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Emily hadn’t made a sound. He could still feel her pain, singeing his nerve endings.
“Afsoon was a bacha posh. She’d grown up going to school with a group of boys training to be soldiers. She’d learned all she could with them, wanting more than anything to be a soldier herself. She had great difficulty settling into a more submissive female role. When it came time to choose a wife for me, her family offered her up for free. By that time I’d already figured out who to listen to, and when and where pertinent conversations took place, and I knew that a deal had been made. Afsoon had offered herself up so she could be a good soldier and keep an eye on me. It gave her a chance to meet with the boys she’d grown up with. To report in. To be one of them, even if just for a few minutes a week.”
“Did you love her?”
He understood why she’d asked the question. And hated the foreignness of it at the same time. “No.” He’d admired her, though. Respected her.
“But you had sex with her.”
Thinking of Emily every single second. He wasn’t sure what that made him. He’d done what he’d had to do. And would do it again, given the same circumstances.
“Enough to keep up the pretense, yes.”
“Did you have children with her?”
“No.” She hadn’t wanted his children any more than he’d wanted to give them to her, not that she’d told him so. But they’d both been very obviously careful to make certain it didn’t happen, in spite of a lack of easy access to traditional birth control.
“What about her? What happens to her now that you’re gone? Won’t they suspect she helped you escape?”
“She did help, in a way—though it wasn’t her intention. I’d heard her planning with a childhood best friend, a soldier in the village, for the two of them to run off together. There was access to a Jeep that would take them to a convoy they were joining. They decided to set a fire during a village celebration to buy themselves time to get away. I used their diversion as my own chance to get the hell out of there.”
“Was it good with her?”
“My leaving? She didn’t know.”
“The sex, Winston.”
“Emily. Don’t do this.”
“Answer me, dammit. Was it good with her?”
“It was sex, Emily. Men like sex.”
“So you liked it.”
“No! It was... I got it up, okay, that was it.”
“And afterward. Did you hold her close as you fell asleep?”
“No.” He hadn’t fallen asleep beside her. He’d been lying next to the enemy. His only real sleep had come in the afternoon, when he’d had time alone to pray and study.
“I have to go.”
Emily hung up on him before he’d had a chance to tell her, once again, how very sorry he was.
* * *
For the next week, visions of Winston in bed with another woman, a dark-haired beauty with lusciously tanned skin, stabbed her again and again, throughout the day, and lying in their bed alone at night, too. The woman was there in Emily’s dreams, turning them to nightmares. She found a pair of his underwear left in the laundry he’d sorted before he left, and pictured the other woman washing them by hand.
Not that it would have been the same exact pair, but...
Hands other than her own traveling her husband’s body, knowing his touch, his particular scent, the way he moved his body when he was inside you.
She was crushed. Absolutely flat on the ground crushed. She went to work Monday, but not Tuesday. She spent that day, and the next, at home, lying on the couch, watching television, sleeping on the couch during the day because she wasn’t getting a whole lot of sleep at night.
After the second day of living like a sloth, she woke up Thursday morning, shook herself off and dressed for work.
The idea of Winston with another woman wasn’t such a shock anymore. Acceptance was on its way, she could feel it. The barbs would poke her for the rest of her life; she pretty much accepted that. Anytime she thought of him with her.
