"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 thanit 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.
