I don’t have the strength to answer most of it, but I’ve learned, in the space of the short time I’ve spent with her, that I don’t need to answer. She doesn’t appear to require it. The words come out of her like something that has been dammed too long, splitting the water into a low current of half-sentences, jokes with no landing, a running commentary on the boat, the wind,the state of her hair, the fact that she is fairly sure this counts as boating without a license and her brother is going to have opinions about that.
I focus on staying conscious. It is, at this moment, the hardest job I have ever been tasked with.
Her skin is pale with the cold, glowing almost against the dark backdrop of the early morning hours. She is shivering. I manage to finally shrug out of my jacket, and throw it at her.
The wound in my side has gone past pain into something else, a deep, insistent throb that pulses in time with my heart, the bleeding finally slowing.
She puts my jacket on and zips it up while muttering something about stealing my warmth. When I feel her soft, small hand slide into mine, I let her keep it there. Blood loss makes a man stupid. I know this and I do it anyway, because the alternative is letting go, and some animal part of me has decided that letting go isn’t something I want to happen tonight.
"How are you doing down there?" she calls over the engine noise, not looking away from the water for more than half a second at a time. She has picked up steering faster than I would have predicted. Steadier hands than her voice would suggest.
"Fine," I say. It comes out like a crackle. My voice broken with the exhaustion of trying to stay awake.
"You said that already. It wasn't true then either."
The lights of Sicily fall further behind us, smearing into a single orange stain low against the black water, and somewhere ahead, unmarked, unlit, is an island I chose three nights ago from a map, a set of coordinates and reliance on a contact I haven’t seen for over a decade.
I didn’t plan for this. I plan for everything. But not one of those plans accounted for Iris Orlova's hand pressed against mine,holding a wound closed with a strength that has no business belonging to someone who spent the last week locked up, scared and alone.
We pass Vulcano far enough away not to draw attention. Iris keeps her eyes on the distance. Lipari is close enough to see.
"Talk to me," she says again. It has become a refrain. "Tell me something. Anything. I don't care what."
"There's nothing to tell."
"That's not true. Everyone has something to tell. Tell me your favorite color. Tell me if you hate cilantro. Tell me literally anything, because if you go quiet on me, I'm going to assume the worst, and I have a very active imagination, Yakob, you have no idea."
My name in her mouth does something to the soul deep ache in me that has nothing to do with the bullet wound.
Nobody has said my name like that in longer than I can remember. There’s no one else on this planet still alive who even knows it. It makes it feel more special, more…something.
It feels intimate.
"Gray," I say.
"What?"
"My favorite color,” I grunt. “Gray."
A laugh breaks out of her, short and startled, cutting through the engine noise. "Of course it is. Of course your favorite color is gray. You couldn't have said blue like a normal person. You had to pick the color of a rainy Tuesday."
"It's practical."
"It's sad, is what it is. When we get through this, I'm buying you something orange. A shirt. A very loud, very unnecessary orange shirt, and you're going to wear it."
I want to tell her that I don’t own shirts that aren’t black or gray or the flat, muted green that disappears into foliage. I want to tell her that the last time someone bought me clothing I was nine years old and it was my mother, standing in a market stall in the cold, holding up a sweater against my shoulders to check the size. I don’t tell her either of those things. I don’t have the breath to spare, and some part of me understands that if I start pulling on that thread, I won’t be able to stop. This is not the time or place to unravel my past.
The boat hits a swell wrong and the whole thing shudders. Pain lances up through my side hard enough that my vision goes white at the edges before it comes back in thin whisps.
"Yakob." Her voice sharpens instantly, all the humor gone out of it. "Hey. Eyes on me. Stay with me."
I find her face in the lightening sky. Pale, streaked with salt spray, her hair plastered flat against one side of her head, and underneath all of it, unmistakably, that same unguarded fierceness I first saw in the tiny window at the vineyard. She doesn’t look away from me. She has one hand on the wheel and the other has found its way back to mine without either of us deciding it should, gripping hard enough to bruise. An anchor thrown across the space between us.
"I'm here," I say.
"You'd better be. I already told you, I didn't drag your bleeding self out of a vineyard just to lose you to the ocean. That would be extremely poor planning on my part, and I refuse to be remembered as the woman who couldn't keep the man who rescued her alive for one boat ride."
"Extraction," I correct, out of reflex. "Not a rescue."
