When She Woke (32 page)

We.
Meaning Simone and Paul. Where was Paul?

“We captured the two who had you, and they talked. That
fils de pute
Stanton sold her to a rich businessman in Havana. Paul has gone after her.”

Hannah exhaled, dizzy with relief, but Simone was plainly annoyed. Of course, she’d think it a fool’s errand: Paul, being too soft, not following the code.

“You, they were taking by car to a brothel in New Orleans that specializes in Chromes. It caters to foreign businessmen and tourists who are looking for something … exotic. Reds are very popular.”

Hannah felt another swell of nausea and swallowed, forcing it back. Her mouth tasted foul and her entire body was slick with cooling sweat. She shivered, and Simone lifted the sheet covering her and looked underneath.
“Mon Dieu,
you are soaked, and so is the bed. We must get you into the shower.”

Simone moved to lift her up, but Hannah, aware that she was half-naked, shrank away, clutching the sheet against herself. Simone slid an arm beneath her armpits and pulled her up forcibly. “Do not be ridiculous. We are all two women. And in all cases, I have already seen it.”

Blood rushed to Hannah’s face as she realized that Simone must have undressed her. Why would she have done that, and only from the waist down? Unless … Panic seized her. Simone was a lesbian, the two of them were alone, Hannah was drugged, helpless, trapped. “No!” she cried, struggling to free herself.

Simone gripped her harder and gave her a little shake. “Who do you think cleaned the piss off you, eh? Now
come.”

Fueled by humiliation—
Oh God, I must have wet myself—
Hannah’s panic turned to hysteria. She had to get away, now, but her body did the exact opposite, lurching upward, toward rather than away from Simone, straining in its eagerness to obey her.

Simone frowned and looked closely at her. “Be still,” she said. Hannah froze. “Shut your eyes.” Hannah shut them. “Spread your legs.” Beneath the sheet, she spread them.
“Ostie!”
Simone let go of her, jerking away in disgust. Hannah cringed, terrified that she’d displeased the other woman, and forced her legs wider apart until the muscles of her inner thighs burned. “Stop!” Simone exclaimed, and then, more quietly, “Stop, Hannah. Relax.” Her muscles went slack. With a gentleness Hannah wouldn’t have believed her capable of, Simone took hold of her legs and pushed them back together. “It is all right,” she said. “You have done nothing wrong.”

Simone sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at Hannah with a haunted expression, as if she were seeing something or someone else. “They did not only sedate you, they gave you thrall. Do you know what this is?” Hannah shook her head. “The chemical name is thralaxomine. It is a drug made for rape. When you are on thrall, you have no will of your own, you must do what they say no matter what. You want to combat them, you want to kick and scream for help, but instead, you beg for more, because they tell you to beg. You are completely conscient the whole time, watching yourself, hating yourself for obeying them. And after …” Simone crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. “After, you remember everything. Everything.” Her voice was low and serrated by pain. The sound of it hurt Hannah’s heart.

“This was done to me,” Simone said, as Hannah had known she would. “There were three of them, and they take me to a motel much like this and keep me there for two days.” Her eyes darted around the room, refurnishing it with different paintings, tables, bedspreads. Repopulating it. “After, my friend finds for me the pill, the pill of the next morning, but it was too late. Two months later I know that I am pregnant. This was in Québec, before we changed back the law. I found a woman who knew a woman who knew a man who made abortions. I met him in a cave, a … basement of an abandoned building. It was filthy, and he was a butcher. When he did it,” she made a stabbing motion with one hand, “he, he pierced me. After that I was very sick. I almost died from the infection.” She paused. “Sometimes, I wanted to die.”

The words “I’m sorry” formed on Hannah’s lips, but she didn’t try to speak them, even though she was, deeply so. This woman wouldn’t want her pity, would fling it back at her like a dead snake. Simone may have been victimized, but she was no victim. She hadn’t allowed herself to be. Instead, she’d fed her outrage, using it as fuel, first to survive and then to help other women do the same.
It’s personal.
Hannah fully grasped, for the first time, the meaning of the words. They weren’t just about choice or even the right to privacy; they were a declaration of self-worth, a demand for personal dignity. Their fundamental truth pealed inside of her, clarion bright.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said, discovering that she could speak again. She reached out and touched Simone’s leg. “The dead can’t fight back. And if we don’t fight, they win.”

