Work Text:
The guide tells her the site is abandoned and isolated and the only way in is on foot. No one visits and no one cares. Even the graverobbers picked it clean decades ago. He says, “Miss, it is not safe.” and Shuri thinks: Perfect.
She has to walk through a small strip of jungle on a mossed over path, whacking at low branches and thinking about the bush back home. She has made it a quarter of the way down the path when her cell phone loses signal. Griot still talks back when she addresses it. She does not check her kimoyo beads.
Her entire body is wet by the time she reaches the end of the path. The ocean roars at her from below.
Shuri is walking up to the cliff’s edge when the rain starts. The pyramid structure ahead of her, topped with a squat building, beckons. The tiered stairs look treacherous.
Behind her, on a decline, a landscape studded with stone structures. Half of them are nothing but rubble. The other half are half-rubble, barely standing. Except the one diagonal to the lighthouse, laced with vines. Shuri sees a ruin with an intact roof and zips up her jacket.
The rain, light and cool, falls heavier with each breath Shuri takes. She trips over a root, slides belly-down along a muddy path and cuts her hand. The rain pelts down now, angry. Shuri lifts her backpack overhead and bolts for the building. There is no entrance facing the lighthouse, only shuttered windows. Shuri turns left, steadying herself with one hand on the stones, and finds a door in the south facing wall. She has to hit it with her shoulder twice before it opens.
Shuri ducks inside, mud splashing under her boots, and breathes in. She cannot see much. It smells like dust and frangipani.
The light of her phone reveals a small room. The walls are stone, some of them plastered over and whitewashed. The floor is red stone tile, muddied with her footsteps. A doorway in the far wall gapes at her. Shuri bumps the light up to the max setting, squares her shoulders, and walks towards it.
Something catches the light, a blur in the corner of her eye.
A thump and then a gleaming mass of brown unfurling. Shuri turns her head and the snake returns her gaze.
The basest part of her brain and body urge her to strike it. The more intelligent part of her freezes. Her hand lists to the side and the snake rears back, pupils shrinking in the light.
It hisses. The sound of beads rolling in a container. Rattlesnake, Shuri thinks, but she can’t pinpoint which one it is. She takes a step back. The snake unfurls completely. One hundred and fifty centimeters long, her mind calculates even as her stomach drops.
“Griot.” She whispers. “What animal is this?”
“A Yucatán neotropical rattlesnake, Princess. Also known as a tzabcan.”
It approaches, glowing russet brighter and brighter as it nears her and the door. When it passes by her, the snake’s flank rubs up against her foot. The rattle knocks against her ankle. She slams the door shut behind it.
Some of the windows are fitted with foggy plate glass. She shoves open the one sided shutters on these windows to let the light in. Others have no glass, only the wood of the shutters keeping out the worst of the storm. It is enough light to let her fumble through the room and find another room with a pile of blankets in a heap on the floor. She also finds a pantry and a paint splattered room littered with broken seashells. Upstairs is a room with a hammock that swings from the ceiling. There is a room beside it. Shuri ventures in and marvels - it stinks of incense.
The light is weak, filtered through rain clouds and strained through the half broken shutters and the thick tangle of vines. Her phone’s light catches on something white and reflective.
She finds the source laid out on a wooden table near the window. A small handful of pearls, loose and covered in dust. She turns and sees a water stained wooden trunk. Inside, a heavy, wide belt. Broken spearheads. Heaps of fabric. The remains of a small statuette with the head missing. In another corner of the room, a pile of ashes in a dish. Beside it lay two cloth bandages, stiff and stained so dark red that they almost look purple.
Her foot kicks against something on her way out of the room. Shuri drops to her hands and knees and feels about, slaps her hand on the floor and stretches out her fingers until she finally touches something cool. She wraps her hand around it and brings it up into the faint light.
A blue-green ceramic crocodile, about as long as the length of her hand. There is a hole above the right rear leg and when Shuri puts her mouth to it and blows, a whistle sounds out from the crocodiles mouth. It’s a wavering, dull sound. Shuri inhales. A thump lands in the far corner of the room. Shuri grips the crocodile in her hand and goes back downstairs, kicking up thin clouds of dust with each footstep.
A more thorough exploration of the house reveals a hand-crank radio and a hand-crank lamp. Both still work.
A Spanish to Maya dictionary that nearly disintegrates in her hands when she flips past the fly leaf and learns that it was printed in 1967. A second book, slimmer, titled Los Glifos Mayas, from 1962. A pair of round sunglasses missing a lens. A silver locket with nothing inside. An acrylic hair comb with a faux tortoiseshell pattern. Coins and bills from France, China, South Africa. Shuri takes all of these little treasures to the room with the hammock and lines them up under the window. Her little museum display.
She leaves the ashes and bandages and pearls where she found them but places the crocodile beside the little pile of coins.
There is food in the pantry. Rum and mezcal and corn and chocolate and eggs and cheese. Beans, squash, chili peppers. Tomato, guava, and papaya. But the blankets are moth bitten and the floors are unswept.
After dinner, she sweeps the rooms and tosses away the seashells and thinks about calling home but doesn’t.
She shakes out one of the blankets and sleeps in the hammock.
There’s a bird in the bedroom when she wakes the next morning.
The bird at her feet is dressed in green and blue feathers, and fearless. And large, too - Shuri squints and estimates it is about thirty centimeters from head to tip. The tail is long and its face is haloed with a stripe of blue across the brow.
“What is this, Griot?” She says.
“A turquoise-browed motmot.”
The bird tilts its head. It hops towards her, then away, then forward again. Shuri uses both hands and takes hold of it as gently as she can and the tiny heart flutters against her palms. She places the bird on the windowsill and it does not look out. It only stares at her, tilts its head at her shoo-ing sounds and flutters down to the floor, the movements of the wings stunted.
The bird walks resolutely from the room, turning the corner and disappearing. A thump. Shuri, afraid of the snake but more afraid that the snake will eat the bird, races to the door and turns into the hallway. There is nothing there.
Shuri leaves a little dish of water on the floor for the bird and does not see it again.
Shuri is becoming increasingly certain that there is something in the house. Someone. Something.
When she sleeps, the windows are shut. When she wakes, they are open.
From the lighthouse she looks out towards the ocean, churning so violently it looks to be boiling. She turns her gaze towards the house and sees, through the rain, a shadow flickering past the window.
But when she asks Griot to detect other life forms, it says, “There are none aside from you, Princess.”
I’m crazy, she thinks. I’ve lost my mind. Fine.
Shuri sees the rattlesnake again on the morning of the sixth day of the storm. She throws her boot at it and misses. It shakes its tail at her and leaves.
On the seventh day, the rain stops. Shuri asks Griot for the forecast - a hot, sunny week, Griot predicts - and leaves the house that night after ten minutes of scanning the horizon for clouds. Then she takes her little telescope kit and climbs up the steps of the pyramid, sweating and trying not to huff even though there is no-one around to hear it.
The lighthouse is dark and cool and has two small windows facing the ocean. Shuri sets her telescope up in front of the right window and wonders what people saw when they approached the shore. It must have looked like a pair of unblinking eyes gazing across the ocean, calling travelers home.
Shuri bends and looks up through the telescope, facing east. Mars shines down at her. She maps the stars out, links them together to form constellations.
The rustle of fabric and sandals makes her jolt. She turns away from the window and sees him there, stepping through the two columns of the entrance.
