To Die For

"It costs extra."

"I will pay you what I wish, b.i.t.c.h. Suck it."

"Pay first. One hundred extra."

I do not even see his hand move. I find myself lying on my side, cheek throbbing. Abdul is above me, a pistol barrel pressed to my forehead.

"Wh.o.r.e!" he yells. "Do what I tell you, or I will kill you. You are nothing but a filthy wh.o.r.e. I pay you because I am generous. Today, you will give me what I want, and you will not be paid. Your payment will be your life. Do you understand?"

I can only nod. He grabs my hair and drags me upright, thrusts my face against his crotch. His member b.u.mps my closed lips. I consider biting him, but I know he'll kill me. The gunshot will alert Hunter, who will drag himself here to look for me. He will be killed, and then my work to save him will be wasted.

I do as I am told. He is unwashed. He tastes vile. He fists his hands into my hair, pulls me against his crotch, jabbing himself into my throat violently, choking me. I gag, nearly vomit, which is when he finishes, filling my throat with his seed. I cannot stop it then. I turn my head to the side and vomit on the cracked tile floor beside the blankets.

Abdul laughs. "Next time, do not argue." He leans down and puts his face next to mine as I heave. "If you argue with me again, I will kill you."

He swaggers away, buckling his belt. I remain there, kneeling on the hard floor, vomiting. Eventually I am able to stop, and I make my way back home, wiping my mouth. My cheek throbs, bruised.

I stumble into the bathroom and brush my teeth obsessively.

I cannot look at Hunter. He sees me, though, and exclaims angrily in English. Tries to get up.

"No. Sit," I say. "I am fine."

"Not," he says in Arabic.

He begins the long, torturous struggle to his feet, so I kneel beside him and let him look at me. He takes my chin between gentle fingers, turns my face to the side to examine my cheek. His brow furrows, and anger flashes in his blue eyes. He touches my cheek, his finger a feather-light brush along the swollen skin. The longer he touches me, the hotter the rage in his eyes grows.

He says something in English, a single growled question. I don't need to know the meaning of the word to know what he asked. Who?

I shake my head. "No." He understands that much. "I do not want you involved. He will kill you. He will kill both of us."

"Who?" He says it again in English.

"Abdul." I have to think hard about how to use gestures and our limited mutual understand to communicate who Abdul is. "Soldier, general."

He shakes his head, shrugs. I stand up, try to a.s.sume an "attention" position, heels together, back straight, and then I salute. Hunter laughs at my pantomime, but nods, understanding. I draw my fingers in a wide rectangle above my left breast, meaning the row of medals and other colorful things a high-ranking soldier wears there, then pat my shoulders, meaning the rank insignia. Hunter seems confused still. I sigh.

I hit on an idea. I put my forefinger on my upper lip, indicating a mustache, and say, "Saddam," and hold my hand above my head. Then I move my hand down a few inches, indicating a slightly lower rank, and say, "Abdul."

Hunter's eyes widen as he comprehends my meaning. Abdul is a high-ranking general not far beneath Saddam Hussein himself. Or, he was until Saddam was overthrown by the Americans. Abdul has been a regular client for many years, since before he achieved his current rank.

I sit down again, and Hunter touches my cheek once more. "No," he says. His voice is hard, angry, determined. "I dead him."

I laugh at his mangled Arabic and shake my head. "No. Say, 'I will kill him.'" I repeat it, pantomiming stabbing.

He nods and repeats what I said. "I will kill him."

There's no humor in my eyes or voice now. "No!" I say it in English and Arabic. "No."

He does not respond, doesn't argue, but I can see in his eyes that he hasn't changed his mind. He intends to kill Abdul for hitting me. I cannot make him understand. This is my life. This is my job. How I survive. If Abdul ends up dead, it could ruin my business, ten years' worth of establis.h.i.+ng clients and a reputation as Sabah.

But something in my heart yearns to let Hunter do as he wishes. Something in me twinges and twitches, like an unused muscle coming to life. He wants to protect me. He sees me hurt, and there is pain in his eyes, anger for me.

He does not know me. He does not even truly speak my language, nor I his. We know nothing of each other. We are enemies. Our people are at war. He cannot protect me. Not from the likes of Abdul. Not from anyone.

Hunter's eyes are mere inches from mine. I suddenly realize how close I am to him. His thigh brushes mine. His body is near enough for me to feel the heat pouring from him. I can see the individual hairs of his beard growing on his chin and cheeks, thick and black. A bead of sweat slides down his temple, curves over his cheekbone to mingle with the stubble of beard. He wipes his cheek on his shoulder, smearing the sweat into a s.h.i.+ny patch of wetness.

