After (23 page)

”But it seemed impossible. I was sure it would be the end of my command. That the men would mutiny. And I had a very clear vision of what would become of you in that case. So I went through with it. When you grabbed my hand and begged me to stay, I told myself that I was saving you from what I guessed you feared.

“Then, John. That was a gamble. An improvisation. I thought I could assuage the men, and still spare you. Almost. But even though I was sure he'd be as careful with you as I would have been, Eva, I'd never felt such agony as I felt when you broke loose and threw yourself against me and held on to me like I was your last hope of survival. I knew what you imagined—that he would just be the first—I tried to make you understand that none of the others would touch you. But god, I wanted to just hold you to me, take you back with me, let you fall asleep, safe and untouched, in my arms. But I let him—made him—tear you from me and consummate your counterfeit union.

“I've done horrifying things before, as you say. I'm a soldier. I've been to war. By definition, just doing my duty I've committed atrocities. But I'd never felt myself to be a monster before that night in the mess hall.

“I made myself stay, not jut to ensure order prevailed, but to force myself to witness what you went through, to endure the sound of your screams and sobs.

Somehow it had been easy, before you'd made your quiet, gentle appeal in my room, to believe that the drugs would nearly numb you. That it would be bad, but not too bad, compared with the broader horror of the apocalypse. Compared with the safety it would buy you. But in the mess hall I saw your terror, even through the haze of your buzz.

When John carried you out unconscious, I hoped for a moment that you'd passed out before he'd...That you hadn't felt anything. But I crushed that hope as soon as I felt it, forced myself to assume, instead, that you'd endured the whole ordeal, fully aware, and had only fainted when John had finished with you, out of terror you were about to be handed off to the rest of them.

“When I heard you and John talking in your room two days later, and understood from your conversation that he had managed to spare you the actual rape, I can't remember ever having felt such relief. Joy, even. But the next second, I was in agony again. It would all have to be endured again. John had meant to be kind, to spare you the brutal horror of being raped, surrounded by that pack of leering, drooling men. But you'd gone through all that terror, and now the rape was yet ahead of you. John had tried to be kind, to prove himself your friend, but in the end he'd have to pin you down and violate you. And even if it would be in the quiet isolation of your own room, it seemed almost more awful that you would be raped by John after he'd spared and befriended you. Because cruelty at the hands of a stranger or an enemy isn't a betrayal.

“But it was impossible to avert the tragedy. The men were so heated and frenzied by your arrival. Just hiding you away, it would have been like going among a pride of starving lions covered in the scent of blood.

“I didn't dare watch your first taped encounter along with the men. My stoicism had been stretched far beyond its limit in the mess hall, and it wouldn't do, letting the men see me. So I waited until they'd had their viewing, then took the tape and watched in the safety of my office. I was prepared for a painful spectacle. John, having no choice, finally forcing himself on you, or, perhaps, you reluctantly allowing him to do what you had to know you couldn't prevent.

“When you appeared before John—before all of us—naked, not crying, not shaking, not a victim, and took control of John, of the whole encounter, you rescued—

not just yourself, but all of us from a worse degradation of our humanity than we'd already suffered. And me—I know you didn't mean to, that you couldn't have cared, that I didn't deserve it, but Eva, you delivered me from hell. I brought that tape to my room to deliver myself into the purgatory I'd earned for myself, and you—my victim—you saved me.

“I'd believed for a long time, that I had to make myself a devil to save the people in my charge; that in order to preserve human life, the actions I would have to undertake would estrange me from myself so far that I would be eager for the end of my own life.

My one consolation was that I don't believe in god or hell. Except hell on earth, of course. And the hell we make for ourselves in our own minds and hearts.

“You spared me the agony of knowing I'd taken a frightened, hunger-weakened girl and brutalized her by proxy. I was in such awe of you—I often frighten and alienate people with my cool hardness, and with the ways my brain is never deterred, in working a solution to a problem, by obstacles of emotion or morality—but I was in awe of you, Eva. How you somehow put aside the horrific indignation you had to have felt at the position imposed on you. Put aside your fear and embarrassment, and instead of being martyred, you took all the power being wielded over you and made it yours.

