After (18 page)

Eva steps forward, lays her cheek on his chest. John wraps his arms around her, pulls her against him, holds her. They wait until o-eighteen-hundred, plus a couple more minutes before sneaking back to their room while everyone is in the mess hall eating.

Eva wants a shower. She doesn’t want to be alone. They shower together. She lets John hold her, lets him stroke her back beneath the pounding spray of water.

“Maybe we should forget about next week, Eva.”

“No.”

“You don’t need to put yourself through that again. You’ve been with him. And once you’ve been with Smith…”

“I’ll keep it up until we know. We won’t know for a while, and if there’s a big gap, if the timing isn’t right, then this will have been for nothing.”

“It hurts you. I hate it.”

“It wasn’t…it wasn’t personal. It’s just that, looking at him, he was so scared of you, so nervous with me; he just seemed so…human. He just looked like any man in his mid-twenties, and I was thinking, is he just like everyone? Do we all have it in us, to do what he’s done? To be what he’s become?”

“I don’t know.”

“The ways people hurt each other. Yugoslavia. Rwanda. Men with AIDS told to rape the enemy women. It’s like societies just manage to check the brutality of human nature, but as soon as there’s a tear in the fabric, fear, hate, horrible violence come spilling out.”

She goes still and quiet. John is quiet too.

“I don't understand the difference. Do you know?” she asks him after a while.

“What?”

“Why you haven’t done what the others have done? And why you didn’t just take me when they gave me to you?”

“I don’t like hurting people.”

“Yeah. But why? Why do you hate hurting people, and others get off on it?”

“I think…I don’t know. Different histories. Different environments. Different ideas about strength and survival.”

“Do you think there can ever be a community without a scapegoat? Without an outsider to define the group against?”

“I don’t know.”

“I feel like when they look at me, I’m not even a person to them.”

“They’re just boys, most of them. Twenty. Twenty-one. A lot of them here fresh out of juvy. Maybe they’ve never really known a woman. Never loved anybody.”

Eva doesn't touch her dinner. She sits down at the little table by the window with her journal and pen, but doesn't write. Several times she gets up, stands in one corner, moves to another, takes her seat again, then leaves it a few minutes later.

“Eva,” John says in his softest voice, touching her arm.

“I'm glad he didn't want to kiss me,” she whispers. “I wouldn't have been ready for that. Funny, huh? That I could let him fuck me, but would have been afraid to kiss him.”

“Kissing can be a more intimate thing,” he says.

“The whole time, he never looked at me.” She is not crying. Doesn't even look like she will cry. But she's stretched tight, so tight it seems like she might begin to tear.

“Eva? What can I do?” She looks up at him. Even though they are just inches apart, it is like she is looking at him from very far away. Or through a thick pane of shatter-proof glass. “Eva.” She turns away and, barely perceptibly, shakes her head.

“Please,” he says. She meets his gaze, her eyes filling with tears.

“Erase him,” she breathes.

For a moment, John looks at her without moving. Then he brings his hands up, touches her face with his fingertips, his breath curls into her hair as he kisses her crown.

Again he looks at her, as if to make sure, then he kisses one eyebrow, then the other.

The bridge of her nose. Her cheek. Her ear. He takes her lips in a gentle kiss, then sinks deep, kissing her and kissing her and wrapping her up in his arms, enfolding all of her in his heat and strength.

When they are naked and on the bed he lingers over every last inch of her, stirring her nerves with feathering fingertips, warming her skin with languid caresses, rousing with kisses, touching everywhere with his lips, with his tongue.

Their eyes are locked and their lips are faintly touching when he goes into her, slow, deep. As they begin to move together, they kiss, tender, urgent, lingering. Tonight for the first time, neither can get enough of the other, and every time one of them comes close, they go still and quiet, drawing it out, over and over.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“What's this?” Smith asks John.

“It's from Eva.”

Smith grins. “Yes. But what does it say?”

“Why ask me?”

Smith scowls, then opens the folded sheet of paper—there is no envelope, no seal—and reads Eva's note aloud.