Even half shadowed she can see that he is beautiful. He steps into the shaft of light streaming in through the window and she sees how large and brown his eyes are. His carefully trimmed beard and his handsome nose speared through the septum with jade. His mouth twitches twice before he smiles.
“Hello.” He says, walking across the room and right into her space. She shifts her weight back onto her left foot, swivels her hips until she is standing sideways. His arm brushes against hers.
He looks up, through the window of the lighthouse, brows furrowed. His jade earrings glow in the moonlight.
“You are not from here.” He says, and then he looks at her again.
Shuri bristles.
“I’m not.”
“Where do you come from?” His eyes are perfectly clear. Alert. But his voice sounds thick and groggy. The way a man sounds when you rouse him from a deep sleep.
“Where do you come from?”
“Here. This is my birthplace. Answer my question, please.”
“Africa.”
“Africa? It is a large continent.”
“Kenya.”
A sound shivers in his throat but Shuri can not tell what it is supposed to be. A cough or a hum, maybe. She begins dismantling her telescope and he watches in silence.
He follows her out of the lighthouse. She can hear him, always a step or two behind her.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Shuri.”
“This place is very isolated, Shuri.” He says. Shuri’s rhythm down the stairs falters. She has her blade tucked into her boot. She could probably knock him over with her telescope case. “I am surprised you found it.”
“It’s not too far from some villages.”
He doesn’t reply. Shuri makes a beeline for the house, walking faster and faster, nearly running the last few yards to the front door. Her fist is closing around the handle when the back of her neck tingles.
“You live here?” The man asks, his voice directly behind her.
“Leave me alone.”
“This is my home.” He says. She turns. Her knuckles ache from how tightly she’s holding the telescope case handle. “I have been gone for some time. I wondered who was keeping the house warm while I was away.”
He smiles at her and this time his mouth only twitches once beforehand.
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.” Shuri says. Her heart is beating fast. “I’ll - I didn’t realize anyone lived here.”
“You did not see the food?” he asks.
“I did. I ate some.” She hesitates, feels stupid. “I don’t know what I thought. It’s not like me to be illogical.”
“There’s no need to leave. You shouldn’t, really. A storm is coming.”
“I don’t want to be a bother.” She replies
“Do you have somewhere else to stay?” He arches a brow. “My home was comfortable enough before. Please, do not reject my hospitality.”
“What’s your name?” She steps aside when he reaches to push the door open. The scent of frangipani greets her. She calms down some and can’t hear her heartbeat in her ears anymore.
“You may call me Namor.”
“This blanket is ruined.” He pokes his thumb through a hole. “I’ve been away too long.” Then he unclips his cloak, folds it over once and places it in the hammock. He removes the blanket before she can protest and says, “I run warm.”
“This is your room.” She protests. “That’s your hammock.”
“I have another.” He says. “Goodnight.” He vanishes down the stairs. Shuri props a chair up against the door.
The storm arrives just as Namor said it would. The house doesn’t groan - there is no wood. But wind slips and slithers in the spaces between the stones and the plaster and the house hisses. Shuri leaves the shutter open and watches the water as it slides down the glass. She wraps the cloak around herself and sleeps with her sheathed dagger in her hand.
“There was a snake.” She says the next day, watching him light the stove with a piece of flint. She flicks her Zippo lighter cap repeatedly. She wishes the radio would catch a signal. She won’t use her kimoyo beads in front of a stranger - doesn’t want to, anyway.
“A snake?”
“Yes, a Yucatan neotropical rattlesnake.” She says and he lifts a brow. “Ah, here they’re called tzabcan? I don’t know how long you’ve been gone, but it was in the house.”
Namor hums, casts his gaze about the room. “Have you found its nest?”
“No.”
“Well, then.” He smiles. “Let’s trust that it has gone for good.”
“I’ve seen it more than once.”
“The next time you see it,” he inclines his head, “show me and I will get rid of it.”
He shows her the easiest way to get to the beach. He dives and brings her conches and sometimes dried out starfish. One day he calls her over and shows her a live starfish that she touches with her pointer finger. It feels like leather.
There’s a husk of a temple and a bathhouse built over a cenote and dozens of abandoned huts. He shows her all of them. She draws the stelae and glyphs in the temple in her notepad. She looks at the cenote and wishes she’d brought a swimsuit. They wander in and out of the huts. They go back to the beach.
His ankles are scarred. In the exact same place on both legs - a jagged, curving mark that half-circles the joint. She looks at them and wonders. His hands are broad, brown, and strong. Tidy nails and smooth calluses. She looks at them and wonders. His eyes, his mouth. She wonders.
The storm continues in stops and starts, stuttering across the sky and ocean. Shuri’s days are completely altered by Namor’s return home.
He sings, sometimes. When he paints murals on the walls of the house. When he prepares the hot chocolate every morning. When he fixes up her hammock after it drops her onto the floor in the middle of the night. He sings under his breath, hums half the melody, and his voice is perhaps the loveliest Shuri has ever heard.
Something in her - the true part of her, the scientist - knows this cannot be true. But at the same time it has to be. Whenever she catches his voice drifting on the air, she wants to get up and go wherever he is. Just to be near him and hear his voice from up close. Watch him paint or cook and listen to a melody she’ll forget as soon as he is done singing it. The urge makes the bottoms of her feet itch.
She wants to kiss him, too, when she can’t stop talking about the snake and the bird and he smiles at her. When he explains what he’s painting. When he listens to her talk about the stars, the comets. The jungle and the ocean. The things she wants to create. He sits there and listens to her until her mouth runs dry and she wants to kiss him.
“Why are you here, Shuri?” he asks her. They are drinking rum together and she focuses on her glass when he licks his lips.
“To be alone.”
“I’m sorry.” He says.
Kiss me, she thinks as loudly as she can.
Shuri stares at the ceiling of her room and listens for rattles and thumps. All she hears is the creak of the hammock as it swings a little every time she shifts. She thinks of Namor’s voice when he sings, dark and mellifluous. Just the memory of it drips down her spine, hot and slow. What do his kisses taste like? Like chocolate, she decides. After breakfast his mouth must taste like chocolate.
He has to taste different, though, lower. His chest and hips and even lower. Shuri has never kissed anyone there before and tries to imagine how that skin feels. For a wild moment she wonders what his cum might taste like.
She turns her head to the doorway and sees nothing. She puts one foot on the floor and stills the hammock. She puts her hand between her thighs, fits her fingers against herself and searches for pleasure in the same corners she’s always found it.
She orgasms as quietly as she can, just in case. It’s just the sound of her panting and the creak of the hammock when her leg kicks out and her foot lifts off the floor as she comes. The orgasm is good, she thinks. Good enough to make her relax.
She opens her eyes and sees the bird at the doorway.
Its chest vibrates and it releases a bubbling dual-note call. Shuri wants to laugh but finds she can’t. She wipes her fingers off on her thigh and hitches Namor’s cloak higher up on her chest.
She looks to the ceiling, counts to ten. She looks at the doorway and the bird is gone. The drizzle is so light, it’s practically mist. She leaves the shutters open.
Her desk is flooded with rainwater the next morning, her little museum of curiosities drenched and scattered across the floor. The wind blows hard, punches the window shutters against the sides of the house. Shuri’s entire torso is soaked when she leans halfway through the window to grab at the shutters and pull them shut. The latch locking them closed rattles violently.
