Instrumental
Emmett
—know that Papa would beat me bloody, if he knew what I was thinking, but why would he have given me the texts if I weren’t supposed to use them?
To protect yourself, he said, when he pressed them into my hands, and surely he was not thinking of protection from loneliness, from uncertainty, from the fear that comes with an utter lack of companionship, but what can I do?
To go outside the community for such a thing is an impossibility, to seek it within even worse.
It would mean the loss of everything, to ask the wrong person.
There are too few of us here to risk it, and the work too dangerous for me to dare attempt it on my own.
I remember the stories Papa told me, of his sister’s companion, of the choice my grandfather made to create her, when the money was too scarce to find a nurse or a friend by more conventional means.
He said that she was kind. Protective, competent, but more than anything, kind.
That he was sure that no matter what else Grandfather had commanded of her, she had loved Tante Rivka.
That he believed she must have chosen to do so, because how could Grandfather compel such a thing?
The companionship I need—is not that. The love I hope for isn’t nearly so pure.
Papa would tell me it’s an abomination, not just to use our family’s secrets for that purpose, but to seek that kind of love at all.
But I have read the stories too, and read them more deeply than Papa ever dared; Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish.
If this works, I will call him Ira. Watchful one.
A guardian, maybe, but someone who will see me. Know me, for who I am.
I am not a disobedient son. I will marry someday, of course. But if you ever read this, Papa, whatever else you think, know that I believe this to be as true as any of the words of Torah: This too is holy.
Delilah goes back to bed after Alex’s phone call, dragging Emmett along with her.
They watch as she curls up under the comforter, ignoring the way her mess of dark, tumbling curls are falling out of their loose topknot, and tucks her arm tightly around Emmett’s waist. She pulls at them until they get the hint and wrap their own arm around her shoulders, and Emmett bites back a smile as she smushes her face into their chest, scooting impossibly closer.
It puts a decisive end to Emmett’s half-hearted plan to go for a walk and clear their thoughts after last night. They find that they don’t really mind.
Last night was—unexpected. Confusing. Wonderful, in a way.
Forbidden and dangerous and sacred. It had been warmth and sensations they hadn’t known their body was capable of, drawn out of them by Delilah’s soft lips and roaming hands, the pressure of her thighs around their waist and the breathless sounds she made when they touched her.
They aren’t a stranger to attraction. They’ve known, intellectually, how to appreciate beauty. But that urgent desire, the need to move and touch, that dizzying spiral toward climax—
The twinge of guilt that came in the aftermath, at least, was familiar. Guilt twisted up with shame—the two feelings that have been such constant companions throughout their life that they’ve never really been able to tell where one ends and the other begins.
They wonder, sometimes, what kind of father Jacob was to Isaac.
Jacob must have loved him, loved him to the point of taking a wild, desperate risk, because nothing else would have made him take that chance, creating a monster in the shape of his son in a last hopeless attempt to restore something of his likeness to the world.
But love, Emmett knows, isn’t separate from harm or cruelty. Love can be ownership too, and obsession and consumption and self-destruction.
Jacob was proof of that.
Emmett doesn’t regret their own existence, however complicated.
But they’ve always regretted what that existence did to Dana—Jacob’s eldest, Isaac’s sister.
She’d never forgiven Jacob for what he made of her brother’s memory.
Emmett doesn’t wear an exact copy of Isaac’s face, but they’re a pale mockery of the life he never got to live.
The fact that she’d known what Emmett was, and been forced to keep her father’s secrets, only made things more complicated between them.
The last time Emmett saw her was the Friday after Jacob’s death, when she packed her bags and left to sit the remainder of shiva in her own home.
She hadn’t said goodbye, but she had let them help her carry her suitcase to the waiting cab.
She’d stood there looking at them for a long moment while the taxi’s engine idled beside them.
The expression in her red-rimmed eyes was unreadable, but perhaps not as hostile as it had been a week or a month or a year before.
Maybe it was foolish to be grateful for that hint of softness. But Emmett had felt it all the same.
Ruth had been waiting at the door when Emmett came back into the house. She reached for them almost before they were close enough to touch, the same way she’d reached for them since she was a tiny baby just learning what her arms were for.
They’d folded her into a hug, stroking her hair. “Are you all right?”
A foolish question, probably. Her father was dead. Of course she wasn’t all right.
“Are we not even going to talk about it?”
Her words had been half muffled into Emmett’s shirt, but they knew what she was asking. Jacob’s accidental truths, Emmett’s halting confirmation. Emmett closed their eyes. “I can’t. Not now.”
She’d pulled back, looking up at them, looking very small.
Emmett had a sudden urge to wrap her in a blanket and tuck her into bed like they had when she was little, when there were no hard questions and no weary circles under her eyes and she only ever cried over skinned knees or vegetables she didn’t like at dinner.
“Emmett,” she’d started, but her mother had called her name from the kitchen, and she swallowed, shaking her head. “Later, okay?”
Emmett squeezed her once and let her go without answering, because they hadn’t known what to say.
They still don’t know what they could have said.
Not that it matters, Emmett thinks. They’ll never see her again.
The thought puts an unexpected lump in their throat, and they press the fingers of one hand against the hollow of their collarbone. There’s nothing, just cool skin, crafted from clay and spellwork. As much an illusion as the rest of them.
Delilah makes a muffled noise against their chest and shuffles closer in her sleep, her fingers twining into the fabric of Emmett’s shirt.
Emmett smiles, absently twirling one of her curls around one finger.
She shifts again, gives a disgruntled huff, and then pokes the rest of her head out from under the comforter to look blearily up at them.
“Hey,” she says, voice still thick with sleep as she stretches, twisting this way and that.
Emmett indulges themself in watching the way her back arches with each movement, like a particularly fussy cat, and only slightly misses the soft brush of her hair between their fingers. “What time is it?”
“Just before eight,” Emmett says. “You got a few more hours of sleep.”
She sits up with a yawn, swiping loose strands of hair out of her eyes. Her hair has almost completely fallen out of its bun, and she tugs the elastic out with a wince, bundling her hair back up into a pile and securing it again, a practiced, unselfconscious motion. “You didn’t sleep?”
“I wasn’t tired.”
“You could have at least pretended, you little creep,” she says, and Emmett hears it for the tease that it is. She peers out the window, wrinkling her nose. “Did the rain stop?”
“Mm.” It’s dim out for this late in the morning, a bit gray and cloudy, but they don’t feel any of the dull aches in their joints they’ve come to associate with stormy weather. “Just some fog now, I think.”
Delilah grimaces. “Still awful to travel in.” She turns back to them, widening her eyes hopefully, and Emmett doesn’t know what it means that they already know what she means by that look, or why it makes them feel so warm to know it.
“That’s all right,” Emmett says. A stubborn lock of hair slips out of the new bun, and Emmett gives in to the desire to reach over and tuck it back.
If they let their fingertips linger an instant longer than they should, well.
At least for now, they’re still dying. They deserve an indulgence or two, and they’re going to hold on to this one for as long as they can. “I’ll drive.”