by Eve Rabi
“Let me know tonight.”
I nod.
“Eight p.m.?
“Sure.
“Love me?”
“With all of this.” I place my hand over my heart.
He tips my nose. “Good.”
***
Alone, I think of the costs of accepting Reed’s marriage proposal. Never seeing my mom and dad or my siblings again, never being able to visit the US again ... it’s too much to think about. Also, with the bounty of five million dollars on my head, I will have to be wary of everyone. And I will be one of the most wanted in just about every country.
The cost is just too high. It won’t work. No matter how much I love him, I can’t do this.
I can’t marry Reed.
I’m in Leeanne and Darla’s room when Reed stands at the doorway and looks at me. He taps his watch. Grinning bashfully, I look away.
“Megan!” he hisses.
I look up at him again.
He taps his ring finger.
I blush under the other POWs’ curious stares.
“Well?”
“Later,” I gesture.
He shakes his head and points to the floor.
“Reed!” I jerk my head slightly to the left. “They’re watching,” I mouth.
“Fuck them!” he mouths with a mischievous look in his eyes. “Tell me now.”
Overcome with shyness, I look at him, think about his declaration of love, his willingness to walk my walk and talk my talk and face all the crap coming my way. He may be the wrong one, but he loves me right. I love him so much. How can I possibly say no to love?
He cocks his head to one side, eyebrows raised.
“Yes,” I hear myself say.
“What?” He cups his ear.
“Yes!”
He punches the air in a victorious motion, then strides purposely towards me. When he reaches me, we stand before each other and grin like cretins.
Then without a word, he scoops me up, throws me over his shoulder, and starts walking towards my bedroom.
“Reed stop!” I laugh.
“I can’t,” he says. “You said yes.”
When we reach my room, he throws me onto my bed and climbs over me. We lie, nose to nose, forehead to forehead, intoxicated by our love for each other.
“Mrs. Megan Kader … meet my wife, Megan Kader. See this pretty lady here? She’s my wife, Megan Kader, also known as Kitty, and number seven on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”
I laugh and cup his beautiful face with my hands. “I love you forever, my Angel-man.”
“You sure? Forever, as someone once said, is a long time. Especially towards the end.”
“Forever!” My voice is adamant.
We kiss like new lovers, and lost in our careless rapture, we fail to see Leeanne and Darla enter the room until they’re next to us. Habit makes us jump apart and stand red-faced under their scrutiny.
After eyeing us suspiciously, Darla turns her nose to the ceiling and sniffs the air dramatically. “Somebody’s had sex? I can smell it.” Her eyes narrow at Reed and me.
Reed slants his eyes at me, a mischievous look in them. “Not yet,” he says in a meaningful voice as he slowly runs his hands down my back, sending me into fits of giggles. When he holds my hand again, a bolt of sexual energy zaps through me and suddenly, I want Reed. Desire him, like I’ve never desired a man before. If I didn’t feel so loved-up, I’d call it lust.
I suspect he might be dittoing that as his eyes become shiny and expectant, causing me to flame under his gaze.
Darla and Leeanne stare as Reed leans in and hungrily kisses me. Our first public display of affection and we don’t give a fig.
“Later?” he asks cryptically.
“Count on it,” is my sassy retort.
His eyebrows shoot up, a pleased grin on his face. “Love you,” he mouths as he staggers backwards out of my room and smacks into a wall.
Laughing, I mouth back, “Love you too. Careful!”
Slowly, I turn around to face my conscience and my antagonist, unsure of what to say and how to handle the barrage of questions coming my way.
The best form of defense is attack. Immediately, I subscribe to this handy adage. “Why are you guys always in my room? I really could do with some privacy, you know.”
My conscience says nothing, but oozes a holier-than-thou air (which she is, by the way), while my antagonist flashes me a go-fuck-yourself look.
With a feigned sigh of exasperation, I walk into the bathroom and shut the door. There I post-mortem, one by one, Reed’s words, his declaration of love, his marriage proposal, his indecent proposal … and I close my eyes and hug myself.
