In the Balance

She moaned softly as she lay back on the mat once more. She wanted it to be good, hoped it would be. Bobby Fiore moved beside her. His lips came down on hers; his hand roamed her body. A bit sooner than she would have liked, his fingers found their way between her legs. They didn’t go quite to the right place. After a few seconds of frustration, she reached down and moved them to where they belonged.

He frowned for a moment. She hoped she hadn’t angered him. Who could say what might anger a foreign devil? He didn’t put his hand back where it had been, though. And now it was better, now her eyes closed and her buttocks clenched and her back began to arch. As if from far away, she heard him laugh, deep in his throat.

She was at the edge of the Clouds and Rain when he took his hand away. Her eyes opened. It was her turn to start to frown. But his weight pressed her against the slick surface of the mat. His tongue teased her left nipple as he guided himself into her. Her legs rose, clenched around him. With her inner muscles, she squeezed him as hard as she could. “Ah,” he said, in surprise or delight or both at once. Then she stopped listening to anything but what her body told her.

Afterward, they were both sweaty and breathing hard. The only thing wrong with making love, Liu Han thought as the afterglow faded, was that it didn’t really help. All the troubles pleasure had let her ignore were still here. None had got any better. Ignoring troubles was not meeting them. She knew that, but what else, here, could she do?

She wondered if foreign devils had the wit to be disturbed by such worries. She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. His hairy face had turned serious, his own gaze distant and inward. Surely thoughts much like her own were passing through his head.

But when he noticed her looking at him, he smiled and sat up in one smooth motion. He might have been imperfectly skilled in matters of the mattress, but he had a well-muscled body which he handled well otherwise. He also had a sense of foolishness-this time he pretended to smoke two cigarettes at once, one in each hand.

Liu Han laughed. A few seconds later, she rolled over and gave the foreign devil with the funny name a long, grateful hug. Whatever private fears or worries he’d been brooding about, he’d set them aside to make her feel better. That was something else that hadn’t happened since the scaly devils came (and not often before then; she was, after all, only a woman).

As if thinking of the little devils was enough to make them appear, the door to the hallway outside her chamber slid open. The devils who had brought Bobby Fiore in now returned to take him away again. That was how it went: they forced a man on her, then took him away so she never saw him again. Up till now, that had been only a relief. Now it wasn’t, or not so much. But the devils didn’t care one way or the other.

Or so she thought, until the scaly devil who spoke Chinese after a fashion said, “You do mating two times. Why two times? Never two times before.” Absurdly, he sounded suspicious, as if he’d caught her enjoying herself at what was supposed to be hard work. Well, in a way, he had.

she’d learned honest answers worked best with the little devils. “We did it twice because I liked him much more than I liked any of the others. I just wanted to be rid of them. But he is not a bad man; if he were Chinese, he might be a very good man.”

The other devil was talking with Bobby Fiore. He answered in his own language. It wasn’t Chinese, so Liu Han could make nothing out of it. Because it had no tones, it sounded to her more like animals grunting than speech. She wondered how-and if-foreign devils managed to understand one another. But compared to the hisses and coughs the scaly devils used, Bobby Fiore’s foreign devil language was as lovely as a beautiful song.

The little scaly devil who had been talking with her turned and spoke to the one who’d been talking with Bobby Fiore. They made their snaky noises back and forth. Liu Han tried to follow what they were saying, but couldn’t: they talked too fast. She worried. The last time she’d had a moment of feeling partway safe and secure, the scaly devils had turned her into a whore. What new horror were they plotting now?

The one who spoke Bobby Fiore’s language said something to him. He nodded as he answered. That seemed to mean the same thing to him as it did to her, so he’d probably just said yes. But yes to what?

The Lizard who knew a little Chinese turned both his eyes back to her. “You want come back again this man?”

The question took her by surprise. Again she gave an honest answer. “What I really want is to go back to the camp you took me from. If you will not do that, I wish you would just leave me alone here and not make me give my body for food.”

“This one choice not for you,” the scaly devil said. “This other choice not for you, either.”