Namor walks in just then and glances down at the water lapping up at his feet.
“I’m sorry.” Shuri says. “I didn’t shut the windows at night.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.” He tells her and only when he unwinds his cloak to wrap it around her does she realize her sleep shirt has gone transparent.
The storm persists. Namor is not present during dinner. Shuri paces the house, peers through the plate glass windows, and it is all an act because she knows where he is.
Under the drumbeat of the rain she hears him. The dark susurrus of his voice sweetening the air in the house. He is in the lighthouse, her body tells her. She can’t think of much else. Her dinner is half eaten and her face is damp from the humidity. She wipes her face dry and only feels more agitated.
She opens and shuts the door quickly. The world is alive with petrichor. Shuri doesn’t have to think about it - she walks straight for the lighthouse.
She finds him gazing through the leftmost window. Namor stops humming but she’s sure he heard her walk into the lighthouse. She knows he heard her climb the stairs, up and up into the sound of his voice as it rang down the planes of the pyramid. He turns and faces her.
“You’re soaked through.” He remarks.
She thinks that perhaps she should say something, anything.
Maybe, Then I better get out of these clothes.
Or, What are you doing in the lighthouse during this storm?
Even a simple Hello would do.
“I heard you singing.” Shuri tells him and his mouth twitches down. She can’t read what it means.
“Through the storm? From the house?”
“You have a good voice.”
“Thank you.” He answers and Shuri realizes she’s wet. Wet through the cotton of her underwear, wet down the soft inside of her thighs right by her cunt.
Lightning flashes and his face is shadowed and glowing all at once for a single moment. She wonders what would happen if she turned around and left. If she walked back down the stairs - or ran down them. Would he give chase? Pin her down and fuck her? Unhinge his jaw and kill her?
“Sing again.”
“What will you give me in exchange?” Namor moves, lithe, until he’s nearly within reach.
“What do you want?” She steps closer. Her heart pounds. The stairs feel miles away. The window is too small to jump through.
“What would you like to give?”
So, she kisses him. His mouth is soft and edged with the short hair of his mustache. He hums into her mouth, mi - re - do - re - mi - fa - mi. He nearly misses the last note when she opens her mouth and presses her tongue to his teeth.
She thinks, is this a lullaby? The question dies well before it can finish the journey from her brain to her mouth, fading away somewhere behind the eyes.
Muzzled by desire. All there can be in this moment is Namor’s hands on her body, sliding over her skin, making her shake. His voice curls around her throat, garroting her.
He presses her to the floor. The stone is wet but her entire body is already slick with rain water. He looms over her, smothers her like her own personal storm, pulls her pants and underwear down so viciously they almost rip.
He sings her name under his breath and her toes twitch, curling briefly. He eyes her then moves his gaze down to the place between her legs. He thumbs her open and she wants to scream. She isn’t sure why she’s so impatient.
“Hurry.” She breathes. “Do it, now. Do it.”
“You are a virgin.” He says, as though she hadn’t spoken. Shuri digs her fingers into the stone beneath her.
“How do you know?”
“I can smell it.” He sounds distracted. Then he bends down and licks her with his hot tongue. His nose bumps her clit. He hums into her cunt and she can’t tell if he’s singing or just reacting to the taste of her.
“What are you doing to me?” She chokes out. Her mouth is dry. She opens it, hoping to catch a stray rain drop through the window.
“I am drinking from you.” He licks her again, deeper, and it’s not even close to enough. Shuri wants to cry.
“Please.”
“I think I will take my time with you.”
“Please, don’t.” She wishes he’d take her top off. She wants to be naked for him. Lay in the storm’s filth with him.
“Little girl.” He says, tilting the words into a coy melody. He presses a kiss to her inner thigh. “You are not afraid. You should be.”
“I am.” She whines. “I don’t care.”
“It will hurt.” He warns. Even in the dark she can see his eyes glint.
“Yes.” She agrees and she reaches for him and he groans before kissing her thigh and her pelvis and her lower belly. She lifts her arms and lets him pull her shirt off, arches her back to push her breasts against his face.
He sings a word or two in a language she cannot understand and his voice is deep and sweet and her cunt is clenching so hard it hurts. It hurts when he fits his fingers inside her and wiggles them around, presses against her walls to open her up. Shuri moans.
He spits on her cunt, as if she isn’t dripping wet, and Shuri moans again. When he takes his fingers out of her, she only has a moment to inhale before he stuffs them into her mouth. He pushes his fingers in deep and she almost gags even as she seals her lips around his knuckles and strokes her tongue against the length of his fingers. She claws at the stone floor, her nails bending when she scratches.
It does hurt when he begins to fit himself inside of her. She bites his fingers without meaning to and he shivers, pulls them out and wipes them against her cheek. He stills. Shuri thinks he might kill her with all this waiting. He leans down and noses against her spit-wet cheek, kisses her there and then her mouth. He thrusts shallowly, again and again and it hurts until it doesn’t.
Shuri has never been so dizzy. Everything is dark and wet and smells of humidity and Namor.
She can hardly see him, can just make out the shine of his eyes and teeth and jewelry. She puts a hand on his face and feels for the bristle of his beard and the ledge of his brow. He kisses her palm and her fingers catch on the tip of his nose.
He bottoms out, his hips flush against her hips and Shuri knocks her head back against the floor so hard that it hurts. He laughs. She holds him by the shoulders. He presses his hands to her knees and pulls her legs far apart, like a wishbone. She feels dissected, sliced open at the seams.
He fucks her into the floor and she wonders if it’s supposed to feel like this - so huge and inescapable. He tells her she’s perfect for him and she thinks that even if she wasn’t, he would make it so with the way he pushes himself inside her. Rearranging her so that he fits like a hand in glove. She can’t breathe.
Shuri comes, so desperate for it that she was close to begging. She comes harder than she ever has in her life. She comes so hard that she doesn’t care when he doesn’t pull out. He kisses her mouth and licks the hollow of her collarbone and she cannot speak. He is still inside her when she falls asleep.
Shuri wakes in her hammock. The rain has softened into a drizzle, blurring the sunlight through her window. Her back and her hips ache. There’s blood under her fingernails.
The rain stops by breakfast. She fucks him again that afternoon. They fuck again the next day, and the next.
She feels the same, mostly, after going from a virgin to not-a-virgin. She aches for a while after the first time but he is never so rough again and her body settles into the soreness. She likes it as a reminder and warning. Only one thing really changes: she is that little girl again, the one who always got what she wanted and didn’t bother with wondering whether she should have it.
Sometimes he dirties her clothes and skin with paint and kisses her open mouth and she gets angry with herself for not fucking him the day she met him.
It’s been a week of sunshine when she hears the rattlesnake. The tortilla on the comal warms and toasts. She peels it off, flips it and hears the rattle. Her hand slips. She burns her knuckles against the comal and drops the tortilla onto the floor.
“Shit.” She turns to face the rest of the room and hears the rattle again, further away. Near the potatoes. She reaches out and runs her hand along the table by the stove until she feels the wooden handle of the butcher’s knife.
It’s five steps from the stove to the potatoes. She kicks the sack to the side. There’s nothing. Not even dust. The rattle sounds again to her right, through the doorway leading to the front room. Shuri tightens her hold on the knife and makes for the doorway when she hears the rattle again from behind her. She turns and kicks the chair out of the way. She uses her free hand to push the other chair away and then overturns the table entirely. Her left hand swings back and she finds nothing.
