She came for what seemed like forever. Finally she collapsed back to the couch, her orgasm ebbing, her mind still reeling from the surprise of it, the violence with which it had taken her. Fatima crept forward, kissing Delilah’s belly, then her neck, then held her in her arms.
“My God,” Delilah breathed. “You are so sweet.
Fatima’s face was buried against Delilah’s neck. “I can’t believe I did that.”
“It was beautiful.”
“I’m glad.”
Delilah took her by the shoulders and pushed her to the side. She slid out from under and straddled Fatima’s hips. “Now it’s your turn.”
Fatima’s amber skin darkened. “No, you don’t have to—”
Delilah laughed. “Have to? I’m dying to.” She pushed Fatima’s shoulders back, leaned in, and kissed her for a long moment. Then she stretched out alongside her and while they continued to kiss she reached down and began to touch her. She felt a bikini wax, the skin soft and smooth and hot beneath her fingertips. Her fingers slipped easily inside Fatima’s wetness, and the feeling of the woman moaning into her mouth while Delilah touched her was enough to make her want to come again. She kissed her way down Fatima’s neck, her breasts, her belly, all the while touching her, deeply but slowly, slowly, teasing her, tormenting her, making her desperate for more. She used a hand to spread Fatima’s legs wider and kissed her inner thighs, her pubis, her labia, all the while her finger sliding slowly in and out. Fatima whimpered and twisted and arched, but Delilah wanted more, she wanted Fatima to ask for it, to beg for it, to be insane for it as she had been. She kept kissing and licking, her tongue dancing toward and then away from what she knew Fatima really wanted. Finally, Fatima panted, “Please, make me come, please,” and Delilah instantly flicked her tongue over her clit. Fatima shuddered and gasped and Delilah kept licking, sliding one hand up to Fatima’s breasts to squeeze her nipples and continuing to touch her with the fingers of the other hand. Fatima moaned, “Yes, oh God, oh yes,” and Delilah licked harder, faster, and as Fatima’s breathing quickened and her hips began to rock Delilah sucked her clit into her mouth and flicked her tongue rapidly all over it. Fatima gasped and cried out, “Oh, oh, ohhhhh… ” and her back arched and her hands twisted in Delilah’s hair and Delilah kept sucking and licking and touching while Fatima arched and writhed. Only when she had collapsed back to the couch and was panting, “Please, no more, no more,” did Delilah relent.
Delilah moved up and lay on her side next to her. Fatima turned her head and looked into her eyes. She saw the most delicious expression of… what? Wonder? Disbelief? Trust?
“Not so bad, no?” Delilah said, smiling.
And then a tear slipped out from the corner of one of Fatima’s eyes. Delilah was surprised, and a little worried. “Why are you crying?” she said.
“It felt so good. But I also… I don’t know. I feel ashamed.”
“Because it felt good?”
“Because of… that I did that with a woman. I’ve wondered what it would be like, sometimes, but I never really thought… have you done that before? I’m not the first, am I?”
A lie would have been safer, and more believable. But Delilah told her the truth. “You are the first.”
“I don’t think I believe you.”
“I’m sorry for that. It’s true.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t know. There’s something… something that makes me want to know everything about you. To know you in every way. Including in bed. Especially in bed. I don’t know why, but it’s true! I’ve never thought that way about a woman before—‘What would she be like in bed?’ Men, yes, all the time, and usually I’m right so it’s not even that interesting an exercise. But with you… I couldn’t tell. You’re so beautiful, and confident, and sophisticated, but also you’re Muslim, so maybe you would be… modest? Shy? Inhibited? Ashamed? I couldn’t tell. And I really… God, I really wanted to know.”
“I hope you weren’t disappointed.”
“Were you?”
Fatima shook her head emphatically. “No.”
“It was the same for me.”
“Really?”
Delilah laughed. “Could you not tell?”
Fatima smiled. “I thought so, but… ”
“If you have any doubts, you can do it again later.”
Fatima laughed, and then her expression was serious. “I want to. Do it again later, I mean. We shouldn’t have waited until our last night.”
