After (67 page)

Refugee, resistance fighter, refugee, resistance fighter. So all of the girls—that's who'd come, the girls from the orphanage and others who looked the same age, who didn't have the shell-shocked, worn down look of the women a few years older who'd had husbands, who'd lost children, who'd been locked inside the sex hotels—so all of them would feel safe, bolstered on both sides by one of the people who'd rescued them.

Except Kayla came by and asked Gareth to switch places with the girl next to Nix. Now that she was between Gareth and stalwart little Andrea, Nix felt like she was the one being protected, and it irked her.

The ceremony involved more ritual than Nix had witnessed since before the dying, when she had gone with her mom and dad to the wedding of a friend in a Catholic church. Now, sitting hand-in-hand with Gareth and Andrea, Nix noticed two doors open in almost perfect synchronicity on opposite sides of the room. Light poured through the two apertures from outside, then was largely cut off by a person stepping into each doorway. For a minute or more, the two figures were still, then in near unison moved forward, and the doors closed quietly behind them.

Now that the sun's light wasn't turning them both into black silhouettes, the two figures were revealed to be a woman and a man, each dressed identically in a single, thin white garment which hung, shapeless, down to their feet. For the first time since she was a child, Nix thought of angels.

Matching step for step like echoes of one another, the robed woman and the robed man converged on the center of the room and stood still, facing each other. He was young, maybe twenty or twenty-two, with impossibly smooth, umber skin and deep brown eyes. He had the look of the Sewanee women, light and bright. She was taller than the man and older, maybe thirty. Her light blue eyes, locked on her counterpart, were red as if she was about to cry. She put both hands out, as if to receive a package, and he laid his hands in hers.

“I want to give myself to you,” she said in a tight, high voice, so quietly Nix just barely heard her.

“I want to give myself to you,” he echoed, his voice warm and smooth.

He gave the woman a smile, radiant in spite of being reserved, and she answered it with her own fragile smile. Hand-in-hand, they turned toward the bed, and the circle briefly broke to let them pass. Inside the circle, they mounted the bed and knelt, facing one another. Again she held out her hands, and again he took them.

In the same soft, tight voice she said, “I want your kiss.”

Holding her hands in his, holding her gaze with his warm, dark eyes, the man leaned forward and touched his lips to the woman's cheek. He lingered there for a few seconds, then slowly retreated and sat back on his heels.

“I want your kiss,” he said, his honeyed voice slow and thick and warm.

When she leaned forward, she took his full bottom lip between her lips, kissed, and did the same to the pretty, bowed upper lip. The youth received every touch of her lips with a yielding warmth that surprised Nix. He never leaned forward or parted his lips to deepen the kiss. Just submitted to her.

When she sat back on her heels, ending their kiss, her voice was fuller, but it wavered. “I want your touch.”

Her shimmering reddening eyes, her determined mouth were met by his luminous gaze, warm and bright, and a soft smile. Everything about him seemed lax, warm, quiet.

In his voice like warmed honey, he said, “I want to touch you. You've been violated. I want to offer you comfort and safety. You've been a prisoner. I want to let you feel how you belong to yourself. Your body has been hurt. I want to help you find pleasure.”

“I want your touch,” she said again.

With his beatific smile and gentle gaze, he reached out and touched her face, cupping her cheek in his palm. Simple, warm contact. When he took his hand away she said it again. “I want your touch,” and he put his fingertips to her temple and feathered a soft caress down the side of her face. When he took his touch from her, she repeated her mantra again, and the man rose up on his knees, leaned close, and with both hands combed his fingers through her hair, again and again, until her lids closed over her shimmering eyes and the tension in her face ebbed away and, little by little, she sank forward until she was cradled against him while he stroked her hair, the backs of her arms, her neck, her back.

She never said, “I want to touch you.” Only, “I want your touch. Touch. I want.”

On the dais the woman sank back and the man touched, Nix thought, as gently, as carefully as Gareth had always touched her, except under that veil of diaphanous white his caress explored far beyond the flesh Gareth had tried. From the corner of her eye, Nix looked at Andrea. A glance told her the tightening of the girl's grip on her hand wasn't from fear. Her lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her gaze was locked on the couple, following every flex and movement of the man's hand under the woman's gown. To Nix's left, Gareth's expression was almost a perfect copy of Andrea's rapt arousal.

