Chapter 202
HUNTER.
The darkness of this dank little room is oppressive. The stench of death is overpowering. Time ceases to pa.s.s. I don't dare move from the corner, barely dare to breathe. I don't know what Rania has planned, but I can't do anything to help her. Merely breathing is excruciating. If I s.h.i.+ft positions, searing pain spreads through every inch of my body. I was starting to heal, starting to have some semblance of mobility, and now it's gone. I'm back to feeling as bad as the day I was first wounded. f.u.c.king sucks. But at least I know my presence is still a secret.
And then, suddenly, I'm not alone. I smell him first. Blood, harsh cleaner, sweat. I grip my KA-BAR in my fist and tense. I have enough strength for one lunge, and I have to get it right. I can't see anything, not even shapes within shadows. I sense him nearby, gather my legs beneath me, snake-slow motions.
His voice is a low rasp. "I would not do that, my friend." Thickly accented English. "Why are you here?"
I don't know what to say. "Sabah, she-"
"You killed Ahmed?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
I hesitate, knowing my answer holds my life or death. "To protect myself. To protect Sabah." I'm careful to use her a.s.sumed name.
"Can you protect her from you?" His voice is casual, but I can sense the threat.
"I'm trying."
"Try harder." A shuffled footstep, done on purpose so I know he's leaving. "Abdul, he will kill her soon. He is evil. A devil in man's flesh. He hungers for things that no man should. She will refuse, and he will kill her. I let you live so you can stop him."
"I will."
"Yes, you will. Or I will make your death slow." I don't even feel him move, but suddenly there's a sharp point digging into my chest. My knife meets flesh, a return threat so he knows I'm not completely helpless; he doesn't flinch, and neither do I. "She is not for you, American. Don't get any ideas."
And then he's really gone. I don't sense or smell him anymore. An unknowable amount of time later, I hear footsteps and voices. Hers and his. He says something I don't catch, and then something about it being business, tells her to lie down. My stomach clenches, and my fist trembles around my knife. I know what's about to happen, and I want to f.u.c.king die so I don't have to listen.
I focus on breathing, slow, shallow breaths, each one a wealth of agony. I hear cloth rustling, the slap of flesh against flesh, male grunts, and then an extended groan of release. I nearly vomit. I have to clench my teeth against the bitter bile. Hate burns in my chest. I could kill everyone in this moment. Every f.u.c.king person in the world except Sabah. I even hate her for a brief moment, for letting this happen. For being a wh.o.r.e. For getting inside my walls and into my heart, where I have to care about her. I don't want to care. I don't want to feel this burning h.e.l.l of jealousy and hatred.
He leaves, saying something about danger. I'm too upset to be able to translate.
I feel her, smell her. "Are you okay, Hunter?" she asks.
"No."
Her hands touch my shoulder, search me by feel. "Are you hurt?"
"No." I push her hands away. "Ahmed is gone?"
"Yes." She takes my hands in hers and tugs.
I let her help me to my feet, hissing in pain. We laboriously move back to her house, and again I have to hobble quickly to minimize my exposure in the street. When I'm lying down again, I'm sweating profusely, gasping for breath, fists clenched as pain throbs through me. She sits a few feet away, out of reach, watching me.
I wave a hand toward the mosque. "Him, that, was to pay?"
She nods, eyes downcast. A thousand different things flit through my head, but I can't say any of them. I don't think she wants to hear them, anyway.
I close my eyes, trying to make it clear I have nothing to say. I hear her move, and then her hand touches my chest.
"What you are thinking?" she asks, in halting English. "I feel your words. Speak them."
She feels my words. Strangely, I know what she means. I shake my head. "Too much. No good," I speak in Arabic. The more I use it, the better I speak it.
"Say." She touches my chin, rubbing her thumb along my jaw. The gesture makes something in my heart twinge, balloon, and burst.
"f.u.c.k," I mutter in English. Then, in Arabic, "I hate..." I gesture at the mosque, "...that. What you do."
She takes her hand back, examines her fingernails. "I do, too." She shrugs. "No choice. That, or starve. You, too."
"I know." I sc.r.a.pe a series of lines in the dirt with my finger. "I will go soon."
I look down at what my finger drew in the dirt: RANIA. I wipe it away roughly.