***
Reed walks in and locks the room door.
I smile provocatively at him from under my lashes.
He walks to the adjoining room door and locks that too. Then he takes a chair and shoves it under the handle.
I chuckle at his added measure. Turning around, he looks at me, eyebrows raised.
I flick my finger at him.
He strides over to me, grabs me, and shoves me against the wall. Our kisses are wild and hungry, our lovemaking impatient, uncoordinated, and all over the place, as if we’re in a treasure trove of pleasure and don’t know what to choose first.
I just know that I want him inside me, to exist as one if only for a little while. Foreplay? Don’t have the patience for it right now. Come to think of it, foreplay started months ago when he began spooning with me. And it’s time to take things up a notch. Or ten.
My hands, like my lips, roam and caress, while his knead and seek. I gasp and writhe when his hands travel down my belly, under my skirt, and disappear between my thighs. Hastily, I jerk at his belt buckle, then fight off his pants while he shoves up my blouse and tugs at my panties.
Finally, we’re naked, with only a perfect erection between us.
The first thrust is swift but magical, just as I imagined it to be. We rock in unison, first fast, then slow, then to a crescendo. For the first time in my life, I cry out as I climax. The physical relief throughout my body is enormous. Like I’ve been exorcised of some demonic spirit.
We lie spent in each other’s arms, grinning like jackasses, just staring at each other. From time to time we take turns kissing and hugging each other, savoring this love that should not be.
For so long, we both settled for innuendos, crumbs; but now we’re taking our chances, opening our souls to each other because … it is time.
He dots my face with little kisses – my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, then finally my nose, making me feel cherished and loved.
Words will just get in the way right now, so I shut up and gaze love-stoned into my lover’s eyes. I’m floating right now, soaring, and I want to languish forever on that ninth cloud, that celestial, magic carpet of happiness and glee, and most of all, love.
Outside my bedroom door, a few feet away from me, may lie evil personified – pain, retaliation and the threat of a sinister tomorrow. But inside my room, I’m surrounded by love, affection, and a crazy notion of finally obtaining my happily ever after.
***
“Are you crazy, Megan? There’s a bounty of five million dollars on your head – you forgetting that? Dead or alive, Megan. Reed will be in danger, Wyatt will be in danger. Is that what you –”
“I know, Leeanne, I know, I know, but … he’s willing to walk the walk with me, Leeanne, so …” I lift and drop my shoulders.
“Megan, you need to find your way back home, clear your name, get back with your husband, and forget about all of this.”
“I can’t, Leeanne, I can’t.”
She looks at me with an air of superiority. “In that case, I have nothing else to say to you.” She turns and walks away.
“Stop judging me, Leeanne. You have no idea how my life was pre-Iraq. What kind of a marriage I was in.”
She stops walking and turns to look at me.
“I’ve never experienced love like Reed’s
before and it’s so addictive. D’ya know what it’s like to live with someone whose phone always vibrates and never rings? Security passwords on his laptop, his PC, his phone …? Each time his phone goes off in the middle of the night, and he suddenly gets up and tells me he has to be somewhere urgent for police business? When he returns from his police business, he heads straight for the shower? When he’s all over a pretty blonde at a party and totally ignores me? When he dances with just about every woman at a party, but not me, his wife? When he gets me a personal trainer for my birthday and a state-of-the-art scale for Christmas that gives me not only my weight but also my body fat percentage?”
Leeanne puts her hand to her forehead.
“When an argument ends with me having a black eye? When I pray for courage to leave, but I just can’t? When I cling to the hope that having a baby would change things and make him want me more? Pathetic, huh?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Reed has introduced me to a life rich in affection and passion and love. I never knew it could be like this, Leeanne. I mean, we fight, we argue, and we love, but all with equal intensity. He wants me, Leeanne. He says it over and over again and I feel it in his touch, the way he looks into my eyes when we make love, the way he says my name, the way his eyes light up when I walk into the room. All that is so addictive when you never had it before. I love it. I need it. It makes me feel wanted and … and … alive for the first time in my life. You expect me to walk away from all that. How can I? I challenge any woman in my position not to want to stay and languish in it.”