The woman under the man was lax, now, soft and yielding, sighing now and then as his touch stirred her nerves, and when she blinked, her lids sank down and lifted, revealing eyes focused on nothing but an inward symphony of sensation.

The knot of rage and resentment in Nix's belly hardened.

When her mantra changed the man lifted the woman's robe and bared her naked body to the circle and to his kisses. Nix watched his umber lips brush across her skin, the color of butter. His umber lips and his pink tongue. Her belly, her thighs, between her breasts. She said her mantra and his kisses crept up the swells of her breasts, mounted the nut-brown peaks, nuzzled her rising nipples as she blinked and sighed, the pink all gone from the whites of her pale blue eyes.

Gareth's hand was hot and damp in hers. Such a big, strong hand. He'd touched her, held her, washed her with that hand. Maybe the heat and damp was hers. Either way, it was too hot, too wet. She wanted to pull free. The woman on the dais didn't need her.

The robed woman 's mantra had turned into a series of pleas, and the man glossed her nipples with his tongue, sucked them up between his lips, let them go, wet and peaked. He kissed down the length of her pale belly, kissed the soft pale flesh of her inner thighs, kissed between while the woman whimpered and sighed, her eyes wide and startled at the sensation of his tongue licking over her pink folds. Another plea and he rose, lifted the front of his gown, and settled his hips between her thighs. All soft languor and whispered pleas she rose to his warmth, sought his smile and his warm brown eyes with her hazy gaze, sought his lips with her mouth, and pulled him to her, took him in.

Beside her, Nix could hear Andrea's shallow little rasps of aroused breath, felt her small hand twitch now and then. Between her own hand and Gareth's it felt like they held a hot ember. She didn't know how to leave herself, anymore. It was torture, watching that pair writhing, their limbs wound up in their fucking, tangled in their robes, their kisses and sighs and the wet joining of their bodies filling the air.

Finally it was over; the pair on the dais collapsed in a warm, damp, panting heap.

Swallowing against the sour nausea creeping up her throat, Nix willed herself to stay still, to leave her hands in the cloying grasps of Gareth and Andrea, made herself keep breathing that humid air that reeked of copulation.

The woman on the bed gestured, and Mahal rose, and the circle rose up after her, an undulating wave of bodies, and she led them to the door, out of the sweltering, redolent air, into the breeze and sunlight of the courtyard. Nix was dying to escape, to flee from the midst of people and buildings, into the trees, to walk along the banks of the river that ran below the window of her room. But their part of the ceremony wasn't over yet. There on the grass they resumed their circle, sitting on woven mats set out ahead of time. Again, they all joined hands.

Nix forced herself to take Gareth's hand, to keep her face blank. From the corner of her eye, she saw him turn his head to look at her. She felt him seeking her eyes, but she kept her gaze fixed on Kayla.

All holding hands, they sat in what Mahal called “quiet meditation” for three minutes, Nix resisting the urge to scream, to tear her hands free of Andrea's and Gareth's hands. Then Mahal told them to open their eyes and Nix fixed her gaze, her anger, her bitter sense of betrayal on Kayla's lit-up brown eyes, that soft smile.

“That woman...” one of the orphans said when Kayla invited the circle to discussion.

“Lauren,” Mahal told her.

The young woman asked her question, and Mahal answered in her warm, soft voice. Beside her, Andrea's high, confident voice rang out. Nix hardly heard the words, her brain didn't bother to process the significance of the answer. It seemed to go on and on, that call and response, the untouched young ones from the orphanage and even the older, scarred ones from the resistance full of curiosity, hope, and dull anger. “Why?

Why the audience? Why him? Had she really chosen it? Really wanted it? Would they be expected to? But if they wanted?

