Page 198 of Whisper
David silenced him with a kiss.
Jealousy slithered up Kris’s insides. “You? Ten years is a long time…”
David shook his head. “Nothing. There was never anyone. Never anyone else.”
“Jesus, that makes me feelworse.” Kris covered his face with his hands. How many men had it been? He tried to add up the round numbers, the nights he’d spent, the weeks in a year multiplied. His face burned.
David kissed his chest, his collarbone, his throat. “Ya rouhi, it’s in the past. Don’t think of it again.”
Kris bit his lip. “Are you back? Are you here for good? You’ve just appeared out of the blue twice. What do you want, David?”
David’s hand splayed over Kris’s belly. “It’s Dawood, now,” he said softly. “I go by Dawood.”
“Dawood.” Kris blinked. “Are you… Muslim again?”
“I’ve always been Muslim. I was born Muslim.”
“Are you practicing?”
David—Dawood—nodded. “La ilaha illah Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah,” he breathed, whispering theshahada.
“What happened over there? What happened to you?” Kris propped himself up on his elbow, turning toward Dawood. He laced their hands together, fingers entwined. “Tell me, please.”
Moonlight glittered into his studio, curving through the windows. Pale light fell on the bed, between their bodies. Dawood held out his hand, as if he could catch a moonbeam in his palm. “Every night, I whispered to the moon. As if it could take my messages straight to you. Every night, I thought of you. Told you what happened during my day. Gave you my prayers. I thought you were with Allah and that you could hear me. I thought the moon was our messenger.”
Tears slipped from Kris’s eyes and fell into the moonlight.
Slowly, Dawood spoke. About how Al Jabal had dragged him free from the rubble of the mosque through an escape tunnel and driven him north, hundreds and hundreds of miles, to the footsteps of his father, Abu Adnan, in the remote mountains of Bajaur Province. “I was supposed to be a prisoner. In secret. One day, Al Jabal would come for me and finish me off.”
“Ryan killed him. Two weeks after your death. Ryan put everything and everyone in Afghanistan into the hunt for your murderer. Two drones obliterated him. I saw his death photos myself.”
Dawood winced. He muttered a prayer under his breath, Arabic too soft for Kris to catch. “Abu Adnan told me. And he told me his son’s death freed me. That his son had told no one, ever, about his home. That no one in the world knew where I was.”
“Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you find some way to reach out? Any way?”
“The mountain felt like the end of the earth. Like the oceans had been turned upside down and we lived somewhere entirely off the map. Maybe even a different world. Some days, I didn’t know if I was alive or dead, if anything was real. The only thing I knew, for certain, was that if I came off the mountain and you were dead, I wouldn’t survive.”
Kris squeezed Dawood’s hand until his bones hurt.
“Abu Adnan took me in. He took care of me. Nursed me back to life. Gave me a place in his home.”
“Al Jabal’s father? Your murderer’s father?”
“He became a father to me as well.Bismillah.”
Kris blinked, slowly. “I can’t even imagine…”
“I had a father again,” Dawood whispered. “I had a father, and I had Allah, too. I thought you were dead, in Paradise, and I gave my prayers to you through the moon. I was just waiting to see you again. That’sallI lived for.”
Hadn’t that been all Kris lived for, as well? But he had stopped believing in fairy tales of an afterlife, delusions of heaven or a hereafter. He’d stopped believing because David—Dawood—hadn’t come back for him like he’d promised he would.
But if Dawood was alive, then of course he couldn’t come back from the dead, from an afterlife, for Kris. Of course not. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? Why had he left his husband forten years? Guilt twisted at his guts, slicked up his spine. Shame, the familiarity of it, curled around his heart. It felt like a homecoming.
“I’m sorry,” Kris whispered. He cupped Dawood’s cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
Dawood covered his hand and kissed Kris’s palm. “I’m not. It was good, being there. I was alive in a way I hadn’t been.”
“Spiritually?”