His eyes pierce mine, so blue, hot and deep and quavering with a tangle of emotions. I wonder what he is thinking. He licks his lips, tongue tip sliding over his lower lip, a pink dart.

I do not realize what is happening at first. His face grows closer to mine, his eyes wide and locked on mine, so, so blue, so close. What is he doing? I cannot move. I am frozen by his nearness, trembling with fear and antic.i.p.ation. This is it. Now he will take what he wants from me. He is still wracked with pain, I can see it in the way the corners of his eyes crinkle and the way his free hand clenches the blanket so tightly his knuckles turn white. But his other hand is still touching my chin, my jaw, the skin beneath my ear, his touch as gentle as a breeze. And now his lips are touching mine; why? What is this? He is kissing me? Clients do not kiss. They do not try, and I would not let them. It is s.e.x, not love.

I remember my mother kissing my father once when she thought I was not looking. They loved each other, Mama and Papa. She put her lips to his, and their mouths moved together, as if they were eating each other's tongues. I did not understand it then, but now I do.

He tastes faintly of meat and garlic and something else unique and indefinable. Something distinctly male. I do not know what to do. I am afraid of this kiss, what it means, what it has begun, where it will lead, why it is happening. I am afraid of Hunter. He is confusing. Strong, and huge, and hard, but gentle with me. Angry when I am hurt. I have seen wounded men before, and they were weak, barely able to move.

Once, a few years ago, a client hit me in the side because I would not do what he wanted. He broke my rib, and I could not work for many days. I nearly starved. I told Abdul what had happened, why I could not entertain him, and Abdul did something. Made sure the client never came back. Not for me, but so Abdul could continue to enjoy my services. Each motion was impossibly painful. Each breath hurt worse than the blow that broke the rib. I could not move for the pain. Hunter has at least one broken rib, and he continues to move. It hurts him, I can see, but he moves anyway.

He kisses me carefully, gently. Hesitantly. It is...soft and wet and hot. I do not stop. I want to stop, want to run away from him and his eyes that see me, his hands that touch me in a way I do not mind but should. His presence confuses me. I do not run away. I let him kiss me, and I know I should not, but I do.

He pulls away finally, palm flat on my cheek, eyes searching me for a reaction. I do not know how to react.

Something hot and salty stings my eyes. Am I bleeding? I touch my eyes and look at my finger. I am crying. Why? I do not know. Am I sad? What is this feeling in my heart, in my chest? It is a tightness, warm and thick, spreading through me. My skin tingles where he touches me. My thighs tremble, and between them...I feel a dampness, and a strange clenching heat, a tension like need.

His thumb brushes the tear from my cheek, then the other side. He is still close enough to feel his breath on my face.

My lips tingle and throb where his touched mine.

It is madness, I know, but I find myself kissing him. Pressing my lips to his, a slow falling forward into him. His lips part and his hand curls around the back of my neck, holds me at the nape and pulls me closer, kisses me back.

Something touches my teeth, my lips. His tongue. It is a bizarre sensation. Invasive and frightening. I pull away and look at him, and I can feel the confused expression on my face.

What in Allah's name am I doing, kissing this American soldier?

I flee, wondering why I suddenly called upon Allah, why I let Hunter kiss me, why I kissed him back, why his tongue in my mouth was not unpleasant.

I wonder, as my feet wend their way through streets and alleys, why do I feel a deep, coiling need in my belly to kiss him again?

What do I do? What is happening to me? What have I done?

CHAPTER EIGHT.

HUNTER.

Why the f.u.c.k did I kiss her? It wasn't a conscious thought or intent. It just...happened. She was there next to me, her leg brus.h.i.+ng mine, that small point of contact burning through me with lightning awareness. Her cheek was bruised and purpling, sending white-hot lances of rage through me.

I heard the whole thing. I heard a male voice give an order, Rania's voice reply calmly, and then his again, angry. I heard a smack, fist on flesh. Heard her cry out. Then the jingling of a belt and an order. Gagging. Vomiting.

It's not hard to figure out what happened.

I swear to G.o.d I will kill the motherf.u.c.ker. I will cut his G.o.dd.a.m.n throat and cut off his c.o.c.k and shove it into his slit f.u.c.king neck.

I have to breathe deeply to calm the rage. My temper, a problem for me my whole life, is coming back with hurricane force. I've learned to control it, keep it contained, not lash out like I used to. I nearly didn't graduate high school because I spent so much time suspended for fighting. I nearly got expelled when a kid ended up in the hospital after a fight with me. Of course, he f.u.c.king started it. Jumped me in the parking lot after football practice. Beat my a.s.s, too. Knocked me down, knocked a tooth loose, and broke my nose. He didn't expect me to get up, but I did, and I got mine. He spent a week in the hospital with a lot of broken s.h.i.+t.