Finally it was over and Nix broke free. Tore loose of Gareth's and Andrea's hands, and stalked off for the river. What the fuck did those Sewanee people want from her? From all of them? Watching one scared woman in a white robe melt and sigh and shudder under a man wasn't going to undo a lifetime of slavery and torture. Having Gareth's hand in hers, sweaty and hot and twitching at every gasp and cry wouldn't keep her there, wouldn't undo the hurt she felt when he was close. It just made it worse.

When she heard the tramp of feet in the gravel behind her Nix wheeled around, ready to scream her rage at Gareth. But it was Kayla. Kayla with her infuriatingly gentle eyes, her exasperating smile.

“I came here to be alone,” Nix said, clinging to the last shred of her self-control.

“I know.” Kayla's easy voice was as steady as her gaze. “In a moment, I'll leave you. I only wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. You weren't ready for that. I misjudged, and it's hurt you.”

“Don't worry about me, Kayla. Worry about Andrea, those girls from the orphanage, the refugee women who were being bought and sold and raped last week.

You can't just stick them in a circle, tell them to hold hands and watch some brainwashed woman in a robe getting fucked. It's cruel.”

Kayla's soft smile shrank until her full mouth was almost a perfect circle. “It's not meant to be cruel.”

“Well, it is.”

“Would it be better to hide our practices from the newcomers?”

“There's a middle ground between keeping something secret, and rubbing their faces in it.”

“We try very hard, Nix, to find a good balance, here. To help the newcomers adjust, without disrupting the harmony that exists among those who've been here longer. And we've been doing it a long time. For twenty years, we've been integrating refugees. Not in such great numbers, of course. But we have a lot of experience helping women and men from west of the line let go of old fears, old hatreds, old habits. The ceremonies are part of the adjustment.”

“Maybe some of us don't want to adjust. Thought of that?”

Kayla gave Nix her serene smile. “Yes.”

“Why, after what they've been through, would any of these women want to let some man climb on top of her, rut over her?” Nix was hoarse, shivering, her eyes red, her hands bunched in fists. Kayla stayed quiet. “These ceremonies. You do them with the men from across the line, too?”

“Yes.”

“The one's who've bought wives? The ones who've used the girls in the sex hotels? The ones who've gang-raped and branded the resistance women?”

“Yes.”

“Like that? With robes and one of you...you ethereal beauties? You kiss them?

Touch them? Let them fuck you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” It was a hoarse scream. “Why reward that cruelty? That torture?”

Kayla waited until a moment of silence passed before she answered, her brown eyes shimmering. “Because, Nix, it's important; it's everything, making sure what's happened across the line never happens here. To make sure the women who come here are truly safe. And the only way to ensure that, to ensure there is peace here, is to make certain everyone's needs are met. When people are starving, they steal. It isn't the only reason, but lack, hunger are powerful forces. Nothing can be done until those are answered.”

Kayla's coy metaphors were twisting Nix's gut into a knot.

“The men who've done the things I've seen,” Nix said, “don't need a fuck to make them docile. They need a bullet to shatter their skull. A knife to slit their throat or their belly open. To cut off their dick and their balls. That's how you know for sure they'll never hurt a woman again.”

“Should we kill all the men? Should we kill Artel?”

Cold. Nix was so, so cold, but a trickle of sweat tickled down her back. All her clothes were heavy, damp and clinging to her. It felt like Kayla had taken a razor bladed a traced a groove around and around each of her organs, that horrible “yes” seeping out of her lungs and heart, bleeding from every vein and artery.

“Nix, it would be inhuman to ask you to forgive what's been done to you. No one expects it. But killing every man who's been part of that horrible wrong can't be the answer. Men aren't born evil, any more than women are. If they were all truly, inherently evil, then what happened after the dying would have happened before. That would be our whole history. But it's not.

“Exterminating the males of the species—it's against nature. Just as what life became on that side of the line was against nature. Because it was against nature, what happened twenty-five years ago. The dying, how few women survived. But it won't be that way forever. Already, the gap is closing. When the babies being born now grow up, their generation will be balanced. And here, those children are growing up with love, with forgiveness. Not vengeance and punishment.

“I look at you, Nix, and want so much for you to have peace. My heart hurts with wanting that for you. But you can't make peace with the blade of your knife.”

“Maybe not here. But I'm not staying.”