She smiled, but the smile didn’t take.
“Are you trying to prove something?” I asked. “Trying to earn someone’s respect by putting your life on the line here?”
“What would you know about that?” she asked. Her tone was a little sharp, and I suspected I was on to something.
I smiled gently. “I fought with the U.S. in Vietnam. Against ‘gooks’ and ‘zipperheads’ and ‘slopes.’ Look at my face, Delilah.”
She did.
“You see my point?” I said. “It took me years to realize why I was willing to do some of the things I did there.”
She nodded, then drained what was left in her glass. “I see. Yes, you would understand, then.”
“Are they worth it, though? They send you out on these missions, at huge risk to you, you bring back the goods, and still they don’t trust you. Why bother?”
“Why bother?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as though trying to see something she had missed in me before. “Have you ever seen an infant with its legs torn off by a bomb? Seen its mother holding it, insane with grief and horror?”
A rhetorical question, for most people. Not for me.
“Yes,” I said, my voice quiet. “I have.”
She paused, looking at me, then said, “Well, the work I do prevents some of these nightmares. When I do my job well, when we disrupt the flow of funds and matériel to the monsters who strap on vests filled with explosives and rat poison and nails, a baby that would have died lives, or a family that would have grieved forever doesn’t have to, or minds that would have been destroyed by trauma remain intact.”
She paused again, then added, “I should quit? Because my superiors who ought to know better don’t trust me? Yes, then I can explain to the bereft and the amputees and the permanently traumatized that I could have done something to save them, but didn’t, because I wasn’t treated sufficiently respectfully at the office.”
She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing.
I looked back, feeling an odd combination of admiration, attraction, and shame. I took a big swallow of the Laphroaig, finishing it. I refreshed her glass, then mine.
“You’re lucky,” I said, after a moment.
She blinked. “What?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples for a moment. “To believe in something the way you do…” I opened my eyes. “Christ, I can’t imagine it.”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “It doesn’t feel lucky.”
“No, I’m sure it doesn’t. I used the wrong word. I should have said ‘fortunate.’ It’s not the same thing.”
I rubbed my temples again. “I’m sorry I said what I said. That you shouldn’t bother. Over the years, I’ve developed the habit of… preempting betrayal. Of thinking that the possibility of betrayal, and defending against it, is paramount. And maybe that’s true for me. But it shouldn’t be true for everyone. It shouldn’t be true for someone like you.”
For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Then she asked, “What are you thinking?”
I waited a second, then said, “That I like the way you use your hands when you talk.” Telling her part of it.
She glanced down at her hands for a second, as though checking to see whether they were doing something right then, and laughed quietly. “I don’t usually do that. You pissed me off.”
“You weren’t only doing it when you were pissed.”
“Oh. Well, I do it when I forget myself.”
“When does that happen?”
“Rarely.”
“You should do it more often.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
“You know why. You have to protect yourself.”
Her expression was so neutral that I knew she had to be consciously controlling it. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you? What do you do?”
“I don’t get close.”
“I told you, I don’t have that luxury.”
I looked at her and said, “I’ve never thought of it as a luxury.”
She looked back. The look was noticeably long. Definitely frank. Possibly inviting.
I got up and sat down next to her on the couch. One of her eyebrows rose a notch and she said, “I thought you just said you don’t get close.” But she was smiling a little, those warm notes of irony and humor in her eyes.
“That’s the problem with making your own rules,” I said. “There’s no one around to straighten you out when you break them.”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to fuck me.”
“I’m not.”
I looked at her for another moment, then leaned slowly forward. She watched me, her eyes focusing on mine, then dropping momentarily to my lips, and moving back to my eyes again.
I paused. Our faces were a few centimeters apart. There was the hint of rare perfume, maybe something she had bottled uniquely for her in expensive cut glass at an exclusive shop in Paris or Milan. The scent was there but you couldn’t quite get ahold of it, like the remnant of a dream upon waking, or an afterimage fading from the retina after an intense flash of light, or the memory of a face you knew and loved a lifetime earlier. Something just real enough to bring you in, to make you want to pull it closer, to get it back before it flickers away again and is irretrievably lost.
I inclined my head further and kissed her. She accepted the kiss but didn’t exactly embrace it, and after a moment I drew back slightly and looked at her.
“Some people might call what you’re doing ‘mixed signals,’ ” she said. She was smiling a little, but her tone was serious enough.
“I have a conflicted nature. All the military shrinks said so.”
“A few minutes ago you were slapping me down, remember?”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t you. It was your alter ego. I’m not interested in her.”
“How do you know you’ll be interested in what’s behind her?”
“I like what I’ve seen so far.”
She looked at me. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I can only be an actress. A poseur.”
“That would be sad if it were true.”
“You’re the one who said it.”
“I was trying to get under your skin.”
“You did.”
“Show me I was wrong.”
“I don’t know that you were.”
I looked at her legs and breasts with mock lasciviousness, then said, “All right, I’ll take the alter ego.”
She laughed, then stopped and looked at me, another long one. She leaned forward and we kissed again.
The kiss was better this time. There was an uncertainty about it, the tentativeness of a cease-fire, the sense of something moving slowly but with a lot of momentum behind it.
She opened her mouth wider and our tongues met. Again the feeling was tentative: an exploration, not a hasty charge; a testing of the waters, not a heedless plunge.
A minute passed, maybe two, and the kiss grew less cautious, more passionate; less deliberate, more a thing unto itself. It waxed and waned as though in obedience to some force that was slipping from our control. I took in all the different aspects of her mouth, each shifting through my consciousness like images illuminated by a strobe light: her tongue; her lips; her teeth; her tongue again; the delicious feel of the whole, this new threshold to so much of whoever she was.
She took my lower lip between her teeth and lips and held it there for a moment, then released it and gradually eased away. We looked at each other. She smiled.
“I like the way you taste,” she said.
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Must be the Laphroaig.”
She made a sound of agreement that was something like a purr. “That’s part of it. The other part is you.”
I smiled at her. “The exotic taste of the Orient?”
She laughed. “Just you.”
We made love on the bed. There was some jocular debate in the midst of the proceedings about who should be on top, debate that we resolved by recourse to each of the alternatives in question, along with several others. Her body was as luscious and beautiful as that glimpse in Belghazi’s suite had promised, and she moved with an unaffected experience and enthusiasm that made me think of the confidence I had first seen in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental.