VIII.

     Sitting inside the hut again, she noticed the patch of landscape through the entryway going dusky gray. Though it was clearly too late for her to head back now, he asked courteously, “Would you like to stay to supper?”

     She couldn’t help studying him as he worked—poured water from an earthen jug into a couple of bowls, scoured them with dry grass, and measured out handfuls of rice for the pot. He had beautiful hands, long-fingered and deft, and did everything with a slow deliberateness, a total absorption and economy of movement that struck her as wonderful. When the rice was cooked, he added onions, tomatoes, garlic, and a crumbled sprig of thyme he’d picked on their walk. After they ate, in silence, he made them tea, and as she sipped it, she found herself growing drowsy, her eyes heavy-lidded from the smoke.

     Partly to revive herself, she asked him a question that had occurred to her earlier. “Your mother must have been young when she died. What did she die of?”

     “She drank,” he said.

     “And your father? What was he like?

     Now she saw a shadow fall across his face—and immediately regretted her question, wanting to snatch it back.

     “He used to…hurt my mother,” he answered.

     The next moment she felt such a rush of tenderness for him, it made tears start in her eyes, a protectiveness so fierce she ground her teeth. It was as though a stone had abruptly been pried away that had blocked a wellspring in her heart, and now she felt flooded with feelings so intense, it was all she could do not to cry.

     They didn’t speak again. He stacked the plates neatly next to the dying fire and put a block of stone in front of it so she wouldn’t stick her feet into the embers in the night. Fully clothed, she folded an unzipped sleeping around herself, pulling a blanket over too for added warmth. Though she didn’t mean to watch, she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye as he stripped, his wiry body as thin as a starved child’s, and stepped into his own sleeping bag.

     The next moment the fire flared unaccountably, casting the huge three-pronged shadow of the tripod on the stones above them, as though they themselves lay under it, within the fire. A moment later, just as abruptly, it went out.

     In the silence that followed, as she lay in a darkness as opaque as obsidian, she listened for Eben’s breath—and imagining she could hear it, she fell into his rhythm with her own.

     Then, as she felt herself on the brink of dreams, Eben moaned softly in his sleep. She had a sudden impulse to reach out and caress him, to brush his snarled hair from his forehead, then to kiss him, her lips only barely grazing his—then to gather his frail-seeming body to hers and be gathered too, each possibility opening onto another, and with each opening, her need quickening, until she was left quivering from the effort at restraint. It struck her suddenly that all that had dampened this articulation of desire before had been the forbidding starkness of his expression. But now in the featureless darkness, its clamor was so loud she was afraid he might hear it even from the distance of dreams.

     She passed the night feverishly, only barely and briefly sleeping, dreaming when she did of the mingling of bodies, losing, for long intervals, what little sense she had of what was real and what wasn’t. Then the darkness passed, and for hours, it seemed, a cold gray light filtered through the hole in the dome. She shifted continually, holding out in one position or another as long as she could, until the rocky earth under her felt like it would wear through her skin to her bones, and as she turned, she kept tucking the sleeping bag around herself to keep out the little drafts of cold air that plucked at her like curious fingers. Whenever she glanced at Eben, all she saw was a tuft of black hair sticking out of the top of his sleeping bag.