“Shuri.” Namor calls from the doorway. His hands are on her before she can face him.
He presses his mouth to the side of her forehead and shushes her, kisses her.
“The snake.” She says. He pries her fingers off the knife handle. He rubs his hand across her sternum, warming her through her camisole. “The snake.”
He shushes her again.
“You are safe here with me.” He tells her and he pulls her back against his front, the butcher’s knife resting at her hip. He kisses her ear and her shoulder.
Shuri grabs his elbow tight and exhales. He freezes and she knows he understands.
He kisses her shoulder again and steps away from her. She stands there and watches him replace the knife on the counter and tidy the sack of potatoes. He hums under his breath. All she can do is flex her hands and watch, wanting him in a wretched way.
“Namor.”
“You are so impatient.” He remarks. He puts the table back as it should be, then the chairs.
“I need you now.” She answers. She can’t shake off the adrenaline buzzing inside of her.
“You will have me.” He replies in a low voice. “You will learn to wait.” He steps closer, finally, and cups her cheek.
“I’ve waited weeks already.”
“Calm down.” He tells her, gently.
“There was a deadly animal in this kitchen!” She says. “I told you there was a snake. It was here.”
“And now I am here.” He kisses her. “I will finish tidying up. I want you to go to your room and sit in your hammock and wait for me. I won’t be far.”
She goes up to her room and sits in her hammock and waits for him. He practically materializes at her feet between one blink and the next. This time, she lets him take his sweet time when he licks her between the legs. He soothes her with his mouth and fingers and cock. He doesn’t give in when she asks him to hurry up.
Shuri learns, over the days, to want the wanting. It used to kill her, to watch him all day and feel the desire stretch from her chest to her belly. But now, when he gets her wet, she knows there will be a reward at the end. She learns to enjoy it when he tells her what he wants to do to her and doesn’t lay a finger on her. Or when he kisses her all morning. Sings something with his mouth so close to her ear that his tongue brushes against the shell of it. Then he abandons her for his murals or a journey into the forest for wood and Shuri wants so badly but she knows better now - knows that the waiting will make it that much better when they finally take their clothes off. The sour and the sweet.
She wanders the ruins. She takes photos of the sad temples. She observes the plant life. She walks down to the beach that stretches out below the lighthouse and swims. She does not stray far, though, because she wants to be closeby when the waiting is over.
One day, she waits for him in the cenote house. He comes here often, she knows. A few times she has watched him float face up in the water and dipped her feet in just to pull them away every time he reached for her.
“You are not with your work.” He says, and she turns to see him walking down the steps carved into the natural stone leading into the water in the center of the house. She hasn’t done much work lately.
She glances down at his ankles and the knotted scar tissue right by the joint. “I want to know more about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Where is your family?”
Namor steps down and sits beside her. He rests his elbows on his knees. He looks down into the water.
“Gone. A long time ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s the way of life.” He adjusts his elbows on his knees and watches her. “People pass on. There is always someone left behind.”
“Come with me.” She blurts and he straightens up, just a little bit. “I want you to come with me when I leave.”
“Leave?” he asks. His voice and expression turn grave. “When? Why leave this place?”
“I won’t leave right now.” She laughs and kisses his shoulder and inwardly marvels at how right it feels. “I just can’t stay here forever. I want to see more stars, more animals. Visit museums. Meet other scientists. I want to invent things again.” She clicks her nails together. “And after a while, I want to go home.”
“And what would I do?”
“Be with me. Everywhere.”
Namor inhales like he has taken a blow to the chest. He smiles.
“I was going to give you something tonight.” He says, reaching into the folds of his tunic. “I’ll give it to you now.”
The bracelet in his hand is all pearl, gold, and square jade stones. She offers her right wrist, watches his hands as he ties it tight.
“Oh, thank you. It’s beautiful.” She murmurs. She looks up and sees that he is watching her, unblinking. “Where did you get it?”
“It was my mother’s.” He answers. Her wrist feels ten times heavier.
“My mother died a few months ago.” She confesses. “And my brother, too, the year before her.” He takes her hand and interlocks their fingers. He rubs a circle into the back of her hand and tilts her wrist just so. The jade pieces reflect the sunlight back into her eyes. “I ran away. Not really, but in a sense I did. We buried my mother and I couldn’t stay at home any longer. I haven’t spoken to any of my friends or family since I left.”
“And you traveled through this jungle alone? That is unwise.”
“I can take care of myself.” Shuri smiles. “I was fine before you.”
“But you are better now.”
“It’s possible.” She shrugs, trying to hide how amused she is. He squeezes her hand before he kisses her. “I want you to come back with me when I go home.”
“I will follow you anywhere I can possibly go.”
He helps her wash her hair that afternoon. She bends herself over the tin tub and he holds her still with one hand at the nape of her neck, humming all the while. He pours bowl after bowl of clear rainwater and massages the crown of her head. She drags her fingers through the curls where they curtain in front of her eyes. He leans forward in his seat to rinse her hair again and she puts her hand on his calf just to touch him. She looks at the hand that touches him, looks at the bracelet on her wrist.
She is waiting for Namor when it happens.
The stranger expects her just as much as she expects him. One moment, she is wrapping her hair and the next a man is in her room. The headless statuette is in his hand and she launches herself at him.
“You can’t have that!” She shouts at him. Her hands wrap around the statue and they tussle over it until she’s short of breath and his voice is hoarse from telling her to just let the damn thing go. She digs her nails into his forearm. He hisses.
The sensation of her lip splitting open is more shocking than painful. She tastes the blood that slips into her mouth and curls her hand into a fist. The man grunts when she knocks him on the side of his head. She kicks him in the stomach and he falls to the floor. He reaches for her ankle and nearly catches her - but then they both freeze at the sound of a rattle.
He plants his hands on the floor. The snake rattles its tail so quickly that it sounds like a hiss.
“Get up!” Shuri shouts. The man is starting to hyperventilate already. Shuri takes hold of him by the material of his jacket and pulls hard with her entire body as she walks backwards and towards the other doorway. He’s heavier than he looks and she cannot seem to drag him fast enough. “Get up!”
He inhales sharply and turns, rests his weight on one knee and one foot. He’s facing Shuri when the snake springs forward and bites him.
The man screams and tugs at the animal. The snake releases him only to bite him a second time.
“Don’t touch it!” Shuri urges and he listens. When the snake lets go it hisses, rears back, and looks at Shuri. Then it leaves.
“Suck the venom out.” He urges, ashen and half crumpled on the floor.
“That doesn’t work.” Shuri responds, some part of her aware that she is shivering. “It could poison me, too.”
The man wheezes.
Downstairs, the door opens and shuts.
“Namor!” she calls, “Namor, come here!”
He appears and his eyes jump from Shuri, to the stranger, to the statuette on the floor beside him. He looks at her again.
“It was the snake.” Shuri says, nose clogged up from trying not to cry. “I told you there was a snake in the house. It bit him twice.”
“He is dying.” Namor says evenly, and the stranger groans. “What can we do to ease his pain?”
“We need to get him to a hospital. Or a village. Something.”
They both focus their eyes on him and Shuri catches him just as his eyes roll back and his body goes limp. Loose pearls drop from his coat pocket.
