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 what 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.”