In the Balance

“Race bad,” she said when he was done, and gave the different cough that put extra stress on what she said.

Instead of answering with words, he just repeated the emphatic cough. she’d never heard a little scaly devil do that, but she followed him well enough.

No matter how they despised their captors, though, they remained captive. If they were going to eat, they had to do what the scaly devils wanted. Liu Han still didn’t understand why the Lizards thought it important to prove that men and women didn’t go into heat and could lie with each other any time, but they did. She lay back again. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time.

As far as skill went, Yi Min was three times the lover the foreign devil with the unpronounceable second name proved to be. But if he was rather clumsy, he treated her as though it were their wedding night, not as if she was a handy convenience. She hadn’t imagined foreign devils had so much kindness in them; few enough Chinese did. She hadn’t known any kindness since her husband died in the Japanese attack on her village.

To thank him, she did her best to respond to his caresses. she’d been through too much, though; her body would not answer. Still, when he closed his eyes and groaned atop her, she was moved to reach up and stroke his cheek. The beard there was almost as rough as a bristle brush. She wondered if it itched.

He slid out of her, sat back on his knees. she drew up one leg to hide her secret place-foolish, when he’d just been inside her. He pantomimed smoking a cigarette with such nimble gestures that she started to laugh before she could catch herself. He raised a bushy eyebrow, took another drag on the imaginary smoke, then made as if to crush it out on his chest.

He’d so convinced her the nothing between his two fingers was real, she exclaimed in Chinese: “Don’t get burned!” That set her laughing again. She groped for words in the Lizards’ tongue, the only one they had in common: “You-not bad.”

“You, Liu Han”-he said her name so strangely, she needed a moment to recognize it-“you-not bad also.”

She looked away from him. she didn’t know she was crying till the first scalding tears ran down her cheeks. Once she started, she discovered she could not stop. She wailed and keened for all she’d lost and suffered and endured, for her husband and her village, for her very world and her own violation. she’d never imagined she had so many tears inside her.

After a little while, she felt Bobby Fiore’s hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” she didn’t know what it meant in his language. she didn’t know if it meant anything or was just a sound. she did know his voice held sympathy, and that he was the only human being who’d shown her any since her nightmare began. She twisted around and clung to him till she’d cried herself out.

He didn’t do much but let her hold him. He ran a hand through her hair once or twice and quietly said “Hey” a few more times. She hardly noticed, so consumed was she by her own grief.

As her sobs at last slowed to gasps and hiccups, she felt his erection pressed against her belly, hot as the tears she’d shed. She wondered how long he’d had it. It didn’t surprise her; she would have been surprised if a naked man in the arms of a naked woman failed to rise. What surprised her was that he’d been content to ignore it. What could she possibly have done to stop him if he’d decided to take her again?

His restraint made her want to cry again. She realized how desperate she’d grown when simply not being raped became a kindness worth tears.

He asked her something in his own language. She shook her head. He shook his, too, maybe angry at himself for forgetting she couldn’t understand. His eyebrows came together as he looked thoughtfully past her shoulder toward the blank metal wall of the chamber. He tried the scaly devils’ speech: “You, Liu Han, not bad now?”

“Not so bad, Bobby Fiore.” When she tried to say his name, she botched it at least as badly as he had hers.

“Okay,” he said. she did understand that; a city person in one of the films she’d seen had said it. People in the city picked up foreign devils’ slang along with their machines and funny clothes.

He let go of her. She looked down at herself. she’d held him so tight, the smooth skin of her chest had the marks of his hair pressed into it. His erection started to droop now that she no longer lay against him. She reached out and closed her hand around him. The Lizards had taken everything she’d ever had, leaving her with only her body with which to thank him.

That eyebrow of his went up again. So did what she was holding. Somehow, the heat of it against the palm of her hand brought comfort. If it was good this time, if she lost herself in her body, sheer sensation might let her forget for a little while the metal room in which she was trapped and the scaly devils who kept her here to satisfy their own perverse curiosity.