“Graverobber.” Namor says flatly.
“We have to take him to a hospital.” Shuri repeats, tearing her eyes away from the pearls as they roll across the floor.
“How?” he asks. “We cannot carry him there in time.”
“He’s going to die.” She finally admits, pressing her fingers to the man’s wrist.
“Yes.”
Shuri stands and notes that her blood pressure is dropping. Somewhere behind her she hears Namor say something but by the time she wonders what was said, she is in the kitchen grabbing the mortar and pestle and filling a glass with water.
Upstairs, she goes back to the room, tries not to look at the man laid out on her bedroom floor, and fetches her pills from her backpack.
“What is that?” Namor asks. She kneels beside him.
“Benzodiazepines.” The mortar and pestle make quick work of the tablets. Once she has reduced them into a fine, white powder, she scrapes it out of the bowl and dumps it into the glass of water. She pinches the stranger’s nose and tips the water back into his mouth. He swallows.
“What will it do?”
“It will sedate him.” She says, throat closing up. “Griot, how long after a rattlesnake bite until death?”
“Between six and forty-eight hours, Princess.”
Shuri starts to cry.
“Shuri.” Namor says. He takes her hand in his, warm and steady as always. “I want you to go downstairs and wait in the kitchen. Make something to drink.”
“What?”
“A pot of coffee or chocolate. Go. I will take care of him.”
She sits at the table, staring at the two pots on the stove - coffee and chocolate - and tries not to weep. She hears the front door open but when she calls out, “Namor?” there is no response. She mixes the coffee and chocolate in one mug and drinks half of it in one go before realizing she forgot to sweeten it.
“Namor?” She calls again. She goes upstairs, shuts her eyes, and forces herself to enter their bedroom. She opens her eyes and there is no-one there.
Shuri waits another hour before she gets nervous. She drinks two cups of coffee and tosses the bitter chocolate.
Shuri sits on the floor of the bedroom with a metal cup and the bottle of mezcal from the kitchen. She pictures a chalk outline of the body, preserving where and how it fell just a yard in front of her.
She pours herself a double shot of mezcal and drinks and cries, salt pouring into her mouth. She drinks another shot. It makes her burp and it tastes awful. She has one more shot and then she can’t feel anything. Her face, her feet, her hands - all gone numb. Stupidly, she thinks, I can’t feel my teeth.
She licks her teeth then touches them with her fingers. Rattlesnake bites cause numbness, she remembers.
Namor walks into the room and takes the bottle of mezcal away. Shuri licks the last stray droplets from her glass and cries more. She feels like she could dissolve into water and hopes she will.
He pulls her close until she’s enveloped in his arms and the smell of him. She presses her nose against his sternum and cries and cries.
“Where were you?”
“Burying the graverobber.” He answers.
“We need to leave. Let’s leave.” She says it into his chest. She can feel the drumbeat of his heart against her cheek, even through his tunic. It’s slow. Very slow.
“My home is here.”
“We have to get out of here.” She whispers. “Let’s leave tomorrow.” He hums his lullaby and she presses herself closer to him, until it almost hurts. “My sister-in-law has a house in Haiti, we can get there fast from here. You can meet her and my nephew, hm? I want to leave.”
The storm that rolls in within the hour is so strong, Shuri wonders if it is really a hurricane. She worries the wind and water will unbury the man in the jungle. The house is completely dark, save for the candles and the hand-crank lamp that she and Namor have to wind up constantly.
“Good morning, Princess.”
A small splash of hot tea laps up against Shuri’s palm. She puts the mug down fast, before she can drop it.
“Why did you call me that?”
“It is what you are.” He says. “I heard your little machine call you that.”
Shuri bites her lip, flinches at the pain, and watches as Namor dries off her hand and the tabletop.
“Are you the Princess of Kenya, then?”
“No.” And then she thinks, I want to bring him home anyway. “I am the Princess of Wakanda.”
“What is Wakanda like, Princess?” He says, almost purrs, and the flush of heat through her body has to war with her shock.
“You haven’t heard of it?”
“I live a very isolated life here.” He replies, a little sad, which just makes Shuri want to touch him. “Tell me about your home. Would I like it there?”
She smooths her thumb over the bags under his eyes. She is tired, too.
He takes her on the kitchen floor. The lamp on the floor rattles and the sound and flicker of it makes Shuri laugh.
The pace he sets is even and deep. He rolls into her and her legs shiver. She hooks one leg higher on his waist and swears when he slides in even deeper.
He kisses her so hard, she feels the cut on her lip open again. He licks it once to soothe it.
“Kissing it better?” she asks and he laughs against her mouth before drawing away. There’s a thin smear of blood on his bottom lip.
Shuri looks him in the eye and reels back. Gasps loud and wide enough that he takes the opportunity to put his thumb in her mouth. His pupils shift, elongate, transform into vertical slits. He kisses her again, around his thumb, and there’s a thin string of saliva connecting his mouth to hers. He licks it away, along with the trace of blood. His tongue is black.
“Bast!” She cries around his thumb. “Fuck.”
He grins. His cuspids are a touch too long. The knowledge sets in, bone deep. He is unlike her. She understands now and she wishes she didn’t. The hand crank lamp dims and sputters out.
Will he bite me? The thought scares her and she shivers.
He slides his hand under her, lifts her hips up at an angle and holds her close as he fucks her into the blankets and pillows. His breaths in her ear are heavy, exaggerated by his chest pressed down on her chest. The only light in the room comes from the candles and it’s as if nothing exists but the two of them and the darkness. No walls, no floor, no ceiling.
I need to get up and run.
“My back.” She manages between gasps. Namor slows. “It hurts.”
He kisses her sweetly then grunts and takes hold of her waist. He rolls them over so that he is laying flat and she is on top. He slipped out of her when they moved but he stays still, mostly, aside from the hand that runs up and down the curve of her ass. They’re both panting. His pupils contract and dilate, elliptical. Shuri is not sure she has ever been so frightened.
I’ll kill him after, she decides before taking hold of him and sinking back down. It’s like an electric shock at the base of her spine. Namor flattens his hand on her lower back and sits up.
“Move.” He says in a soft tone. He noses at the space behind her ear and scrapes the side of her neck with his teeth. She moves. She fucks him so well that he is the one who begs. He moans into her mouth and she sucks on his black tongue and almost shouts when she finishes.
He comes inside her. She pushes her own thumb into his mouth and presses down on his tongue and sees pink. His eyes flutter open. His pupils are blown wide, a black circle edged with brown.
She slides off of his lap and he kisses her cheek. She shuts her eyes and opens them again once she is sure he has gone to find a cloth to clean her with. She leaps up and fetches the butcher’s knife and crouches low.
His footsteps, heavy and measured. She counts out the steps from the wash room and stretches forward with her left hand, swiping at his calf. Namor freezes. The blade does nothing. When she looks up she sees, for the first time, anger in his face. His eyes widen at the sight of her with the knife in her hand. Shuri drops it and runs for the stairway.
Upstairs she scrambles for her backpack, forgotten in the corner of the bedroom. She finds the dagger in a case for sunglasses, wrapped in cloth. She holds it close to her chest and races for the doorway, presses herself against the wall and listens. He comes to the door and she spins out of the room, leading with the dagger.
Her aim is true but he is so fast she feels the breeze left in the wake of his body when he moves and dodges. She tries again and the strike lands. The wet, meaty resistance of flesh and muscle vibrates through the blade and up her left arm.
