Yakob
Not a single part of me could have stopped her.
Not because I’m still healing, or because she is a job…
She has taken over something inside of me.
Or maybe she broke through something. I don’t know.
I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is Iris Orlova made me feel alive for the first time since that night when I was sixteen years old.
She made me want to be alive.
Even before what we just did. The extraction, the boat, the recklessness of how much of herself she gives to others without even thinking.
Her eyes. The way she stripped off her T-shirt to wad against my wound even though it left her in nothing but her bra.
The way she talks to the house like it’s an old friend.
She is the sun, and she can’t even see it.
I kiss her again. Twisting my tongue with hers, desperate to taste her. I move over her, wait for her to slide into the center of the bed roll and lick my way down her body.
Her nipple pebbles beneath my tongue and she moans when I swirl my tongue around it.
When she arches into my mouth, the sound she makes reaches a place in my chest that hasn't received a signal in twenty years.
I take my time with her. I have never taken my time with anything that wasn't a target, and the difference undoes me.
There's no objective here. There's just her skin under my tongue and the way her breath keeps catching, and the slow, blasphemous discovery that my hands, these hands, can be used for this.
"Yakob," she whispers, and her fingers slide into my hair.
Nobody touches my head. It's a rule so old I forgot it was a rule until she broke it, and I wait for the flinch, the recoil, the instinct that's kept me alive in doorways and stairwells across three continents.
It doesn't come. What comes instead is a stillness I don't recognize, a settling, like a rifle finally coming off safe after being carried cocked for two decades.
I kiss my way down her chest, between her breasts. Down the soft plane of her stomach. Every inch of her is an answer to a question I stopped letting myself ask when I was sixteen. Is there anything left in the world for me? Is there anything left that can be mine?
Her. Her.
"You don't have to," she starts, because even now, even here, she's still triaging, still putting herself last, and I press my mouth to her hip bone to stop the sentence.
"I want to." My voice comes out wrecked. "Let me. Please."
Please. Twice now in one night. Twenty years of never asking anyone for anything, and this woman has me begging in the dark like a man at an altar, which is what this is, I understand that now.
I've stood over bodies. I've knelt in confession booths in three countries for cover and felt nothing.
This is the first time I've knelt and meant it.
She lets me.
Then my tongue is on her center. She tastes of both of us and a jolt of primal possession punches through me.
Yes. She is mine now, my inner voice says. Does she know? Can she know she detonated the thing inside me that was holding my humanity back?
And what about everything that comes with?
The way I no longer just want to get her home to her family.
I want to become her family. I want to spend every moment with her lighting up my life.
Spreading into every dark corner I own and pulling whatever part of me resides there into the brightness of her.
I worship her slowly, thoroughly, the way I do everything, except nothing I've ever done has felt like this, like being given back something that was taken.
Every gasp she gives me goes into the hollow place.
Every time she says my name, Yakob, not the ghost, not the contract, not what I am but who, another stone comes out of the wall I built around the boy from nowhere.
He's still in here. That's the thing I'm learning with my mouth against her skin and her hands pulling me closer.
The boy who carried kerosene through the snow, who had a mother who sang badly and a sister who followed him everywhere.
I thought he burned with the rest of the town.
He didn't. He just went quiet, and this woman looked at him without fear and he's been getting louder ever since.
Her thighs tremble against my palms. She's close.
I can read her body the way I read everything, but this intelligence is for her benefit, all of it, every skill I have repurposed in one night into a single function.
Make her feel what she makes me feel. There aren't enough hours on this island for that.
"Yakob, I..." Her voice breaks apart, and I hold her through it, steady, devoted, greedy for every second of it and I ravish her.
Afterward I move up her body and she pulls me down to her, and I brace my weight on my forearms, careful of nothing anymore except her, and when she wraps herself around me the last of it goes. The hollow. The haunted. The twenty years of being a loaded weapon in an empty room.
I'm not empty. Not anymore. I'm hers.
I press my forehead to hers in the dark.
"Thank you," I say, and I don't explain it, and she doesn't ask, because she already knows. She's known since the fever. She heard me calling into the dark and instead of running she lay down beside a ghost and made him human.