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i
Growing up, you learned to make yourself small, even though you were never meant to be. You taught yourself to talk quietly and keep your eyes just left to the face talking to you and you learned to never, ever talk back.
This is how your life has always gone. You were never small and never scared and never sorry, but where you come from, where the hot wind is howling through broken windows on the wrong side of the highway, you are either a man or you’re a bitch and you couldn’t survive on your own.
So you made a decision and you stuck to it. Blissfully uninvolved. Quiet. At the edge of the group. The endless gardens of foster homes, men waiting to kill a group of dealers.
There is always a big, scary man by your side, not always between your legs. Sometimes they are your brothers, sometimes cousins, sometimes bouncers, twice your size. They always have a hard grip on your long hair, twisting and untwisting. They move slowly, closely, and you try not to make them angry, because their anger is painful. It leaves bruises. It leaves scars.
They always liked that you’re not as hard as the others, even though you box and you fight and you run and you win medals and learn to dodge kicks to your teeth and receive framed papers pointing at how hard you can get. They like the vagueness, your fear, the lack of focus.
“You bitch!” They call you inside cheap motel rooms with cheap furniture and watered down party drugs.
“You stupid, useless bitch.” They keep calling you while you lie next to them, in black panties the size of a dental floss and a pair of six-inch Jimmy Choos knock offs.
“You dumb bitch!” They tell you while you stride naked to the bathroom, collecting your clothing and your money, brushing your teeth, thinking about the girl next door.
You hate the word but you make yourself into one. You shake your ass for dollars and you take the pricks inside your mouth and you pretend not to notice the smiles some of the girls share with you. You never go with girls and you only keep to those guys who pay well and when a man twice your size gets rough and sticks something that you don’t want in a place you never meant for it to go, you quit.
Simple and stupid and final. You’d rather burn your fingers on too hot grills and smell like burnt meat and ketchup and piss and earn shit money than stay another minute in the sweet, suffocating room with fake neon lights and fake, toothless smiles.
Screw them and screw their money. You’d rather chafe your skin to the bone than spend another minute having your hair yanked and your knees bruised and your gut twisting as you throw up everything they put in you in a random bathroom, in a random neighbourhood., in places where you get the feeling evil still clings to the walls around you.
The man who thought he could do what he wanted with you is still lingering outside the club. You don’t go there often, but when you do, you see him.
You want to hunt him down and you want to make him pay and you want to crash a car into his body and laugh while he burns. What you do instead is find the meanest motherfucker in the block and lodge yourself into him. You stick by his side and you take his abuse and you tell yourself this is just how life goes. For you and for your poor mother and for all those dumb bitches like you, not strong enough to live on their own.
But you were never meant to be small and abused and scared. When he raises his hand one too many times, you raise a skillet pen and when he chases you down the street, bloody and screaming murder – you run.
This, you think to yourself, sure you’re about to break a rib or two, is just how life is. For you and all those dumb bitches like you, too scared to live on their own. Too idiotic not to see what is right in front of their noses. Too weak to straighten whatever spine the Lord saw fit to give them and try to make their life more than a shit pile of fists and kicks and snarling, stupid men with bad tattoos and worse ambitions.
Your problem is, you think, is that you could always forgive human weakness in everybody else, except yourself. You could never give your inner self excuses, especially when you deserved one. You fucking hate yourself.
What’s scarier, then? you think, teeth bared and mouth hurting, another bruise blossoming on your cheekbone. Leave? Run away? Or stay and have his fist punching your other eye black?
//
You’re running. The air is cool, strange against your newly scraped face.
You don’t run for pleasure, the way you used to. You’re not taking it easy, jogging over dying grass, grey in the street lights, through fallen leaves whose colours you can barely see but guess: orange, yellow, brown.
When you were little, you used to run with others along the street, making sounds like a dive bomber, and then jump, clearing the mounds of leaves like hurdles. Forbidden, but if you missed it didn’t matter, the leaves were only smoldering. Men were shaking rakes, telling you to fuck off and never come back.
Now you’re not running for fun, sprinting at high school, first place on the relay team. You’re not running around the track with the stick you once pretend was dynamite you had to pass on before it exploded. You were too skinny then for any other activity, but you could run. You won twice the state race for 800.
Now you run like your life depends on it. And it does. You run against the traffic, the cars meeting and passing you owl-eyed, dark and sleek. Behind you runs a deranged man, screaming profanities and making oaths to kill you, spitting every mean word he ever learned, promising to end your life in a choked, hateful manner which you wholeheartedly believe.
You run, banging on doors and screaming for help. You recall with more than just discomfort, sheer disbelief, that you once thought you would go into sports. Have a life. Go to college.
You could have gone to college. Could have had a real life. A real chance. You were once among those who felt the universe should be just and merciful and were prepared to help it achieve this state. That was your mother’s doing. Before. Before…
You recall your convoluted pain, your sense of betrayal when you realised finally how impossible this was. She was dead and your brother was in prison and your father was gone and you were left alone. Fifteen and lost and hating the world, more so for believing in it in the first place.
Now, you think, your family’s legacy finally caught up with you. You were living on borrowed time, this much was obvious. But then, why do you run with burning lungs and tears in your eyes and the desperate, sick need to be saved?
//
The man is huge and the man is black and the man is angry and the man, you notice with more than a little surprise, more than a smidge of shock – stands up for you.
You watch in disbelief, frightened and small and a out of breath as he puffs up his chest and declares a small beef between lovers is a matter of the United States Marines.
You watch him, eyes wide, breath hissing. He doesn’t know you and he doesn’t know you’re just as guilty as the monster at the door and he stands up for you anyway.
The man has a commanding air about him and a frown. He looks like the hero in all those action movies Edgar was so fond of, before his brain turned into mush and his fists became a source of terror. He’s the main character of his own life. Something you’ve never been.
With gentle shame you watch him crush Edgar’s hopes at getting back at you for leaving him. For daring to raise a hand back at him. Then a window crushes and you scream, at least you think you do. But the man is still standing there like an old, eternal statue of authority and kindness. He doesn’t react to the childish violence. Nor to your poor manners.
You don’t remember the last time a man was this kind to you, in such a strong, unapologetic way. He doesn’t pity you. He’s not expecting anything in return. He just stands there and watches you.
”Thanks,” you manage.
”You did that to his face?”
You look up at him. Neon light from a row above your heard hit the shaved face of your savior. He’s a tidy man, powerful with genuine natural authority. He has big hands. You always notice things like that.
”I cheated. I used a frying pan.”
”In war,” he says with eyes that aren’t masking his appreciating. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying”.
”I’ve been in war my whole life, then”.
“You’ve come to the right place,” he says in a booming voice and you’ve got a strange feeling that maybe he’s right and maybe you have.
//
The officer look at you with pity and concern, but one that don’t go deep. He wants to finish here and go home. It’s been a long day and he’s been dealing with more women like you than he’d like. You don’t judge him. You get it.
”I’ll take my chance at the park.” You say, and you don’t want to but it’s the right thing to do. The right thing to say. Your only option.
”I know your chances at the park,” says the policeman. “They aren’t good”.
It’s not your first time at a shelter and you’re not too proud to admit you’re feeling safe among the crying, laughing, bubbling loud girls. It’s familiar and warm in a sort of depressing way and for the first time in a long time, you have a bed and a pillow and no one else to share them with.
For the first time, you stop chasing and stop running and stop trying to kill all thought and wonder if you could ever possess the kind of power the black man in the United States army uniform possessed.
The harsh light above your head blinks, illuminating the wreckage of human behaviour. You think about the Marina and for the first time in a long time – you have a purpose.
//
“Attack everything they throw at you just like this, and there’s no stopping you,” says a white man in a hat who thinks being called “sir” is the worst insult someone can throw his way, and you purse your lips and think I have. I do. I will.
//
“I have no life, sir,” you say and you mean it because it’s true and because you don’t.
The white man with the close-cropped hair and the crooked teeth and the kind eyes look at you. He doesn’t smile but there is a smile in his voice. He tucks his chin to his chest, eyebrows furrowed. You know what he’s going to say but you listen anyway. You drink his words like a dying man in the desert.
“You do now”.
//
You run west, along the north side of the street, in the cold grey air that is an extension of the unbroken fish-grey sky. You don’t glance into the store windows; you know what you look like and you don’t indulge in fantasies of looking any other way. You don’t need your own reflection, or the reflections of other people’s ideas of you or of themselves, lodged inside your head.
You wear a black coat. You’re a hard woman, with a dense core, that dark point around which other colours swirl. You keep your eyes straight, your shoulders level, your steps even. You march on.
You can remember when this sort of exercise, this sort of walks, through this part of the city, would have excited you. Those windows with their promises that are, finally, sexual, replacing earlier windows and earlier promises that offered merely safety. When did that happen, the switch to danger? Sometime in the past two years the solid suits and Liberty scarves moved out in favour of exotica, and you’ve never been one for fashion, but this here is a complete foreign territory.
Once, it made your skin burn merely to walk along these streets, the windows offering themselves, not demanding anything, certainly not money. Just a word. Yes.
Now, after two tours and bathing in blood, you think there is something wrong with you. Something wrong with your ears. You think you might be going deaf. From time to time, not all the time, you hear a high sound, like a hum, a ringing. And you know you’ve been having difficulty hearing what other people say to you. But it might be just your stubbornness. It’s hard to tell.
//
You can still recall, vividly, the day you swore your oath. The only one that ever made sense. The only one you know how to keep.
“I, Cruz Manuelos, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God”.
//
You feel awkward, as if the bones of your elbows and knees aren’t really touching but are attached to one another with string. Gangling. Surely, your teeth are larger than usual, your chest is flatter than most, your eyes too dark.
You push your shoulders back. Your fellow marines aren’t exactly unfriendly, but there’s a withholding, a narrow-eyed evaluation. The new kid. The outsider. You have to prove to everyone that you deserve be here. Prove you’re worth their attention. Their time. Their trust.
You can see their suspicion. Who are you anyway and what are you getting them into? Can they trust you to have their back? To shoot straight? To not have mercy?
You learned from bitter experience not to say anything unless you’re certain, so you don’t talk much. You shrug and you nod and you move on. When you’re not sure, you ask. When you have to do something, you work words around your mouth and you keep quiet and you do it.
It takes them less than a month to get used to your presence. It takes them another week to respect you. Two years later and it’s hard for you to imagine another life. Another family. Better mates by your side.
//
Special Activities both impresses and annoys you. She’s beautiful and tough and lean, like a feline who somehow took the form of a human. She’s wearing a cap but you can see her features. She doesn’t hide and doesn’t play games. She doesn’t keep her chin low. Instead, she looks you in the eyes and tells you she has no rank. Then, she tell you to strip.
You don’t want to strip in front of this stranger. It isn’t about nudity. You’ve been nude in front of strangers more times than you’d like to admit. You danced around a pole and you showed your ass and you shook whatever god saw fit to land you in the tits department. Which isn’t a lot but enough for some men to enjoy while getting ridiculously drunk on cheap vodka and watered-down cocktails.
You’ve undressed in the showers. You shared a tent and a room with tons of people. You slept in mud and been vetted and SEREd and, just like the word might suggest, you survived and evaded and resisted and escaped all while wearing less than a baby. Sometimes less than a burn victim. Often covered in some degree of blood and human mess.
So, this isn’t about nudity.
This is different. The Special Activities eyes’ are hungry, blank. There is something inhuman in the dark-skinned woman who says your name right and ingnores all questions, who sends a jolt through your body, a frisson of fear that you can barely contain. Then the part of your brain dealing with the present reminds you that you’re there and you’re alive and she can’t hurt you while surrounded by thousands of soldiers. Special Activities is exactly the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Something tells you she’s both to be avoided at all times and kept close to in order to survive.
Survive what? You can’t say.
”All of it,” she says and this is a test and you’re be damned if you ever fail another, so you strip down and you hold your hands out and you stick up your chin and you do your best not to spit in her face.
“That’s how you get off? Be my guest, lady. I can stand here all fuckingday”.
The Special Activities’ mouth twitches. Apparently, it’s the right thing to say.
//
You don't know how to live outside the structured life the army has provided you. When you're not wearing uniform you live it like a peeled snail and it's no way to go through life.
You no longer need to impress anyone. Not your superiors and definitely not the hard-looking lady that doesn't go by rank and isn't to be called “ma'am” and wouldn't answer any of your questions. And yet, you're not disgusted. You're not lashing out. You want to throw a tantrum and smash shit around. You want to make damn good and sure you'll never be hurt again. Not by men and not by soldiers and not by people who only know to use their hands in violent, short outbursts.
It still hurts, of course. You want to cry, mourn, sit in a rocker with a black-edged handkerchief, bleeding from the eyes. But you're not crying. You're angry, so angry you could kill someone. But there is no one to kill.
//
The team is small and loud and cocky. They smile too big and laugh too loud and make grand, showy gestures. They’re the sort of team who has their hands in everything and leave fingerprints on nothing.
Bobby has an undercut and killer biceps. She looks just like the woman you expect to lead a fucking QRF team, including the toothpick at the corner of her mouth and the flirtatious air around her.
Two cups isn’t what you call attractive, even though you get the sense he’s the man who gets the ladies’ phone numbers in the group. Not counting Bobby. He’s built like an American Bully, short and stout and muscular. His hair is long, wild around his ears, and his eyes are hidden behind a pair of glasses. Later, you will learn he keeps them on for evasion purposes. His eyes are kind and open. Not something much appreciated on the force.
Tex is quiet, balding, and manly. A true American soldier. There are things on his face that tell you a story, things he refuses to talk about. Randy is loud and round and wears a cross around his neck. You have trouble remembering who is who until Randy thrusts a bottle of bear in your face and declares, more or less, that you will have to drink your way to their hearts.
Tucker, bearded and shirtless, is a huge man built like a body builder. He is silent, grave and refuses to speculate. He has a straight face and he gives you a stern up-and-down look. He isn’t unfriendly, just cautious and you appreciate his calmness.
You sit in the corner, in the desert, and assess your new teammates. You like them enough and anyway, you guess it can always be worse.
“So, your name is Cruz, huh? What’s that from?”
