RainStorm

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