He retreats and the blade is buried so well that she loses her grip on the handle. The blood pouring from his shoulder is bright. Shuri wants to touch it. It’s revolting.
He wrenches the knife out and examines it. She moves back by one step and the movement breaks his focus. He stops admiring the blade and when his eyes lock on her he looks near delirious. The blood has reached his fingertips now.
His right foot shifts forward and before Shuri can turn to run he has curled his bloodied fist in the back of her shirt and pulled her back onto the floor. He’s on her in seconds, straddling her hips and holding her down at the sternum with his left hand. She is reminded how much broader he is than her. Heavier. He presses the blade beneath her chin.
“Where did you find this?”
“It’s mine.” Her stomach turns. She bucks her hips up and he doesn’t budge. She digs her fingernails into his thighs and can’t leave a single scratch. “Get off of me!”
“Who gave it to you?”
“My brother, to protect myself.” She’d spit on him if it wouldn’t drive the tip of the blade right through the soft underside of her jaw. He’s bleeding all over her.
Namor sighs and relaxes. His entire weight rests on her belly and she wheezes.
“Who gave it to your brother?”
“No one. He had it made for me. They’re nothing special where I’m from.” She replies. “Why do you care?”
“Why did you attack me, Shuri?”
“I saw your eyes. I saw them. You’re the snake. You killed - you killed him.” Her voice cracks. “You lied to me.”
His eyes flash. He leans back and the weight of him shifts just above her bladder. She winces.
“This metal is very special.” He says. Then he tosses the knife so it lands beside her head and rises. He bends over and picks up the rag meant for her thighs and presses it against his shoulder as he walks away. She lies there on the floor for thirty minutes, half-naked and trying her best not to cry.
The storm worsens. Half the windows are shuttered and the floors still grow damp from the sideways gusts of wind and rain. Shuri lights more candles. She hears Namor’s inhales and exhales in the places out of the candlelight’s reach.
He comes to her three days later, at midday. It is dark as midnight in the house and she can see that his wound is healed. She points her dagger at him.
“I am sorry for lying to you.” He tells her. She believes him. It doesn’t matter.
“What are you?” she asks, extending her arm and pointing the blade’s tip at his nose.
“I am the snake and the bird and myself.”
“What are you?” she repeats and lowers her hand to match the level of his heart.
He watches her.
“You cannot kill me.” He says, instead of answering.
“I can.” She spits. “This blade cut you.”
Finally, he smiles at her. Shuri did not know she was waiting for him to smile at her.
“Improve your aim.” He says after a while. “You have questions.”
“What do you want?”
“What I want has not changed, Princess.”
“Who was the last person in this house?”
“A man named Miguel. I don’t know how long ago - perhaps more than half a century. He brought the little book.” He replies. “The dictionary.”
“The dictionary from 1962? How old are you?”
“Much older than that.” He steps further into the light.
“Did you seduce him, too?”
“I did not seduce you.” He replies. “And I never revealed myself to him in this form.”
“So you killed him as the snake.”
“He did not stay long. He left before he could irritate me enough to earn a bite.” He answers. His tone is a little clipped. “You assume much.”
“How long is too long?”
“Do not worry about that.” He half grins before smoothing his expression. “There is no ‘too long’ when it comes to you.”
“Have you slept with others before me?”
“No.”
“Killed others?”
“I have killed others.” He answers. “You, I will not kill.”
“Do you swear?”
“Ah.” He says. “A promise. You trust the word of a snake?”
“Swear it.” She says.
“I will make an oath. I will only kill you should you try to abandon me. If I do, I promise I will keep you in the cold until your beauty gives way to bones. Then I will live all my days as a beast until I finally die and join you again.”
“Die? You have lived this long, you might be immortal.”
“Fine. Then I will use the pretty blade that your brother gave you. I am little more than a beast without you, so the day I tire of my clipped wings and my fangs, I will put your dagger in my heart. Does this appease you?”
“We wouldn’t go to the same afterlife.”
“You do not believe in any afterlife.” He rebuffs. “Forgive me if I do not believe you.”
The storm eases up but only by a little. Laying in her hammock in the bedroom, she can see everything around her through a muted filter of gray. She hears something like the sliding sound of a foot dragging on the floor.
It is the snake, reared back and rubbing its striped head along the inside of her hand. Its black, forked tongue skids over the scar on her palm. Shuri gasps and snatches her hand back. The snake’s tongue peeks out three times. It stares at her.
“What do you want?”
The snake stares at her, still, before rearing back even more. Before she can second-guess it, Shuri extends her arm. She cannot suppress the shiver that runs all through her when the snake places its head in her waiting palm, sliding up her forearm, the long body and tail spiraling as it climbs up onto her chest. Her heart is in her throat, saliva pooling in the back of her mouth because she cannot swallow. The snake curls onto her torso, head right over her heart, rattle resting at her hip bone, by the waistband of her shorts.
She wakes up with Namor on top of her. He kisses her slow and wet before she throws him off and out of the hammock.
“I cannot decide.” Shuri says, tilting her head and taking in the curve and jut of Namor’s nose, backlit by the window. The storm has eased up a little more in the past few days. She can make out the vague shape of the lighthouse through the pane of glass.
“What is it that you cannot decide?” he asks, always ready to humor her. He is watching her eat, watching her mouth. He uses his thumb to turn the ring on his middle finger, over and over.
“It’s impossible to tell, I think, whether you are a ghost or a fae prince or a changeling. A vampire?”
“Have you considered that I may be an incubus?”
“A poltergeist, maybe?” Shuri asks, not leaving his question any room to breathe.
“Is there a difference between a ghost and a poltergeist?”
“There is.” She clicks her tongue. “So, are you going to tell me?”
“I enjoy watching your clever brain work through a problem. You become so bright-eyed.”
“Will something bad happen if I figure it out?” She takes a sip of her drink and clears her throat. It’s water and lime juice. She could do with some rum, she thinks. She has the diet of a pirate, now.
Namor smiles.
“Are you going to kill me once you do?” he asks. “You are so docile, today.”
“I am tired. But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up. I will leave this place.”
He hums and stops fidgeting with his ring. He rises from his seat and walks to her place at the opposite head of the table. Shuri wraps her hand around the table knife but the gesture is insincere, and a regular blade cannot cut him in any case.
He can either tell she doesn’t mean it, or he simply does not care if she does. He stands beside her and slides his hand from her shoulder to her throat to her jaw. She lets him tilt her head up to look at him. His thumb rubs along the seam of her mouth.
“You taste good,” He advises, “when you have rum after your meals.”
She does not watch him go. She focuses on the plate in front of her and counts out the beats between the claps of thunder. She’s watched him leave, before. He melts into the darkness - a shadow meeting shadow.
She wakes and the sun is blaring bright and obnoxious through the window. She has to blink several times and she’s bewildered by the silence surrounding the house. No rain pelting the roof, no wind howling, no thunder.
She turns her face from the window and confirms that her hammock is empty aside from herself. It’s cold, too. There is no sign of him in the kitchen or his old room. From the dining room she peers up into the lighthouse. Nothing. She only just stops herself from calling out to him.
She dresses and reminds herself that it is a straight shot to the southeast to find the nearest village. There’s a silvery spiderweb bridging her boots together when she fetches them from the mud room. She laces them tight.