The answer is sad and boring and exactly what they expect. You feel the ease settling about them. Bobby shuffles the cards again. Someone tells her to stop cheating. You work the words inside your mouth, a nervous tick you can’t seem to avoid.
“Not a nickname,” you say simply.
They all think it makes perfect sense.
//
The beer is a bad idea but a one you can’t pass easily. You take a deep breath, clench your jaw, pretend the hateful, wonderful taste in your mouth is water. It doesn’t work, but it’s better than explaining. Better than avoiding. Better than making these new, strange people dig too deep inside your former life.
There are things you’re not proud of in your past. There are things you’d rather forget.
There are things you can’t.
So, you work unspoken words around your mouth, gather spit and drain the bottle in one, long sip.
“I think I’m in love,” says Bobby and you think don’t do this, and you think not again and you think this is a bad idea.
//
You sit and wait for Joe and the crew to work on your legend. They come up with some story that’s easy to remember and takes little time to organize. You’re an undecisive American student who goes to visit her uncle in order for him to arrange for some fast, bullshit marriage suited for a good Muslim girl.
You’re not good and not Muslim but it’s not a major problem. You have the ancestry and you speak the language and you can, when pressed to a corner, repeat a story you’ve been told.
In the middle of trying to juice your shaky legend, you receive a file full of documents and pictures. Men and women, you’ve never seen in your life. You read about their lives, their jobs, their connection to your story and your mark. To the mission ahead.
”None of them are the woman I’m supposed to befriend?” You look at Joe. She gives you a blank look. “Shouldn’t I at least know what she looks like?”
”She’s got a point, boss,” says Bobby from her corner.
Joe doesn’t answer, instead, she takes a shining thick paper from her back pocket and hands it to you. The woman staring back at you from the picture possess a sort of sensuality which you couldn’t anticipate. Her eyes are dark and deep under straight eyebrows and she gives off the vibe of someone who can read right through a liar. She’s stunning.
Your breath hitches. Joe doesn’t say anything. Bobby’s smile grows wider. She sends a wink your way.
//
You sleep like shit and you can’t relax on the plane. After showering, you look through the clothes you’ve been supplied with and was pleased to know most of them aren’t too expensive. And although you leave the flat wearing someone else’s clothes, you don’t feel like a complete and total clown.
Zara Adid is someone you need to know. Someone you need to trust. Someone you need to become and you wish and wish and wish you were her, but you’re not and the pounding in your head is strong and painful. You think you’re going to be sick again.
You almost wish you were.
Drinking is never a good idea, but it's not like you had any other choice, and so you sit in the jerking car, trying to remember painful details of a life you never lived. The uncle and your situation is somewhat of a blur. The fact that your whole life depends on your skewed judgement and false memories - is not.
Everything is moving too fast and a sort of panic you never experienced before during launch missions rises in your chest, squeezes at your lungs, pushes against your ribs.
You’ve never had girl friends and you’ve never set foot inside fancy stores and you’ve never, in your entire, miserable life, had spent money on things that aren’t cheap food or second-hand clothing and silly ass knickknacks to try and mask the fact that you were different than the rest.
Most of what you owned belonged to your mother and your brother before they were taken. One by the state. One by a higher, somehow less forgiving, type of power. Nothing was bellow you. Not even rummaging through garbage, hoping to find a treasure in place of half dead rats and old, stinking meat.
So, when you step out of the vehicle and into Louis Vuitton, the contrast is overwhelming. It’s huge and gold and fake. It’s easy to forget that there is absolutely nothing about this place that is at a half-affordable price. Not to you, at least.
But the fake gold store and the huge white smiles that are thrust your way like weapons when you walk in are nothing compared to the woman who’s supposed to be your mark. Who’s on the page seemed small and flat and less than human, like some beautiful Hollywood actress who can't be real.
This woman, on the other hand, the one you make sure, in a split second decision, to gently crush into, is something you haven’t expected. Your advantage at seeing her picture is gone. You’re glad nothing of the gear you’re wearing can transmit your embarrassing, sky rocketing pulse.
She’s smiling, radiating like a galaxy. Like a supernova. Like the fucking sun. Her voice is rougher than you imagined, but still soft. Confident. The type of confidence you imagine that must come with a protecting detail and more money than you can spend in a single life span.
You feel a little lost. You weren't ready. She was so different in the picture, you almost want to stomp your feet and tell Joe this isn’t fair. This isn’t what you signed up for.
You gazed at her face for hours while listening to others build up your story, crumbling the paper in your fingers. You imagined her stiff and angry. You imagined her proud and confident. You imagined her poised. Icy cold. Unapproachable.
The woman in front of you is soft and smiling. She’s care free. She’s happy. There’s a faint smell of sea and sun around her, like she’s made of light and summer, not entirely human. Not entirely flesh and bones.
Even though your nose is filled with scents, hers gets through to you with no difficulty at all. A mixture of expensive fragrance, sea salt and hot, sunny rays on a clean washed sheet. She smells like something important and expensive. Something you can’t afford.
In the soft light, she appears as delicate and tender as melancholy. She has dark hair and blue eyes, so luminous and large that even from afar you can stare into them. Her beauty is mesmerising. Breathtaking. Insane.
You are supple and athletic. Somewhat androgynous. Firm. There is nothing in you of the woman’s sense of muted arousal.
You don’t need much encouragement to keep close to her. To start a conversation. To follow her lead. Even though she is exactly the type of woman you distanced yourself from your entire life, it’s hard to keep your distance now.
You’re supposed to be here and you’re supposed to befriend her and you’re supposed to play nice. But this isn’t work and all. There is no lies and no trouble and no discomfort. There is no pretend and you feel like an utter idiot. You feel like a fraud. You are a vicious, wild fighter with a grin of a wolf. You're used to growling and spitting blood and painting your face red with bruises.
What you don't know is how to go about the sinking in your heart, the sharp intake of your breath, the heavy, pressing need to know her, this Oil Princess, thriving on dirty money. You don't know what to do about your jumping pulse, your settling stomach, your confidence, dipping fast.
//
You can hardly think, hardly speak. Her stare - open and honest and dark, catches you off guard. You’re a marine. A soldier. You’ve been through countless hours of training. You’ve endured torture and beating. You torched your fear and doubt in cement rooms and dusty deserts. You burned your palms on scolding iron. You shot and you killed and you twisted limbs. You punched guts and broke two hands and a nose and your stupid fucking will. You inflicted agony on others. You made people into rotten meat while screaming your truth. You tore entire villages to the ground, wiped entire towns from existence.
You shudder to think of the flesh melting off the bones of those unlucky enough to escape all the fires you started.
And yet. The Oil Princess is looking at you, lips curved into a mischievous smile and you’re gone. Your brain is wiped clean. Your head is empty. You believe the thing you see in her eyes. As if you're someone worth smiling upon. Someone good and kind and honest. Someone with more than death upon their lips.
“What’s your name?” She asks in her salty voice and you stare, dumb and shaken to your core.
Speak! Speak, you idiot! What the fuck is your name?
The woman waits, a sad smile on her beautiful, sun-kissed face. She has rays of distant planets shine in her dark eyes and you can tell her heart bleeds for company. She is young and strong and pretty and there is something lonely, something pleading in her eyes.
”If you don’t want my help that’s fine…”
“Zara,” you lie through your teeth. “Adid.” And for a split second – you are.
A smile splits on the woman's sad face. Dark eyes stare at the very core of you, storms swirling inside. Your heart beats so loud you’re afraid she’s going to notice.
“Aaliyah Amrohi.” She says in a bright, cheerful tone – and that’s that.
ii
You’re drowning in pain and in water. You’re fighting for your life. Fluids cascading over your face, your naked backside, your heaving chest. Surge after surge of pure agony. It’s becoming the only consciousness you know.
Your head is tilted back, your throat open, water flowing down and triggering endless spasms of gagging. Your lungs scream, your body collapses. Terror had chased out every rational thought and you’re concerned that if they don’t stop, you’re going to die. It’s a vague concern, but your human nature fights with everything you got.
Behind the blindfold, you travel to a distant star. You see the void, the end of the universe, a darkness without a form or a shape or an end. You know the men, whoever they are, damaged you beyond pain. Scarred you to your soul.
They control everything. You can’t even drown yourself.
You feel the water stream from your hair and the filthy towel rips free from your mouth. You’re shaking, your body completely out of control, and your mind far behind. You don’t notice the faces or the room. You don’t care about your nudity. You don’t think about what a pack of angry, vicious men can do to a naked woman in a lonely, remote location.
Someone forces your eyelids open and look into your pupils, calculating how much life is present, while a hard hand grips at your throat.
”What’s your name?” The man demands. “Name!”
”Fuck you!” You shake your head weakly. “Fuck you!”
”It’s only going to get worse.” He promises and kicks your raw flesh. He’s tall and muscular and huge. Dangerous.
Pain splits your mind in half, leaving only shadows behind.
//
The pain is excruciating. The pain is white. The pain, you realise in a sort of dazed horror, is nothing compared to the surprise you feel when Joe removes the sack from your head and sits, calm and pretty, across from your painful, bloody self.
You’re glad they have you restrained. You feel like you could kill her. The chant of death in your lungs is fearsome.
“This was a fucking training exercise?” You spit, white agony shooting through your jaw and into your nose as you speak. “You fucking bitch!”
Only Joe doesn’t care about name calling and Joe doesn’t care about angry faces and Joe doesn’t care about being on the receiving end of threats and sneers and spitting, uncontrollable anger. She watches you with the pressure of cold assessment in her eyes, held back by a strong will.
Something clenches in your chest.
Joe looks at you as if you’re a stain on a wall she has to deal with. Something unpleasant she cannot ignore. Something hateful and small that needs to be handled. A problem. Nothing at all.
She says Edgar’s name and you can’t control your reaction. Your mouth is twisting. Flashes of fists and words and black-out nights dance in front of your eyes, blurring your vision. You let your body clench, tighten around your anger and hurt. You're shaking, but you refuse to break. You promised yourself to never be weak again. This is no place to break your promise.
“He’s dead, you know,” says Joe in a quiet, even voice. “Beaten, stabbed and shot. Like someone made a game of it”.
A spark goes through your angry stained mind. Not of regret, but of joy. You don’t believe for a second some idiot from the next block got him. That was never Edgar’s style. What you think about instead is a night out you've been invited to, a day or two after you arrived at the base, and Bobby and Tucker and Two cups sitting across Tex and Randy, eyes hard and jaws set and smiles big and humourless. Something about the scene didn't make sense. Now you think it does.
What does the word Marine means to you?
You think about Bobby’s hard eyes. You think about Two cups moving mouth. You think about quiet, angry Tex swinging fists like he can’t wait to plant them into soft, bleeding flesh.
Joe, unaware of your dark thoughts, ploughs on. “I bet you were quite the dancer, if you’re gonna call it dancing. I bet you were good at it”.
Tears prick behind your eyes. You try to school your face into an emotionless expression. You shake your head in a small, almost none existing motion. Please, you think. No.
“Why’d you stop, hmm?” Joe’s speaking in a soft, gentle manner. If you didn’t understand English you might have thought she’s saying something kind. Only she isn’t. Her words are cruel and stabbing and mean. They’re meant to be all these things and yet, you feel betrayed. You feel small. You feel stupid – as if somehow this is all your fault.
“Did someone get a little rough in the champagne room? Have his way and you weren’t strong enough to stop him? And now here you are, proving how strong you are? That sound about right?”
You’re shaking, trembling. You can feel his hands on your body, his salty flash in your mouth, his back hand against your cheek. You can still remember the exact twist in your gut when you felt your underwear being torn, your body exposed, punctured, violated. You don't remember how many times you had to endure it. Your skull explodes from the force of the memories.
You want to crack Joe's ribcage open, and smother what you'd find in the space between. You wonder if it will cause her to speak this way, next time. You wonder if you'll laugh at her pain.
“Looks like these boys had their way, too”.
Shut up, you don’t dare to say.Just shut the fuck up!
“There’s always someone bigger. Stronger. But you know that, don’t you? that’s the story of your life”.
You close your eyes and try to breathe through your nose. She's right, and it is.
//
The air around you is buzzing. Anger takes form. The faces around you are twisting and you think this is what it’s like having a family.
It takes you a moment longer to realise what’s going on. Bobby, motioning to the door. Tex, whooping uncharacteristically. Two Cups, screaming at the top of his lungs, rising volume giving you goosebumps. You're too sore to even sit straight, but when Bobby poses a silent question, you can't help but push yourself up, a violent smile spreading across your face.
Bar fight.
Only it isn’t.
The bar looks sober, quiet, devoid of pinball machines and jukeboxes and pimply eighteen-year-olds who drink too much and throw up in the can. This place is half full of men in zip front jackets and open-necked shirts with the T-shirt collar showing, slow and steady drinkers; serious television-watchers like all the men you had to deal with on the force. Familiar and easy. If it was any other moment, you’d like the bartender to tune in on the national news and then get the sports scores.
Your teammates, all four of them, two or three steps ahead of you, are indistinct in the cavernous dark. Monsters loom over them, reptilian, skeletal, wired into poses of menace as if in some gargantuan tunnel of horrors. You feel your bones eroding, stone filling the cavities. You feel stupid. You feel trapped.
Then Bobby throws a bottle and Two Cups laughs and then he pulls a teaser gun and it’s chaos.
The man is on the floor and Bobby called you her teammate so you’re pretty sure there isn’t much trouble you can get into with your big, muscular, angry new family around.
Something inside you twists, then plummets, then breaks.
You know how to tear down mountains, how to level the ground and carve the earth until nothing remains. You know how men look burnt down to the bone and - Oh. It’s only when Randy has his arms around you that you realise what you’ve done.
You’re not helpless. You’re not weak. You know exactly why you’ve been chosen for the job. You’re the perfect candidate. You’re smart, and a fast learner. You have been always a loner, and you are damaged deep in your soul. You showed it on the first day of training and you showed it ever since.
You’re ready to teach every motherfucker who makes again the mistake of thinking you weak just what real strength looks like.
//
Your father walked out before you were born and your mother was murdered several years later in a bedroom just off the highway. And without parents, without a family, you learned to survive the best you could.
You learned to mask what you feel, and if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in your head and hide inside. You’re grateful for this practice now, needing to deal with Aaliyah Amrohi.