She glances up sharply at my words. "No. You die." She switches to Arabic. "If you leave me now, you will die. You are not well enough to leave. You cannot even walk on your own."
"If not for me, you wouldn't have had to do that," I say in English, knowing she won't catch it all and not caring. "If not for me..." There are too many ways I could finish that statement, and I say none of them.
"If not for you, I would be alone." She speaks slowly in Arabic, so I can translate. "I was alone for so long. Now, you are here, and I'm not alone. I like not being alone."
She looks down, as if ashamed of her admission.
"We are different," I say in Arabic. "Too different."
"I am an Iraqi wh.o.r.e. You are an American soldier. I know. But...still. Should be...is...they are different things."
Ain't that the f.u.c.king truth. Should be and is are completely different things.
I can't help it. I can't help kissing her. I know what just happened next door and disgust rifles through me, but it's subsumed beneath the tsunami of need
She tenses at my touch at first, then relaxes and lets my hand roam her back. When our kiss breaks, she leans back to sit with her legs folded beneath her.
"I know what you want," she says, sounding resigned. "I will give it to you. Just be still."
She unb.u.t.tons the first two b.u.t.tons of my fly before I have the courage to stop her. "No, Rania. You don't know what I want."
She struggles against my grip on her wrists. "Yes, I do. You are man. I am woman. I know." Her English is fractured by emotion, but clear.
"It's not like that." I don't let go of her wrists. "Do you kiss them?" I ask, gesturing at the mosque.
She flinches at my words. "No. Never."
"Do they kiss you?"
"No." She looks confused. "Why are you-"
"I'm not them. I'm not one of them. I don't want you like they do."
Her eyes search mine, brown s.h.i.+ning with tears. "Then what are you want with me?" She shakes her head, realizing her grammatical gaffe, and switches to Arabic again. "What do you want with me? I do not...I do not know anything else. This is what I know."
I've loosed my grip, and she breaks free to undo the third b.u.t.ton. I'm hard at the thought of her touching me, but I can't allow myself let her. I take her wrists in my hands again and tug her down to me. She resists, then complies. I arrange her so she's laying her head on my chest, one arm around her shoulders, the other keeping her hands pinioned. Her weight on my chest f.u.c.king hurts like h.e.l.l, but I ignore it. She feels natural, cradled here in my arms. She's tense but slowly relaxing.
"There's more, Rania," I say in Arabic. "More than just s.e.x."
"Not for me."
"There is caring. There is..." I search for the right words in her language, "...there is wanting, but with the heart and also the body."
"Wanting with the heart? Is this not love?" she says in English.
We go back and forth like this in each other's language, trying out the words we know, running out and switching to our own.
"It can be. It doesn't have to be."
A long silence, full of unspoken thoughts.
"Is it, for you?" she asks. "Is it love? Your wanting with the heart? For me?"
This is a terrifying, dangerous conversation. We've been avoiding this for days. I've lost track of how long I've been here with her. Days run together, nights run together. Has it been weeks? Most likely.
We shouldn't be talking like this. How can we be speaking of s.e.x and love like it could ever be anything, go anywhere? This is a morbid fantasy. If I survive, I'll end up leaving her to go back to Camp Fallujah or Ramadi, or wherever the h.e.l.l, and then home. The States. I'll go back to jumping out of seven-tons and tossing candy bars to the locals. IEDs and car bombs and ambushes in the wavering, suffocating heat.
She'll keep turning tricks to feed herself. All this will be a dream. Good dream, bad dream. Just a dream.
If I let anything happen, it'll be heartbreak. I'm already broken from Lani's betrayal. Love is a joke. I loved Lani, and she f.u.c.ked around on me. f.u.c.ked me over. How can I even pretend anything could happen between Rania and me? It's complete horses.h.i.+t. I don't love her. She's a s.e.xy-as-h.e.l.l local girl. Off-limits. Not for me. I'm a danger to her, and she to me.
And she's right: All I want is to sleep with her. f.u.c.k her. That's what it would be, right? Just f.u.c.king?
Yeah, right. I can't fool myself. It would be more. She saved my life. She's gone through h.e.l.l keeping me fed and bandaged and infection-free.
