"But your eyes won't shut up."
He accuses her of this on a cold afternoon in December, as she sits across from him, avoiding his gaze as he eavesdrops on her side of a phone call. Enough time has lapsed to regain the ability to walk on dry land steadily and revert back to the pesky colloquialisms that had rusted after an entire summer of Hebrew. An entire summer and a too long stint in Israel and a too long deployment at sea, where the rocking of waves were more nauseating than comforting, the levels of testosterone stifling. He has shared virtually every aspect of his prolonged stay aboard the floating prison, or at least what is worth repeating (not much, actually) but she seems reluctant to expand on her clipped and guarded account of her own adventure. He knows she was in the field, with men he trusted no more than she did, in a desert far from home -far from him. And he knows that something befell her during an operation of some sort, the kind of something that most likely involved bad guys and highly volatile explosives. And he now has reason to suspect that she is withholding more beyond even that. Not a something, but a someone. A someone she staunchly refuses to disclose all the while deflecting his inquiries, weak defenses of "I don't want to talk about it" and "Nothing happened." Perhaps this is true, but her dark brown eyes, forever wary, yet oh so easy for him to read, are screaming in protest to what her lips profess. He only wishes at the time that he knew what it was exactly that she was begging him to understand.
And her eyes never do shut up but they do eventually let her heart get a word in edgewise.