Avery
,

I wonder if you might loan me some novel from your library—something written
by a woman. I’m feeling lonely for a feminine voice.

Gratefully,

Eva

“If you come back by my office after your shift, you can take her what I've got,”

Smith tells John.

“I think it would make Eva happy if you brought them yourself.”

Smith is quiet for a minute as he studies John. “Yes, fine. I'll stop over there a little later.”

* * * *

In the early afternoon, there is a knock at Eva’s door. Following the chafe and clack of locks turning and sliding, the door opens and Smith appears. Eva is standing by the window, the sunlight streaming through her sheer garment. Smith is burning the outline of her form onto his retinas.

“I’ve brought a few books for you. Two Brontës and a Woolf, I’m afraid, are all I have to offer.”

She gives him a warm smile. “I’m very grateful.”

She steps forward to take the books from his hands. Her fingers touch his for a moment as she does so. She lays the books on the nightstand.

“It's nice that you brought them yourself.”

“Your note was so melancholy. I thought you might like some company.”

“That was thoughtful of you.”

“I realize it must be very difficult for you, cooped up alone here so much of the time.”

“It gives me a lot of time for reflection. Sometimes that’s not such a good thing.”

“No.” He perches on the edge of the bureau. She comes and sits beside him.

“What do you think about, Avery, all your long hours alone in your room when your day’s work is done?”

“Mostly about the next day’s work, I suppose.”

“Keeping our happy little family together.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to know, Avery, I’ve had something of a change of heart where you’re concerned.”

“How so?”

“I can’t agree with what you’ve done, but I’m beginning to believe in your noble intentions. And I can’t deny the good that’s come of it. John is really very good to me.

And though I hate to admit it, I think your video scheme has turned out to be a bit of mad genius. I sense it’s been cathartic for the men. Though not in the way you had planned.

“No?”

“You wanted to give the men an outlet for their sexual impulses.”

“Yes.”

“But something more has happened.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s not just what the men write in their fantasies.”

“No. Things are going as I'd hoped. The brutalities that have been going on for two years seem to be abating. You were forced to make a big sacrifice. But Eva, you've done a great deal of good.”

“Are you saying that it’s all happening according to your prescient plan?”

“I suppose we all seem like a pack of cave men to you. And perhaps we’ve earned that impression with our treatment of you. And the boys. And yes, I admit that in my considered opinion, ensuring the men a minimum of sexual release is critical to maintaining the sanity of the group. But the men
are
more complex than that. They need some warmth of human contact. Seeing you and John together provides at least a sense of that, since I cannot conceive of a way to ensure they get it first hand.”

“No,” she says with a smile that is hard to figure.

“You know, Eva, you’ve surprised me as well.”

“Have I?”

“You astonished me, actually, the way you’ve adapted to…your situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how quickly you took to John, and to your role.”

“You didn’t expect it?”

Smith chuckles. “No.”

“Because I’d half wondered whether it was all part of your careful plan. Making John a victim too, so I’d be more cooperative, feel sympathy for him, become more brazen to lessen his hardship, conveniently falling into a role more conducive to your purposes than would have been the case if I’d been paired up with one of the others, someone who would have had fewer qualms about forcing me into his bed every night.”

Smith gives her a weighing look. “You give me too much credit.”

Eva grins. “I doubt it.” Her grin fades as she pins Smith with a sharp stare. “May I ask you a…more personal question, Avery?”

“Yes.”

“Do you watch us?”

“I've told you I do.”

“No. You've told me you study the tapes to see if we're complying with our obligations. I'm asking if you watch us. For your...entertainment.”

Smith's face hardens.

“Come on, Avery. John and I have bared so much to you and the others. Surely you can spare me a harmless confession or two.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I watch the tapes.”

“With the others?”

“No. Later.”

“And do they excite you?”

“Yes.”

“You get yourself off, watching them?”

“Yes.”

“Which ones excite you the most?”

“Eva—”

“Don’t be shy, Avery. I’m pretty sure that nothing can shock me anymore. I’ve been wondering; I’d really like to know if anything I do gets to you.”

