After (20 page)

John withdraws his hands. Smith catches John’s wrists. Looks at John. Looks at Eva, caught between their arms. London bridges. Smith presses John’s hands to her belly. Kisses her deeply. Cups her breasts in his hands.

Looking at Eva, Smith says, “Touch her.”

With one arm John holds her gently to him. His other hand dips down the open fly of her pants to caress her. She shivers, sighs as the two men touch her. Touching her, Smith kisses her again, long, deep. Eva is trembling and smiling as both men take her to bed.

Some hours later, Eva and John are alone in their own bed. Almost nervous, it seems, she kisses him. He draws her to him, and there's tender warmth, even a charged heat, in the kiss he gives back to her. Then they go still, laying there for a long time, just looking at one another. She grins, then, a mischievous little grin that comes over her once in a while. He's provoked, grins back. She cups her hand over his mouth.

“I love you,” she says, bright and giddy.

She takes her hand from his mouth and kisses him eagerly, lingering a long time, sweet and deep.

* * * *

Smith's eternally hard expression looks somehow exceptionally sharp and stony.

He raps once, and enters. The room is empty, but the sound of running water can be heard behind the bathroom door. Smith erects himself like a statue by the window, looking like years and disasters could pass and he would wait, unmoved, until the end of time. But then there's a faint trembling, as if the statue was being vibrated by a minor earthquake. Then the statue comes to vivid, violent life.

Eva starts, jumping back into the farthest corner of the shower, defending herself from attack with outstretched arms when the door flings open. Seeing it's Smith, she lowers her arms and smoothes away her terrified expression, but her chest keeps working fast, like a hunted rabbit's. Smith's face is composed, but Eva looks more and more uneasy as he goes on staring at her without saying anything.

“Hello, Avery,” she says in a voice that further gives away her fear.

Smith says nothing. Pinning her to the white tile with his sharp eyes, he stands there, still and silent.

“Avery. What are you doing?”

Keeping her fixed in his cold stare, he begins unbuttoning his jacket. He strips naked. When she sees that he is hard, her rigid body softens a little. When he steps into the shower, she reaches for him.

Like he's deflecting an attack, he catches her wrists and pins them hard over her head. He watches the water streaming over her sleek skin, skirting and gathering around and between her contours. She pants as he comes in close, brings his lips against hers, just enough to convey contact.

“Why don't you tell me to leave?” Smith breathes against her wet skin.

He looks like he's staring into his own grave. Eva smiles.

“Because I want you to stay.”

“I didn't come here for this,” Smith tells her, still holding her wrists overhead in his fierce grip.

Then, like he's drowning, helpless and unable to swim in a violent sea, he sinks into her. They go at each other, fierce and hungry, mouths devouring, fingers clawing, arms grasping. When he hoists her up, she wedges her feet against the close wall opposite and he grapples for a fit, then thrusts into her, his pumping urgent, frantic, never growing cautious even when his feet slip an inch or two now and then on the slick tile floor.

When they finish she moves to step from the shower, but Avery blocks her exit.

Pushes her back against the cold tile. With a soap-slick hand he works over her, scrutinizing every millimeter of her flesh as he goes, as if he were sculpting her from clay. It is not a tender caress, an intimate exploration after the act of love. And it is not the study of some beautiful creature who must be looked at and touched because it is irresistible. It is an attempt at taking possession.

His touch goes everywhere, everywhere leaving a swath of white and clear and iridescent froth floating down, riding the streams cascading over her. Fingers trace the delicate whorl of one ear, then the other, thumbs mirror one another out from the center of her lips, over her chin, down her throat. Suds stardust across her collarbones, whorl outward from dark nipples, textured areola, smooth breasts, sleek belly, rich white foam in the triangle of thick black curls.

His hand curves under, and she lets out a little whimpering gasp as he drives two fingers inside of her. Drawing his hand back, he watches the water wash their viscous, whitish fluids from his long pink fingers. Smith moves her under the showerhead, rinses the soap from her body, then sinks to his knees. Parts her thighs, presses his mouth to her. A pleading moan groans from her lips as he grasps the backs of her thighs and licks into her still-swollen, throbbing folds.

