20. Kat #3
"Delam tangeh," he says, and I don't know all of it but I know the shape of missing when I hear it.
"I'm right here."
"I know." His hand comes up and covers my throat, gentle, thumb at my jaw, and I lean into it. "I know. Delam tangeh anyway. For years, before I knew your name."
The tears come and I keep moving through them, the pressure winds tighter with every roll of my hips, gathering low and mean under my navel.
"Harder," I gasp.
He sits up under me, one arm bracing my back, the other hand between us, thumb landing on my clit, and he takes over. Drives up into me, setting a punishing pace while he works me with his thumb, the angle changes and hits the spot that makes my thighs shake uselessly around him.
"That's it." Rough, right against my mouth. "There. Come on me. Let me feel it."
"Naveed…"
"Say my name again."
"Naveed, baby…yes…yes"
"Again."
"Naveed. Jesus Christ"
"I can't take that title."
It breaks. "Fuuck…"
It breaks so hard the room goes white at the corners, everything in me slamming shut around him in waves, my nails dragging down his chest, a sound escaping my throat that I have never made in my life.
He holds me through all of it, grinding up into me, thumb still working, saying my name into my hair, the aftershocks keep rolling and rolling until I collapse forward against his shoulder with my mouth open on his scar.
We stay like that for a long time. His arm across my back, my forehead against his collarbone, my mouth still resting on the ridge of scar tissue because I cannot make myself move off it.
His heart is slamming under my cheek. Mine is not much better.
The sheets are wrecked, one pillow is on the floor, and somewhere in the last ten minutes the lamp got knocked so the light comes at us sideways and turns the whole room amber and strange.
His hand moves. Up my back, down again, palm flat, slow, the way you'd gentle something that got loose in traffic.
"You're shaking," he says.
"So are you."
He doesn't argue. That is new. The old Naveed would have said negative and gone to check the window.
I lift my head. His face is right there, closer than he has ever let it be, and the discipline is just gone. Not softened. Gone. His eyes are red at the rims, and his mouth is swollen, and there is a line of scratches down his chest that I put there and do not regret.
I brush my thumb along the edge of his jaw. Stubble catching. My hands still won't hold steady.
"Say something."
He breathes out. Under my palm his ribs rise and drop, and the scar shifts against my fingers, and I know now what it is and it makes me want to hold it forever and also throw something through a wall.
"You should not be near me."
There it is. Quiet. Not cruel. Not even an argument. It comes out of him like an old address he has recited so many times his mouth does it without permission.
Something in my chest folds down hard.
"Too late."
"Kat."
"No." I sit up. The sheet slides off my hip, I don't reach for it, because covering up right now would be a lie about what just happened in this bed.
"You don't get to say a thing like that and then say my name in that voice like you're softening the blow.
Too late. It was too late the night you fell asleep against my door. "
His mouth sets, his hand stays on my back, he doesn't take it away, because his body is more truthful than his mouth.
"You don't know what happens to people who get close."
"I know exactly what you cost one person." My voice cracks straight down the middle. "He was mine before he was yours. And I have been paying that bill since I was nineteen years old, so don't you dare hand me the invoice like I've never seen it."
We are bound by a body. That is the thing neither of us will say.
Most people fall into each other over something bright, a laugh, a good hour, a want that costs nothing to feel.
He and I are welded together at the worst day either of us ever survived: his, because he could not save the man; mine, because the man was the last one left standing between me and being completely alone in the world.
A sane woman runs from a love with a grave at the bottom of it.
I look at the grave, and then I look at him, and I understand that this is the only kind of love I was ever going to be able to trust, one that already knows to the meter the weight of what it will cost to lose, one that walked into me with its eyes wide open, over the body of the one man who ever guarded me.
A sane woman would call that cursed. I call it the first honest thing anyone has set in front of me since I was nineteen years old, I close both hands around it before he can take it back.
His eyes close. When they open they are moist, I have known this man for weeks and never once seen him fail to hide something.
"He talked about you," he says. "In country. He used to say his sister's girl was going to be a reporter and God help everyone. He said it like a warning."
A sound that isn't a sob leaves me and drops somewhere between us in the room before I can take hold of my emotions.
"He was right."
I press my hand over the scar again.
"That's what I mean," I tell him. "Too late. Not because I'm stubborn. Because you're standing in the middle of my life now and there's no version of it where you leave and it goes back to how it was. That's not a threat. That's just how it is."
"Zaid would appreciate that framing."
"Don't be funny right now, I'm not equipped."
The corners of his mouth move. That almost-smile again before he schools it.
I have wanted him for weeks. It makes me sharp, reckless, hungry and it burns through in an hour.
But this is not that. He has seen the letters and the box, the dead and the hole in the middle of my family, he saw all of it before I ever let him in, and he stayed at my door anyway.
That is what has me shaking. Not the orgasm. Not his hands.
Being wanted, I could have walked away from. Being known has put a hook in me under the ribs, and every breath drags on it.
My eyes keep leaking without my permission. There is a fine tremor running through my hands where they rest on his chest and it is not fear, it is the body of a woman who has been alone for eleven years and just got looked at all the way through.
"Kat." His hand comes up. Thumb along my cheekbone, catching the wet there. "Breathe."
"I am breathing."
"You're holding it."
He is right, I let it out.
"Say the other thing," I tell him.
"Which one?"
"The one you said before. When you were inside me. About the years."
His hand stills on my face. He looks at me for a long moment, I watch him decide, watch the wall come down brick by brick because he is choosing it and not because I knocked it over.
"Delam tangeh," he says. "I missed you before I had a name for you. I had a photograph in a drawer, a debt I could not pay and I kept the door because it was the only thing I knew how to do. Then you opened it." His thumb moves. "I have not been able to put you back since."
I drop my forehead to his and stay there, if I look at him I am going to come apart in a way neither of us is prepared for.
"Then stop trying," I whisper. "Stop trying to get me somewhere safer than you. I'm not going. I'm not one of your casualties, I'm not his ghost, and I'm not leaving this bed, so you can tell me I shouldn't be near you every single day for the rest of your life."
His arm tightens across my back. Full strength. It is the closest thing to a promise he has.
"You should not be near me," he says again, into my hair, this time it comes out shredded, it isn't a verdict. It's a confession.
"Too late."