Now this Abdul a.s.shole is..h.i.tting Rania, and I can't see straight. Can't think straight. I shouldn't be reacting like this. She seems to be under the impression this Abdul character is some high-up general in the Iraqi army. I don't care. I'll still f.u.c.king kill him if he touches her again.

She ran after our kiss. After she kissed me. I didn't see that one coming. She was there next to me, lush and beautiful and hurting and needing comfort. Needing protection. No woman should ever be hit. No woman should ever be forced to do what she did. Something primal inside me reacted to her proximity and her pain. My lips touched hers before I knew what I was doing, and then I was lost in the soft sweetness of her lips.

G.o.dd.a.m.n, but I'm screwed. She tasted like mint toothpaste. Felt like heaven. It was just a kiss, but it got me so hard I thought I was going to explode without even being touched. And then she pulled away, crying. I don't get why she was crying. She didn't seem to know how to kiss. She didn't respond, just let our lips touch, her whole body tensed and frozen. And then she was crying.

I think it was her first kiss. Seems impossible, but it feels true.

Then she kissed me, leaned in and took my lips with hers, and I think I did come in my pants a little. I'm still achingly hard. Painfully hard. She's gone now, running away from me, from our kiss. She's as confused as I am, if I'm any judge of her facial expressions.

I'm so hard, it hurts still. I need relief. I'd take care of it myself, but then I'd have no way to clean up. I slowly and painfully s.h.i.+ft down to a lying position and focus on thinking of something else, anything else but Rania. I call up a memory of combat, but that only leads to remembering Rania's face above me when she first rescued me.

I owe her my life, and I refuse to let her be beaten.

My combat knife, the only part of my gear aside from my clothes that seemed to make it here with me, is lying in the corner near my feet. It takes several agonizing minutes to retrieve it. I have to keep stopping to catch my breath and let the bolts of pain lessen. It hurts so bad I could puke, but I grit my teeth and bull through it. I hide the knife under my blankets, near to hand. Next time I hear something like that happening, I'll stop it. I don't care how bad it f.u.c.king hurts. I don't care if I rip open my wounds and re-break my ribs. I won't let it happen again.

This animal fury inside me at the thought of Rania being hurt baffles me, confuses me. I don't know where it comes from, but I can't explain it away or ignore it. It's not just my temper, or my upbringing. My dad drilled into me all my life that women are to be protected. Never, ever struck. Ever. Women are to be cherished and taken care of. Dad held doors for Mom. He treated her like a queen. He was a difficult man, angry and disturbed and broken from his war experiences, but it never translated into violence against me or Mom.

My drive to protect Rania is something else. Something deeper, harder, fiercer. I don't dare look too closely at what it is, because that's impossible. Unworkable.

I'm exhausted from the pain now. I close my eyes and try not to picture Rania's face, try not to remember her lips. It doesn't work, though, and I pa.s.s out to an image of her bright brown eyes like melted chocolate, her red lips and her soft skin.

She kissed me.

G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

I just need to heal enough to walk so I can sneak out of here and get back to the base. I can't deal with this. With her. With her lips on mine like a slice of sweet, hypnotic heaven, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s crushed against my chest, soft yet firm, her nipples pebbling. The smell of her arousal wafting up to my nose.

My c.o.c.k is throbbing, rock-hard.

See? s.h.i.+t. She's under my skin. She's in my head. What the f.u.c.k am I supposed to do? I can't kiss her again. Can't let it happen. Certainly it can't go further. I'm not physically capable at the moment anyway, but...it wouldn't be right. It would be...a mistake. She's a prost.i.tute. Iraqi. I'll get out of here at some point, and I'll never see her again.

Plus, she still has to work. Her tricks are putting food in my belly. Water. Bandages. Antibiotic ointment. Without her johns, I'll starve. If anyone finds out about me, I'm dead and she will be, too, or worse.

How could I sleep with her and then lie here and listen to her turn a trick? I couldn't. I would flip the h.e.l.l out.

f.u.c.k. Why am I even thinking of sleeping with her? I can't. I won't.

But G.o.dd.a.m.n, is she s.e.xy. Tantalizing. That fine, thick, l.u.s.trous blonde hair draping across her face, her wide dark eyes blazing with so much emotion, so much I can't identify, can't fathom. Her lithe, lush body pushed close to me.

I groan and scrub my face with a sigh. My c.o.c.k is tangled and bent painfully sideways. I push the blanket down past my hips and adjust myself inside my BDU pants. But then, dammit, touching myself was a mistake. I've got a mad case of blue b.a.l.l.s going on. Kissing Rania, and then thinking about her...it's giving me a perpetual hard-on. I grasp my c.o.c.k in my fist and consider again taking care of it myself.