Shuddering, she tries to shake him off, to break free of his grip, but Smith braces his arms against her legs and forces her back against his mouth. Belly flexing fast with her frantic panting, she grips the showerhead in both hands and gives her body over to its tremors and spasms. When Smith drives his fingers into her again, still lapping at her hungrily, she bucks and grinds over the penetration, against the torturing tongue, and sobs out, sounding startled. Almost wounded.

Smith lifts her down, into his arms, holding her to him as she trembles, still moaning softly, burying her face against him. When she's calmed he drives his fingers into her hair and kisses her, fierce and urgent, as if she'd never yet let him touch her.

“I should never have touched you, Eva,” he exhales before taking her mouth again, biting and sucking and tonguing like a dog at a bone it fears will soon be taken away. “I won't know how to leave you alone, now that I've had you.”

* * * *

For days, Smith hasn't seemed himself. It's not that he has been less attentive to the operations of the base, that his sharp eye has failed to discern that Washington turned up late for laundry duty, or that the southwest corner of the cornfield wasn't tilled properly on Thursday, as ordered. And it isn't that Smith has been any softer or any harder on the men.

It's just that lately he looks like a man who hasn't slept in a very long time. His hazel eyes are bloodshot. His skin is pale. His movements are less sure, less fluid than usual.

At this particular moment, though, he looks like a man struggling under an awful weight, as if he is straining to keep the tonnage of a car from crushing someone he loves.

Lott stands at rigid attention across the desk from Smith, his usual grin straightened out so that, with the exception of an amused glint in his blue eyes, he appears to be showing all due, grave respect.

After being admitted, Lott had opened with, “I hope I'm not out of line, sir, but I seen something. I thought you'd want to know.” And when Smith had told him to go on, Lott had said, “It's to do with Eva, Sir.”

That was when Smith's body began to quiver, as if his heart were driving the blood through his veins in a quantity and at a speed too great to be endured.

“I'm worried now I should have said something sooner. But the first time, week before last, really I wasn't sure if it was important, what I'd seen. And I didn't want to bother you for nothin'.”

Lott's obsequious words come in stark contrast to his manner. Even in his rigid stance of attention, it's plain he's at ease. And if one looks closely, it's possible to see that he is more interested in watching Smith, observing the impact his words are having on him, than he is in efficiently delivering pertinent information to his commanding officer.

“And then, the second time, well, I know what I saw. But it didn't make no sense.”

“Lieutenant!” Smith is terse, but not heated. He still has that much control.

Watching Smith, just managing to hide his pleasure, Lott recounts his observations, doling out his words like a dollop of honey, slow, slow to come, but sure to be sweet.

“I don't suppose you have any proof of these allegations, Lieutenant.”

“Nah. Nothing to show that's true, what I said about last week and the week before.”

Smith's rigid trembling lessens a little.

“But, reason I come to you just now is so you could see for yourself. You should hurry, though.”

Smith hurries, but all he sees, as he nears the building where Lott said to look is Eva walking with John in the direction of her room. Holding herself, her eyes are down on the ground just ahead of her feet. John has an arm around her shoulders, and when he notices Smith approaching, he pulls her in a little closer and says something to her.

“On your way home?” Smith asks as he intercepts them.

“Yeah,” John answers.

“Late, isn't it? Your shift ended almost thirty minutes ago.”

“We went for a walk.” Again, it's John answering.

“A walk? After all that physical work in the field?”

“Just a quiet stroll. We're never in a big hurry to lock ourselves in that little room,”

John says.

“You all right, Eva?” Smith touches her shoulder. Eva seems to want to flinch back from his hand, but roots herself. She meets his eyes, lets him probe into her. “You seem on edge.”

“I feel a little off,” she says, her arms going tighter over her middle. “I think I just need to eat something.”

“Well, you'd better get back to your room, then.”