She doesn’t leave. She travels into the jungle and hears the bouncing call of motmots in the canopy overhead and she turns back. He looks at her muddy boots by the door when he comes back and says nothing about it.
The curiosity kills her. That’s always been what powered her gifts. How does this work? How can I make this? How will I prove them wrong?
She stares at him. What are you? Who are you?
Shuri bends at the waist and practically buries herself face-first in the open trunk. She pulls out the swathes of fabric, places the statuette on the floor with care, examines the belt. She holds it up and can easily imagine it low on Namor’s broad waist.
“Have you found something interesting?” he asks and her stomach churns at the thought that he entered the room as the snake or the bird to surprise her like this. She turns. “What are you looking for, Princess?”
“Nothing.” She says. “It’s boring to sit inside for days with nothing to do.”
“You will find more excitement with me than with old clothing.” He retorts. Within moments he is maneuvering her down to the floor, her feet slipping all over the fabric pooled around them. She has to twist herself to get out of her shorts and she hears clinks and clatters. She sees the glint of metal in the corner of her eye, right next to the hand resting by her head. She turns to look. A loose spearhead.
Namor presses himself against her and groans and it brings her back to the present moment with his cock hard against her bare hip. He enters her, renders her breathless, and places his right hand in her left hand, their fingers tangled together. A hard thrust moves their bodies inch by inch on the floor, facilitated by the slide of the fabric.
He lowers his face and noses at her throat and she turns her head to let him. She will think about the damp of his breaths on her skin for the rest of the day. She stares at their hands and sees the spearhead again. When their hands press into it, Shuri cries out. He doesn’t flinch, but her palm is slicked over with his blood.
It’s vibranium, she realizes, nearly alarmed. She should be more thoroughly amazed but Namor is mouthing at her neck and biting hard enough to hurt. She doesn’t care anymore. She comes.
“Why didn’t it storm today?”
He breathes in deep. He exhales loudly.
“Why didn’t you leave?”
He runs his fingertip around her belly button in concentric circles.
“Are you really not going to kill me?”
“I won’t.” He shakes his head. Shuri brushes through the black curls as they shift. She touches his ears. She rubs her thumb along the tips of them. She’d discovered them days ago and nearly shouted in surprise.
I had them the whole time, Namor told her, You only see what you want to see.
“Seriously? You won’t?”
“If I was going to kill you, why wouldn’t I have done it by now, Princess?”
“Maybe you enjoy playing with your food.”
“No.” He says, thoughtful. “If I could, I think I would much rather swallow you whole.”
“I’d eat you bit by bit and save the best parts for last.” She says, picturing his eyes and his tongue and his chewy vocal cords on a platter. His heart, too. Offal. Sweetbreads. “I’m a little bit insulted that you wouldn’t savor me.”
“If I don’t have you all at once you may run away.”
“Are you K’uk’ulkan?” she asks. Namor drops the paintbrush in his hand. He looks down at the paint splatter he caused and inhales deeply. She takes another step into the room and tosses Los Glifos Mayas onto the floor. “Is that your real name?”
“It is what my people called me.” He answers, looking down at the brush and not at her. He squats and hikes his tunic up. He picks up the brush.
“Why did you tell me to call you Namor?”
“There was no other name I could give you.” He answers. “I was forgotten. All that was left was Namor, the thing the conquistadors saw and named in their hateful language.”
“What does it mean? Namor.”
“Sin amor. Without love.”
“What does K’uk’ulkan mean?”
He wipes the brush off on a stained rag.
“Feathered Serpent. But you knew that. You were in my temple.”
“You are a god.” She accuses.
“I was.” He says. Shuri trembles and curls her hands into fists.
“How can someone stop being a god?”
“When no one believes anymore. No one remembers.” He squares his shoulders and does not look at her. “Get out.”
She puts her eyes to the telescope and looks. Venus and Jupiter, above the moon. She swings the telescope east, towards the ocean. Leo, Cancer, and Gemini.
Shuri squints and pulls away from the telescope to look at the sky with her naked eyes. Leo, Cancer and Gemini. She turns west again, hunting. She is facing West-northwest when she finds Mars. The stars glitter and flutter, huge webs cast out across the wrong parts of the sky.
Namor must have heard her storming down the pyramid steps. He is outside of the house, tangling his fingers in the vines wrapped around the northern wall
“How long have we been here?”
“I do not know.”
“The stars.” Shuri inhales through her nose, exhales through her mouth. “The stars have moved west.”
“Your hair has gotten longer, too.” He says. He reaches out and tucks a loose curl behind her ear. It is just barely long enough to sit there.
“But yours is the same.”
He blinks and it looks like a lagging camera shutter. Like he has to remind himself to do it. He’s bored with the conversation.
“Griot.” She whispers. She watches Namor as he looks at the sky through her telescope. “Griot, what day is it?”
Namor swivels the telescope to the right by just a few degrees. He smiles at whatever it is he sees. Griot does not reply.
Namor has her pressed up against the wall that he says once boasted a mural but is now nothing more than discolored gray stone. She asked what the mural was of and he said, “You don’t really care.” and she really didn’t, not in that moment. She can ask again later.
“Wait.” She realizes she’s panting. He stops. “What if this is - someone might see us.”
“Who?”
“Anyone. They could come walking through the bush like I did.” It’s a flimsy excuse. She comes up with thin excuses almost every time they fuck, now. He hasn’t stopped entertaining the charade so far. Maybe one day he’ll stop letting her get away with it.
“If you want no one to see, I will kill whoever crosses the jungle’s border.”
“This is a temple.”
“It was.”
“What is wrong with you?” Shuri asks before breaking off into a moan when his thigh pushes up against her cunt. “Won't your gods judge you?”
“They’ve abandoned me. There is only me and you.” He says it like he says everything else, with deep conviction. She believes him for a moment - there is no one else on earth but them. There never was.
“I thought you were -” Shuri cuts herself off to pant, “I thought you were religious.”
“This was my temple.” He retorts and he licks a stripe up her throat before making his way down her torso. He pauses to mouth at her breast through her shirt. “Seeing as it was my temple, I may do what I wish. You will be tonight’s sacrifice.”
He parts her legs.
“I’m leaving.” Shuri says. He leaves a wet kiss on her inner thigh, nibbles the skin.
“I don’t think you will.”
“I’m going. Soon.”
“You won’t.” He rubs his beard against her skin and it burns.
He walks her back to the house after, his big hand holding hers. He fucked her so well that she’s dazed. Shuri sees herself like a half dead animal, limp and heavy, dragged through mud by the creature that caught it.
She tells him this, later. He offers her a pound of flesh in apology for keeping her and Shuri is a little delighted that Namor knows that phrase.
“That’s from a Shakespeare play. Did you know that?”
He shakes his head, shrugs. Draws her in for a kiss when she brings the dagger up to his skin to collect on his debt.
She carves a fine line from his thigh and down to his calf. At his ankle she touches the scar tissue and asks, “Who did this to you?”
“The hateful strangers who forced my people from this land. The zealots could not kill me, so they clipped me. They used my own weapons against me.”
She dips her head down and kisses the scars on both feet.
It becomes a favorite pastime of hers. A way to stay occupied between the fucking and stargazing and arguments.
He makes for a fine anatomy lesson. Arms and legs. Feet and hands. The peach fuzz that runs all over his body. Vellus hair.