The woman proves harder than shooting a man from behind while a vicious desert wind blows in your ears. Her smile and her eyes and her voice, all made to drive you insane. Her gentle words, her cheeky stabs at you, her soft, kind way of carrying herself – everything plunges into your chest with the precise deadliness of a bullet.
The fact that you won’t have it any other way might be slightly worrying, but you turn your face away from it.
//
It’s beyond you how a voice so calm, so warm, can bring both terror and excitement.
It’s beyond you how a woman so lovely, so kind, can be so cruel.
“You have a bathing suit?”
”I can get one”.
”Good. Get a small one. I’m bringing boys”.
You grit your teeth. “How small?”
”Eh,” she makes a happy sound. “Some things are best left to the imagination. Your body isn’t one of them”.
Next to you, Bobby is trying very hard not to laugh. If you weren’t sore and emotional, you’d probably punch her in the face.
“Fuck,” you say when you hang up, and you wonder if you died and went to hell because you’d rather take another beating in a facility off shore than do what Aaliyah suggests you should.
“I need to go shopping”.
//
Through the door, which you left open an inch out of habit, you can hear the crashes, the sounds of breakage, the screams of Bobby when she tells the boys to take their guns outside. You can see them from your bedroom window, and they can see you. You think they know something is wrong. Their politeness, their evasion, is chilling because it’s so perfectly done.
Randy goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and pokes through it. He rummages through a drawer. He mumbles to himself as he does.
"Shit. Look at those bean sprouts gone bad, spinach in a plastic bag starting to decay. You can smell the fucking decomposing. Fuck. Can't anyone of you fuckers here clean the fridge? Not a single one of you, motherfuckers?"
Your phone vibrates. A message appears on the screen. Her name shines and then dims. Your heart makes its new sickening dance.
What are you doing?
You find this question so mournful that for a moment you cannot answer. It's a question from former times, the old days. Your eyes blur. Suddenly, you want to be close to her. You want to be near her and take her in your arms and hug her. Instead, you pick up your mark phone and type a mundane answer. She sends back a voice message. She sounds remote, guarded, giving a careful imitation of pleasure.
"Well," says Aaliyah in the voice of a sad adult. "I'll be seeing you soon, yes?"
You want to do something, perform something, smash your hand through the bedroom window. But on the other side of the glass there’s a screen, and three men enjoying a calm afternoon. It will cause another injury and it will be absurd. What is smashing a window compared with blowing off your head? You feel cornered.
You breathe in destruction. Exhale.Yeah, sure you type back.
You think your life can be characterised into two parts: before Aaliyah and after. You're not sure how it makes you feel.
//
Your new favourite thing, as far as things go, is having Joe steering you with a stern look and an exhausted whisper in the right direction. You thought you’d hate it, but you find it easy, throwing all thought to the gutter, having her decide what you do and what you wear and what you talk about.
You thought you’d hate it but it’s better this way. Just like on the force. Just like in Iraq. Someone has to make tough decisions. You’re just a soldier.
You know it will get on your nerves pretty soon, but for the moment – this is your new favourite thing.
“Head in the game, Cruz” followed by instructions. “Head in the game” followed by tips and angry remarks and a sigh, so tired you secretly hope she has a family to go back to. A pack of happy, pretty boys to surround her and call her “mommy” and remind her that the world is not as dark as she came to believe it to be, in her line of work.
“Cruz! The fuck did I just say?”
“Eh…”
“Did you hear a word I said?”
“Yeah. I got it”.
Joe makes a bone-weary sigh. You can imagine her tired face. Ashen. You wonder if she had enough of you already.
“Roger that’ ma’am.” She reminds you, not gentle.
“Sorry, ma’am,” you say without thinking, just like you’ve been taught. You’re a fucking Marine. You’d be damned if you ever made her think less of your comrades because you’re a fucking moron.
“Roger that, ma’am”.
Soon, you know. Soon it’ll be enough. This can’t go on forever.
//
The miles fly by quickly. You drive past olive groves and tiny white houses. On distant hills you see derelict windmills. There is a beautiful, shinning late just under the bridge and the sky is blue and clear.
Green hills tumble down into the water, and the whole world just lays out in front of you. It’s early in the afternoon, the sunlight washing across the bays that hug the town, highlighting the walls of a magnificent villas that stand on the headland between the water and the mountains.
For a moment, you’re just a young woman, watching the lights from the exclusive houses dance on the water, listening to music from a myriad clubs feel the air. The dazzling sunlight hits you hard. You feel it painting your skin in soft, dark burns.
How could a mission that started with so much promise end in such disaster?
//
You see her the moment you arrive to the house and your breath jumps. Suddenly, your curiosity is with you again. For a moment and a half, the Queen of The Desert is invisible behind her sunglasses and the smile she maintains for the sole purpose of diversion, but then she glances at you and her face splits into a smile and it’s like you’ve been waiting for her your whole life.
For a time, there is no rejection. No disappointment. As if she’s been hoping for one, but a reason never came. As if she has things to ask you, things she isn’t sure she can allow herself the possibility to ask, and she says your made-up name, hoping for recognition.
Aaliyah is reaching out to you, smiling her sweet, sweet smile. You look at her, stars trucked. Her thick dark hair and deep eyes make your spine feel like it's cracking under the weight. You watch her and you think she is old. Much older than you. Not in years, but in experience. In all the things that matter. You look at her and you see the sin burning the bits and parts of her humanity. You'd like to take the things that crush her down and make them disappear. Make them yours. Gladly.
Aaliyah's talking as if she's more ancient than the earth. As if her situation might be turning the surface of the world to a wasteland. She is beyond the reach of men. Beyond the reach of time. Even gossiping, there is something dark and old and wonderful about her. Something you’d like to explore.
Your heart beats in your chest. Your lungs fill with war. Your veins are singing.
//
You’re a scarred, tall, slender monster among Aaliyah’s beautiful friends. A fearsome, bruised kind of woman, made up of violence and murder, forced to have civil conversation with normal, unsuspecting people.
You feel awkward and clumsy. Nothing about you is right. Aaliyah’s trying to somehow make it better, but there is only so much a person can do. She sneers at her friends and rolls her eyes at the bad attempts of her male friends at flirting and she tugs on your arm and steers you away, as if trying to protect you of something, and when you put your drink in her hand, she looks surprised.
You guess a servant never supposed to hand his glass to the mistress. But you’re no servant and you have no masters and if she has any problem with holding your drink while you undress, fast and nimble, she doesn't say anything.
You look around you as Aaliyah make’s a comment, laughing with delight at your version of a bathing suit.
You’re like the villain in some children’s story, crawled its way up to the castle. You’re the ruthless warrior, clawed its way to power with fire and steel. You’re like the evil character in every movie, fast, dodging the hero’s bullets. You’re something that doesn’t belong in this people’s presence. Climbed to the top on a pile of corpses left in a hot, stinking desert.
You look at Aaliyah and her eyes are shinning when she smiles up at you and maybe you are a monster, but next to her you don’t feel like one.
//
You spend so much of your life telling half-truths, you find out you can lie like it’s nobody’s business. And frankly, it’s not entirely a lie, what you tell the kind, stern doctor. It might not be the whole truth, but it’s far from being a blatant, ugly made up story, meant for diversion.
“I already reported it,” you say in a whisper and you forget there are people listening to this conversation, outside this room. You forget you’re no longer Cruz but not entirely Zara, and you give in to something you later tell yourself was just an act but at the moment feels truer than the last couple of months. Rough, painful months.
“I’m trying to make friends,” you give a small, helpless shrug. “I’m trying to start a new life. I’m really, really trying”.
You hate yourself a little more because this is far from being a lie. This is too close to the bone. This is not something you should be confessing to a total stranger in a stranger’s house, miles and miles away from the place you once used to call your home.
The kind man gives you a pitiful nod. He promises to keep your secret.
//
The house is huge and pretty. Large wrought-iron gates block the road, backed by men wearing suits for extra privacy. There are stone pillars, a huge pool, a private beach. The house doesn’t comfort you. It’s dark and it looks like it was built to overpower everyone around. It stands in a spectacular location, with long runs of glass.
“Maybe then this thing will leave me alone,” says the Oil Princess and you’re caught off guard. You think you hear something she doesn’t say out loud, but still is shouted, screamed, conveyed in the air between the two of you.
This thing.
This thig being what? You don’t ask, but you don’t think you need to. She’s a prisoner in a golden palace. She’s nothing more than a means to an end. She’s not human, not in her family’s eyes. She’s something to be ordered around, to be offered, to be traded. Something, when the day comes, to be passed down to make babies. Raise children. Keep her husband company. Make sure the legacy lives on and the – then what?
She says Ehsan’s name in contempt. She says he’s kind, a good man. But you’ve been told more times than you can count about good men that turned out to be just like everybody else.
You hope for the Sun-Kissed Princess her fiancé is not that kind of man. You hope he turns to be everything she wants him to be. The beautiful prince on a noble steed, with piles of gold and a mind set on making his wife the happiest woman on earth.
You know the chances are slim, and you’re not someone to put much faith in hope. You’re not a dreamer and not a naïve little girl. You’ve seen the world and tasted it. You’ve been beaten down by it. Let down. Chewed down. Still, you think. If someone deserves your hope, it’s Aaliyah Amrohi.
“Stay away from Malika and Nashwa,” she says in a grave tone and there is this secret again, like she’s saying less than she means. Like she means more than she’s willing to say out loud.
You watch her, carefully. You watch her face, the curve of her nose, her plump lips. You watch the light in her dark eyes, and the way she keeps her wits about her. You watch her speak and you watch her when she doesn’t and you wonder if there is something you can do to save her, which is a dangerous path for a spy.
This is what you are, you remind yourself when your heart gives a frightened lurch. A spy. You’ve not come here to make friends. You haven’t met her on accident. There is something you need to learn. To extract. Something to take away. There is a dark, mean purpose to you hanging out next to her. You're not there to be spoiled and hugged. Just like always - you're there to end a life.
You want to reach out and tuck the flying strand of hair behind her ear, but you don’t dare to touch her.
You’re afraid that if you do – you’ll burn.
iii
The view on the beach is amazing. A necklace of distant island, the lights hugging the bays, a yacht in the distance. The ocean water is clear and blue and you’ve got a feeling someone is watching you.
You know exactly who that is.
Aaliyah laces her fingers through yours, and tugs you forward. She’s smiling, young and happy, dressed in a small bathing suit you try your best not to glance at. She points at something you can’t see, suggests you two go for a swim. You watch her with a slight smile.
It’s your job, but when she lets go of your hand, fingers lingering a little longer pressed to the skin of your palm, the loss of touch is a tragedy.
//
It’s bad enough that so much skin is showing, you don’t think you can ever get used to Aaliyah’s spontaneous touching.
She holds your hand when you go into the ocean, and she touches your shoulders when you go back out. She’s pressing against your knee, hands on your lower thigh, breasts in a wet bathing suit that leaves very little to the imagination, resting snuggly against your burning skin.
She’s hot and her skin is warm and her bra is cold and wet and she shakes her hair out and you laughs. Something is steering inside you and you’re too much of a coward to even think about it.
"For making the boys crazy." She says, but her eyes are far away. When she looks at you, her stare is too intense and when she gathers her things, you notice she doesn't check any of the topless, tanned, pretty guys around her. Instead, her eyes stay glued to your skin and you think you know what it means, but you don't dare to dream.
//
You can hardly believe it’s happening to you again. Another drink. Another idiot. Another bad decision you should have never made.
You feel half alive when you wake up and then like you’re about to die when Bobby sticks something in your throbbing right thigh and then like you want to hide and never resurface when Tucker gives you an honest, hard look and says “He didn’t get nowhere”.
You don’t remember anything, but you know your underwear is gone and so his honest eyes mean less than nothing. You stare, harder than ever, and you don’t say anything. Tucker lets out a small breath.
“Marine,” he says it like a promise. Like a reminder. Like an oath. “I wouldn’t bullshit you on this”.
You don’t know why, but you believe him.
You feel dirty for the rest of the day.
//
Your breath rasps in your throat, oxygen sharpens all the edges. There’s nothing you will do forever, you know that, but you still feel like a Marine first. Not a woman. Not a friend. Not someone with a name and a history, but a soldier. A damn good one at that.
You’re heading for the War Memorial but halfway you throw yourself down on the grass before you reach it, rolling onto your back. Small dots swim in the amniotic blue; rods and cones, black stars in your head. Beneath you, grass strains upwards. For the first time in a long time, outside of Aaliyah’s reach and her intoxicating presence, you feel alive. Slick with sweat, hot and almost happy.
It seems like the happiness clogs your brain and you strain to keep your head cool. You find Aaliyah’s number on your phone and dial it before you have time to think about your actions. When she answers, she speaks quietly, without undue fervor. She’s somewhere in the south, she says. Not on a beach, but in a mansion and she misses the sound of the waves and the smell of the trees and you.
“Aaliyah,” you say her name like a warning. Quietly. Emotions must be avoided. You’re supposed to represent the average citizen, and be the elite soldier. You know you’re neither.
It gives you a wry sort of satisfaction, the enthusiasm in which Aaliyah is answering your mundane, day to day questions. The way she just plays with your secretive, stupid avoidance.
“Where are you?”
You watch the black-shirted youths, obvious dope pushers, fences and petty thieves. At any moment you expects to see her among them. You think it would be a pleasant sort of shock.
“Just… hanging”.
“Come hang with me, then”.
You pause. What kind of a lie would be acceptable?, you wonder. “I have school”.
Aaliyah laughs her care-free laugh. As if everything has a simple answer. A quick solution. “Take your laptop with you. I will not interrupt your studies”.
“I’ll think about it”.
“I miss you. Do you miss me?”
You pause. “I’ll think about it,” you say and she laughs.
//
You lay in bed, arms at your sides, feet together. The weak light from the street lamps comes in stripes through the blinds, falls in bars on the walls, broken by the shadow of the spider plants, curved fingers which do not hold or reach for anything.
The window is open a little at the bottom, the wooden slat covering the three holes in the sash of the storm window is lifted, cold air sifts through.