“I didn't realize it that night, or for a long time after, but that—you appearing that way before John and orchestrating your encounter with him—that was the moment I began to fall in love with you.”

It sounds like he is speaking of being diagnosed with an illness.

“I didn't guess it, didn't even consider so...impossible a thing, until the day we...Until I'd made my first sperm donation. It was no surprise to find, when tested, that I desired you so intensely it felt like going mad. I knew I was astonished by you, that the way I'd seen you were with John was the most enticing image of sexual allure imaginable to me—a genuinely eager appetite tempered by that incredible sweetness you always show him—even when you're tearing the reins from his grasp.

“And even as you defeated me in that first battle, there in your room, I allowed myself to admire you as a worthy adversary, but never for a second did I let myself even wonder if your seduction was anything but a piece of strategy. Maybe to make me violate the cardinal rule, so you could blackmail me. Or maybe just to lure me into your bed where, perhaps, you thought you'd earn some influence with me, so you'd have some hope of directing your own fate to some small degree.

“Then, when you kept me inside you as I finished, I knew—at least in part—what you wanted with me.

“But then you held me so tenderly, after. And the way you looked at me—there was no smug triumph in your expression. No contempt. You looked... I imagined, in that moment, that you actually liked me.

“I didn't permit myself to dwell on it. Even to wonder. I resolved that it was only a ploy. Then, you and John coming to me. I wanted to feel ensnared. Tricked. Held hostage.

“But those evenings, the three of us. I felt sure, watching you all those weeks before that you really cared for John. Even loved him. And when we were all together, and I'd watch you a while with him, and see how tenderly you'd look at him as you touched him, made love to him. And when you'd come to me, I thought you looked at me just as tenderly.

“And when I came to you later, on my own, I even imagined your need with me was fiercer that I'd ever seen it with John. I imagined that you... I imagined that you loved him differently, but not more than me.”

Smith falls silent.

Eva says, “I was wrong. You don't doubt me because you think I need to manipulate you. You doubt me because you think you're unlovable.”

Eva extricates herself from Smith's desperate embrace. The blanket slips to the floor as she turns and kneels, her eyes fixed on his, her hands stroking his hair and face.

“It must hurt, so much, being touched, and kissed, and never feeling cared for.

Just feeling used. But Avery, I'll love you, if you'll let me. But I can't make you believe it.

You have to work out for yourself how to do that.”

Against Smith's wet, burning cheek Eva brings her lips in a slow, gentle question of a kiss. Smith doesn't flinch or recoil, but he is so hard, not even breathing; it's like he's steeling himself against an anticipated hurt. She touches his face with her lips again, wetting them with his tears. Her fingertips comb into his close-cut hair, just above his ear, and her lips follow, kissing his temple, his hair, the upturned pink crescent at the top of his ear.

“You're wrong about me, Avery,” she says low and soft, “I'm not cruel. Any more than you are.”

She draws him into her arms, holding him to her, their bare chests pressed together.

“Let me, Avery. Let me be tender with you. Let me love you.”

When he releases his caught breath, he convulses with sobs, shaking her. She holds him tighter, lets him squeeze her to him in his desperate grip. When he calms and softens, she pets and kisses him, stroking his hair, his shoulders, his back, pressing her lips to the pale, sinuous curve of his neck. When she leans back to look into his eyes, then touches her lips to his, he is trembling.

Then, as if he's decided to throw himself from the precipice he's been hovering near, he hurls himself full force into her kiss, against her body. His tongue and lips and teeth on her lips, her jaw, her throat, her breasts.

“Avery,” she pants. “Avery, wait.”

When her words fail to cool or slow him even a little she wedges her elbows between them, pries him from her.

“I love how hot and hard we fuck, Avery. Sometimes I go a little insane, wanting it, having to wait for you. But tonight I want to be tender with you.”

