Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

“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.

We used a condom, something I assumed was one of several practical items she would typically keep in her purse. It was smart. In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases . Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS or some other unpleasant alternative.

We lay on our sides afterward, facing each other, heads propped languorously on folded pillows. She reached over and traced my lips with a fingertip.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What did you think, I was going to frown?”

She laughed. Her words, her attitude, it all felt authentic enough. But she was a pro. If she was letting her hair down, I had to assume it was tactical, a means to an end. And I still couldn’t be sure about her motives, about what she might have tried back at the Mandarin Oriental. A shame, to have that knowledge lying on the bed coldly between us, but there it was.

I asked her, “How did you get involved in your work?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes I ask myself the same thing.”

“Tell me.”

“I answered an ad in the newspaper, same as you.”

I waited. There was no sense saying more. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t.

We were quiet again. Then she said, “I was a skinny kid, but when I was fourteen, my body started to develop. Boys, men, started looking at me. I didn’t know why they were looking, exactly, but I liked it. I liked that I had something they wanted. I could tell it gave me a kind of power.”

“You must have driven them crazy,” I said, remembering what it was like to be that age, testosterone-poisoned and single-minded as a heat-seeking missile.

She nodded. “But I wasn’t interested in boys my age. I don’t know why; they just seemed so young. My fantasies were always about older men.”

She pulled herself a little higher on the pillow. “When I was sixteen, a friend of my father’s from the army moved to our city because of a job opportunity. He stayed with us for a couple months while he looked for an apartment and got settled. His name… I’ll call him Dov. He was forty, a war hero, dark and handsome and with the softest, most beautiful eyes. Every time I looked at him I would get a strange feeling inside and have to look away. He was always proper with me, but sometimes I would catch him looking at me the way men did, although it seemed that he was trying not to.

“When I realized he was looking at me that way, it was… exciting. Here was this man , this war hero, handsome and intelligent and so much older and more sophisticated than I was, and still I had this power over him. I started… experimenting with the power. Testing it, in a way, to try to figure out what it was. I would laugh at something he said and hold his eyes a moment too long. Or brush against him when I walked past. I didn’t intend for it to lead anywhere; I didn’t even know that it could lead somewhere with a man like Dov, or where that place might be.

“One day, when he was home and my parents were out, I put on what I thought of as my sexiest outfit-a white bikini top and matching sarong. I knocked on his door. My heart was beating hard, the way it always did when I was near him or even thought of him. I heard him say, ‘Come in,’ so I did. He was sitting at the small desk in his room, and when he saw me he stood up, then flushed and looked away. My heart started beating harder. I told him I was going to walk down to the beach-we lived near the ocean-and asked him if he wanted to go for a swim. He didn’t say anything-he just looked at me for a second, then away again. I realized I could hear his breathing. I was so young at the time, I didn’t even know what that might mean, but it excited me. And I felt awkward because he hadn’t answered me. I didn’t know what to say, so I fanned my face a little and said, ‘It’s so hot in here!’ which it suddenly was. He still didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with the oddest expression-smiling, but almost a little sick, too, as though he was in pain and trying to be brave about it-and I saw that his hands were trembling. It made me nervous that he wasn’t answering me, so, just trying to think of something to say, I said, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to swim,’ and I realized my voice was as shaky as his hands.