You opened it before you went to bed, needing air. Now you lay with your eyes open. In the kitchen below you, someone is moving. You note the movements, pushing the sound back.
You pretend you can see up through the dark ceiling, through the joists and layers of plaster and the worn linoleum, blue squares, which you think some slovenly landlady should have replaced a long time ago. You pretend you can see up through the rafters and the patched and leaking roof to the air, the sky, the place where there is nothing between you and pitch black nothing.
The stars in their envelopes of bright gas burn on. Space no longer frightens you. You know that unlike this house and unlike this earth, unlike the woman with the dark eyes and the bright stare, its not going to ruin you.
//
You feel dirty until you’re holding a familiar heavy weapon and move into a familiar, heavy position, and pull the trigger without hesitating and without thinking and without holding your breath. Just like you’ve been taught. Just like you’ve done more times than you can count.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Joe is not impressed, but then again, she’s hardly impressed with anything. You changed your mind about her. You hope she doesn’t have kids. If she does, you imagine her to be a stern, horrible mother. Better than the one you had, for sure, but that isn’t saying much.
Boys or girls, you hope she has neither.
“Saving your life.” You shoot back with equal flatness. You’re not in the mood.
Once you were all softness and laughter. You don't remember that, but you imagine you were, as a child. There must have been days when your older brother smiled at you, when you were running through parks, but that version, if it indeed ever existed, died a long time ago. You're glad your mother is dead and can't see the murderous mess you have become.
//
You find yourself in a car, Joe a quiet presence by your side. You don't remember how you got here; the last thing you remember was law enforcement driving up to the house.
You stare out the window and you want to jump. You want to disappear. You want to cease existing.
In the midst of it all, one thing never leaves your mind.
Dark eyes, a cheeky smile, the smell of sea salt on smooth, fragranced skin. Hair the colour of a dark sunset. A glinting, peaceful look on a smooth, beautiful face.
“What do I tell her?" You say and when Joe stares, you clarify. "Aaliyah. It’s been three days”.
“I don’t know”.
It’s not a good answer. You let your head fall back and you let yourself stay that way for a long time. You don't know how long. You watch the view outside the window change, and the hangar comes into view.
The whole way home, you keep quiet.
//
It’s good to be home.
Everyone’s on edge and nobody’s talking. Bobby disappears inside her bedroom, angry and quiet. Two cups and Randy stay in the garage, metal clinking, voices raising in friendly argument while they work on their truck. Tucker takes his shirt off and strays into his bedroom. You can hear him while he trains. Angry puffs of air leaving his huge, muscular body when he pushes himself further, further, further into unbearable pain.
You flop down on the sofa, groaning with relief. You’re sore and your skin is raw. Tex has a huge bowl of cereal and when he sits next to you, you flip off his comment. It’s good natured and easy. Those men around you, that angry woman, is more of a family than you had ever had.
They’re mad and insane and angry and tired. They’re silly and funny and weary and sad. They’re soldiers without uniforms, they’re a team of friends who are not forced to hang out together, but choose it anyway.
You look at Tex, quietly munching on his cereal.
It’s good to be home.
//
You’re having a bad dream. In the dream, you are lost and you’ve never met Aaliyah, even though you still feel her tight embrace around your shoulders.
In the dream you’re hurrying through unfamiliar streets looking for her. The streets are deserted, the windows dark; there’s snow on the ground and no leaves on the hedges, the sky overhead would be full of stars if you could only look up. You don’t. You can’t. The sky and the stars mean nothing to you if you’re not able to share them with her and in your dream – she’s a ghost. Far away and fading.
You would call to her, scream her name into the wind, but you know Aaliyah will not be able to answer, even if she could hear you.
You turn over, force yourself awake. You look around the room, the looming TV, the spider plants, the stripes of light through the blinds, making sure you are here. Tex is still sitting on the sofa, your legs in his lap. He don't seem to mind. He watches something on the screen. An old movie from couple of years back. It's an action film and whenever the main character does something heroic, something extraordinary, Tex lets out a quiet snort.
You let the dream fade while your heart quiets. The dream is an old one, an old familiar. You began having it after your mother passes away. At that time, you would wake crying convulsively, and nobody would be there to comfort you.
During your time on the force, you shut them out, both your mother and the dream, as well as you could, but they come back anyway, using the forms that will most torment you.
You will go on having the dream. Nothing ever finishes.
//
Your phone is blowing with messages. You want to answer all of them, explain everything, but the idea of talking is exhausting and so you don’t. The idea of hearing her voice on the other side of the line gives you goosebumps. Makes your heart race. You want to talk to her and you never want to see her again and you want to wrap your arms around her and squeeze her tight and you’re sad and angry and confused. You’re sick of being confused. Just once in your life you want clarity.
The NFL will have to wait.
You take a deep breath and hoist your aching body up.
“Fuck”.
//
“You hate me?”
You didn’t expect that as a greeting and you can’t hold the idiot smile that spreads on your face. It surprises you, just how much you missed this. How much you missed her.
“Why would I hate you?” You ask with genuine curiosity.
She’s explaining something and you’re having trouble remembering what is it exactly she’s talking about. It takes a long moment to realise she’s referring to the club and you know you should tell her something, something Zara would say in this situation, but you don't really know how to do it. Not right now. Not with her voice steady in your ear.
So you do what Cruz does. You don’t say anything.
“FaceTime me”.
“Eh…” you survey the room. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. Enough for someone to maybe get a vague idea where you are. Maybe even notice this is not how a dorm room should look like.
Only it kind of is. Detached and clean and dark. A room fit for a student. For someone with normal life. Friends and worries that don’t include terrorists and missions on US soil and oil princesses to talk to and angry women with dark, perfect complexions to humour.
Your room is a twin bed and some gear you managed to salvage. It’s a tall wardrobe, a fluffy rug, a duffle bag you just threw on the bed.
“Eh, no. I look like hell”.
“That’s not possible. FaceTime me, please”.
You don’t really have a good excuse to why not to do exactly that and your heart does the weird thing it does whenever Aaliyah’s close. So you agree, somewhat reluctantly.
“Give me two minutes”.
//
She is radiant, illuminated by the sun. Laying on the sand, hair loose, mouth slightly open, eyes searching your face on her small iPhone screen. When you greet her, her expression changes. A happy, full blown smile spreads gently on her lips.
“Still in the Hamptons?” You make a stab at playful, but it comes out too curious.
She’s in no mood for your questions. You have to down play everything with your heart beating a mad drum against the inside of your chest.
Her smile makes you want to reach out and touch her. Something about her uncovered shoulders and the thin golden chain makes her look, more than ever, like a princess from some distant fairytale. A woman not entirely human. Someone you could never measure up to.
A flash you can't entertain go through your mind. You wonder what her smiling lips would taste like if you ever had the courage of leaning in and kissing them. What she'd feel like around your fingers. You imagine her to be slick and hot. If you ever had the courage, you think you'd go on your knees for her, worship her like you've been taught to only worship the Virgin Mary. Like royalty. Like a true queen.
When she’s showing you her suit you feel like a teenager again and there is nothing you can say or do to claw your way out of this one.
You’re gone and when she suggests you come to her and you make a pitiful attempt at brushing her off, you get a vague feeling you both know there isn’t much to it. There isn’t much to you.
You want to see her again, have her hands on your shoulder, her smile in your face, and there is very little to hold you off.
You think the pain of having her near you is less than the pain of not being able to see her at all.
“No, I can’t”.
“You can.” Is her answer and all you can do is get on your knees and praise her like a goddess. She's beautiful. Strikingly beautiful.
You know you will land soon; already your heart is pounding. But you aim again for it, that nonexistent spot where you long to be. Mid-air. Next to her.
iv
Feeling older, but somehow calmer, you get into your rented car and drive up to where Aaliyah is waiting.
Several hours later, and a few confusing phone calls, you’re in a bad frame of mind. You want to see Aaliyah, but you’re also aware of the eyes your team and Joe has on you. It makes you feel a little dirty. Like you’re betraying Aaliyah somehow.
You know you do, but you also know that was the deal.
//
"Do i just... go inside?"
The house is as beautiful and you remembered, but not as beautiful as the Queen of The Desert. It has a fence and a barrier and it gazes upon stormy waters. It’s gloomy in the dark, rainy weather, the air full of explosions and multicoloured drops.
The balled frowning man looks like he's about to shoot you point blank if you so much as move a finger. He motions towards the door anyway, eyes narrowed.
"Please."
You open the door and there's a flash of dark hair, a shout of happiness that makes your fake name and then Aaliyah's in your arms, lips pressed hotly to your cheek and she squeals with excitement.
Your heart leaps into your throat. She is so, so beautiful. Like lightning in a bottle. Her skin is so fine it seems to reflect the light. She’s tilting her head, her sharp eyes staring, making you feel like you’re the only person in the world. Like every thing you might say is smart and true and important.
And you knew that a long time ago, but tonight you can't tear your eyes off of her and you can feel your heart hammering in your chest. The Queen of The Desert is bathed in moonlight, thriving in the horrible weather.
The air has left your lungs the moment you saw her and you can't do anything else but stare, and stare and stare, at all the beauty offered to you.
//
This, if you’re being completely honest with yourself and everybody else around you, is as uncomfortable as you can get. Easily the worst experience you had in a while, and that says something.
“You’ve never been to a spa?” marvels the Queen of Beauty and you’re not annoyed at her but you don’t like being touched by strangers.
“I’m weird, about people.” You clarify and when she asks about facials and Hammams and other stuff you never really heard of, it’s hard for you to keep a straight face.
You’re not laughing anymore when she talks about marriage and husbands, and you’re not laughing when she gives you a long, meaningful look you cannot hope to read and says that everything’s going to be okay. You’re not laughing when she suggests she should be the one looking for someone to enter your life in a form of a man.
“You need a dreamer. But dreamers don’t have money. It’s okay. I find you a dreamer with money”.
You look at her, fighting tears, and you think you already found one.
You don’t say it out loud.
//
“Why did you let him do that to you?” asks the Queen of The Desert in a soft voice and her eyes are liquid and she’s shaking with emotions.
Anger rises in your chest. You don’t like the accusation. You don’t like what her words mean. It’s been so long since someone said it so blatantly, with such purpose, with zero fear of hurting your feelings, that for a moment – you’re shocked into silence. You’re dumbfounded. You’re not sure how to react.
“I didn’t let him do anything”.
“Men don’t start with beatings,” says the Oil Queen in the same careful, forceful voice, as if a daughter of an all-powerful terrorist, a man who makes money on both sides of the cold, unspoken war, a man who has a vice grip on politics around the world and has the means to dictate it should he choose to, can know what the backhand of a man feels like.
“They start with shoves and slaps”.
You wonder, silently, if this woman was ever beaten. If she ever had someone lay a hand on her. She speaks like someone who experienced something other than kindness and you discover your anger is not at her, but at whoever made her talk this way. Whoever made her realise what some men, the worst of them, are made of.
Jackass, you think unkindly while you watch Aaliyah’s eyes come alive with anger. Asshole. Fraud.
Usually, you say such things while doing chores, while cleaning after somebody else, while dragging a sagging bodies into a shelter. Right now you mean yourself. Idiot.
How can someone like her, someone so protected and radiant and untouchable, speak as if she knows what a slap against her face feels like. Like she knows the struggle of waking up sore, knowing she could never hide the bruise under makeup, no matter how hard she tries.
Your hands are shaking.
“It was the last beating,” you say in a flat tone, making sure to hold her gaze. “I made sure of that”.
“How did you make sure?”
You imagine you hear a slight hopeful tone in her question. As if she’s not asking for the sake of talking, but with a purpose. You wonder if Ehsan, for all his spoken kindness, all his gentle smiling and wonderful surprises and stern concern, is the kind of man to raise a hand at a woman like Aaliyah.
You swallow hard. You speak in a rushed, strangled tone. You don’t want to talk about it, but you also can’t stay silent.
“I hit him in the face with an iron skillet until he didn’t have one anymore, and then I ran for my fucking life”.
Tears glisten in Aaliyah’s eyes, welling up. Her voice quivers, then shakes. Then breaks.
“And then you came to me?”
You let a tiny smile tug on one corner of your lip. Your brow twitches. “And then I came to you”.
You exhale, nodding.
”And then I came to you”
There are no words between you, just a sad, painful familiarity. You don’t want her kindness. You don’t want her guilt. You don’t want her extended hand and her offer of a friendship and you don’t want to be the idiot to fall for a mark, but falling you do and being the idiot you are, you take her hand and shake it lightly.
Aaliyah takes your face in her hands and gently pushes, willing you to look at her. But you're avoiding her eyes, so she waits. Patiently. Until hesitant look meets her's. Then she smiles, leans in, pressing a soft smile to your skin, kissing your forehead with all the tenderness she can offer.
The both of you wear next to nothing. And still, you let your head fall against her heart. Closing your eyes, you breathe in deeply as Aaliyah wraps her arms around you. It fells like a promise and like home. It feels a lot like love.
There's a silent ring in your ears. You wish you could cry.
//
“I want to be,” she had said and then, more forcefully. “I will be. I want to be your friend. And I am the one who stands up for you”.
You watched. Only watched.
Then there were tears again. Her voice was breaking. She fought back tears with such dignity and courage it was hard not to feel your heart go out to her. She was barefoot, wrapped in a towel, hair down and wet. She was so achingly beautiful in the in-house steam, you thought she might kiss you.
She didn’t.
“Will you be my friend?” She asked instead.
You didn’t take a breath and didn’t pause and didn’t make it into something it wasn’t. You answered earnestly, and without letting doubts coat your words.
"Yeah, I will”.
You thought this was it but it wasn’t. You’re going back to it, now. It pains you to think of it. Her hair wet, her eyes liquid. That mad, purposeful look in her eyes.
“But no more lies," she said it like she knew something was going on. like she was pleading you to let her in on your secret. Like she couldn't bare finding it out any other way. Though, of course, you couldn’t. and you can’t.
"How can I stand for you if you don’t tell me the truth?”
And you looked her in the eyes and you forced a quivering smile and you said: “No more lies”.
You promised. You promised. How could you be so dumb? How could you let a pair of black eyes work you up like that? How could you sit there, naked and vulnerable, and make sure that once you leave, you’ll be breaking a beautiful, hurt, stitched up heart?