And there’s the blood. He flinches and gasps very softly, sometimes, when the blade drives home through skin and muscle. It makes the blood feel all the more well earned when she can see the way his body wants to retreat.
“You’re a scientific marvel.” She tells him and he smiles like she’s said something funny, like she’s kind of stupid. Then she watches his skin stitch itself back together and cuts into him again despite already knowing what will happen, because she is so angry with him.
She hasn’t taken her blade to his pointed ears or strange ankles, yet. She makes repeat visits to her favorite places - the handsome jut of his cheekbones, his breastbone, the road from the ditch of his elbow to his wrist.
He opens up to her like a flower. A lily unfurling, night-blooming. Skin, veins, muscle. Layered like a sodden book. Wet pages parting. Nerves and tendons. Fat and cartilage. He starts sweating in earnest when the blade knocks against bone.
She does it until he finally bucks her off of him, teeth bared, and the force behind it gives her a little frightened thrill every time. She wonders why he lets her do it. Can creatures like him get bored?
Sometimes he vanishes for days after. Other times he comes back after a few hours, cleaned up but still smelling of blood.
“I would do the same to you, if I could.” He tells her one night, after she took her blade and discovered the insides of his gut. They are on their sides in the hammock.
“Do what?”
“What I would give to be inside you the way you’ve been inside me.” He whispers. “I want to split you and crawl under your skin, through your belly.” He touches her abdomen with a flat hand. She holds her breath. “And then climb up your ribs and sleep there for some time, by your heart. But you are fragile and too young to die.”
“You wouldn’t fit.”
“A snake might. A bird could.” His hand brushes up against the underside of her breast.
“Please.” She whispers.
“Fucking you is not deep enough.” He confesses and Shuri bites her tongue and tilts her hips back against him. He’s hard.
“It will have to do.” She says. She bares her neck to the hand that has wandered past her breast to hold her throat.
“For now, yes.” He answers and he finally drags his free hand down to her pajama shorts and touches her.
Today is bright, likely because she complained about missing the beach the night before.
She finds him sitting on the flat plane of a huge rock at the bottom of the lighthouse. She joins him and tilts her head back so that the heat tingles all over her body. She strips down to her panties - who cares?, she thinks. This has become their own little Eden, only it works in reverse. What use is there for shame when it’s just him and her and the jungle and the rain and the ocean.
“I’m tired.” He says. “The sun, the heat - it makes me tired.”
She watches as he walks into the ocean, walks so far that his head disappears under the water and stays gone for an entire five minutes before emerging. He looks a little bit better when he strolls up to her.
“Are you alright?”
“Tired.” He says again. He plays with the ties of her bracelet and kisses her. She tugs on his waistband and plays with that, too. He smiles and she watches him go.
“Why keep me here?” It’s drizzling today and Shuri wants to cry. She is pacing the kitchen. “I wanted you to come with me. I wanted to see everything with you.”
“You were happy here. You’re safe here.” He says from his seat at the table, his hands busy with his work. Namor splashes more water on the adamantium whetstone he kept in the trunk upstairs. He drags the edge of her blade across it. “Have I not protected you?”
“You are a killer.”
“I invite you to tell me how that discounts the fact that I protect you.”
“Did you not want to come with me? What, you can’t leave the house?” She wants to shove the table to the side. “You are selfish, just admit it.”
“I leave the house every day, when you are not keeping me occupied.”
“I mean, can you leave this place? These ruins? Can you go past the forest and the beach?” she asks. He flips the dagger over and drags it along the stone in a smooth motion. He drags it again, and again. Shuri jostles the table with her hands and he freezes. “Namor.”
He looks up from his work and stares at her.
“I love you, Princess.” He tells her. “If I could, I would go with you anywhere.”
He’s asleep in the hammock. She fucked him to sleep, or at least close to it. She dissolved two of her anti-anxiety tranquilizer pills into his glass of mezcal and lime, too. He was already lounging like a sun-bathing cat when she walked back into their room with the alcohol, nude and sly. They drank together and she kissed him stupid. They smiled all through it. She kissed him until his mouth went slack against her lips. And then she dressed and finished packing her bag.
Now she stands over him, nudging his foot a few times, watching the way it rolls limply. She turns to the middle of the room.
She punctures the Zippo lighter with the tip of her vibranium blade and drains the fluid out onto the old blankets they’d abandoned ages ago. She closes the shutter and the windows. She tucks bits of tinder from the stove into the blankets. She kisses him a few more times for good measure, plays with the curls that rest on his brow, and kisses the back of his right hand.
She strikes the match and tosses it onto the blankets and does not look at him as she shuts the door behind her. She runs. She runs down the stairs and past the lighthouse and the ruins and along the cliffside and when she glances back she sees smoke pouring out of the second storey window. She can’t hear anything but her own ragged breathing and the roar of the ocean.
There are scorch marks from the second storey window up to the roof. The shutter is gone and the window is smashed. A blue motmot calls out to her, perched in the window. The vines are withered down to ashen gray twigs. The door is crooked on its hinges. It looked like this when she first found it, she knows. But she could swear it was lovely when she left.
He walks out of the house. He is exactly as she remembered and not at all like she remembered.
“Princess. I promised to kill you.” He says by way of greeting. His cuspids are not as pointed as they were in her dreams. “My promises do not expire.”
“You won’t.” She answers. She has a weapon in her back pocket. She places her hand there, hoping she looks casual, and admires her monster. She points the tip of her umbrella down and leans on it like it’s a cane.
“I’m a man of my word.”
“You won’t kill me if I kill you first.” She spits back. “And you wouldn’t, anyway.”
“Why not?” His eyes harden. His pupils remain round.
“You want me.”
“I do not.”
“And you love me.”
“I cannot stand the sight of you.” He tells her.
“I hate you, too.” She snaps. “So what?”
“Why have you come here, after so long?” he asks. It has been two years since she escaped. She wonders what a year really feels like for someone like him. “It is beneath you to taunt me.”
“I want you to come with me.”
“I cannot.” He bites out and he takes a step closer. “Do not taunt me again.”
“Ch’ah Toh Almehen.” She says. He freezes. “Come with me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. I’ve decided.” She tosses the umbrella and reaches her hand out. “Come here.”
He obeys. She wonders if she looked like this, enthralled by his siren song. Blissed and frightened.
He stares at the bracelet on her wrist and takes her hand. She unsheathes the blade from her back pocket and slashes at his forearm.
He shouts something in Maya, probably a swear, and Shuri holds his hand tight. He looks at her with fury.
“Again with your tricks!” He thunders. “Twice you have tried to betray me.”
“Look.” She whispers. His eyes are wild and she lifts the blade. “Look.”
He does and she waits patiently for him to understand. She can tell when he does.
His startled eyes follow her movements intently when she brings the Swiss Army knife back to his arm. She swipes it on his forearm again, parallel to the first cut but shorter. She drops the blade and rubs her thumb over both cuts, heart racing at the feel of his hot blood, striking up memories like a match.
“Be careful.” He murmurs and he tugs his hand out of her own before a long dribble of blood can reach her hand, her wrist, her bracelet.
“Come with me.” She repeats and she wipes her thumb clean on the front of her shirt. “Let me keep you.”
He licks his wounds, like a child or an animal. She kisses him with her fingers tucked into his hair and breathes him in. He wipes her mouth clean with his cloak and follows her through the jungle.