He stares at her, the hurt, crazed look in his eyes flickering, then softening. She kisses him again. He yields with a soft mouth, and when he folds her in his arms again his embrace is gentle. Between kisses she looks at him, lets him read her. With quiet calm, she moves back the few inches necessary, and undoes his fly. They collaborate to get the constraining fabric out of their way, then she rises up on her knees and takes him in.

She trembles as she makes love to him. Sometimes they watch each other.

Sometimes they kiss. But after a while they are holding each other tight and close, all their flesh meshed and twined until she sobs and twitches through her climax, then cradles him through his.

After, she brings him to her prison bed.

“What do you want from me, Avery?”

He looks at her for a long time.

“John,” Smith says. “You really do love him. Don't you?”

“Yes.”

“You know I don't mind that, don't you? That I don't feel some need to...possess you. Keep you from him.” She is quiet. “Or even to try to wrestle some sign from you that you love me more than him. It's enough for me, possibly more than I'll know how to bear, if you sincerely love me.”

“If you can learn to believe it, you mean.”

“I suppose so.”

“I do love you, Avery. If you'll stop looking for reasons to doubt it, maybe you'll feel it, it will feel real to you someday. But you'll never feel it, as long as you hate yourself. The things you do here in the name of saving us.

“You can be a good man, and a good leader, both. That's what I want from you.”

Smith smiles, and in his smile, in his eyes, there's more fear than joy.

“I'm trying, Eva,” he breathes.

“I know.”

She looks back at him with almost the same fear-laced smile, strokes his flaxen hair. Then she presses his palm to her lips, brings his hand to her breast, guides it down, holds it against her taut, flat belly.

“There's one other thing I want from you,” she says. “Be a good father to your child.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Smith escorts Eva back to her old room, back to John. When Eva goes through the door, he watches her go to John, watches John pull her to him, kiss her hair, whisper to her. Before Smith closes the door John meets his eyes and, a moment later, looking sad and fatigued, smiles.

“You're all right?” John asks her when Smith has gone.

Eva smiles up at him and nods.

“They didn't hurt you?”

“No. No one hurt me. What about you?”

“No.”

They pull each other close again, hold each other for a long time.

“I told him,” Eva says later.

In his calm, quiet way John says, “Good.”

“I was afraid you'd be unhappy.”

“No. If you told him, you trust him.”

“Yes.”

“And he brought you back here. So you were right to. Probably.”

Later, they are damp and hot and naked, twined together, panting their fatigue.

Eva had started it, and John had yielded, warm, tender, like always.

“Are you going to him tonight?” he asks her.

“No.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

“Eva.” John looks at her, smiles. With one finger, he touches her hand, connecting them. “It's all right, I mean, I'll be all right, if you want to be with him. Instead of me.”

Eva's eyes go bright. She clenches her jaw. “Is that what you want?”

“I want you to do what makes you happiest.”

“What do you want? For yourself?” she asks him.

“You. As much of you as you really want to give.”

“Then I stay with you.”

“Only as long as you're happy.”

She smiles. “I am happy.” Then, “It feels weird to say it.”

“I wish I could love you the way you need to be loved,” John says.

“You do.”

“No. I don't.”

“John.” She nestles against him, their faces just an inch apart on the pillow they're sharing. “It's just that you don't need me. He loves me like he'll disintegrate, blow apart if he can't have me. You love me like you'd suffer anything for my sake. Like you feel my needs before your own. “Your love holds me safe. Warm. You, your love, you...

You're my joy. My hope.”

* * * *

“Avery.”

“Eva.”

Smith looks at her, his grin teasing, his eyes glinting. His naked body is pale and smooth as marble, and even though he's slight of build, his finely muscled body is so sleek he looks like he might be as hard as marble, too.

“I don't want to sneak off and do things behind your back any more.”

The grin and the glint fade. “Good,” he breathes. His focus sharpens.

“I'm going to go to Jake.”

“What do you mean, 'go to' him?”

“Avery. You know what I mean,” she says, her voice gentle.