How could you?
What the fuck are you doing?
//
You want to reach through the bathroom door, comfort her. You think about knocking, but decide against it.
What if she opened the door? What if you confessed everything? Your love and your lies and your miserable, unworthy life? What if you said that to her face, no wall between? You’d have to take action. Even though you mean to. You want to. But you know that if you do, you’d find yourself in midair, hurtled into a future you could not yet imagine, the mission left on the solid earth behind you, feet on the ground where Joe always claimed they were, a dark hummock, your teammates faces pale ovals beside you.
You cannot. Yet you kneel; tears come to your eyes. You hold on, and you know you need to held on more tightly. It’s your own eventual death you cradles here, on the floor.
You’re lost, you’re kidnapped, Joe and her warnings and her wanting and her government gone from you, kept hostage. Who has done this? How did you allow it to happen?
//
Aaliyah has her head on your shoulder, a glass of wine balanced on her bended knee. The movie on the screen is dark and wonderful, and her proximity is intoxicating. You’re not drunk on the wine, but on her smell. On her closeness. On her warmth.
The man in the movie is talking, and you surprise yourself by understanding exactly what he means.
The remaining matter, lacking the energy to balance its own gravitational field, collapses into itself, forming a black hole. The pointer locate a space in the sky where there is nothing. No one can see a black hole; but because of their effects on objects around them, they are known to exist.
You glance down to the girl pressed into your side. Her eyes are wide, her lips are parted. She’s too fascinated with what’s going on the screen to shift, or glance up at you, or move.
The man in the movie keeps talking.
No light, for instance, shines through them. Nobody quite understands black holes, but they are thought to be stars collapsed to a density so great that no light can escape from them. They suck energy in, instead of giving it out. If you fell into a black hole, you would disappear forever; though to anyone watching, you would appear to have been frozen for eternity on the black hole’s event horizon. The piece of blackness expands, perfectly round, lightless, until it fills the centre of the dome. A man in a silver suit falls towards it, reaches it, stops.
You think you know how it feels. When you look into Aaliyah’s eyes, you think you can understand the potential human, hanging spread-eagled against the blackness. The optical illusion. That real cosmic disaster.
What if the earth, without knowing it, were approaching a black hole? The voice explains that such a thing is not really very likely, and so, simply because it isn’t a real possibility, there is nothing to fear.
You respectfully disagree. Kissing Aaliyah isn't very likely, and yet you fear it. You dread it with every fiber in your traitorous, stupid body.
Aaliyah is shivering, staring up at the ceiling, as if she can see through to the sky, which isn’t really a sky but a complicated machine with tiny lights projected by slides and push-buttons.
“What a comforting thought,” she says in a distant voice, pressing harder into you. There's a softness in her voice that makes your skin warm. You slides your arms around her waist, enjoying the safeness, the softness, you find in the heartbeat echoing in her body as if it was your own.
“People do not become stars of any kind when they die,” you say, only to say something. “Comets do not really cause plagues, or whatever. Really, there isn’t anybody in the sky. Really, there is no round fucking spheres of darkness, no fucking black sun, no damn frozen silver man”.
“You don’t believe in God?" The Princess of Darkness is staring at you with confusion and disbelief, but a lack of judgement you deeply appreciate. "Allah isn’t a presence in your life?”
Your lips twitch. You cock one eyebrow. You push against her, very lightly.
“Is he in yours?” You say it with a soft smile. Aaliyah laughs her wonderful, loud laugh. Later you remember that she spoke of many things, but she never answered.
//
You know this isn't the right thing to say, and yet you can't seem to stop yourself. You don't plan the words. They just slip out.
"Cancel the wedding and see what happens".
Aaliyah's face split into something like terror. Something like doom. You want to bite your tongue off. Fuck, Cruz. What the fuck is wrong with you? You never knew when to keep your stupid mouth shut.
She smiles but her smile isn't happy. There are tears in her beautiful dark eyes and despair written all over her lustrous, royal face. Not for the first time, you wonder what exactly you walked yourself into. Not for the first time, you feel like a bagger, in the presence of an ancient, important, all-powerful queen.
Aaliyah shakes her head gently. "If I cancel the wedding, I'd be killed".
And there is truth in her words, in her eyes, on her glistening, curvy lips. You know the truth of her words. You've seen it before.
She isn't free to walk away. She isn't free to do what she wants. Unlike a queen, the shackles around her wrists and ankles are not made of soft gold but of cold, biting, bitter iron. She cannot pretend and she cannot ignore them. She is painfully, totally, unabashedly trapped. A prisoner of circumstances. Of choices she never made.
//
Aaliyah is on the window sill, her arms resting on her knee and the side of her head pressed against the cold window. You can only see half of her face but it makes your hands ache to reach out. Your fingers twitch to caress. You want to trace the line of her neck, of her hypnotising features, of her lips. You want to kiss her. Every part of her. Even though, of course, you would never let yourself do that. Kissing Aaliyah would be like tying the knot on the rope around your own throat. Like pulling a trigger. Like admitting defeat.
You get up, still mesmerised by your new friend, your naked feet softly hitting the ground, making Aaliyah to turn her head in your direction.
"What?" she says in beautiful, musical Arabic. "What's the matter?"
And suddenly you're falling. you're falling into deep deep night eyes, faster and faster, myriads of shining stars brushing your skin and you itch to catch them and hold them close against your heart, but they're moving too fast. You're falling head first into oblivion and you don't care, because this is the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to you.
Your feet are bringing you closer to your doom with each step and you can't bring yourself to mind because with every inches won, you sees clearer. And you're willingly give all of yourself away if it was just to be granted a whole minute with Her in this universe.
Aaliyah's eyes are shining, you notices. The stars reflecting in them diffuse too much light. You see it now. You sees the tears and you're breathing again, reconnected with reality, with why you got up in the first place. Your lips spread into an hesitant smile and you lets the tips of your fingers softly brush Aaliyah's bare arm. It is gentle, whispers of touch, and the Oil Princess looks away, lost again in her swirling, nagging thoughts.
You kiss the side of her head, wordlessly, as you gaze at the same sky as The Queen of Tears. You let your hand slides down her back, rubbing comforting circles and Aaliyah lets out a soft sigh before slightly leaning into you. You kiss her hair again, letting her find in you whatever strength she needs. You're there and though there are about one billion questions pressing at your lips, you stays quiet.
You knows that whispers need silence to be heard.
//
"Notebook!" she says, eyes agleam. "You seen the ‘Notebook'?"
You're trying not to laugh. The taste of popcorn is salty in your mouth, soggy and coated with butter. You don't feel like laughing. You feel like crying. You've been over this more than once, more than ten times, and still – she has trouble understanding.
"I – eh. I haven't seen anything." You say apologetically, waving your hand around, trying to make yourself small.
Aaliyah is watching you carefully, lips pressed. There is curiosity in her stare. There is no judgement. No laughter. She doesn't poke fun at your poor knowledge of all things popular. She doesn't know much about your life, you haven't been exactly forthcoming with her, but she senses something neither one of you is comfortable talking about. Not yet.
"Okay," she says in the way she says everything else. Offhandedly. With biting confidence that makes you wonder about homes and families and dream, very briefly, of a possibility that would never come.
"Now you'll cry. A good cry. Love-exists-in-a-world kind of cry," she settles back into the pillows, smiling, though her voice isn't happy. She scoops chocolate cereal into her mouth, whips a trail of cocoa stained milk from her bottom lip.
Whenever Aaliyah's talking about love, you get a feeling as if something is lodged between your ribs other than your heart. Something painful and huge, poking at you from the inside.
You nod, because you don't know what to say. There isn't much to say anyway.
//
"Don't marry him," you say when the movie is over and Aaliyah has her pretty head pressed to a pillow and you lay next to her, at eye level.
What you mean is don't take you away from m".
"It's not my choice," answers the Princess, and your voice is caught inside your throat. You manage only a whisper.
"It's absolutely your choice".
What you mean is choose me.
"For me to choose love would be the death of me." Aaliyah looks up, her hair flying a little around her, eyes lost somewhere far away again and you have to fight the urge to kiss the away her pain.
When you don't move, Aaliyah is suddenly crying, those hot, sad, painful tears. They are rolling like fat diamonds down her cheeks, trailing soft, sun-kissed skin, falling into black, thick, silky hair.
It's not a choice. Not a choice at all. Not half a thought. Barely a decision. You reach out and sweep a thumb under her eye. Gently, as if not to spook her away. You hold her face in your palm, skin burning.
The tear drop is hot on the tip of your aching finger. It hurts more than any bruise you still cary.
And that's when it hits You. Her mother and her brothers are not people to depend on, not people to run to when something is wrong, and you find herself suddenly wondering how her life looked like before you met her, and who the girl in your arms will have once you're gone. And you're aching to take the pain you can see in her, in this girl you're holding close to your chest.
Her walls have tumbled down and you bear yourself at this act of trust.
//
It could, you know, go either way. It could, you know, blossom into something else, something different. It could, if you let it, spiral out of control because honestly, you're doing a shit job and this spying thing.
Joe can say whatever she wants. She can whisper abusive encouragements into your ear, can squeeze you hard and suck you dry and flung every insult your way - you're still not sure how you ended up here. How you became this person. How you exchange honest work for fucking shady calculations, a name you don't recognise, too tight clothes and the brush of your hair against your back.
//
You cling to sleep a little longer, though a happy shriek jerks you awake. Someone is creaming. A happy scream. A scream of joy.
You’re too hot in this strange bed, but you’re comfortable and the dream is sticking to the outside of your brain, like drops of water on a foggy window. You try to fall back asleep but the world is hollow and the screaming is loud and there is no chance for you to keep floating in this dark, happy place a little longer.
You grind your teeth, growl with fury, and force yourself awake. Gradually, gradually, you remember where you are and who you’re with and you realise the happy screams are coming from downstairs, and they belong to a human you were never supposed to meet.
You’ve always had difficulty getting up in the mornings. In that prehistoric era during which you lived with Edgar, you were able to depend on him to wake you up. He liked being on time for whatever stupid job he was on that week. He also liked getting up. He’d take a brisk shower, scrubbing himself with some kind of medieval flagellation instrument, and emerge pink as a rubber duck to ferret in the kitchen for cereal and milk, rubbing his head with a towel, making forays into the bedroom to prod at you and pull the covers off your legs. The army was no different, and you couldn't sleep much anyway, with the bombs going off around you and the shrieks of the locals in your ears.
But now, alone in the huge house, you have to force yourself into the air, sticking your feet out one at a time from beneath the blankets, a lungfish ousted from its stagnant puddle. The house, with little furniture, nothing radiating back to you from the bare walls, absorbs what little energy you have.
You can smell fresh coffee as you go to the living-room door to contemplate the small piles of food the hired cook made sure of making before the mistress of the house woke up. You go blindly down the stairs, groggy with sleep.
Aaliyah is there, at the window. She looks radiant. Even first thing in the morning, she looks like a woman sprung out from the pages of a magazine.
“Mallorca! Mallorca!” She's screaming with fresh delight and she’s jumping up and down and you’re sleepy and warm and happy and the look of her, first thing in the morning, is more than you can handle, so you hang your head and you smile and you don’t need to act shy. You can barely look her in the eye. You can barely stand close to her.
But then she’s pressing in close and grabbing your head with new delight and then she’s kissing you and whatever feeling you had before is knocked out of you like it never existed.
She’s kissing you, slowly and deliberately. Almost shyly. She’s kissing you with tender fervor. With the tips of her lips. A smack, then a graze, then a soft press. Her mouth is hot and she tastes like toothpaste and chocolate and coffee. Her smell is all up in your nostrils and her strong hands are on your shoulders and she’s so damn close you couldn’t resist her if you tried.
You don’t try.
You search her eyes for a catch, for a trick, for something that might tell you none of this is real, it’s all in your head. It wouldn’t be the first time, you know. But as you search, all you see is a pair of black eyes staring back at you and goddamit.
She isn’t kissing you as if it was a test. She isn’t asking for something you cannot give. She searches gently, asking softly, and you don’t try to deny her anything. You simply cannot do that.
There’s a pause. A moment.
Then you surge forward and knock your mouth into hers. This is what you’ve been dreaming of. This is what you’ve been dreading and if there are security men watching around the house, if there are cameras placed all over the sunny kitchen, you don’t care because you can’t not touch her.
You lean down and capture her lips with your. Aaliyah moans into the kiss and you feel your heartbeat quickening, a familiar ache stirring between your legs. Her hands are stroking your waist with feather light touches, with sick maddness. It's driving you crazy.
You lean in, move your lips to her jaw, to her neck, gracing your tongue along the way towards her ear. She shivers and moans. It baffles you that you're able to make an actual woman react like this, like she weakens at your touch. Aaliyah actually growls.
It's a deep rumble in her throat and your hips thrust forward, as if by instinct. You kiss her with everything you have and she kisses you back and the shock of her pushing into you is giving you pause.
“Wait…”
And she jumps backwards, smiling and laughing and awkward, hand jumping into her messy hair. Hair she had perfectly arranged before your stupid fucking hands flew into it, made a mess of it like you made a mess of the whole situation and
Fuck, Cruz. Fuck! How can you be so stupid? How can you be so reckless? How can you be so perfectly, so helplessly in love with a woman who doesn’t even know your real name? a woman you were sent to ruin?
Aaliyah's eyes are dark and glazed, pupils blown, a nervous sort of smile tugging on the corners of her lips. You can tell the throb between your legs matches in her body and
Fuck, Cruz. Fuck!
”Woo! What was that?”
You stare at her, lips swollen, the taste of her still on your tongue. “I don’t know”.
v.
It’s difficult to act like nothing has happened but you try it anyway, fighting the painful urge to grab her head and kiss her again. You put on some clothes and you make a point of keeping some distant between you and Aaliyah, and you get into the Range Rover and you try to talk like you did before you knew what her mouth tastes like.
You do it for your sake, but also for hers.
When she talks, you listen and when she stays quiet you stare out the window and you make sure to keep your distance.
There are clothes, in the rented-out shop. The prices looking like a long, scary barcode and you can’t help the little “Holy shit” that escapes you.