“I know. We could have left here even better rested.” She moved her head closer and kissed Fatima softly. “God, you are lovely.”
“Thank you.”
They were running out of time. It might be now or never.
“Do you want to see the pictures I took?”
Fatima raised her eyebrows. “Now?”
“Yes, now. Don’t you want to see what enflamed me so much?”
Rather than wait for an answer and risk a demurral, Delilah sat up, grabbed the camera, and popped out the card. “Here, it’s yours. You can view the pictures on your laptop and do anything you like with them.”
Fatima smiled reluctantly, but she sat up and pulled the robe close. Even now she was modest, Delilah observed, but that wasn’t so unusual in her experience. She had known many men who could only make love with the lights out and were shy about their bodies even afterward.
Fatima took the card and opened her laptop. She turned it away from Delilah and typed in what sounded like a long passcode. Then she popped in the card.
Delilah glanced at her iPhone. It was on the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. So it was already uploading Fatima’s code. The op was done.
Ordinarily, at a moment like this, she would feel a flush of suppressed elation. But now… a jumble of emotions she didn’t understand. Relief, certainly, that MI6’s horrible Plan B had been rendered moot. But also a strange sadness. And guilt. It didn’t make sense. She needed to get a hold of herself.
Fatima spun around the laptop so they could both see the screen. She started scrolling through the pictures Delilah took. “I have to admit,” she said, smiling, “you make me look good.”
They spent some time going through the photos. They were great shots and Delilah pretended to enjoy them. But in fact they were making her feel worse and worse.
When the candles had burned low, they got in bed. They made love again and lay in each other’s arms for a long time after. But Delilah couldn’t sleep. For maybe the first time in her life, she felt like she’d committed a crime. The nature of the offense eluded her—what she had accomplished here would save lives, she knew that, she always knew that. And she’d likely saved Fatima from horrors she didn’t even want to think about it.
And then it hit her, so powerful and obvious she realized that until that moment she’d been willing it away. Yes, perhaps she’d saved Fatima from one set of horrors, only to inflict another. Because the most direct, the most immediate consequence of the information she had just acquired would be the violent death of Imran, Fatima’s last brother. The woman had already been brutalized by the loss of her other brothers, and now her shattered world, which she had labored in slow agony to reassemble, would be blown apart again. And her parents’ world, as well.
Delilah was aware of the irony. Fatima had said how her family’s tragedy continued to haunt even her happiest moments,
especially
her happiest moments. And now, in the afterglow of such a beautiful and moving and unexpected connection, Delilah was haunted, too. And not by a tragedy past. But by one to come. One that she herself had just set in motion. One in which she had used all her guile, all her skills, to make Fatima complicit.
She knew this was the wrong way to look at it. It was the lives she was saving that mattered. And what was she supposed to do, allow by her inaction for Fatima to be delivered up and be tortured? But no matter how she tried to reason with herself, the horrible guilt persisted. Along with the foreboding sense of punishment to follow.
• • •
The trip back was long and felt fraught. Delilah could imagine what Fatima was thinking—some version of what she herself was grappling with. What would they do now? Was it a one-time thing they could attribute to too much wine and leave behind in paradise? Would they stay in touch? Visit each other in their respective cities? Were they friends now? Something more?
All of which confusion was compounded for Delilah by her knowledge of what their “relationship” had really been about. About the horror that was now in store for Fatima and her family, the horror Delilah had set in inexorable motion.
She knew she should turn her face away now, not watch what was coming, not see the results. Focus on the lives saved, the trauma prevented.
But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want it to be over. It was strange. She had never failed to seek an excuse for ending a “relationship” the moment her operational objectives had been achieved. But now she found herself seeking a way to prolong things, instead. It was worse than stupid. It was dangerous. She had to end it. She had gotten what she had come for and her cover offered the perfect excuse to break contact. Now was the moment. She told herself to make it quick, make it clean. Make it over. And to not look back.
They arrived at Heathrow on a gray, rainy morning. They took the express train to Paddington Station, then stood awkwardly outside the turnstiles to the subway. Fatima broke the silence.
