War won’t stop me.
He’s been wanting us to touch for a lot longer than I have.
He stares at the action, his eyes deep, his body unusually still.
My finger slips over the back of his hand and up his tan forearm, beginning to touch all the skin I’ve told myself not to touch. Beneath my fingertip, I can feel the thick bands of his muscles. Muscles that, to the best of my knowledge, formed into existence a little over a decade ago.
“Wife.” War’s voice has gone rough with want, and there are a thousand desires in his eyes. He’s starting to lean forward, and he looks like he’s going to pounce on me at any second.
Fuck, I think I want to find out what that feels like, just as I want to know what it would feel like to have War’s hips nestled between my thighs, his massive body pressed against mine …
I’m leaning forward too.
I almost manage to forget everything else.
But then, there’s a lot to forget. Too much.
I can hear the screams from battle, and I can see the way the birds circled those conquered cities. I remember the corpses—all those corpses—littering so many kilometers of road, and War’s armor covered in blood.
I release his hand. He’s handsome and kind and he saved my life, but as he said—
I am not like you, and you should never forget that.
Abruptly, I stand. “I think I need to go to bed.”
You idiot, Miriam. To think that you almost initiated something with the horseman.
Loneliness is clearly getting the better of me.
I can feel the horseman’s gaze on my back as I move over to my pallet. Just like the first time we traveled, mine is heaped with blankets. I’d take War’s instead, just to make a point that I can stand to sleep like a miser, but considering the way we were eye-fucking each other only a moment ago, he might get the wrong impression.
And I don’t think I’d have it in me to turn him down twice.
As I take off my boots, War puts out the last of the fire. I expect him to say something about what just happened—some promise for more, some frustration that I slipped from his grasp (literally) once again, but he doesn’t.
It’s unnerving as hell, mostly because I’m reminded that as brutal as War is, he’s a strategist. And I think he knows how to play me.
Shortly after I lay down on my pallet, he does the same, removing his shirt as he does so. I can see his tattoos glowing in the night.
“You don’t need to go to bed just because I am,” I say.
“I don’t want to be awake when you’re asleep. Talking with you reminds me of how lonely it is to exist.”
Those words tighten my chest. I hadn’t imagined that the horseman might feel that way when he lives among a horde of humans. To be honest, I hadn’t considered that he was even capable of feeling lonely. Loneliness is a very vulnerable, very human feeling. It doesn’t fit my notion of War.
Maybe your notion is wrong.
He’s right there. It’s not too late to be a little less lonely for an evening.
“Miriam,” he says, interrupting my thoughts.
“Mm?” I say.
“Tell me something beautiful.”
I’m not sure I heard the horseman correctly. He wants to hear about something beautiful? I didn’t think a man like War had room in him for something like beauty.
My notion of him is most definitely wrong.
I turn on my pallet so that I can look at the horseman. He lays on his own bed, staring up at the stars. He must feel my gaze on him, but he doesn’t turn to me.
Something beautiful …
The story comes to me almost immediately. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Jewish.”
He’s quiet.
I run my fingers over the cloth of my blankets as I speak. “They met at Oxford while they were both getting their doctorates. My dad told me he heard my mother’s laugh before he saw her face. Supposedly that’s when he knew he was going to love her.”
My fingers still. “They weren’t supposed to love each other.”
“Why?” War’s voice comes from the darkness.
My eyes move to him. “Their families didn’t want them to be together—because they were from two different cultures and two different religions.” My father, Turkish-American, and my mother, Israeli.
The horseman doesn’t say anything to that, so I continue.
“In the end, it didn’t matter to them what their families thought. They knew that love was love. That it can