizzy all over again. He’d captured me—my lashes, the shine in my eyes, the faint arch of my brows, and the fine hair that made them up, down to the last detail.
I knew he always stared at me like he was memorising me, but I never knew he wasactuallymemorising and saving my face for later. The thought sank into my chest like a stone, too heavy for my already weak body.
I dropped that one and picked another pencil drawing, and it was another one of my eyes. I tried not to let the tears cloud my vision as I picked another one and another one, unpeeling them with desperate hands only to find more eyes—my eyes. The next was of my lips, and the detail in that one was jaw dropping. My breath shook, tears rushing until I couldn’t blink fast enough to clear them.
The sketch of my lips filled the sheet, and he’d drawn it like he’d been staring at me when he was doing so. Like he’d traced the curve in his mind a thousand times until he couldn’t help but let it bleed out on paper.
He’d really drawn this from his memory?
“You can draw?” The words choked me, rasping past the lump in my throat as I opened paper after paper. Each one was the same desolated worship, him sketching me multiple times like a madman trying to brand me into his memory forever.
“I’ve lived over a millennium.” His arm came around my waist as he stood behind me, pressing my back to his chest, his chin resting on top of my head. His touch grounded me, though my knees were close to giving out. “That is long enough for anyone to pick up a million hobbies just to forget how slow the world is crawling.”
I picked up another paper, and it was of my lips again. How many times had he drawn them? My hands shook under the weight of all his devotion. “Do you still feel like the world is crawling?”
Thrax exhaled deeply, his other hand coming around me to press me tighter against him. “No, Sanora. Since you walked into my life, Ifeel as if time has been running. I never thought I’d see the day when my every thought was only for the day not to end. Time used to be so slow for me that I stopped counting days, only noticing how night bled into morning and day into night. It was torture, Sanora. And now, with time moving so fast with you here, I didn’t know that could be an even greater torture. But it is. You make me want to surrender everything I’ve got just to bargain with time to slow down. Yesterday, all I did was stare at you as you slept, glancing at the window and hoping daylight would never come. You have made me a greedy man when it comes to time, and I would never have imagined a day would come when all I wanted to do was stop time and live in the moment. Until you came.” He pressed his face to the top of my head, and a small, ragged sound escaped him. Time—the enemy he’d always known—had become a thing he wanted to rob. For my sake. “So no, I don’t feel like the world is crawling when I’m with you. It’s too fast that I can’t breathe sometimes.”
As if my heart wasn’t already breaking, his words tilted my world, and I bit my lip to keep from unravelling like a child once more. My chest ached under the tears I refused to let fall freely, my fingers peeling open another paper through blurred vision.
The next paper was of my whole face, not the separately drawn features, but a portrait—me, whole. And it baffled me how many years it took this man to reach this level of perfection.
He’d drawn me so accurately it was baffling, the strokes so alive they almost moved. Down to my collarbone, every detail was more perfect than I could ever have imagined.
“Have you been doing this since I left?” I asked after clearing my throat.
“Yes.”
“To kill time?”
“To etch you into my skull,” he said. “To have your face own me completely, so that you’ll be the first thing I see when I close my eyes. That way, I’ll be able to take you with me everywhere.”
Would he stop saying the nicest things I’d ever heard? He was making me bawl inside even when I fought to keep it together.
“And here I was, thinking you’re not as affected by the fact that I was leaving the way I was.”
Those words made him tighten his arms harder, almost crushing me to him. “Oh gods, Sanora. You don’t want to know,” he said. “You don’t want to know how fucking hard it was for me to stay back and not touch you. I wanted to do more than touching you. I wanted to kiss you, I wanted to hold you. I wanted to carry you back into the room and lock us there. And I was scared I’d do all that if I touched you or even crossed a certain distance to you. Believe me when I say it was hard for me,Nher.”
Those were the words I’d wanted to hear while leaving, and hearing them now, hearing how he’d sat in torture begging the day not to come, made me feel stupid for even thinking this man would just be okay with saying goodbye to me.
“I thought...I thought you’d be used to saying goodbyes to people,” I confessed, my voice breaking.