Aaliyah is her perfect cheeky self. "No no no," she says without force. "Don't look at the price".
She drinks champagne and she smiles big wide smiles and she laughs her wonderful, happy laugh and she tries on dresses and suits and different shoes, making the room look like some crazy runway show has exploded inside it. She drinks too much champagne and opens another bottle and she’s acting all cute and you wonder, can she not remembers this morning? Does it not makes her feel as dizzy and as silly and as wobbly as you feel right now?. You wonder if the kiss even meant something, or was it just a happy accident and you make up your mind to never mention it again.
You'd take this sort of accidents over any calculated kiss any day.
//
You make a point of laughing loud. Loud. Louder. You make a point of acting the fool, trying every dress she flings at you. You make a point of keeping your hands to yourself and not flinching at her touch when she zips you up, and you make a stupid, childish point of avoiding eye contact.
You don’t like this version of yourself but there is little you can do. Your other option is jumping into her lap and kissing her senseless. Which, you figure, you cannot do. Not here, in this closed off store on one of the fanciest streets in New York. Not anywhere else, because there are cameras and there are people and there is a protective detail and your team, listening to every word you’re saying. Every breath you’re taking. Every sound you’re making.
So you laugh and you undress and you play at dress-up with her. You squeeze yourself into tight dresses, into huge suits, into small blouses you know for a fact you'd never wear.
Aaliyah's acting like everything is perfectly normal, spinning in a chair, drinking another glass of sweet, bubbly wine. You can’t take your eyes off of her and you can’t let yourself get any closer and you take a deep breath and do the same.
//
“Did you think about this morning?”
She catches you off guard and you turn to look at her, sure you misheard. She’s sitting in a chair, chin lowered, eyes raised. She’s been drinking a lot of wine and you can tell she isn’t sober, even though she isn’t exactly drunk. Maybe drunk enough to gather the necessary bravery for this type of question. You're not sure. You don't have this sort of gut in you.
“I don’t know what to think about this morning.” You answer truthfully.
She lets out a breathy laugh. “Me neither”. Then: “But… it’s all I think about”.
You look at her, mouth slightly open, chest heaving.
She furrows her eyebrows. Her eyes are made of stardust and daggers. Burning hot. You don't move and don't speak. You know this isn't what she meant to say, you can see it written all over her face, so you let her gather the rest of her brave, drunken self, and you try not to hyperventilate.
“Have you thought about it?”
There's no point in denying it. Not now. Not with her looking at you like she's about to jump your bones, eyes dark and determined and endless.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it”.
She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Her hand taps against the arm of her chair. If she keeps looking at you like that, you think there is danger in what you will do. If she keeps looking at you like that, you think there is danger in how far you’re willing to go. You both dread it and anticipate it in equal measure.
“Come here,” she whispers and that’s all the encouragement you need. It is as if she has all the power and you’re a mindless doll, made to obey.
you swallow hard, trying to focus your attention away from the concentration on Aaliyah’s face, the nervous press of her hands. Aaliyah, in her too-attractive dress that doesn’t belong to her yet, with her dark hair loose and a fueled with desire smile. It hits you right between your legs.
Aaliyah’s looking at you, confident and charming, a teasing glance in her eyes. She isn’t smiling, and her hands are in her own space, and you should be handed a medal for having kept it all together this long.
You drop the dress that costs more than the house you used to live in and you make a slow, deliberate way to her. You can hardly breathe, hardly think, hardly move. Yet you make it, heart racing.
Your hands are at Aaliyah’s hair before you can reel them back, straightening the flow of it, sliding lightly inside, gripping her scalp. You can feel Aaliyah’s next breath, her body tensing under your palms, even as you let one brave, stupid, reckless hand, brush her hair off her face, dragging lightly across her scalp.
This is a bad idea, you think as Aaliyah’s eyes darken, as your own skip from her mouth to the wall in front of you. A very bad idea, as Aaliyah’s tongue darts out and wets your skin, just below your belly button.
The alert, hungry expression of someone who half-expects you to run away is gone. The alert, hungry expression of someone who can’t resist leaning in, just a little, to see what you will do, is present now.
You’re not conscious of breathing, of your hands on the crown of Aaliyah’s head, of Aaliyah’s hands on your hips. You’re not conscious of anything until you close you eyes and fall into her.
You push her legs together and trap her between your knees. Her hands slide up your waist, map your spine, your fingers sink into her thick hair. She leans in, breath hot on your skin, and starts trailing kisses down your belly. Her lips are burning hot. Icy cold. Everything in between and a mad, hungry feeling settles low in your gut. Pure desire pulls between your legs, flooding your tiny black underwear. Aaliyah slide one hand up, pushes into your chest, and you’re about to say something stupid, do something reckless, when a knock comes on the door and you barely manage to jump away.
The door slams open, and it’s like a crowbar between you two. You jump back, already leaning towards the farthest corner of the room, jerking harder against the wardrobe edge; hissing, certain there will be a bruise by morning from crashing into Aaliyah with such force.
Aaliyah, dress half-messy, one side of her hair almost obscene in its rumpled state, brushes a hand against her lips and makes a sound like a cough, deep inside her throat.
You wipe the lipstick that is smeared across your stomach, the memory of Aaliyah’s mouth on you filling you with embarrassment, the incongruity of it sends a fresh spike of warmth through your body.
You can only imagine how guilty the pair of you look to Hilary, the store employee. She makes a small attempt at smiling and then puts the new clothes on a nearby sofa and slowly, tactfully, leaves.
“This…” you choke out when the employee walks out, wiping your mouth with a nervous, shaking hand, pulling the dress you still can’t quite figure out, over your head. “Is not the place to figure this out”.
“No, it’s not”.
You catch Aaliyah’s eyes and there is an absence of fear inside them. Pure want. Mad desire. Your hands are gripping your own sleeves, your eyes searching Aaliyah’s. She tilts her head, presses in. You can see the gears moving inside her pretty head and you’re already dizzy with the contact, even before it’s actually there.
There’s a fierce, glazed joy in Aaliyah’s blue eyes. The mark of a woman making a choice she stands firmly behind.
“But I do know a place," she continues with newfound urgency. "If you want me to take you there”.
“Take me.” You blurt out before she has time to finish her sentence and something cracks inside you. You know this is a bad idea. Yet, you cannot help yourself.
//
The car ride is pure torture. You need to touch her and so you do, secretly, tenderly, eyes staring through the windshield, making sure Assif isn’t all too aware of what’s going on behind him, on the back seat. It’s a stupid kind of risk, and yet, you don’t deny yourself the pleasure.
Her dress drags up, you plant your hand on the inside of her thigh and you don’t look at her when she starts to shiver.
You want her to feel you. You want her to shake. If there is something you've learned about this woman, sitting so rigidly beside you, is that you know she wouldn’t have it any other way.
//
Your control snaps in two the moment she turns her burning blue eyes to you, and you cross the burrowed room and you take her face between your hands and you kiss her like a drowning woman. You kiss her with everything you’ve got and she kisses you back, making small noises into your mouth.
You can’t not hold her. Can’t not touch her. The time for self-control is over, now that the door is locked and there’s no one peeping through unseen cameras and secret holes. Even if there were, you don't think you'd be able to control yourself now.
It's like walking for the first time, like taking a mouthful of fresh air after drowning in cold, dark water. Kissing Aaliyah is a riot of colour and taste and scent, of pleasure and vivid images and insanely sweet fear.
When she sighs into your mouth, your heart makes a violent jerk inside your aching chest.
Aaliyah's lips are soft, hopeful under your own, her hands cupping your face so fiercely you’re scared she’ll leave a mark. She leans in harder, until she's touching you not as something that might break, but with genuine intent. Her thumb slides across your cheek, fingers cradling behind your ear, mouth searching, searching, searching, crazy and minty and everything you ever wanted.
You tip her head back, pulling her until she’s flush against your chest, as you make a breathless sound like a confession into her mouth. You're almost embarrassed with how good holding her in your arms feel. Almost.
Aaliyah's dark gaze, and the crooked arc of her smile, and the warmth of her skin beneath your fingers, is making you feel like you drank too much wine. She makes a sound that hits right between your legs and you’re sure there isn’t any type of alcohol that could possibly make you this stupid. This reckless. This wet. Aliyah sounds like she's been fighting down the need to do this all day, and it grabs what’s left of your resolve and breaks it apart.
You find yourself sliding rapidly out of control, pushing into the kiss with a ferocity that takes you by surprise. You've never been the kind of woman to push with such force into someone, not even while kissing them. You’ve never wanted to kiss anyone with such uncontrollable hunger. You think you might be going crazy at the idea of not having Aaliyah close enough. You think, with a pang of regret and sadness, that you've been doing things wrong this entire time.
Aaliyah's hands grasp at your dress so hard, you wonder how you're going to make it out of this fancy hotel room with everything intact, and if not, if you'll be able to explain the situation to the men posted outside. If you're being honest with yourself, you don't really care. You don't really care about anything except the way The Queen of The Desert is kissing you, angling her head up for more contact, trying to make up for your height differences, grabbing and pulling and moaning, tongue a hot flick against your own, hands roaming wildly through every inch they can reach .
Aaliyah's body arches when she grips your dress in her fists, yanking, using the fabric to pull you closer. The build of it, the stacking of hour after hour of pretending, of acting cool, of not rising suspicion, is like drawing a great breath after holding it for too long. Like coming home, even though you never had one. Like finally admitting to yourself some giant, enormous truth you avoided looking at too closely for about thirty years.
This, you think distantly while pushing your tongue inside a hot, wanting mouth. This is what it’s like to actually want someone and be wanted in return..
Aaliyah makes a low sound in her chest, pushing against you while her hands roam up and down your spine, sending you stumbling back, nearly knocking the both of you down. You laugh into her neck, and Aaliyah laughs with you, groaning, as one of your hands slip behind her neck and yank her closer.
>p>The frenzy is building, that wild inability to stop touching, stop exploring, for even a moment. You're in the middle of the room, Aaliyah's dress on the floor, yours torn apart by eager hands, and your world has never been so bright. So hot. So mad.
You close your eyes and Aaliyah is moaning into your mouth, gasping hot and sharp, saying your made up name in a hopeful, pleading way as if she’s forgotten every other word ever existed.
Her hand is in your hair and she presses against your slowly thrusting hips. The Queen of The Desert is making strangled little whimpers as she guides your own hand down from her chest, as you push her underwear to the side, as your fingers circle the front of her, pressing into soaked, slick, smooth skin.
The Oil Princess makes a noise, too raw to be an actual laugh, as you're guiding her with trembling, inexperienced hands, into slow friction. Her hips twitch against your palm, jerking when you presses your face into the juncture of her shoulder and neck and then your knees buckle when she’s babbling in fast, frantic Arabic.
For a brief moment you want to correct her. Ask her to say your real name, but the moment passes and you let yourself enjoy her hitching breath. You are Zara to her, and so, the desperation is for you. The pleading and crying and urging – all for you.
You feel like you couldn’t be close enough. Then Aaliyah rips the rest of your clothes off and then you take her underwear off and then she has two fingers inside you and you’ve never felt so alive, so full, so human before. You can, in fact, get closer. It baffles you. It leaves you breathless.
If all it took was a desert queen, an oil princess, you think you would have looked for her a long time ago. Miserable and doomed as this whole charade is.
Aaliyah's underwear slide off easy enough. You recall with dizzy delight she couldn’t figure out the mechanics of the buttons on yours before ripping it apart like a savage.
Aaliyah breaks the kiss only long enough to take a ragged breath before she’s kissing you again, coaxing your lips apart and licking into your mouth, her body surging forward to pin you against the wall. Her hands fall from your shoulders to the small of your back, tracing patterns against your bare skin. She says something you don’t quite catch and pulls you in until you’re pressed against her, each bump of her hips against your crotch hitting you like a bolt of lightning.
“Don’t worry,” she says into your mouth and you’re too impatient so your kiss her, hungry and happy. “I’ll buy you five more”.
“I don’t care about the fucking dress.” You tell her and you really don’t. All you care about is having her in your arms. Kissing her. Feasting on her.
You get lost in kissing her, nibbling and sucking at her bottom lip until she’s whimpering quietly into your mouth again, and she retaliates with stroking her tongue against yours until you go weak-kneed and have to cling onto her in order to stay upright.
Aaliyah squirms underneath you as you move your mouth down to her neck, kissing and biting at her skin while your hands slip under her back to get to the clasp of her bra, undoing it and sliding the straps down her arms before throwing it aside. Her hands tangle in your hair, fingers tightening when you pause your descent to her chest to suck and nip at her collarbone until you’re sure there’ll be a bruise tomorrow – something you know you wouldn't be able to explain.
Even gloriously naked, she’s still Aaliyah. Your Aaliyah, and so you laugh and you kiss and when it’s over, you cry.
//
The Queen of The Desert leans over and kisses you deeply. You let out a low groan, feeling her hand wrap around your head, tugging you closer to her. Her mouth is hot. Her tongue persisting. It's a good, strange sort of feeling, having her entire body pressed so closely to you, and you don't notice that you drag your nails down her back until she groans, then grinds against you. You're a little worried the guards posted outside the room can hear your moan. Aaliyah laughs into your mouth when she notices your terror struck face.
"Quiet," pants The Queen of The Desert into your mouth.
She’s kissing you with the sort of unfiltered want you’ve never felt before. You have slept with people before, but it was all business. There was never excitement. Never fear. And suddenly you feel your chest swell with happiness and you're so confused by the feeling, you almost stop. Almost.
You tug on her head gently and watch her hair flop back messily onto her shoulders. You move your thumbs along the lace of her bra and reach for the clasp. It clicks open. A miracle waiting to happen.
Aaliyah is kissing you so hard, you're sure she'll leave a bruise. her loud, laboured breath is coming in short outbursts. You smile up at her and flop her over, plant your knees on either side of her body, hovering over her.
"Beautiful." You tell her in Arabic and her breath catches. “You’re so beautiful”.
You're worried it was the wrong thing to say and that Aaliyah might get up and leave the room, but instead she leans up, mouth open, and kisses you softly. Her tongue strokes languidly against yours before she sucks on your bottom lip and then tugs on it slightly with her teeth. It was, after all, the right thing to say.
