Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

“His lips moved, but no words came out. Then he reached out and touched one of my cheeks with the back of his fingers. I was surprised and took a quick step away. He pulled his hand back and told me quickly he was sorry. I didn’t know what he meant by that or why I had stepped back; all I knew right then was that I wanted him to touch me, wanted it more than anything, and without another thought I took his hands in mine and said, ‘No, no, it’s okay!’ Then he looked at me with his beautiful, dark eyes, took my face in his hands, and kissed me. It was my first real kiss and I felt like I would faint from the pleasure of it. I could hear myself moaning into his mouth and he was moaning, too. And you know what? When he put his hands on my body, just my hips and my breasts, I came. That was another first for me-I didn’t even know what was happening, I couldn’t breathe, there was this explosion of pleasure and then I was sagging against him and crying. He held me and stroked my hair and told me over and over that he was sorry, and I couldn’t speak so I just kept shaking my head and crying because it was so wonderful, he was so wonderful.”

I smiled, wanting to believe that the story was true, that she was showing me something more of the person behind what she had called the “poseur.” Maybe she was. Even if it was a pseudonym, Dov was an Israeli name. From what I could tell of the timelines, Israel’s Six Day War might have been the conflict in which he had distinguished himself. Her city by the sea? Tel Aviv? Eilat?

Or maybe it was a story she had told so many times and for so many reasons that she’d come to believe it herself. Maybe it was part of a campaign to get me to develop an attachment, to warp my objectivity, cloud my judgment.

But I could remind myself of all those unwelcome possibilities later. I didn’t see the point of dwelling on them now.

“Did he make love to you?” I asked.

“No. Not that time. Although he could have. He could have done anything with me.”

“What happened after?”

She smiled. “We promised each other that it would never happen again, that it was wrong because he was so much older and if my parents found out it would be a disaster. But we couldn’t stay away from each other. My brother was in the army then, and he was killed that year. I don’t think I could have gotten through that without Dov. He understood war and had lived through a lot of loss. He was the only one who could comfort me.”

“That must have been hell for your parents.”

“They were devastated. A lot of people didn’t think we should even have been fighting where we were, so their feeling was, ‘our beautiful son died for what?’ It wasn’t like losing someone in the other wars, which everyone knew had been forced on us. It was more like… more like just a waste. You know what I mean?”

She could only have been talking about Lebanon. If she was making all this up, it was an impressive piece of fabrication.

I looked away, thinking about my first trip stateside from Vietnam, when the best you could expect from your average fellow American when he learned you’d been in the war was polite embarrassment and a desire to change the subject. Often you could expect much worse.

I said, “One of the cruelest things a society can do is send its young men off to war with a license to kill, then tell them when they get home that the license wasn’t valid. America did the same thing in Vietnam.”

She looked at me and nodded. We were quiet for a moment. I asked, “How did things turn out with Dov?”

She smiled. “He moved away. I went to college. He has a wife and two sons now.”

“You still see each other?”

She shrugged. “Not very often. There’s his family, and my work. But sometimes.”

“Your parents never found out?”

She shook her head. “No. And he never told his wife. He’s a good man, but you know? We can’t help ourselves. There’s something there that’s just too strong.”

I nodded and said, “Most people only dream of a connection like that.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What about you?”

I looked away for a moment, thinking of Midori. “Maybe once.”

“What happened?”

Nothing really , I could have said. Just, she figured out I killed her father .

“She was a civilian,” I said, finessing the point. “She was smart enough to understand what I do, and smart enough to know that our worlds had to stay separate.”

“You never thought about trying to get out of this world?”

“All the time.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it.”

There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done . As spoken by that philosopher, my blood brother Crazy Jake.

I nodded and said, as though to his ghost, “There are things you do that you can’t wash off afterward.”

“What was it between you?”

“I screwed up. I hurt her.”

“Not that. The good part.”

“I don’t know,” I said, imagining her face for a moment, the way she would look at me. “There was this… frankness about her. In everything she did. I could always tell how I made her feel. She was experienced and sophisticated, even renowned, in her field, but somehow when I was with her I always felt I was with the person she was before all that. The real her, the core that no one else could see. I made her happy, you know? In a way that made no sense and caught me completely off guard when it started to happen. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that before. I can’t imagine I will again. Making her happy”-I paused, thinking it would sound corny, then said it anyway-“was the thing that made me happy.”

“You’re not happy now?”

“This very moment? I feel pretty good.”

She smiled. “Generally.”

I shrugged. “I’m not depressed.”

“That’s a pretty minimalist way of defining happiness.”

“I take pleasure in things. A good single malt, good jazz, the feeling when the judo is really flowing. A hot soak afterward. The change of seasons. The way coffee smells when it’s roasted the way it ought to be.”

“All things, though.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Yeah, mostly. I suppose that’s true.”

“Someone once said to me, ‘If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.’ ”

I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. Maybe the comment hit home.

“You don’t trust,” she said.

“No.” I paused, then asked, “Do you?”

“Not easily. But I believe in some things. I couldn’t live without that.”

We were quiet for a while, thinking our separate thoughts. I said, “You can’t do this forever. What’s next?”

She laughed. “You mean when my ‘pheromones dry up’? I don’t know. What about you?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe retire someplace. Someplace sunny, maybe by the ocean, like where you grew up. A place with no memories.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Yeah. Don’t know when I’ll get there, though.”

“Well, in your line of work, you’ve got a longer shelf life than I do, I suppose.”

I laughed. “What about a family? You’re still young.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could give up Dov, so I’d need a pretty understanding husband.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“I’d have to not tell him about what I’ve been doing for the last dozen years, too. You know, if a man learns that you can be an actress in bed, he’ll always wonder afterward whether you’re acting with him. Men tend to be insecure about those things.”

I realized that the comment might have been directed at me. Maybe a probe, to see if I would admit to something along those lines. Better to sidestep. I said, “It must be hard being so close with someone like Belghazi, knowing what he does.”