S
IMONE HALF WALKED,
half carried Hannah to the bathroom and eased her down onto the toilet, where she lolled like a rag doll. Her mind was a little sharper, but her limbs still felt sluggish and uncoordinated, and she was as tired as though she hadn’t slept in days.

“I think we had better make it a bath,
non?”
Hannah nodded; not that she could do otherwise, now that Simone had expressed a preference. The other woman started the water running and said, “I will leave you for a little. Knock when you are ready.”

“Thank you,” Hannah said, grateful for the modicum of privacy. Simone withdrew, closing the door behind her. There was a mirror on the back of it, directly opposite Hannah. A pitiful creature sat there, huddled on the toilet. Its scarlet face was slack, like a half-deflated balloon. Its hair was matted, its sweater torn and filthy. One knee was encrusted with dried blood. The creature was weeping, and who could blame it, as hideous and abject and lonely as it was? But its tears, Hannah perceived suddenly, didn’t just spring from wretchedness. They were also tears of relief, because it was alive, because it had survived another day. How could anything be grateful for such an existence? And yet, this creature was, and when it saw itself and knew that it wanted to live in spite of everything, it wept even harder, sobbing inconsolably until it was depleted.

When Hannah knocked on the door, Simone returned with the toothbrush from her pack. She took in Hannah’s swollen eyes but made no comment, merely applied the toothpaste, wet the brush and handed it to her. Hannah used it clumsily, still sitting on the toilet, spitting into a plastic cup Simone held out for her, rinsing, spitting again. Afterward, she drank several cups of water and felt better for it.

“Ready?”

Hannah nodded and lifted her arms, and Simone pulled off her sweat-soaked sweater. Her touch was brisk and impersonal, and she averted her eyes from Hannah’s body, but Hannah still felt self-conscious and exposed, and she had to resist the urge to cover herself with her hands. Simone helped her up off the toilet and into the tub.

“Do you need help to bathe?”

“I think I can manage,” Hannah replied, but then it occurred to her that if she lay back in the tub to wet her hair, she might not have the strength or coordination to get up again. How absurd it would be, after everything she’d survived, to drown in a foot and a half of water! She briefly considered skipping her hair, but her desire to be completely clean outweighed her modesty. “On second thought, I guess I’ll need help washing my hair.”

Simone shrugged. “It is not a problem.” She took the cup Hannah had drunk from and knelt beside the tub. “Move forward.” Hannah scooted toward the center of the tub, sloshing water over the side in her haste to comply. “Sorry,” Simone said, with a rueful smile. “I will try to stop telling you what to do until the thrall wears off.”

Hannah stared at her, startled. The smile had transformed Simone’s face, peeling ten hard years off it and making her look surprisingly … feminine. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, but there was an arresting purity to the sharp, clean planes of her face. She was finely made, Hannah thought, with a sort of dreamy dispassion. Like she’d been chiseled by a master carver.

“It should be completely dissipated by morning.” Simone dipped the cup in the water and tipped Hannah’s head back. “Please, close your eyes.”

Warm water streamed from the crown of Hannah’s head down her scalp.
What a strange baptism,
she thought, with that same detachment. Simone poured cupful after cupful over her head, lifting her hair to wet it underneath, and then her fingers worked in the shampoo, slowly massaging Hannah’s scalp. It felt sublime, and she started to get drowsy. As Simone began to rinse her hair, Hannah listed to one side.

Simone righted her with a clucking sound. “Almost finished,” she said. A wet washcloth moved gently across Hannah’s face, around her neck, down her back, under her arms, across and under her breasts. Like a child she let her limbs be raised and lowered, let herself be drawn upward and enfolded in a towel, her hair tousled and combed. Like a child she let Simone lead her to the second bed, turn down the covers, remove the towel, ease her under the cool, clean sheets and tuck them around her. She felt a soft brush of lips against her forehead, heard the other woman murmur, “Sleep now,
chère.”

Chère,
Hannah thought.
Cherished.
It was a good thing to be. She wrapped the word around her and carried it down with her into sleep.

