He looks up at that. And there it is again, the flicker, the thing behind the nothing, and this time it stays a half second longer than it ever has before, long enough for me to see that it isn't amusement at all, or not only. It's something warier than that, and hungrier, and it's pointed at me.
The kitchen is suddenly feeling very small.
I turn back to the washing up. My heart is behaving like it's been drinking.
That evening the light goes gold and then rose and then that deep, bruised blue the sea gets here, and we eat outside the door because I bullied him into it, two chairs on the stone, the track in his sightline, I'm learning to arrange the world in his language. The lamp between us doesn't smoke, and we keep it low. He was right. He's always right. It's very annoying and I've decided to find it charming, which is its own bad sign.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, "You can say ‘no.’"
His eyes come to mine. "You'll ask anyway."
"I won't, actually. That's the offer on the table."
He considers me for a moment, longer than the question deserves, like he's checking the offer for wires. Whoever taught him that offers have wires, I hope they're somewhere unpleasant.
"Ask."
"When you say nowhere." I keep my eyes on the sea, because some questions are easier when there’s no eye contact. "Is it because there's nothing there now? Or because there was, once?"
The silence goes on long enough that I think I've spent everything I earned today in one go. The olive trees whisper, the only sound interrupting the growing tension between us.
"There was, once," he says.
Three words. Delivered quietly, into the dark, at the very edge of his voice's range, and I hold absolutely still, the way you do when something wild has come close enough to touch and the worst thing you could do is reach.
"Okay," I say softly. "Thank you."
I don't ask what. I don't ask where it went, though I think I already know sort of, from a fevered voice in the middle of the night calling one small worn-down name into the dark. He'll bring it to me or he won't. Doors, not walls. You can't push a door open from the inside; you can only leave the light on and make it obvious there's somewhere warm to walk into.
We sit while the lamp does its perfect, smokeless work, and the sea goes black below the terraces, and I sneak a look at his profile, this impossible, locked, devastating man.
I told him I'd keep him.
I didn't know then that it was going to feel like falling.
Yakob
The lamp is out, the house has gone over to its night sounds, and I am lying on a bedroll three feet from a sleeping woman, holding three words in my chest like a live round.
There was, once.
I said them hours ago, out on the terrace, into the dark where I thought they'd be safe. They weren't. Words don't disperse the way I was taught they do. They stay in the room and wait.
I try to ignore their presence and run the inventory instead. Door, barred. Shutters, latched, one slat angled so I can see the track. The knife where my hand will find it. My side aches in the deep, itching way that means it’s knitting back together, and my pulse is a slow, obedient fifty-two. My body is recovering on schedule. The bullet wound is the only part of me behaving normally.
Iris took the cot under protest, which is the only way she takes anything that benefits her. The protest lasted eleven minutes and involved the phrasemanagement decisionused against me twice. She's on her side now, facing me, one hand tucked under her cheek and the other resting at the edge of the mattress, open, the way it hangs open every time she sleeps near me, like some part of her stays on call.
Her breathing went long and even forty minutes ago. I've timed it. Six seconds in, seven out, the tide of a person who is genuinely under.
And I'm lying here in the dark, in the one place on earth where nothing is supposed to reach me, learning that something already has.
Twenty years of interrogation resistance. Men have worked on me with tools and pharmaceuticals and patience, and never got anything out of me. She asked one question, softly, looking at the sea instead of at me, and the vault opened a crack.
I should be going over the exit plan. Ferry schedules. My pilot’s whereabouts. Instead I'm lying here with my eyes on her, watching, and the past is standing at the foot of the bedroll like a debt collector. For the first time in twenty years I don't have the strength to send it away.
Maybe it's the blood loss. Maybe it's the fever's residue, some door it burned open on its way through. Maybe it's her, asleep three feet away, the first person since I was a boy who has touched me without wanting something in return.
I start talking.
