“I won’t let you fail, Meg. I just won’t.”

This is my lover. I call him the pasha. The pasha looks at me from the kitchen counter. His eyes are marvelous, the color of butter browning. Beurre noisette, the French call it. Hazelnut butter. One lick and you melt.

That’s how it was for me. The first time I saw the pasha, I wanted to lick him. Couldn’t think of anything else. My nostrils flared. I tucked my hair behind my ears and buried my nose in my book.

Later, on our first night together, once I had the whole brown length of him spread out beneath me, my hands traveled over him as greedily as a refugee through a rice paddy, shucking him of clothing, savoring the long grains of limb and torso. Trained as a massage therapist, I was well drilled in the art of touching, in tenderness, in respect. I handled bodies the way a baker kneads her soft white balls of dough, gently, the layers of muscle and fascia and bone-deep strictures of gristle softening beneath my hand’s steady heat.

But the pasha’s body made me crazy. I wanted to rake my nails across his chest. I wanted to claw him, to see the bloodied welts rise in his flesh. I needed to stamp my own territorial markings over his net of scars.

“What’s this?” I asked, my fingers trailing a harsh ridge of skin.

“Knife wound,” he said, teasing a nipple, his touch more tender than I could have imagined.

“And this?” as I traced a long vicious scar up his arm.

“Fracture.” He cupped my cheek in his hand. “The bone came through. They had to stick it back in.”

My fingers found a particularly angry blaze across his ribs. I looked at him, but he didn’t answer right away.

“Gunshot,” he said finally, tumbling me back into the bed.

***********************

The pasha’s body makes me want a baby.

We’re driving to the supermarket. He’s talking about radio broadcaster John Batchelor – “This guy, he’ll cover the stuff that no one else covers. Stories you won’t hear anywhere else,” – but all I can do is stare at his forearms.

“For example, one of his favorite subjects is Taiwan,”

The pasha’s forearms are thick.

“because Taiwan is a pro-democracy, pro-capitalism enclave just off the coast of China,”

Dark coarse hair curls out of his skin.

“and it faces constant threat from the Chinese mainland.”

When he grips the steering wheel, the sinews of his forearms bulge in ways that make me dizzy. I think of lions ripping apart their prey, the blood-hard columns of their necks rippling in stark relief against fur-dense flesh, their jaws clenched shut, uncompromising.

The pasha has a thing about jaws. Whenever he sizes up another man, it’s the line of the jawbone that earns his nod of approval. “Good chin,” he’ll say, eyes narrowing speculatively. “Strong. Good jawline.”

I tease him about it, but now, sitting under the chiseled ridge of his jaw, I admire the tautness of him. I remember my delirium in those first few days, at the sheer masculinity of the man beside me. “I love your man’s body,” I’d told him, clumsily, and he had smiled and reached for my hand. And when he touched me, I had felt it: baby, a throb, a desire for it, a shot of longing, splitting me wide, like an arrow through an apple, his seed in my womb, how the word womb suddenly gained weight, the rich round heaviness of it, and the organ inside me pulsed, eager for ripening.

I tease him about it, but the truth is, “good chin,” is just a shorthand, a byproduct of the pasha’s seemingly mystic ability to cut you straight down to your core. He strips you down with his eyes before you’ve said a word, seeing in an instant your loneliness, your desperation, your grief. He reads people the way the rest of us read recipes, noting the ingredients, the exact proportions of feeling, the ratio of wisdom to regret.

The pasha’s body is in constant vibrato. He wades through an atmosphere thick with informants – fluctuations in mood or mental temperature whisper to him. Sometimes they shout. His mind burns with it, this barrage of information. His body throws off heat in clouds; the air around him is filmy with insight, like those old celluloid reels, frame after frame flashing before his eyes, he phosphoresces with it, this psychic deluge, he might catch fire.

He seems to know instinctively, as Torricelli wrote, that “we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.” We are held captive in an ever-gathering molecular tsunami, and he feels the suck of things usually undetected, how greed can turn the air dank with chemical stink, the electrical burn of malice, anger’s blinding white-out balm. His skin prickles in the dark, alert not just to water vapor’s thickening but to the sturm und drang of human emotion. His heart twists, he feels it in the throat, a tickle, a constricting, the polarities of motive jolting him, positive and negative, good and evil, the alternating current of human intent. I’ve seen it happen, his hackles rising as surely as mercury in a barometer, moments before a fight breaks out.

He’d never tell you so himself, but the pasha’s body is an instrument of detection unrivaled by science.

***********************

“I won’t let you fail,” he tells me, and I believe him. The pasha doesn’t accept defeat. “Listen, Meg. Are you listening?” I nod. “You have to write your book.”

I’m listening. Sometimes it’s the only mooring I have to my dreams, this woolen voice, whose words unravel thick and thistle-burred, the way the “r”s spiral around in the back of the throat, “Writer,” he calls me, “you’re a writer, Meg,” smoky, like peat moss, how each word drifts away from his lips, as light and crisply launched as a paper boat.

Sometimes he sighs and runs his hands through his hair. This is when I’m being obstinate, when nothing he says sparks anything in me but tears and frustration, when all I can offer is I can’t. “Look,” he says. “You have to do this for yourself. Don’t do this for me. If you want to write a book, write a book. You can do that, can’t you? You have to write for yourself.”

I’m afraid if I don’t write, you won’t love me anymore.

I told him that once. Can you imagine? Puny and weak. Most men would shrivel at those words. They’d turn stony with silence, the gift of their love and encouragement flung back at them like a Medusa’s head. Why did I raise the stakes so high? But the pasha isn’t most men, and he only pushes harder.

“Don’t do this for me,” he tells me, but it’s no use.

Everything is for you, my love. Everything.