"May I?" You hook your fingers through the sides of her underwear and pull it a little. It snaps back against her skin. She makes a delighted laugh.
"Please."
And that's all the encouragement you need. You kiss the inside of her thighs and feel them quiver every time you get closer to her centre. She tangles her fingers in your hair, and you finally slide the tiny piece of fabric down her legs. She makes dirty, loud sound when your mouth completely envelops her, and you lick the entire length of her before moving away.
"No!" She whines and you show her a crooked, mischievous smile.
"Oh," you make a jab at innocent but it comes out darker than intended. "I thought you - "
Aaliyah's eyes are narrowed, her pupils blown wide. You hear her breath hitch above you. She tries to moan your name but all that comes out is “You're so cruel!” followed by a dirty, loud “Fuck!” and because you never heard her swear in English before, you push your head further until the obscenities, both in English and in Arabic, come flowing in such a high pitched note, they are barely audible.
"Cruel?" You ask her when she no longer is trembling, your lips still wet and taste like her.
Aaliyah is spread on the bed beneath you, beautifully naked, arms stretched to the sides. Her skin shines, beaded with sweat. Her hair is spread around her like a black halo. She gives you a look that makes you shudder and when she has you trapped under her, hands on your burning skin, lips at your throbbing throat, you don't remember her answer, even though she gave you one.
//
It should be too awkward to even consider anything, but then Aaliyah’s fingers are tracing your throat and her skin is so warm and you can't stop yourself from pressing your mouth to the column of her throat and graze your teeth down her skin. Her fingers still for a moment and it takes you a minute to realise that she has stopped breathing. You chuckle into her neck and she shudders.
And then her hands are in your hair once again, pulling you to her, and her lips are warm and taste like chocolate and champagne and you, and you feel her moan into your mouth and you’re not laughing. Your hands quickly push into her skin and you're pressing into her spine, tracing her shoulder blades. Her thigh is between your legs and your pulse is hammering low in your belly.
It dark and Aaliyah’s a shadow above you, haloed by a beautiful moonshine. Your heart stutters and then she's kissing hotly down your neck, nipping your collarbone. You moan into her shoulder when she shifts her thigh, and you can feel her smirking into your chest. Her fingers are tracing your hip, tongue darting out to taste the salt on your skin. You think you might pass out.
This, you think in a desperate sort of urgency, is no time for games.
You twist your fingers through her hair and pull gently, catching her moan in your mouth. You try to roll over but she just laughs and gives you a sardonic look. You buck your hips and smile when she loses balance.
Aaliyah’s eyes darken and you wonder if she just took that as a challenge because suddenly her tongue is against your teeth and her hand is trailing down your belly until her fingers reach wet, hot warmth and you let out a loud, embarrassing moan.
“Good?” she says it with the sort of triumph she has always possesses she surprises you. Whenever she does something you didn’t expect her to do. Whenever she presents you with a new dress, a holiday offer, a huge bowl of sweets from across the see. She’s looking at you now, eyes focused, pupils blown wide, mouth slightly open in a breathless gasp.
You whimper into her mouth and she sucks your tongue, bites your lip, pulls back and whispers in beautiful, erotic Arabic something about beauty and something about magic and something about never-ending nights. You understand most of what she says.
You’re already too far gone to read too much into it, even if you know logically this isn’t exactly the type of connection you’re encouraged to have. Each swipe of her tongue and each curl of her fingers send sparks of white hot pleasure coursing through you, building you higher and higher until you can barely breathe.
You come, for the third time, laughing so hard you think you might pass out, because this is a weird mixture of things happening, and Aaliyah is laughing too, so joyfully you feel it in your own chest.
“You know I don’t speak Arabic fluently, right?” You wheeze out while she’s busy kissing your neck, smearing whatever is left of you on her lips all over your skin.
Aaliyah’s kissing you slowly, then, removing her hand from between your legs and tugging the blanket tighter around you.
"So," she looks at you very seriously. "I teach you?" And you're laughing, with your hands trailing down her sides, and you're laughing as you slide her panties down her legs, and you're still laughing as she comes again, quietly, lovely, above you.
//
“This has no future.” You tell her and you know it hurts, but you need her to understand.
“It has the future we make it!” She insists, tears pulling in her beautiful eyes and you hate yourself more when you force your eyes to stay cold, when you force your face not to twitch, when you refuse to drop your bag and curl inside her arms.
You feel like a monster when you say: “Then it has no future.” and you walk out.
//
You don’t know what hurts more. Admitting to Joe you’re in love with a woman you can never have, or telling her you can’t keep doing this. One might lead to a lecture. The other will pull you forever outside of Aaliyah’s reach and you’re not ready to lose her, even though you know - lose her you must.
This is what it was coming to right from the very beginning. This is where it must end.
“All you are to her is the last attempt at feeling free.” Says Joe in her cold, cruel, usual way.
“You making contact and eliminating that target – that betrayal will break her.” Says Joe and her eyes are cold and her mouth is set and she doesn’t care about anything but her mission and her country and a murder of a man you only know as the father of the most extraordinary woman you’ve ever met.
What makes it worse is that you know this. You know this. Your attempt at fair has failed, just like it always has. This shouldn't come as a surprise, and yet - it stings worse than anything you have ever experienced.
"Give the other guy a gun, I’ll be the first one through the door. Just give me a fair fight”.
You know it’s the last chance of a childish, feverish dream. You know this isn’t what you came here to do and you know you will never get this. Joe is looking at you with something like pity in her eyes. Something like sadness. Something like regret.
//
“What did I do wrong?”
You drop on your knees as soon as you see her. She stands there, illuminated by the moonlight, crying, hurt. It pains you more than it should, knowing she was sitting there, musing it over the last two hours. You need her to understand it isn’t her fault.
“You didn’t do anything wrong”.
“But you’re acting like I did something wrong”.
You’re angry. Impatient. More reckless than you’ve ever been. You want to drag her to you and kiss her. You want to shove at her shoulders and push her away. You want to strip her down and fuck her through the mattress until she’s imprinted on your fingertips. Until she understands.
You do nothing of this sort. Instead, you kneel. Tears come to your eyes. You shouldn’t have left and the dark, betrayed stare is digging holes in your skin. You’re nervous now, glancing up at the curtained windows. You wants to shout, a huge raucous shout that will startle the darkness, bring the cold crab eyes in these stone houses hurrying to their windows; something that will unlock your throat and drive away Joe and her lackey and make the goddess standing before you understand.
You want to let go of her and you want to kiss this mouth that exists only now. You don’t want to stop and you want to twist her, allow her to come to you. You kneel before her, like a devoted peasant in front of her high queen. Like a zealous monk, before a saint.
You groan. For a moment you almost scream. Only you don’t. You can’t. Aaliyah will never understand. Worse – she’ll know what a fraud you are. Not her friend, but a spy. Someone to fear and hate. You're too much of a coward and a liar to let her hate you before due time. You're not ready to lose her. Not here. Not yet. Not like this.
“You’re getting married!” You say and this one is too close to the truth. You didn’t really mean to say it like that.
You expect pain. You're used to pain. Pain means nothing to you.
You’re still wearing your leather jacket. She wears nothing but a bathrobe with the name of the hotel on the right, above her breast. The robe, for some reason, fill you with tenderness and lust. You almost feel like yourself again.
“Cancel the wedding and see what happens.” You say in a reckless, stupid moment.
Aaliyah is looking at you as if you lost your mind. Maybe you have.
“If I cancel the wedding, I’d be killed”.
Your attempt was pitiful. You expect that much. And you have no other option but to accept the invitation she’s extending, to let her bend down, to silently agree to a touch you crave more than anything else.
“Stay,” says Aaliyah and though there is nobody around, she whispers.
You hold on to her, spread open the robe. You can hardly see, hardly hear, hardly feel anything with her glorious, shapely body bare before you.
The room is a blur around you, your vision a shaft of light illuminating tigers, off-red tigers in a purplish jungle. Under the tigers there are flowered sheets.
Wordlessly, you undress her, lifting her arms, bending her elbows as if you’re undressing a doll or a child. And while you do that, Aaliyah stands still. She doesn’t speak. The tears she shed before leave traces on her cheeks. Her eyes are liquid.
You hate yourself for making her cry.
You ease the robe open, press your cheek against her stomach while you kneel. Aaliyah steps out, obedient. There’s cold air, a draft somewhere in the room. Her skin contracts. Gently, you pull her onto the bed. You sink into a hollow, petals flow over her. You’re on top, both of you impelled now by fear, the soft light moving across the sky, the feet walking inexorably towards them, the sound of a door which has not yet opened, boots on the stairs.
Something lurches in your chest. She’s so wet and hot against your fingers, you don’t dare to tease her before sinking two fingers inside. Through the haze of lust it dawns on your that you probably shouldn’t want this quite this much. You feel like nothing exists outside of Aaliyah and her rocking hips and her tightening around you and her silent, teary cry.
You’re lying on two pillows. Aaliyah’s head rests on your belly. The world is again the world, and you can see detail. The luminous blur has faded. Nevertheless, you’re happy. And even though this is wrong and you don’t necessarily see a happy result, you can’t help it.
You drag your fingers through thick hair. Aaliyah sighs softly.
“Don’t leave me again.” She says.
Although you want to drown her in thousand promises, you stay silent.
“I think it’s worse," She whispers into your hair a little later, choking and sad. "Feeling love just once. Now I know what I’m missing. Better not feel it”.
You think she might be right.
//
You don’t sleep much. After a restless few hours you get up with first light and you go through the motions without paying too much attention to your surroundings or your company or the sour faces of your teammates when they watch you plug small headphones inside your ears and spend eight hours looking at bloody, violent, scary deaths of people you’ve never met.
Another jet touches another asphalt at another airport. Some flights are late, but you don’t really care. You feel numb. You feel stupid. You feel like a lifeless, emotionless robot heading towards its own destruction.
You pass through immigration without any difficulty, hair covered in a fashionable scarf, and by the time you reach baggage claim, your feelings are flooding back into your body.
You walk through customs unchallenged, plunge into the sea of people. There are large man and stalls with food and electronic devices and clothes. You join the check-in desk and smile politely, making sure your crisp headscarf is covering just enough of your hair. You take your suitcase and swap your ticket and go through security and when you immerge on the other side, slightly baffled and a little winded, the man you know as Assif is waiting for you, stern and angry and sweating.
You only care about him because he’s about to take you to Aaliyah, and you can’t help the little tug of excitement and fear that’s mixing inside your chest.
This is it, you tell yourself with no small amount of self-reproach. This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to. Choose her or choose the mission. Whatever path you choose, know there are consequences you aren’t ready yet to deal with.
For some reason, the thought it a calming one. You tip your head back and watch as Palma De Mallorca flushes before your eyes.
//
Ehsan’s back hand hurts, but no more than any other back hand you ever received and you can tell he’s all bite and no bark.
From up close, he’s a tiny man with big hopes and empty threats and insecurities he doesn’t know how to solve. He’s no different than any other angry asshole you ever met, and so he doesn’t scare you.
You could almost pity him. Almost.
You can’t help one last stab at his sad, beaten down ego. “I bet she spends it with her legs close anyway”.
Ehsan’s face is pure shock. Complete anger. ”Where did you learn to speak like that to men? Who fucking raised you? Who the fuck raised you to speak like that?”
You let the corner of your mouth twitch. Because you know men like him, because you were raised with this sort of bullies, because there isn’t anything you can say to make him understand, you give him one last overall look, pouring as much disdain as you can manage into it, and then you turn around and leave.
It might not be a smart thing to do, but you do it anyway. Fuck him and fuck men like him, you think while you follow the bald gorilla to the women’s wing. You crawled one last time, and it wasn’t for him. Wasn’t for men like him. Ehsan could never make you crawl again. Not again.
//
Aaliyah is beautiful, radiating and royal in her shinning, expensive dress. Her mother is impatient and unkind and when you glance at Aaliyah’s hopeful face, your heart breaks for her.
“In two days all I will know from love is what I can imagine,” she says while leaning on the stone parapet, eyes distant and empty. “And what I can remember. It’s not fair to you to say, but it’s true. And maybe you’ll remember me, some day”.
There's nothing to say. No hope you can offer. You give her a sad, broken smile. “You’re gonna be pretty hard to forget”.
//
You’re not in. You’re somewhere between your body, which is lying sedately almost on the bed, under the covers, wearing a simple t-shirt and boxer briefs, and the ceiling with its strange patterns the likes you’ve never seen.
You can see yourself there, in the thickening of the air, the kind you only get in Spain. What comes when you boil an egg.
You’re a body without a soul. A heartless creature. You relieve every moment with vivid colours, over and over. You’re at the door once more, leaning gingerly to the side. You’re looking at Aaliyah’s face, you laugh awkwardly in her presence, you -
You jerk back when she leans forward, just a little, and you watch in your mind’s eye, over and over and over, like a sick carousel of torture, her eyes empty, her face slacking, her smile dropping. You watch her reaction, turn it in your head, twist it like a blade lodged deep inside your guts. You want to stop, but you dare not.
Sadness and anger and betrayal flow inside your chest, choking the air out of your lungs. Aaliyah’s smile disappears. She takes a step back. You close the door behind you, again and again and again, and you let yourself watch the scene unfold.
You could have kissed her then and there. You could have taken her in your arms and you could have held her but you didn’t and so when you play the scene, you lose her. Over and over again. You lose her.
The pain is almost unbearable.
Distantly, like tiny thunder, you can hear people walking across the floor outside your room, speaking in loud voices, shrieking with delight. It’s late and you should be sleeping, but you can’t stop thinking about the mission and about Joe’s warning and about Aaliyah, just across the hall, in her own big warm room, waiting for her judgement day. A prisoner waiting to be hanged. No longer The Queen of The Desert, but a small, tiny girl, being traded for power and money. For human delights. For pleasures she has no part in.
You listen to the night, the black vacuum of the ocean, the air being sucked with a soft, barely audible whistle. You lie on the strange bed and you imagine what it would be like to get up and pad across the floor, and sneak into Aaliyah’s room and tell her everything.