W
HEN
H
ANNAH OPENED
her eyes, she saw Simone’s face inches from her own, illuminated by a vertical filament of sunlight peeking through a gap in the curtains. Confusion turned to panic as the events of yesterday cascaded through her mind, and then to relief. Safe, she was safe. Because of this woman.

Hannah studied Simone, remembering what she’d revealed about her past, her courage and anger and sorrow, her tenderness in the bath. She was lying on her side, as Hannah was. Her mouth was parted slightly, her face softened in sleep, one hand curled beneath her chin. Her eyelashes were the color of honey, and they made a thick, curved fringe against her pale cheeks. A faint line of worry bisected her brows, and Hannah’s hand, of its own accord, lifted from the bed and reached out to smooth it, the barest brush of her thumb against the other woman’s skin. Simone sighed, and Hannah yanked her hand back.

What am I doing?
Her pulse quickened at the thought that Simone might wake up.
And if she did? What would she do? What would I
want
her to do?
The first two answers her mind supplied—
Nothing,
and then,
I don’t know
—came reflexively, one after the other. The third was slower to materialize, a reluctant dawning that gave the lie to them both.

I’d want her to touch me back.

The realization was staggering, inconceivable, and Hannah’s immediate response was denial. But it was a weak no, and when it had faded away, the third answer was still there in her mind, waiting, and she knew that it was the true one.

Wickedness, perversion, abomination:
here it came, the virulent, all-too-familiar vocabulary of shame. But this time, she halted its onrush and examined it for truth. To her surprise, she found none that she recognized. These once-powerful words from her former life were tired and feeble, harmless unless she gave them teeth by believing them.

Hannah’s hand returned to Simone’s face, hovering above it. She owed Simone her life, and she knew that gratitude was part of it. She recognized too her own loneliness, how starved she’d been for the loving touch of another human being. But as her hand descended and her fingers traced the blade of Simone’s cheekbone, Hannah knew that she needed and wanted to touch as much as to be touched, and not just any human being, but this one. This woman she admired, respected. Was undeniably attracted to.

Simone jerked awake, stilling when she recognized Hannah. The crease between her brows deepened, and Hannah reached up and stroked it with her thumb. “What are you doing?” Simone demanded. “Stop.”

Hannah paused for a moment, and then her hand resumed its slow, deliberate odyssey, sketching the divot between Simone’s mouth and chin, gliding down and across the angle of her jaw, down the soft, vulnerable column of her neck.

“Stop,” Simone said again, but more questioningly. Hannah’s eyes followed the path of her hand, so lurid against Simone’s pallor, marveling that it should be there, moving across the other woman’s bare shoulder, down the length of her lean, corded arm to circle her palm. A quiver ran through Simone’s body, and as Hannah’s hand traveled back up her arm, she felt the stippling of goosebumps rise beneath her fingers, and within herself, her own desire rising. As if from a great distance, she watched her hand drop down to the hem of Simone’s tank top.

Simone pulled away and heaved herself up.
“Non,
this is not a good idea.”

“Stop,” Hannah said. “Lie down.” She lay her hand flat against Simone’s chest and pushed.

Simone searched Hannah’s face and then relaxed, lying back with a languid surrender that made Hannah’s heart pound. Her hand drifted slowly up from Simone’s waist to her breast, the landscape less sinuous than her own but still unmistakably feminine. Simone was still, watchful, her lips slightly parted. Hannah’s fingers skimmed across the lower one, followed the whorl of an ear and threaded the short-cropped hair, finding it soft as a pelt. A pulse beat visibly in her neck, beckoning Hannah’s mouth. She cupped the back of Simone’s head and drew her close. Her lips encircled the pulse point, and she felt the insistent throb of life beneath the delicate skin. She breathed in, smelled sea salt and vanilla, a deeper musk. Simone made a sound between a groan and a sigh, and Hannah pulled back to look at her, rubbing her cheek against the other woman’s like a cat.

Simone took Hannah’s chin in her hand, pressing her fingers into the soft flesh between cheek and jaw. “You are sure?”

Hannah thought back to her first time with Aidan, remembering how utterly certain she’d felt then, how confident that she was carrying out God’s will. This feeling was entirely different. She had only her own volition to follow, her own desire to act upon, or not. Whatever decision she made would be hers alone.