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 ass, 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 shift 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 pass 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 scrapes 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 prickling of my skin and the shivers 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 shivering 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.
“Sabah?”
My first sight of him is a pair of scuffed military boots, then Iraqi military camo pants. He peers in, sees the empty shower, the toilet. My heart hammers and I want to vomit, but can’t.
How can he not see me? Maybe I’ll get out of this without having to kill him.
Nope. He sees me. I lunge, jab my hand in a stiff-fingered jab to his throat, silencing him. My knife flashes out and up into his stomach. Soft flesh parts easily, then bone stops the blade. He staggers back, gasping. I swipe the blade sideways across his throat, loosing a flood of blood down his front. Fuck. I’m making a mess of this. I stab out again, and this time I hit his heart, right between the ribs. Fucking lucky. That’s harder to do than most people might think.
He staggers, stumbles, flops backward to the ground. I can’t leave him bleeding out on the floor. Absurd panic hits me, and I wrench his body into the shower stall so he bleeds out down the drain. There’s not too much blood on the floor; most of it is on him.
But what the f**k do I do with the body?
The adrenaline is wearing off, and agony is lancing through me, stealing my breath. Merely staying upright takes every ounce of stubbornness, toughness, and strength I have left. It won’t last long.
“Hunter?” Rania’s voice, worried, confused.
I stumble out of the bathroom, bloody knife held in a red-painted hand. Rania gasps.
“We have a problem,” I say in Arabic. “A man came. Soldier. I kill him.”
Rania curses softly and glances into the shower at the body. “Ahmed.”
“What do we do with—” I can’t think of the word for body, “…the dead man?”
Collapsing against the wall, Rania runs her fingers through her loose blonde hair, hissing through her teeth. “I do not know.” She fixes me with a confused glare. “What was he doing here?”
I’m guessing at a lot of her meaning. I understand some words, and can infer the rest from context.
I shrug. “Looking for you. For Sabah. Went to other door first, then here. He sees me…I am dead. He sees me, bad for you. Bad for me. So…he dies.”
I hate how I sound. I’m not a verbally eloquent man, but I hate knowing my words are bumbled and garbled. She has to think to understand a lot of what I say.
And that’s all I have. I collapse forward, powerless to stop my fall. I have time to think as I topple, This is gonna hurt. It does, like a bitch. I hit the ground on my shoulder and my face. I know better than to try to catch myself on my hands or wrists, with the way my shoulders are. My shrapnel-wounded side takes the brunt of the fall, along with my already-broken ribs. I think they get re-fractured. Lances of agony shoot through me, and I can’t breathe for the pain. Can’t even gasp. I drag a long, stuttering breath in, face in the dirt, nostrils clogged with dirt, eyes stinging with dirt. The knife is still clutched in my fist, and I bear down with all my force, until the handle creaks. I cough, spewing dirt.
Rania is beside me, rolling me to my back, clearing my eyes first, my nose, my lips. Her fingers are tender and gentle, cleaning each individual speck with the pad of her index finger. Her eyes are huge, softly concerned as she cleans the dirt from my face. The sharp contours of her lovely face are brought into high relief by the afternoon sun blazing through the window, setting behind the roof of the building opposite.
I hate that my eyes stray to her br**sts, swaying as she leans over me. I slide my eyes closed, try to focus on the pain rather than how gorgeous she is, how badly my fingers want to slip under her shirt to touch the silk of her skin. How badly I want to pull her down for another kiss.
Such awful timing. There’s a dead man in the bathroom, and I’m trying not to kiss Rania.
What the f**k is wrong with you, Hunter?
When I open my eyes, she’s sitting cross-legged next to me, watching me, her expression full of emotions I recognize within myself. Her hand rests on my stomach, at the exact midline between the intimacy of my chest and the erogenous zone lower down. Moments pass and our locked eyes search each other, wavering, flitting from side to side. We’re each daring the other to make the first move, look away, move away, or do it. Move closer. Lean in.
A warm trickle alerts me that my thigh is bleeding. I don’t care.
She smells like woman: sweat, arousal, deodorant. Her hand shakes on my stomach. She’s breathing deeply, steadily, as if to prevent hyperventilation. Her nostrils flare with each breath, her full lips pursing and relaxing, trembling with emotions contained. Her br**sts swell and shrink, drawing my gaze. Her skirt— she always wears a skirt, a little too short, marking her profession in this land of extreme modesty—has slipped up her thighs, her other hand casually covering herself. Her legs are endless, miles of shadows and skin pulling my hand toward them.