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Every day, he felt that he was failing. Every day he could feel the darkness inside calling to him, pulling at him, silencing the voices of his better angels. And over and over again that malicious bitch Fate shoved him in the direction of new violence, new killings, new crimes. New sins.
All of this bubbled like a witches' brew in Toys's mind as he strolled with Aayun through the gardens. It was still there when they returned to his rooms and sat on lawn chairs with cold beers and watched the hummingbirds. His scruffy cat, Job, came and stared at Aayun for a long time. She tried to pet him, but the cat walked away.
"He's not a very social animal," said Toys.
"Are you?" she asked. Her eyes were large and beautiful and they awakened something in him that Toys had long since thought dead. Not just passion, but a desire to feel passion. To allow it.
"I . . . I need to say something," he found himself saying.
She set her bottle down and swung her legs over so she sat sideways on the chair, facing him. "What?" she asked, her voice smoky and soft.
"I'm damaged goods."
Aayun smiled. "Who isn't?"
He saw it in her eyes. Pain, old and worn like calluses into the soft flesh of her life. He had no idea what species of pain it was, or why it had come to her. He assumed it had something to do with the wars that followed 9/11. He didn't ask, though. The pain was there and it was hers, and he could understand it without having to know a single detail. As she, clearly, understood him.
There was no more conversation for a long time. He stood up, and she rose with him. They kissed beneath the fires of a dying sun. The kiss was tentative at first. Careful, as if each was afraid of breaking the other. That moment held in sweetness, and then everything became incredibly intense.
They tore buttons and fabric on the way inside to his narrow bed. When she was naked, he could see that she was beautifully made but far too thin. It did not matter. She was so alive. They kissed with volcanic heat. There was a kind of tenderness between them, if layered beneath need and urgency and fumbling of a kind that happens when things are so new, or so newly intense; the hands tremble and the body shudders and the blood roars.
He came too quickly because it had been so long. It didn't matter. She came a heartbeat later. And then after half an hour they both climbed the long hill together, sweating, crying out, gasping, and as one they plunged over the edge.
When there was no more for either of them to give, when they were spent and languid, and exhausted, he held her in his arms and buried his face in her hair and tried not to weep.
But when he heard her first small sobs, he lost all control. They clung together like drowning people.
5.
Dawn was still hours away when she leaned close and kissed his cheek, then whispered softly into his ear.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He swam upward through lingering dreams toward the surface and wakefulness. He wanted
to tell her that it was all okay, that there was never going to be any reason for either of them to say that they were sorry. For anything.
Then he felt the sting on the side of his neck. A little bee sting.
He tried to say something, anything, but even "ouch" was beyond him. Once more he seemed to fall off a cliff, but now he fell down, down, down into a bottomless black hole.
6.
Nowhere
He woke naked, bound to a wooden chair by duct tape, sick and terrified.
"You're awake," she said.
Toys forced his eyelids up. It took effort. The darkness wanted to pull him back down, to keep him. He almost let it take him.
Almost.
Instead he looked at her.
Aayun sat on the edge of a metal equipment case. The last time he had seen her she was naked. Now she wore a white lab coat over jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. No makeup. No smile.
"What the bloody hell are you playing at?" he mumbled, his voice thick, his lips rubbery. "And what the hell did you do to me?"
