I’m so hard, it hurts still. I need relief. I’d take care of it myself, but then I’d have no way to clean up. I slowly and painfully shift down to a lying position and focus on thinking of something else, anything else but Rania. I call up a memory of combat, but that only leads to remembering Rania’s face above me when she first rescued me.
I owe her my life, and I refuse to let her be beaten.
My combat knife, the only part of my gear aside from my clothes that seemed to make it here with me, is lying in the corner near my feet. It takes several agonizing minutes to retrieve it. I have to keep stopping to catch my breath and let the bolts of pain lessen. It hurts so bad I could puke, but I grit my teeth and bull through it. I hide the knife under my blankets, near to hand. Next time I hear something like that happening, I’ll stop it. I don’t care how bad it f**king hurts. I don’t care if I rip open my wounds and re-break my ribs. I won’t let it happen again.
This animal fury inside me at the thought of Rania being hurt baffles me, confuses me. I don’t know where it comes from, but I can’t explain it away or ignore it. It’s not just my temper, or my upbringing. My dad drilled into me all my life that women are to be protected. Never, ever struck. Ever. Women are to be cherished and taken care of. Dad held doors for Mom. He treated her like a queen. He was a difficult man, angry and disturbed and broken from his war experiences, but it never translated into violence against me or Mom.
My drive to protect Rania is something else. Something deeper, harder, fiercer. I don’t dare look too closely at what it is, because that’s impossible. Unworkable.
I’m exhausted from the pain now. I close my eyes and try not to picture Rania’s face, try not to remember her lips. It doesn’t work, though, and I pass out to an image of her bright brown eyes like melted chocolate, her red lips and her soft skin.
She kissed me.
Goddamn it.
I just need to heal enough to walk so I can sneak out of here and get back to the base. I can’t deal with this. With her. With her lips on mine like a slice of sweet, hypnotic heaven, her br**sts crushed against my chest, soft yet firm, her ni**les pebbling. The smell of her arousal wafting up to my nose.
My c**k is throbbing, rock-hard.
See? Shit. She’s under my skin. She’s in my head. What the f**k am I supposed to do? I can’t kiss her again. Can’t let it happen. Certainly it can’t go further. I’m not physically capable at the moment anyway, but…it wouldn’t be right. It would be…a mistake. She’s a prostitute. Iraqi. I’ll get out of here at some point, and I’ll never see her again.
Plus, she still has to work. Her tricks are putting food in my belly. Water. Bandages. Antibiotic ointment. Without her johns, I’ll starve. If anyone finds out about me, I’m dead and she will be, too, or worse.
How could I sleep with her and then lie here and listen to her turn a trick? I couldn’t. I would flip the hell out.
Fuck. Why am I even thinking of sleeping with her? I can’t. I won’t.
But goddamn, is she sexy. Tantalizing. That fine, thick, lustrous blonde hair draping across her face, her wide dark eyes blazing with so much emotion, so much I can’t identify, can’t fathom. Her lithe, lush body pushed close to me.
I groan and scrub my face with a sigh. My c**k is tangled and bent painfully sideways. I push the blanket down past my hips and adjust myself inside my BDU pants. But then, dammit, touching myself was a mistake. I’ve got a mad case of blue balls going on. Kissing Rania, and then thinking about her…it’s giving me a perpetual hard-on. I grasp my c**k in my fist and consider again taking care of it myself.
As I’m touching myself, I get the sense of another presence. Rania stands in the doorway, watching me with a strange expression on her face.
“Shit,” I say, tossing the blanket over myself quickly.
Embarrassment floods through me. I cast a hesitant glance at Rania, who is still in the doorway, staring at me. I expect her to look upset, or disgusted, or…I don’t know. What I don’t expect to see is her cheeks blushing, her gaze now darting around the room as if trying to forget what she saw but wanting to get another glimpse.
“I am sorry,” I say in my halting, broken, poorly accented Arabic.
She shrugs, not looking at me. I want to explain, but I can’t. Even if she was fluent in English, or I was in Arabic, I couldn’t explain. I just wouldn’t be able to get the words out. She finally shakes head as if banishing the vision and goes into the kitchen. She has a few bags of groceries in her hands, which I hadn’t noticed. I want to get up take them from her, put them away for her, but I can’t.
She doesn’t look at me, and when her eyes do slide across the room to mine, I can’t hold her gaze. I wonder if she knows it was she who gave me the hard-on?
It’s subsided for now. God help me if she gets too close. It’ll spring back fully erect if she so much as looks at me the wrong way. Or the right way, depending on how you look at it.
The worst part is, there will never be release. It can’t happen. I have to be smart. It wouldn’t be just sex, even if it did happen. I can tell. The way she gets under my skin, the way my heart hammers when she looks at me, touches me, the way I want so desperately for her to just sit and talk to me…it would be emotional, if anything happened. I’m smart enough to realize that much; now I just have to be smart enough to keep anything from happening.
I have to keep telling myself to think with my brain, not with my cock. Not with my heart.
And then she looks at me, curiosity ripe in her gaze, gaze eyes sliding down my bare chest to my crotch, covered with the blanket, and she blushes and looks hurriedly away, biting her lip.
Fuck. This is going to be difficult.
* * *
We’re both extra cautious for the next few days. She doesn’t sit close enough to touch, and I don’t try. My hands stay on my lap, busy, fidgeting. She starts facing away from me when she has to change or clean up, and I make sure to look away.
I’m learning enough Arabic every day now that we are able to have halting conversations. They contain a lot of pantomiming and roundabout explanations of strange words, but they are conversations. We talk about neutral things. Usually words themselves, meanings and contexts and connotations. We don’t know what else to talk about, I think.
Her false enthusiasm when working a john is quieter now. I hear her less. She seems to be having a harder and harder time summoning the ability to pretend. The loathing on her face takes longer to vanish.