Part II
Chapter 3 Gold
Sandi is gone before I’m out of the shower.
I take my time. The bra is a problem — leaking again, that slow persistent gold that has no respect for schedules or dignity. I rifle through my bag for something absorbent, find nothing, stand there dripping and furious.
A throat-clearing from the entrance. Fatma, eyes down, arm extended: a neat stack of nursing pads. She doesn’t wait for thanks.
I strip entirely. Start again. Stuff the cotton into the bra, dress over it, check the mirror once and decide not to.
Blasted Tarmo. Creates the problem, then arranges the solution. Probably from three countries away.
I walk out into the courtyard and there he is — in an actual rattan throne, Mikael at his shoulder, Sandi circling the perimeter like something that hasn’t been fed.
Karim conspicuously absent.
Something in my head just — goes.
“All your pieces in order, I see. Knights, rooks, pawns. Just missing the queen.”
The headscarf slips. The gold catches the light. Tarmo watches me with that face he uses — the mask — but there’s something behind it.
“Are you finished?” he asks.
The courtyard tips.
I come back to the ceiling fan. The blades going round. The particular quality of heat that means afternoon, means tent, means Tarmo lying beside me with that expression he doesn’t know he wears when he thinks I might not wake up.
“You’re going to stop my heart,” he says.
“Kiss me,” I say. Because, I know what’s coming.
“Pirates, Elena. Karim told me everything. By Odin — a plane. There are planes.”
I look at him. Those eyes. That infuriating, specific blue.
“Kiss me.”
He holds out for exactly as long as he ever does, which is not long.
What follows is not elegant. It is honest.
His mouth finds the old geography — collarbone, pulse, the strap off the shoulder before I’ve decided to allow it.
His hand beneath the cotton, rough palm, and then the particular complication of me right now: cloth and milk and heat and the ache of too long.
The wanting that has been accumulating since last or before, longer maybe, since whatever Tarmo is first recognised whatever I am across whatever distance gods use to find each other.
The liquid catches his hand. He looks up.
Gold, he says, and means it, and takes his time.
I stop being coherent. I stop being careful. My nails find his back and leave a record there. We are loud and unhurried and I say don’t stop and he doesn’t and when it finally arrives — the release — it comes out of me half-laughing, which is the only honest response to something you’ve been avoiding for that long.
After: his fingers loose in mine. The fan. The heat. His thumb moving in small circles on my hand.
I believe it, for a minute. The stillness. The idea of staying.
The satellite phone.
Mrs H, of course. Approval received. Financial, insurance, everything arranged.
I read it twice. Set it down. Turn back into his arms one last time and kiss him the way you kiss someone when you already know you’re leaving — slow, and with your whole attention, and your hand finding his and placing it where he can feel what’s there, the small new gravity of it.
He lets go when I pull back. His jaw does that thing.
“I’ll be behind you,” he says. Not a threat. Just the facts.
I’m already at the door when I answer. The cool air hits before the words do.
“I know,” I say. “You always are.”
I.Ph.
This is the public edition. The complete, unabridged chapter is available to subscribers on Ream.
https://reamstories.com/phaedrasfables/public
https://reamstories.com/page/mlum9wko9f8d8a/story/mluynoysf992b6/chapter/mmp19obdfcbb5436
The C.O.M.C. Files 