Work Text:
A moth flew into a candle yesterday. I had watched it burn alive as I brushed my teeth before returning to the bed where Teresa and I had made love.
Walking back from the en-suite, I find Teresa, same as yesterday—a disarray of beauty—lying supine on the messed up linen of a different bed, with a thin sheet not even trying to cover her. Her leg is bent at the knee, lazy and graceful. Bathed in the sepia of the bedside lamp, she glows in different shades of bronze.
It’s probably her lidded eyes on me, or it may be the shadows around her, made deeper by the lamp. Whatever it is, she seems unreal. Like a dream I haven’t yet dreamt. Nostalgia becomes an aching swell in my throat. I can’t say what memory it is that Teresa evokes. Really, it’s more a feeling—a memory of a feeling—than anything else. She’s everything impossible I’ve always craved. Weird that all this happiness can hurt. Or maybe I’m just being sentimental, overwhelmed with emotions I’ve never known.
Sliding under the sheets, on the left side of the bed—my side—I shuffle so that my nose almost touches hers, and I can smell her again, her scent that’s becoming lost to me in its familiarity. Her eyes remain closed longer with each blink. Soon, she’ll be asleep. But it’s half an hour before midnight, seven and a half hours before we’ll get out of bed, get ready. Two hours later, she’ll leave me to head to her plane, to head to Belize. Before I can count to 34,200, she’ll be gone. Losing any of that time to sleep is unbearable. And what if I don’t even dream of her?
If only I could slow time down, make the tick tick tick tick stop. There isn’t even a clock in Teresa’s room. The ticking’s in my head—fucking relentless. It sounds like the consecutive cocking of guns. Thirty-four thousand two hundred guns. And then she’ll be gone. I can’t bear to think of who they’ll be aimed at.
It was a similar dread yesterday. Instead of the white top-sheet not even trying to cover her naked body, all I could picture was a white shroud wrapped around her corpse. ‘It’s suicide,’ I had told her on that Manhattan balcony. Who the fuck knows how I kept my composure.
When she kissed me, I knew it meant Just in case I don’t make it. When I said ‘I love you’, it was to tell her what would happen to me if she didn’t. I’d noticed a recklessness to her bravery recently, a bravery I’ve always admired. And it was her recklessness that terrified me. She knows grief better than anyone. So perhaps it was cruel, but I wanted her to fear my grief, hide from even the thought of it. Gives her a reason to live harder, to survive with all her might.
We’d spent long, glorious hours last night mad with lust, with love. It had started on the balcony, and before we could make it to the bed, we stumbled onto the pool table and then the countertop of the bar, the bar where we’d shared a drink, where we’d shared a kiss, the last time we’d been there. It was her smile that kept me going. It was the tick tick tick tick that made me insatiable.
As we lay in the aftermath, our future filled my mind.
I want to learn you, I thought, and—fuck knows—I may even have said it out loud. I want us to share food from the same plate, drink from the same cup. I want to wake up everyday with the taste of your coffee already on my tongue. I want you to tell me stories about all the loved ones you’ve lost, and when you cry, I’ll hold you close. I want our home to smell like you. I want to irritate you, grate against your nerves, and just when your patience wears thinnest, I’ll make you laugh, knowing that will annoy you the most. I want us to argue over me not picking up after myself, over you getting us late for appointments. I want us to have lazy sex, as boring as it is nice, the pleasure like that of a warm blanket, a precursor for a good night’s sleep.
‘Teresa,’ I began, drowsy, by then, with fatigue, my hand kneading her thigh.
‘Hm?’
‘What’s the first thing you’re gonna cook for me?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘How ‘bout’—and I nuzzled my face into the warm crevice of her neck, taking the deepest of breaths in—‘that rib-eye steak I’ve been wanting since Dallas?’
She laughed at that, exactly like she had in Phoenix when I last bought it up.
‘I like mine medium rare.’
‘‘Kay. Medium rare it is.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Good,’ I said, both of us knowing it was a promise she’d come back to me as much as it was a promise she’d cook me a steak. The comfort of it allowed me to stop fighting, to fall asleep. ‘I’m holding you to that.’
Despite the danger that loomed over us, I’d never felt as much peace as I had this morning. For a second, anyway. Because Teresa did this thing that made my heart palpitate. With just the tips of her fingers, she stroked my skin, more reverent than a painter’s brush on a blank canvas, as if I were her very own masterpiece. And I woke up feeling like a new man. Or rather, like the man I knew I could be. A good man. She gave me that.
But the palpitations took on a chaotic aspect, and soon it was hard for me to breathe. Dread gripped me in a headlock. When she left our bed to get ready, I felt I could’ve cried. But we had no choice.
Teresa bound back her unruly hair. Every insubordinate strand smoothed down. Back to business. Back to reality.
‘Here,’ I said from behind her, revealing a long hairpin. ‘See, it’s tiny. It’ll blend into your hair. No one’ll be able to see it.’
She fingered the bug that was glued onto the curved end of the pin, seeming to approve. Then, I secured it firm into her tight bun before tapping my invisible earpiece. One upside to working for the CIA: you become an expert in everything espionage. And these little devices were better than anything I could get off the damn black market.
‘I’ll be able to hear everything, now. When you need me, I’ll be there.’
After, I harped on about her not mixing up the shot glasses. ‘Don’t let him outsmart you.’ As if it was as easy as that. I gave her a gun that looked like a phone (Devon was a clever prick, I’ll give him that). ‘Two shots. Use them wisely.’ But I knew she’d probably never get the chance.
So when she whispered ‘I love you’, it caught me off guard, and all I wanted to do was ask ‘For how long?’ I wanted to know what did it for her, when did she know, what did it feel like to love me. I wanted her to know the effect it had on me to hear her say that, to see the truth of it in her eyes and in the way she kissed me. I needed her to know that however much she loved me, I’ll always love her more. But I didn’t even get to chance the process it before her phone rang and the dread doubled its grip on my neck and my head went tick tick tick tick.
All I could do in the car was hold her hand in my own. The words two shots and outsmart and I’ll be there were repeated like an echo for the duration of the ride.
As if in reply, my mind yelled back it’s suicide and these Russians are animals and I love you. But worse than that was the ticking. The tick tick tick tick ticking. So fucking loud I’m sure Teresa could hear it.
I wonder if she hears it now. Now that we’re safe from Kostya. Now that a more savage predator’s prowling in the shadows.
Come morning and we’ll be as vulnerable as insects, the sun exposing us to Devon and his men. But like that moth I saw yesterday, Teresa and I are headlong in our pursuit of the light, of that other life. Only time can tell if it’s a fatal attraction.
Reaching over, I switch off the lamp, veiling Teresa in the night. For now, at least, we’re safer in the dark.
‘So,’ I whisper, pulling her closer, kissing down the contour of her cheek to the sharp curve of her jaw, keeping her awake for moments longer. I can’t bear to lose this night to sleep. ‘You love me?’
She assures me that she does. All night long.