"Look at her," Sullha murmured. "She's doing all right."
Yaaf nodded. "She is. Who would have thought that Leehy could ever look so alert, so present. She always looked so dead inside."
Sullha looked up at him, and something in her face softened further. "It seems that all she ever needed to wake up from her stupor was a taste of freedom."
Yaaf felt a question rise in him that he had no business asking. "What do you need, Sullha?"
It left his mouth before he could stop it, and he wished at once that he could take it back. He had no business asking Sullha such an intimate question, and he wasn't even sure he wanted to hear her answer.
She did not flinch from it.
She looked up at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before, tender and unguarded, and she lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek, her palm warm against the stubble there.
"You need a shave," she said, and the corner of her mouth curved in a smile.
It wasn't the answer he'd expected, but it undid him anyway. "I can shave if that's all you need. The moment we're somewhere with a razor, I'll shave and present you with a clean jaw. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get."
She chuckled softly, and then her smile faded, and her face turned serious, but her hand was still resting against his cheek.
"I haven't thanked you yet." She held his eyes. "Thank you. For Tomek. For me. For taking the bullets that were meant for us so we could live."
"I would do it again," Yaaf said, and his voice was rough. "Every day for the rest of your life, if it came to that. I would put myself between you and harm a thousand times and think myself lucky for being able to be your shield."
"I know." Her thumb moved against his cheek. "I know you would. And I love you for it." She looked into his eyes. "And for a great many other things."
Yaaf stopped breathing.
She couldn't have meant it the way it had sounded. That was just a figure of speech of the English language.I love you for it, meant only thank you. It wasn't what he wanted to hear. She couldn't have meant it the other way, not after spending days pretending she hadn't heard him tell her that he loved her. She would not turn now, right after watching her son being taken under the water, and give him the answer he'd always wanted to hear.
He swallowed hard because that was all he could do. Words just couldn't form in his throat. He didn't trust himself to speak because he was terrified of saying something that would break whatever this was.
"You asked me what I needed." She hadn't moved her hand from his cheek, and she hadn't looked away. She was looking at him with the full weight of her attention. "I want to dive with you," Sullha said. "I don't want to be paired with one of the Guardians. I want to be with you."
That wasn't what he'd expected either, and it produced two contradictory emotions that were braided together so tightly he could not separate them. Disappointment, because some hopeful part of him had been braced to hear her say that she wantedhim, the whole of him, and she had said instead that she wanted to pair up with him for the dive. But under the disappointment was a thrill because she didn't want to leave his side. Instead of choosing one of the trained Guardians to carryher safely through the water, she had chosen him, who'd never dived before.
"Sullha." He forced himself to be honest because she deserved it even when it cost him. "I'm not a diver. This is my first time, and all I've been given is a ten-minute crash course. You would be safer with a Guardian who is experienced and has done this before. Far safer. I'd never forgive myself if I put you at risk."
"I'd rather take a risk with you than be safe with anyone else."
This statement could be understood in so many ways, but he couldn't allow himself to read too much into it. She preferred to risk the dive with him than do it safely with a stranger.
That was all. There was no other meaning to it.
"I trust you with my life," she continued. "I want to make this crossing holding on to you."
And then she lifted onto her toes and kissed him.
It was a small thing. Chaste, brief, her lips soft against his for the space of a few heartbeats and no more, nothing like what he'd seen in the dream that had haunted them both, nothing elaborate or hungry. And yet it held so much meaning. Every word she hadn't said and every word she had, the whole of the shift she'd made somewhere between the blood and terror of the day, was pressed into the simple meeting of their lips.
When she settled back onto her heels, Yaaf found that his single, solitary mind had gone entirely silent, and for a long moment, this mind of his could produce absolutely nothing.
"We'll have to stay close to the Guardians," he managed once his thought process rebooted. "I'll follow their lead. If anything goeswrong, you do exactly what they signal, not what I do, because they know what to do, and I don't."
"I'm fine with that." Sullha slid her hand from his cheek down to his chest, over the stiff, bloodied fabric and the bullet holes, and rested it there, over the place where his heart was. "Close to the Guardians but holding on to you."
39
ANNANI