“Megan, I didn’t know about your previous life, because … you come across as so guarded whenever I ask you questions about your husband.”
“It’s always too painful to tell the truth, Leeanne. If I admit it, I’d have to deal with it, so it’s best if I just don’t talk about it. As long as I am with Wyatt and Reed, I am whole. If I should ever wake up one day and find that they are not in my life … Leeanne, I will just die.”
“You must understand, you’re not thinking clearly …”
“Of course my moral judgment here in Iraq is … is fragmented. Can you blame me? Not only am I a prisoner here; I’ve been assaulted, raped, pregnant. All the lines around us are blurred, Leeanne. I mean, look around – I take care of injured insurgents on a daily basis. Yeah, we smile and joke with each other, and I write letters to their families in which I say, ‘I miss you sooo much.’ Let us confront each other in the streets of Fallujah – I’ll reach for my M16, he’ll reach for his Kalashnikov, and we wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to blow each other’s brains out.”
“We all know that war is …”
“War is fucked up, Leeanne. So you sit there with your halo and you judge me and that’s okay. You don’t have to be happy for me, but please, don’t ask me to give up Reed. Never.”
I walk away before she sees my tears.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Megan, wake up! Wake up!”
I open my eyes and look into Leeanne’s frightened face.
When she realizes that Reed is fast asleep next to me, she jerks back.
“What’s wrong, Leeanne?” I ask, rubbing my eyes and ignoring her reproachful look.
“Darla.” She points towards her room. “I think she’s being attacked.”
“What?!” With all the tension in the bunker and knowing how much Riyaard and Omar despise Darla, it wouldn’t surprise me. I shove Reed a little and he opens his eyes.
“Darla is being attacked,” I whisper.
“Attacked? What do you mean?” Reed doesn’t make eye contact with Leeanne.
Leeanne beckons for us to come with her.
Both Reed and I jump out of bed and follow her to her room. On tiptoe, she leads us outside her bathroom where we stand with our ears to the door. Sure enough, we hear Darla’s troubled moans.
A look of alarm on his face, Reed gestures vigorously for us to stand back. Without protest, I do, terrified that we may be too late to stop the torture she must have undergone for hours in the hands of the gay-bashing bastards.
Reed boots open the door like they do on Cops. Clasping my hands, I frisson at his bravado. Darla is going to be so grateful that he’s rescuing her, and they will probably become friends again.
The sight that we’re greeted with leaves us slack-jawed and speechless.
Darla stands bent over the bathtub, naked, while Riyaard stands behind her, also … you guessed it, naked!
Riyaard of all people. He’s the one who constantly mocked, insulted, and threatened Darla. She always accused him of being gay, but we didn’t believe her.
Riyaad recovers first from the shock and scrambles into his pants.
“No, no, don’t go!” Darla cries as Riyaard hurtles out of the bathroom, almost knocking us over like skittles. “Come back, I haven’t finished!”
But Riyaard high-tails it, tunic and checkered scarf in hand.
Darla turns to us, eyes blazing and as naked as a newborn. “The door is shut. Means you have to knock before you enter, you fucking perverts!”
Under normal circumstances, we’d be mad with her. Call her unfucking grateful and tell her how Reed wasted a perfectly executed boot to save her ass.
But we’re just too gobsmacked to be anything right now. I mean, we’re talking Riyaard, Omar’s son. That’s Omar, ruthless leader of the insurgents who will not tolerate gays. Oooh Boy!
Reed snaps out of his trance first and tries to usher Leeanne and I out of the bathroom, but we stand like stunted oak trees and gawk at Darla putting on her clothes.
When we get to our room, we look at each other in silence for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Riyaard?!” Reed shakes his head. “I … man, I can’t believe it. Omar is going to be pisssssed.”