I've kissed her. I'm f.u.c.king cuddling with her right now. Lani never wanted me to hold her like this. She'd leave the bed to clean up and then lie down away from me. She never just lay in my arms like this.
I know I'm upset by how much the word "f.u.c.k" is going through my head. Lani always claimed her barometer for my mood was how often I dropped the F-bomb.
"Hunter? Is it?"
I realize I never answered her. She cranes her neck to look at me. Her wide brown eyes are vulnerable, soft, pleading. I don't know if she's pleading with me to say yes or no. She deserves the truth, though.
"I don't know, Rania. Maybe. Yes."
"Maybe? Maybe yes? Or yes? Which is it?"
I can't look at her anymore. Her eyes pull too much from me, incite too many emotions I don't know how to deal with. "I don't know, Rania." I find myself stroking her hair, smoothing the long white-gold locks beneath my fingers. "If I did, what of it? What does it mean for you?" I'm talking in English.
She doesn't answer for a long time. "I do not know. I want you to say yes, but also to say no." Her hands are free now and resting on me, one tracing the gap between ribs, the other on my stomach. "I have never known anything but that," she says, gesturing at the mosque.
"Never?"
She shakes her head. "I was...fourteen, I think. When I first sold myself. It wasn't for money then. It was for food. I was starving. So near to dying of hunger."
I can't fathom what she's telling me. She's twenty-three or twenty-four, which would mean she's been a prost.i.tute more than ten years, at least. More like eleven or twelve. Insanity. I can't make it make sense in my head. How has she avoided pregnancy and disease all this time? Maybe she hasn't.
"I'm sorry," I say.
She shrinks away from me. "Why? What have you done?"
"No. For...what you have been through."
"Oh." She shrugs. "I have survived. It is enough."
"Have you ever been happy?" I ask.
She looks at me as if I've sprouted horns. Like I've suggested an irrelevant and foreign concept. "Happy? I don't know. Maybe when I was a girl. Before the war. Before Mama and Papa were killed. Before the other American."
"The other American?"
She doesn't answer for a long time. When she does, it's in quiet, slow Arabic. "When I was a girl, during the first war with the Americans and the other soldiers, my brother and I were hiding. An American came. Ha.s.san had a gun. He was only protecting me, but the American, he wasn't a soldier. He was a picture-taker. But he had a gun, a pistol." She's going back and forth between English and Arabic as she tells the story. "Ha.s.san shot him, and missed. He shot back and hit my brother. I...picked up the gun and killed him. The American. Ha.s.san ran away to be a soldier, and then my aunt died, so I had no one. I managed for a while to live. And then there was no food, no money, no work. I begged a soldier for food, and he gave it to me. And then he made me have s.e.x with him."
"He raped you?" I ask this in English.
"No. Not...not really. He told me he would only give me the food unless I agreed to let him have s.e.x with me. I had not eaten in days. I was so hungry..."
She trails off, and I feel wetness seeping through the thin fabric of my wife-beater tank top. It's a non-reg piece of gear, and I was busted several times for wearing it. She's crying into my s.h.i.+rt.
Crying for her lost childhood.
"s.h.i.+tty choice," I say in English.
She doesn't answer, and I just hold her. Let her cry for a long, long time. Eventually she stands up and goes to the bathroom, readies herself. I look away. Watching her get ready has turned into a ritual. I watch her put on the uniform, the makeup, the blank face, the hard eyes, the seductive smile. I hate it. She becomes Sabah, and Rania, the kind, vulnerable girl I know is gone.
"Don't go," I say.
She stares down at me, all Sabah now. "I must. Abdul is coming."
I'm confused. I thought he came during the afternoon. It's nearly dark outside now.
She sees my confusion. "He sent word. He is coming now, not tomorrow."
I'm never sure how she arranges her appointments. It's clear she has a client list that comes to her. She doesn't work the streets. She has a number of regular johns who visit her, and they seem to always just show up, but she knows when to expect them. She doesn't have a phone that I've seen, or a computer, or anything. But still she knows. It's a mystery to me.
"He hurts you," I say.
"He can. He is powerful." She shrugs, seeming fearless. I see the fear lurking behind her eyes, though.
She leaves then, and my gut churns. My instincts are telling me something bad is about to happen.