The trio parts ways, Eva and John continuing toward their room, Smith walking at a brisk clip in the opposite direction, past the makeshift granary, until the tool shed is in sight. From a discrete position he waits and watches until the door opens and a soldier glances left and right, then leaves, heading in the direction of the mess. Charging, Smith catches his prey.

“Corporal.”

The soldier halts and turns. Riggs. Smith had to have known; Riggs is the only man in uniform who is that tall, that wide. But Smith looks like he's been punched in the gut.

“Come with me, Corporal.”

Smith turns on his heel and heads for his office. Riggs should be right behind him, but he hesitates, and has to scramble to catch up. He looks like a man going to his execution. Terrified. Hopeless.

* * * *

With kisses and caresses John is cleansing her, washing every inch of skin clean of the other's saliva and sweat, imprinting on every nerve the sensation of his body, his touch, fading the sensations of the other from her sense memory. When his semen spills into her, it spills into the semen already there, so that after, anything that seeps from her, slicking her thighs, staining the sheets won't make her shudder, won't make her sick, because it's John's.

Only what takes root will belong to Riggs as much as John and Smith.

“He knows.”

Her words to John are the first they've spoken since before they entered the tool shed.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“What do you think he'll do?”

“God, Eva. I don't know.”

“John. Will you promise me something?”

“What?”

“If he, if things get ugly, promise me you won't get yourself killed trying to protect me.”

“Eva...”

In her softest voice she pleads, “Please, John. There's nothing you can do against Smith. He has the men. Armed or not, if it comes down to anything physical, you can't keep me from him. The best thing you can do for me is keep yourself safe, then reason with Smith, if he gives you the chance. Even if he doesn't, knowing you're safe will be a comfort to me. If I imagine you're dead, I don't know how I'll cope.”

“And what comfort do I get?” he asks, broken-sounding.

“No matter what, Smith will be careful with me. You know that.”

“Does that comfort you?”

Eva cups John's face in her hands and holds him steady in her gaze.

“I won't pretend I'm not scared. But I promise you, Smith could give me to the worst of them, and I'll be okay. Anything I have to endure, now, I feel like there's a reason. So I'll be okay.”

They curl into each other, fingers, whispers, limbs, the lengths of their bodies. It's usual, after Riggs, for Eva to want, to need John again and again. But tonight they seek each other with the desperation of a farewell.

* * * *

Done with her shower, Eva steps from the tub. Before she takes a towel, she stares at her naked form in the mirror, turning to study her profile, running her hands over her breasts, over her belly. She's not as wasted and bony as she was the night she'd showered in Smith's room after all those hungry months in the woods, but still thin.

Thinner than she had been before the internet and phones and televisions had gone dead, and everyone she knew had died.

She does not look pregnant.

Eva towels off, then indifferently tugs one of several gowns from a hook at the back of the bathroom door and slips it on. She opens the bathroom door, which she shuts habitually whenever she is in the bathroom, perhaps to evade the cameras.

She steps into the bedroom and freezes. In a few brief seconds, she composes her expression of alarm to steady calm.

“I wondered when you'd be coming for a visit,” she says to Smith, her voice less composed than her face.

“Yes, I'm sure,” he says, his voice tight as he turns from the window to face her now that she's spoken, though he must have heard her emerge from the bathroom.

Then, in a voice that's softer, almost gentle, wavering a little, even, with some small, faint hope, “You and Riggs.”

Her body is still, her expression unchanged.

“Eva. Did he rape you?”

“No.”

“Eva.”

The way his body is tilted toward her, the way his hands twitch forward for a moment, it's as if he'd like to touch her. Maybe take her in his arms. But he stays cemented to his spot across the room from her.

“Rape isn't always a physical coercion,” he says, barely finding the air to carry his words. “If he made some threat—“

“Riggs didn't threaten me. He didn't do anything to force me.”

“What have you done?” he breathes.

“I went to him and I let him fuck me,” she says without bravado, her voice earnest. Sad.

“Eva? Why?”

“Avery. Think. If I get pregnant, if I have a baby, and John is the father, what will happen?”

“You know what will happen. When she's old enough...”