“So, Darla was right about Riyaard all along,” Leeanne says. “Imagine that, huh?”
“Yeah. But he’s the one … remember how he went out of his way to humiliate her in front of the men?”
They nod vigorously.
“Was probably quietly ogling her all the time,” Leeanne says.
“Not a word to anyone,” Reed cautions. “This is big, and Omar will probably line us all up and shoot us just for even suggesting that. Maybe even kill Riyaard.”
Still giggling, I nod and put my finger on my lips.
From then on, Darla struts around with a smirk on her face and we know why.
When the men in the ward poke fun at Darla, guess what? To our disbelief, Riyaard joins in and mocks her too. Fucking asshole!
Like we discussed, we say zilch to her or anyone else. But for a long time, we snigger like schoolgirls whenever we think or talk about that night.
***
Thanks to Reed’s medical help, Sallah is up and about. Ain’t that just downright dandy? Not.
Well, little I can do about it. As expected, Omar and Mahmood turn their attention back to me and initiate their plans we discussed a while ago.
Our meetings are long and exhausting, and even though Mahmood wants to give me a break, Omar won’t let him. The pressure mounts, and everyone around me feels it too. I see sympathy for me in their eyes.
Omar wants to replace Saddam, I think. No doubt he would be just as evil a dictator as Saddam was.
Even though Reed doesn’t say anything to me, I see him often staring into space and I know he shares my concern about Wyatt being here. As much as I love Reed and we have this romantic notion of blowing this joint, somehow, and living incognito; deep in my heart, I know the best thing is for Reed to smuggle Wyatt out of the bunker as soon as possible.
It’s 3 a.m. and Reed tosses and turns in bed. I’ve been awake for hours myself, but he is unaware of it.
Without looking at Reed, I say, “If you had to, who would you leave Wyatt with?”
“My sister.” His answer is immediate and he too won’t make eye contact.
With a heavy heart, I say, “Arrange it.”
He doesn’t
answer.
***
I see the secretive looks being exchanged between Reed, Bygone, and Shaida, and I know they’ll be the ones helping Reed smuggle my baby out of the bunker.
Guess my distress is visible, because Leeanne puts her hand on mine. “You’re doing the right thing.”
I nod slowly.
“How do you know that?” Darla asks.
None of us care to answer her.
When Reed walks into my room a short time later, his shoulders drooping, Leeanne in tow, I know it’s time to say goodbye to my son.
I should be relieved – my son is going to be safe, but the pain of losing my precious baby supersedes sensibleness and logic. “How?” I whisper, feeling the urge to throw up.
“Bygone, Imtiaz, Shaida, and Rafiq – they’ll sneak Wyatt out. A short while later, I will leave, empty-handed.”
Tears sting the back of my eyes.
“Megan,” Reed says and reaches out to me. I take a gigantic step back, out of his reach.
Leeanne steps in. “Gotta be strong, Megan,” she says in a kind voice. “Gotta think of Wyatt’s welfare before your happiness. Your sacrifice means he will be safe and with his father, who cherishes him, honey.”
She’s right, they’re right, but tell this to my heart because it just doesn’t understand. Tears silently cascade down my cheeks.
“The alternative is for Wyatt to be shipped out to Afghanistan or God knows where, and Reed and you may never find him again, Megan.”
Her words snap me out of my grief. “Take him,” I croak. “Now!”
Reed walks over and stands behind me. “I love you, Megan, and I want you to know that I will always, always, always love you.”
With a cry, I turn around and slam into his embrace. “I love you, Reed. Don’t ever forget me. I look forward to us being together one day cos, you … you told me that. You promised. I’m holding you to that, Reed. I just …” A sob escapes me. “I’ll be waiting for you, Reed.”
“Of course, baby,” he says and squeezes me to him. “Of course.”
Shaida enters and touches Reed’s shoulder, then taps her wristwatch. Reed nods and looks at Wyatt.
With my heart splintering, I kiss my son one last time. “I love you, baby,” I whisper. “Daddy will keep you safe.”