“When do you go back to Paris?”
It was the perfect cue. Delilah said, “Soon, I suppose. I’ve already sent in our interview. I don’t have a reason to stay much longer. A professional reason, I mean.”
Shit. There had been no good reason to add that last part.
Fatima nodded. “I know. That was pretty… crazy, wasn’t it?”
Delilah nodded, thinking,
You have no idea.
Fatima said, “You’re not… sorry?”
Delilah shook her head quickly. “No, not at all. Are you?”
What the hell was wrong with her? She should be sorry. She
was
sorry, though not at all in the way Fatima had intimated. And regardless, reassuring Fatima was exactly the wrong way to play it.
There was a long pause, then Fatima, her eyes on Delilah’s said, “Stay with me tonight?”
Say no,
Delilah thought.
You have to go back to Paris. For work. Don’t be an idiot.
Instead: “I want that, too.”
Fatima’s face flushed with relief—and excitement? She smiled and said, “Anytime after dark. I’ll text you the address.”
Delilah nodded wordlessly, and suddenly they were in each other’s arms. The embrace felt like a delicious secret—a harmless hug to any of the passers-by around them; recollected intimacy, and the promise of pleasure to come, between the two of them only.
She showered and changed back at the rented flat, then went out, did a surveillance detection run, and called Kent from a payphone, using the code he had established to tell him where he could set up a meeting.
Two hours later, they were sitting in a back corner of The Wolseley, a posh restaurant near the Ritz in Piccadilly, all vaulted ceilings and dramatic pillars and huge chandeliers. Over pluperfect English breakfasts, tea, and a basket of croissants so mouthwatering they would have induced a fit of jealousy in any self-respecting
boulanger
, Delilah briefed Kent on Bora Bora. He had already received the upload from the app and was delighted by her success.
“The technicians are optimistic,” he told her, amid the buzzing backdrop of conversation among the scores of power brokers, beautiful people, and wannabes around them. “Of course we can’t be certain until we can access her laptop, but I’m told the recording was exceptionally clean. You must have been very close, and in a quiet place. Was it your room?”
Nothing about Plan B being forestalled. She supposed he didn’t particularly care. Or maybe he really had just invented it to motivate her, and now barely remembered having done so.
“Yes. My phone was right next to her laptop.”
“But you only managed to bring it off on the last night. Had she been careful before then?”
“Yes. It was the first time she’d logged in when I was nearby.”
“Well, how did you manage it? Considering how careful she’d been.”
“I shot some pictures of her and gave her the card. She downloaded them to her laptop.”
“But only on the last night.”
She wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “As I told you.”
“She hadn’t let you shoot her before then? Because you’d shot her in London. Why was she suddenly so… modest?”
“She’s concerned about her image. She didn’t want to be photographed in a bathing suit and a sarong. That’s all.”
“And yet you managed to persuade her.”
She was getting annoyed, and not sure why. “Yes. By telling her she could have the card as soon as we were done with the shoot. Why are you so interested?”
He smiled and took a sip of tea. “Well, I’d like to tell you I’m just curious about your tradecraft. But honestly? I find I’m rather enjoying the thought of the two of you, scantily clad, photographing each other. It reminds me of some of my boarding school… ruminations. Appallingly unprofessional, I know. I really should apologize. Do you still have the pictures?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, you
cochon,
as I told you, she kept the card. And I wouldn’t give them to you even if I still had them.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “Protecting her, are you?”
She wondered if he had been deliberately baiting her. He’d read the sympathetic interview she’d sent in; just how concerned about her loyalties might he be? Her irritation increased.
“Protecting you, Kent. From your own unprofessional proclivities.”
He smiled. “I don’t think you give me enough credit.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“What I mean is, who do you think was sent to Riyadh to sew up loose ends there?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Yes, she could believe it. She’d sensed the hardness beneath the humorously urbane exterior. She had no doubt that, were it part of the job, he could kill without compunction.
She bit off a piece of croissant, slowly chewed, and swallowed, taking her time, the nonchalance deliberate. “And you’re telling me this now why? You want me to sleep with you out of gratitude?”