“Oh, Eva,” he says, with a charming smile he had probably used to great effect in times past, “everything you do gets to me.”

“When I read the fantasies, I try to guess whose they are. Each time I’ve wondered, ‘Could this be his?’ I wonder if it’s you, imagining your mouth on my mouth, is it you fantasizing that you’re touching my breasts, kissing them. Is it you combing your fingers deep into my hair, then curling your fingers into a fist, is it you who wants to finger my ass as you fuck me…”

She is very close to him, looking at him with her large amber eyes, her full lips parted for a kiss that is easily within reach. He does not kiss her. He sits, rigid, a faint sheen of sweat beginning to shine his face as he looks at her face, not at her body, hardly concealed in her sheer garment, her shoulder against his shoulder, her thigh against his thigh, her breasts standing out in perfect little peaks, like twin mountains beneath a faint cover of snow.

“…or are you the one who presses his lips to the soft skin of my neck and breathes in the scent of my hair?”

“I'm a pragmatist, Eva. I’m the one who doesn’t get caught up in fantasies of the impossible.”

“Being with me isn’t impossible.”

“It is.”

“No. It just goes against what you’ve decided. Your rules. Break them.”

He gives her a strained smile. “No, Eva.”

She slips from the edge of the desk and stands before him, her feet planted between his feet. His hardness like wood becomes hardness like iron. His hands lay on his thighs, probably putting sweaty palm prints there. She folds her hands behind her back as she leans forward to whisper in his ear, their faces touching, or almost touching.

“Avery. Be my lover.”

“I’m going to go now, Eva.”

“No, you’re going to stay.”

She looks at his eyes, then down, then back to his eyes.

“I see plainly that you want me.”

“What I want doesn't matter. What I want hasn't mattered for almost three years.”

“Yes, you’ve proven to yourself that you’re strong enough to resist your desire.

But you’re going to stay, because if you try to leave before you’ve made love to me, as you go toward that door, I’m going to tear my gown and begin sobbing, very convincingly. And when you open that door I’ll scream a stream of vile names at you, and the man guarding the door will see me, and hear me, and before dinner time every man in the camp will believe that you came in here and raped me.”

“Don’t be stupid, Eva.”

“Excellent advice. I’ll take it. I’ll be smart. I have my own plan for ensuring the peaceful and prosperous future of our little group. And in my version of peace and prosperity you get to abandon your rigorous chastity.”

“Eva, let me go.”

He puts his hands gently but firmly on her arms and pushes her slowly back, away from him. She pushes back with her body, pins him against the dresser. He is being careful of her, and she uses his gentleness to her advantage. She is pressing herself against him, her delicate garment against the starched stiffness of his uniform.

“I want to touch you, Avery. I want to taste you, fuck you.”

She puts her hand to his groin. He is hard. She strokes his bulge through his pants. He grabs her wrist to wrench her hand away but lets go suddenly as if burned.

“Careful you don’t bruise me, Avery. You know, I don’t need to prove my case in court. Merely sow the seed of suspicion.”

He shoves her away and charges toward the door. From behind him comes the sound of fabric ripping—a long, slow howl as long successions of inches of filmy gauze is rent.

Smith halts two feet from the door. He turns. Her gown is torn wide open, from the neckline down well below her belly. He can see her breasts, her navel, the dark hair peeking out from behind the frayed threads her hands have snapped apart. He charges back to her, pulls her to him, holds her against him, whispers a frenzied plea.

“Please, Eva. Please don’t do this.”

She wiggles out of his anaconda arms, holds him back from her a few inches. He is white, trembling, his eyes fiery red. With one hand she puts his hand on her breast.

He does not jerk his hand away. With her other hand she caresses the traitorous bulge at his groin. He is still. Except for the trembling.

“Stop it, Eva.” His voice is different. Soft. She goes on stroking him. “Stop it!”

His shout is a whisper. He yanks his hand away from her breast, out of her hand.

He shoves her other hand away from him. With both hands he grabs her head. He looks like he will smash her face against the desk or the bureau. Sudden fear transforms Eva’s face. She grasps his wrists, trying to pry his hands from her. He is fierce.