He pauses in the doorway of the mosque, backlit by the brilliant afternoon sun. “Be careful, Sabah. What you do is dangerous, and not just for you. ” And then he is gone.
I am left wondering how much he knows, and what he will do about it. The answers are not pleasant.
TEN
HUNTER
The darkness of this dank little room is oppressive. The stench of death is overpowering. Time ceases to pass. 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 shift 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. Fucking 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 assumed 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**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**king person in the world except Sabah. I even hate her for a brief moment, for letting this happen. For being a whore. 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 hell 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.
“Fuck,” 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 scrape 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 whore. You are an American soldier. I know. But…still. Should be…is…they are different things. ”
Ain’t that the f**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 for her. There is so much pain in her eyes, raw and potent, and I just want to erase it. Fuck, she tastes good. She feels good. She’s like a drug whirling through my system, banishing intentions and logic. All that’s left is desire. My hands hunger for her skin, her silken flesh. My palm finds the hem of her shirt and brushes it up to cup her waist near her back. My fingers skim up her spine, trace the knobs and ridges to the bumps of her shoulder blades, protruding as she kneels above me, her hands on either side of my face, knees next to my chest. Her hair drifts to fall around us, a golden waterfall shimmering in the early evening light.
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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 unbuttons the first two buttons 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 shining 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 w
hat I know. ”
I’ve loosed my grip, and she breaks free to undo the third button. 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**king hurts like hell, 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 sex. ”
“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 sex 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 hell, 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**ked around on me. Fucked me over. How can I even pretend anything could happen between Rania and me? It’s complete horseshit. I don’t love her. She’s a sexy-as-hell 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. Fuck her. That’s what it would be, right? Just f**king?
Yeah, right. I can’t fool myself. It would be more. She saved my life. She’s gone through hell keeping me fed and bandaged and infection-free.
I’ve kissed her. I’m f**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 “fuck” 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 prostitute 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. Hassan 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. “Hassan shot him, and missed. He shot back and hit my brother. I…picked up the gun and killed him. The American. Hassan 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 sex with him. ”
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“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 sex 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 shirt.
Crying for her lost childhood.
“Shitty 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.
I prepare myself for pain.
I prepare myself to kill.
ELEVEN
RANIA
Terror hounds my every heartbeat as I wait for Abdul. He will hurt me again. Make me do something awful. I sit on the mattress and wait. I will not welcome him. Will not pretend or play games with him. He is a monster, and all I can do is try to survive him.
He comes. As he swaggers through the door belly first, his hard beady pig eyes rake over me, going first to my br**sts.
“What, no kiss for your lover?” he asks, laugh
ing as if he has told an uproarious joke.
I do not answer. Just wait, staring at him. He licks his lips, then draws off his belt with the gun holster, pulls the gun out of the leather and holds it at his side. His demeanor changes, and I know it has begun.
“On your knees, whore. ”
I move to my knees, facing him, hands resting on my thighs.
“Take your clothes off. All of them. ”
I strip, and then kneel naked in front of him. My legs shake, and my skin is clammy, cold, and sweating all at once. My heart is a mad drum in my chest, and I could vomit, if I did not know it would anger Abdul. This is about survival, I remind myself. Not about pride.
“On your knees, whore. ”
“I am,” I say, not arguing, but calmly pointing out facts.
“No! Like a dog. Like the bitch dog you are. Face away from me. ”
I swallow hard and move to comply, shaking so badly I can barely move. I have done many vile things as a prostitute. I have faced fear. I have been beaten, threatened, injured. Forced abortions. Raped.
But this, what Abdul is doing to me…this is different. Little causes me true terror anymore. But now, my knees digging through the thin mattress into the hard ground, elbows and arms barely able to support my weight for the trembling, now I know terror as never before.
I know he will push me to a certain place, and then I will refuse, and he will kill me. And then it will be over.
I hear him behind him. I hear the signal, the jangling belt, and my mouth goes dry. I hang my head, arch my shoulders and my back, preparing for his brutal entrance. Instead, he slaps my backside so hard I cannot help but yelp in pain.
Again and again, he slaps my backside, until I scramble away.
“Get on your knees, whore!” he screams. “I’m not done with you. ”
I force myself back into position, fighting tears of pain. And now he slaps the other side of my bottom, again and again, until my backside is stinging, burning as if on fire.
He laughs. “Look at you, whore. Your little ass is red. You are ready. ” He caresses my backside, absurdly gentle after his abuse. “I am going to f**k you in the ass, whore. You are going to like it. Do you understand?”
I feel the cold metal barrel of his pistol against the back of my head. I cannot move. I know this is it. That is my one hard line. I would not let any man do that to me. I have been beaten for it before, but I have always refused. And I will refuse now.
It takes several tries to swallow enough saliva that I can speak. “No. ” It is a small, fierce whisper.
“What did you say?” Abdul’s voice is low and deadly.
“I said no. ” My voice is louder now. I am ready for death. “You will not do that. I will let you do whatever else you want. I will let you f**k me. I will suck you off. I will not fight you. But you will not touch me there. ”
I am still on my hands and knees, I realize, and I move to turn and face him. He is too quick. He grabs my hair by the root and jerks it, hard. I scream. He jabs the top of my head with the butt of his pistol, brutally hard. I see stars, and a knife of pain shoots through my head. Something hot and wet trickles down my scalp and across my forehead.
“Let go!” I scream. I am committed to fighting him now.
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