Iris
By the second morning I have learned the house's whole vocabulary, and I have decided that getting Yakob to talk is going to be the hardest thing I do on this island, including the part where I stitched together a bullet hole.
The house says plenty. The shutters have a creak for wind and a different creak for me.
The cistern pump complains in two syllables.
The camping stove, whose name is Dmitri now whether he likes it or not, hisses and pops at me every time I light him, which I take personally.
Even the olive trees outside have opinions, all that silvery whispering every time the breeze comes up the terrace.
Yakob says four words before noon. One of them is "no."
I'm changing his dressing when I decide to make it a project.
He's sitting up on the cot under his own power today while watching to make sure I noticed.
His color is better. His pulse under my fingers this morning was slow and strong and somehow smug about it.
He's mending at a speed that isn't reasonable, as if his body got the same training the rest of him did and knows better than to waste time.
Which means I get to stop being terrified for him, and start being curious about him, and I have a week of enforced silence to burn through and nowhere to spend it but here.
"This one." I touch the edge of tape at his side, then nod at the old scar a hand's width above it, a pale rope of tissue that curves along his ribs like a parenthesis. "What's the story?"
"Knife."
"That's not a story."
"Bratislava." A pause while I peel the tape, but he doesn't flinch. "Two thousand nine."
"Better. Setting, and a date." I check the wound. Clean. Dry at the edges, no heat coming off it, knitting itself shut like it has somewhere to be. I reach for the fresh gauze. "Now we need a plot. A knife doesn't just happen to a person. There's a whole event attached to that."
"There was a man. He had a knife. Then he didn't."
I look up at him. His face is giving me nothing, but I've had two days to study nothing and I'm starting to read the dialects of it.
There's the nothing that means he's gone somewhere behind his own eyes, and the nothing that means pain, and then there's this one, the one with the almost invisible longitude of tension at the corner of his mouth, which I am nearly certain is what happens to a joke when it dies in customs.
"You're teasing me," I say. "You've discovered banter. I want it noted that this is the proudest day of my life."
"So noted," he grins, and my stomach does this weird back flip thing.
There’s something else I’ve noticed about his face. Probably from staring at it so long on the first night with the fever. The angles, the planes, the way his stubble casts shadows. The shape of his eyes. The flinty gray color of them. He is handsome, and I feel stupid for noticing it.
I tape the new dressing down and smooth it flat, Keeping my hands professional about it, which takes more supervision than it did two days ago.
Two days ago he was a dying man and his body was a problem to be solved.
Today the gray is out of his skin, and what's left under my palms is just him, warm and solid and built out of long, efficient muscle.
There's a scar low on his shoulder and another above his hip and a small, old, silver one at his collarbone, and every one of them is a door he keeps locked.
I sit back on my heels before my hands can develop ideas of their own.
"That one." I point to the collarbone. "Small. Old. You were young."
Something crosses his eyes, fast, like a bird's shadow over a field. "Yes."
"How young?"
"Very." He reaches for his T-shirt, and it's not modesty, I've worked that much out. It's cover. He puts it on the way other men put on a story. "It was a long time ago."
"Where?"
"Nowhere."
He says it without weight, the way you'd say the time, and that's exactly what gives it away.
Everything else gets a place and a date.
Bratislava, two thousand nine. Grozny, a shrapnel graze, don't ask.
Even the fresh ones came with coordinates.
This is the only scar on his whole body he marked as ‘nowhere.’
Everyone from nowhere started out somewhere. That's what nowhere means. It means the somewhere hurts.
I don't push. I want to, the curiosity is practically climbing out of my skin, but I grew up in a house full of men who went quiet about the wrong things, and I know what pushing gets you.
Pushing gets you a wall with a fresh coat of paint.
Waiting gets you a door left open a crack because someone finally trusted you not to shove it.
So I fold the old dressing into the bowl, and I say, "Okay," and I feel him notice that I let it go. He notices everything. It's the job, he told me. Well. Noticing things is my job too. Nobody hired me for it, but I've been doing it since I was six years old anyway.
I make lunch, which is rice again, because we're on a strict regime of rice with rice, garnished with rice.
I talk while I cook. I've stopped apologizing for it.
He sits in the chair by the window where he can see the track, and he listens with that whole-body stillness of his that I mistook for indifference initially and now know is the opposite.
My family listens loudly, interrupting, arguing, finishing your sentences wrong on purpose.
Yakob listens like it's marksmanship. Nothing gets past him and nothing gets wasted.
I tell him about the time Connor tried to deep-fry a turkey for an American-style Thanksgiving that nobody had asked for, and the fireball was visible from the gate, and Ma didn't say a word, just stood there holding the fire blanket she'd fetched twenty minutes earlier, because she knows her sons the way sailors know the ocean.
I tell him about the wives' group chat that I'm in and my brothers are banned from, and how it's mostly used for logistics and blackmail.
I tell him Rafferty cried at the end of a film about a dog and made us all swear an oath, an actual oath, hands in, never to speak of it.
"You just spoke of it," Yakob says.
"You don't count. You're a professional secret keeper. Telling you things is basically the same as burying them at sea."
That upward tick appears at the corner of his mouth again. I'm getting three or four of them an hour now, and each one pulls another thread loose from around my heart. I'm going to have to start being honest with myself about that.
It's the afternoon that undoes me, though.
He decides to earn his keep, which I could have predicted, because lying still is clearly a torment for him designed by the devil himself.
He won't take the walk I offer down the terrace, too visible, he says, so instead he sits at the table with the med kit and repacks it, everything wiped, everything squared, and then he takes the oil lamp apart because I mentioned, once, in passing, that it smoked.
I watch his hands while I'm pretending to do the washing up.
Hands I held whilst running from my captors.
Hands I held when he was fading with blood loss.
Now I watch them trim a lamp wick with a precision that's almost tenderness, and set the glass chimney back with two fingers, careful of the fragile thing, and something in my chest turns over and lies back down facing a different direction.
He's not a weapon. A weapon is a thing someone else picks up and uses, and that's how he talks about himself, when he talks at all.
The contract. The job. What I am. Language with all the personality filed off.
But a weapon doesn't choose the seat facing the door so the woman can have the one with the sea view.
A weapon doesn't take a bullet to keep it out of someone else's body, or fix a lamp because she mentioned the smoke.
He's a man. A damaged man. A dangerous one, I've seen the proof, I'll see it when I close my eyes for years. And a devastating one, which is the part I've stopped being able to un-notice, the part currently sitting in the low afternoon light frowning at a lamp wick like it's a hostile negotiation.
I'm in so much trouble.
"You're staring," he says, without looking up.
"I'm supervising. There's a difference. I have a lot invested in that lamp."
"It won't smoke now, but use it sparingly. We don’t want to give our position away, not even to the locals.”
"My hero," I say with an edge of sarcasm.
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.