As I'm touching myself, I get the sense of another presence. Rania stands in the doorway, watching me with a strange expression on her face.

"s.h.i.+t," I say, tossing the blanket over myself quickly.

Embarra.s.sment floods through me. I cast a hesitant glance at Rania, who is still in the doorway, staring at me. I expect her to look upset, or disgusted, or...I don't know. What I don't expect to see is her cheeks blus.h.i.+ng, her gaze now darting around the room as if trying to forget what she saw but wanting to get another glimpse.

"I am sorry," I say in my halting, broken, poorly accented Arabic.

She shrugs, not looking at me. I want to explain, but I can't. Even if she was fluent in English, or I was in Arabic, I couldn't explain. I just wouldn't be able to get the words out. She finally shakes head as if banis.h.i.+ng the vision and goes into the kitchen. She has a few bags of groceries in her hands, which I hadn't noticed. I want to get up take them from her, put them away for her, but I can't.

She doesn't look at me, and when her eyes do slide across the room to mine, I can't hold her gaze. I wonder if she knows it was she who gave me the hard-on?

It's subsided for now. G.o.d help me if she gets too close. It'll spring back fully erect if she so much as looks at me the wrong way. Or the right way, depending on how you look at it.

The worst part is, there will never be release. It can't happen. I have to be smart. It wouldn't be just s.e.x, even if it did happen. I can tell. The way she gets under my skin, the way my heart hammers when she looks at me, touches me, the way I want so desperately for her to just sit and talk to me...it would be emotional, if anything happened. I'm smart enough to realize that much; now I just have to be smart enough to keep anything from happening.

I have to keep telling myself to think with my brain, not with my c.o.c.k. Not with my heart.

And then she looks at me, curiosity ripe in her gaze, gaze eyes sliding down my bare chest to my crotch, covered with the blanket, and she blushes and looks hurriedly away, biting her lip.

f.u.c.k. This is going to be difficult.

We're both extra cautious for the next few days. She doesn't sit close enough to touch, and I don't try. My hands stay on my lap, busy, fidgeting. She starts facing away from me when she has to change or clean up, and I make sure to look away.

I'm learning enough Arabic every day now that we are able to have halting conversations. They contain a lot of pantomiming and roundabout explanations of strange words, but they are conversations. We talk about neutral things. Usually words themselves, meanings and contexts and connotations. We don't know what else to talk about, I think.

Her false enthusiasm when working a john is quieter now. I hear her less. She seems to be having a harder and harder time summoning the ability to pretend. The loathing on her face takes longer to vanish.

We've started exchanging long, awkward glances. Yeah, that stage. Where I'm watching a bird on the roof visible through the window, watching it peck and flutter, and then I feel her eyes on me and I turn to her, and she's watching me, her expression at once hard and curious and soft and tender and frightened. When our gazes meet, she blushes and looks away, her expression shuttering closed. Then I'll be watching her, wondering what she's thinking, trying not to stare at her a.s.s, trying not to wish she would kneel beside me and kiss me again, and then she'll catch me looking at her. I'll be the one to s.h.i.+ft my glance away, hoping my thoughts aren't visible on my face.

Yeah, that stage.

Trouble comes later that week. She steps out for something, leaves me with the door closed. I hear footsteps outside, think it's her, but they pa.s.s by, slow next door where she works. A male voice calls out, then again angrily.

My gut churns, and my instincts tell me get up, move, hide. I grip my KA-BAR in my right fist and struggle to my feet, gritting my teeth to keep from crying out at the pain biting through my whole body. I can't breathe. Fire burns in my chest, my lungs, my stomach, broken ribs protesting my movements. A gasping, grating moan sc.r.a.pes out of my lips as I hobble and hop to the bathroom, the only place to hide in this house. I push myself into a corner of the bathroom. Little cover, little protection, but the best I can do.

I hear the door open and footsteps in the house. The creeping of my flesh, the p.r.i.c.kling of my skin and the s.h.i.+vers in my spine and rush of adrenaline tells me it isn't Rania in the house. I can't be found and reported. For my sake and Rania's. It's life and death.

The footsteps, stomping, dragging male boots, move around the tiny room. A smoke-roughened voice calls out, "Sabah? Are you here?"

I hold my breath. My knife is clenched in a white-knuckled fist, cutting edge up. The s.h.i.+vering in my belly tells me this won't end well.

The steps move closer to the bathroom, and I prepare myself. Hold my breath, hands spread, ready to pounce. Injuries are forgotten. Adrenaline masks the pain of being upright.