You stare, silently. You could, if you were willing, be pulled up and into the air like smoke. You can’t move your fingers. You think about you your hands, lying at your sides, like rubber, useless gloves. You think about forcing bones and flesh down into those shapes of hands, one finger at a time, like dough. You think that if they never touch Aaliyah’s skin again, you don’t want to use them. Not now, when you know what she feels like under your fingertips, smooth and wet and wonderful. You get the distant feeling that you no longer know how to touch anything else. Only her. Only her.
There’s a small knock. A step. You move your eyed down. You can see the door opening, the darkness of the hall behind, Aaliyah’s face bobbing like a pale balloon in the strange, watered-down darkness.
She comes into the room, breaking the invisible thread you habitually stretched across the threshold to keep her out, and you are unable to turn your head, unable to tell her not to come in, unable to do anything but smile weakly up at her and wish and wish and wish you won’t have to do the thing you came here to do.
“I don’t wanna do anything,” you say in a rush before she can take another step, and it’s a lie you promised to never tell, but you can’t have her in here and you can’t have her close and you know that if she takes another step you’re going to break the promise you gave yourself just the other night, before boarding a plane and swearing to do your fucking job.
“It’s too confusing”.
Aaliyah’s face is pure hurt. You’re not sure if you have anything to do with that, but it breaks your heart regardless. The expression is all wrong. She shouldn’t look so broken. So sad. So fucking scared.
“I don’t want to get married." She tells you in a rushed whisper.
You’re cut off guard and you sit upright. You stare at her, eyebrows furrowed. “Tell him”.
“I did!” She says with forced desperation. Silver moonlight falls on her skin, smoothing her features. She’s wearing some sort of a nightgown, red in the dark room. Her eyes never leave yours. "I did, and it doesn’t matter. I don’t have a say. No one cares what I want”.
You look at her. She stands in front of you like a proud queen, like a convict before the gallows.
“What do you want?”
You want to take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake, throw her against the wall, tell her to pack her shit and leave before it’s too late. You want to tell her you’re there to kill her father. You want to tell her she has options. But of course, you can’t do any of that. Instead, you sit there, dripping with desire, looming at her dumbly.
Aaliyah’s eyes are poison, a dangerous drug, and you feel your body sagging at your spine, the flesh drooping like warm taffy on a sucker stick. You press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, work it behind your clenched teeth, words you will never be able to say out loud staining your mouth with dark, bitter agony.
You want to run to her, kneel in front of her like a devoted idiot, howl in your own voice about something you know you could never voice. You feel, not for the first time, that you had told this woman too many things and now, you can never leave her. You don’t want to leave her.
You must.
The woman you used to think of as the Queen of The Desert climbs into your bed and pulls you into her. She’s warmer than you remembered. Softer. She smells like vanilla and alcohol, like warm sun and cold ice. She smells like fire. Like something you can never have, and everything you can never afford.
“I’ll never have this again,” she says quietly and you feel the vibration of her heart under your ear. A steady, fast boom-boom-boom that sets your own treacherous, pumping muscle into a frantic pace.
“This is the last time”.
You want to ask her why am I here? You want to look inside her blue, mesmerizing stare and ask Why did you really invite me to your wedding? Was it really because you needed to settle the future of whatever you want to call this? Only you know that can’t be right and so you think, You didn’t really invite me to have one last chance, go one last time, share one last kiss.
The thought proves too hard so you move away from her, even though it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever sone.
“I… I can’t”.
“I just want to feel loved," says the broken girl besides you and she isn’t a queen any longer. She isn’t something royal to marvel at. Not a woman of pure and complete power. She’s a lost child. A sad orphan. A casualty of circumstances.
"I just want to feel loved. One last time”.
You have a feeling as if you're the one leading her to her doom. The thought of her wanting your touch enough to risk coming to your room the night before her wedding, is making it all worse.
"You don’t want that from me,” you manage through greeted teeth. “You don’t know me”.
“I know you,” she says with a sad smile.
“You don’t”.
She settles beside you, arranging herself around you like you’ve been doing this your whole lives. She fits perfectly by your side, all soft curves and round muscles everywhere you’re hard and lean.
“You’re kind,” she tells you softly and you wish you could believe it.
“I’m not”.
“You’re honest,” she says in the same tender voice, fingers stroking your cheek lightly. This one hurts more than it should.
You sound bitter when you say: “I’m the furthest thing from honest”.
Her soft smile grows softer yet. You can tell she won’t believe the truth even if you told her. Not now. This isn’t the night for truths.
As a reaction to your childish stubbornness, it seems like Aaliyah has regained something of her former self.
“Oh, yeah?” She says with something like amusement. Something like annoyance. “Then what are you?”
You turn your head. Staring into her eyes is painful. The hardest thing you’ve ever done in your entire, miserable fucking life. The blue is fading and slight, yet electric. Ice and crystals.
The only truth you can offer her is broken and tiny. Something insignificant. Something small.
“Not what you think”.
Aaliyah is nothing if not stubborn. She stares down at you and there are secrets floating in her eyes.
“Are you my friend?”
A surge of pain twists your guts. “Don’t ask me that”.
“Are you?”
You can't stand the look in her eyes, so you turn away. Later, you'd regret this decision. Lates you’d think you should have looked at her whenever you had the time. Later you’d recall this moment of doom and think that you should never have stopped looking at her.
“I don’t know what the fuck I am”.
Aaliyah slides her hand up your jaw, cups your cheek, makes sure you’re looking at her hovering above you in the moonlight.
“But you know you want this. You know that,” and then, in a feverish whisper. “Tell me that you don’t”.
Aaliyah is pushing down and in, her hands skidding along your cheek as her mouth covers yours. Her expression is not quite right.
This isn’t your first kiss. Not the tentative, nervous brush of playing pretend. Not the drunken exploration of playing a game, either. This isn’t a fireball of desire. Isn’t a hurried, scared kiss shared in a forbidden, half-public place. It is, instead, a sort of a welcome kiss. A needy, hopeful, waited years for this kiss, even though it has only been a couple of days since the last time you had your mouths attached/
It is the kind of kiss you never dreamed you’d get, though some tried their best. Only Aaliyah can kiss you like this, with gentle hands and eager body and the pressing flex of grip. Only Aaliyah can kiss you with breathless hunger and endless patience and practiced, soft, pushing lips.
You can’t quite stop yourself. She is soft under your hands, her nightgown sliding between your fingers, her hips pushing into yours with a small, wanting groan. You’re dimly aware of your own heartbeat in your ears, of Aaliyah beneath the flat of your hand when your fingers land against her breastbone, pushing down and to the side, sliding over one picking nipple you still can recall the taste of.
Nobody ever kissed you quite like this. You’re sure nobody ever kissed Aaliyah quite the same. You’re sure, with your hands finding their own rhythm and Aaliyah moving gently beneath your own body, that nobody has ever tipped her head back quite so, brushed their tongue on her bottom lip quite like you do, no one ever was stroking the arc of her cheekbone, while messing with her ear.
You’re pulling at her with desperation, with strong, wanting hands and Aaliyah is guiding you back. There’s her lips again and her smell in your nose and you’re intoxicated with the taste of her and her close proximity.
If You had known it was the last time, you think you would have made a feast out of it. Instead, you sprang to your feet and left her sitting in your bed, small and distant and hurt. You didn't give her a second glance. You thought you had more time.
//
You think of her and remember the sweet smell of her skin, the strength of her hands, the shape of her frown in the dim light. You remember the warmth of her, pressed up close to you at night. You know there had been something good between you, even if all the words that are left to say are hard.
//
This is it. You’ve spent several months avoiding this. you would rather be doing anything else at all.
You have a brief vision of yourself on a raft, floating down the Amazon with malarial steam rising around you. A crocodile, raises its head from the murky green water, stinking like a dead snake, hissing, lunging for you. You’re on your way to discover something, or perhaps you’ve already discovered it. A lost civilisation. In your back pocket is a creased and water-stained map, which will be the only clue if the poisoned arrows get you.
The pressure, the unavoidable vortex has you at last and you’re being swept along, out of control, towards some chasm you can dimly perceive. You try not to panic, though you can feel your eyes jerking, making the room flicker like an old film.
You concentrate, refuse to gulp. You uncross your legs and cross them again, left over right. There’s nothing to drink but tea, there isn’t even a beer, and you know for absolute goddamn certain that this is deliberate. You’ve done this. Your past self-thought this would unsettle you, and she was right. She was right.
You hold the phone up, press your thumb to her name, and slide to the right. Your heart gives a sickening lurch when the line breaks. There isn’t time to think of what you wanted to say. Her voice fills your ears like a booming thunder – warm and soft and intoxicating. Not hateful at all. Not angry.
You can’t help the sob that escapes your lips. You weep with pain and fear, with shame and anger, with helplessness and disappointment. Above all, you weep with relief.
She says your name. Your real name. And you can hardly breathe.
+i.
When she shows up again, you don’t expect it. It’s been hours and you were beginning to think she wasn’t coming back.
She opens the door to your hotel room abruptly, not caring about being quiet, and you jump in your chair. When you turn around, your first instinct is to worry. It’s not like her to make noise, to draw attention.
The woman you knew as Zara and now think of only as Cruz looks wild where she’s standing in the middle of the room, chest rising and falling fast. Her hair is disheveled, her clothes wrinkled, her eyes dark and wide. It looks like she’s been walking in the middle of a storm.
She’s standing there with her wild look. She’s so beautiful and you are so angry. You’re so angry with her, you can feel your fists clench. You’re angry because she left you. She walked out. She walked away. She left, not caring, and you want to scream and shout, really lash out and make her understand that she can’t just do this. Can’t just walk away as if this means less then nothing.
Stupid, useless spy!
But she is so beautiful and so hurt. So lost. It makes you breathless.
And you can’t bring yourself to scream at her because you remember that all she’s ever known are harsh, bitter words. Cold commands from fake smiles. Praises in a tone so condescending that she has forgotten that they are not praises at all, only invisible ropes to hold her down. You realise no one has been angry with her because of love. And you remember her stories. All she knew her entire life are people screaming at her, demanding question. Demanding her time. Demanding her undivided attention, her body. Her soul. You cannot be one of them. You refuse to take part in her abuse.
So instead you school your features into something that isn’t anger and you look up and you say with as much restraint as you can: ”What did I do wrong?”
Her eyes darken. Her jaw is set. ”You didn’t do anything wrong”.
It makes you get up from your chair and step towards her. You’re shaking – shaking because it boils and burns and consumes you, just how much you love this liar. It’s probably the most important thing you’ve ever felt.
You’re so angry that you snap your mouth shut. You’re so angry that you kiss her.
You don’t think she’ll get the words anyway.
For an unknown reason, the taste of her mouth only fuels your rage. So you kiss her harder, opening and closing your mouth, almost forgetting that your tongue can be used for more than speaking. She reminds you by showing you just how, her initial surprise of being kissed like that wearing off. Maybe she expected anger, maybe she expected you to hit her. You know she didn’t expect this.
You’re moaning into her mouth when she presses herself against you. Her lips connect to your throat, making you eagerly tilt your head to give her access to where she finds you the most physically vulnerable. You have absolutely no qualms about it. If she wants it, it’s hers.
The woman you still think of as Zara sucks and licks, making you squirm and rock your hips against her. You cling to her, grabbing her shoulders and sliding your hands down her shirt, to her back. You can’t help but scratch your nails along her skin because, even though you want her to take you this very moment, you are still so angry with her.
It’s not like you really want to hurt her but if she could just feel for a second the impact her actions have on you, then maybe, just maybe - she’d understand.
There is an answering snarl in your ear before you are hoisted up to wrap both legs around her waist, and then you find yourself staring into dark, dark eyes. The world just stops for a few seconds and you swear you see stars.
Her eyes are burning as she continues to stare at you. You aren’t used to her keeping her eyes on yours for long periods of time. It never happened before. Her stare is intense.
The woman you can’t help but think of as Zara doesn’t look as wild now, but you know this won’t be slow. You don’t want that anyway. There’s no time for slow. Not when her proximity is overwhelming your senses, because going from not having her here at all, to having her all over you is kind of amazing, and you’re still very, very angry.
You tangle your hands in her hair and pull her forward to feel that mouth on yours. Her tongue running over your lip makes you grind faster, searching for more, more, more. When her hand reaches the bathrobe, you sigh, before she opens it up and slowly, so very slowly, runs her delicate, strong fingers through you, stroking you into madness.
She sets a pace that graces all the right spots, slick noises accompanying your huffs and whines, making you feel like a ragdoll. This is no effort at all for her. Holding you up easily and fucking you with determination.
But you can see it when you rest your forehead against hers. The sheer weakness you feel is reflected right back at you and you know she needs this just as much. It forces your rage down to just a simmer and you cover her mouth with yours. The kiss is sloppy, full of rolling tongues and teeth and heavy moans. You have to break it. You have to breathe to let out a yelp when she hits a particular spot that makes you believe there are stars imprinted in your eyes too.
You are so close. You need to concentrate on breathing, just so you simply don’t die. The hollow of her neck tastes salty when you run your tongue over her skin and you just let your open mouth rest there. It earns you a low groan. When you bite down hard, it earns you a whine.
There’s a rhythm to this; your lower back thudding against the chair, you somehow landed in, with your oh gods and fucks singing in tandem, and you’re briefly reminded of dancing.
She trails open-mouthed kisses and little bites down your neck while maintaining the almost vicious pace in and out of you. Every stroke curls and loves and breaks you into submission. You forget to be angry because your release is in her hands and your body is desperately handing itself over to her.
Her fake name becomes an anagram of swearwords and Zaras when your thighs start to quiver around her, the sounds of wetness and her heavy breathing taking you so high that eventually you shatter into her. You’re so grateful for the strength holding you up, so you can fall apart – Writhing and wailing, clutching her to you.
Then, as if a string had been cut, Cruz sinks to her knees before you, hangs her head low and sobs. It’s the kind of tears a woman sheds at a funeral. You watch her silently, arrange your robe around you, take a gulping breath.
”Don’t marry him.” She whispers urgently, wetly. “Don’t marry him.” And you were never one to obey orders, but this one is an order you wildly, desperately, want to obey. You know it’s impossible, and you know who she is and what she came here to do, and so you school your features into something other than hopeless rage, sickening love, and follow her to the floor.