IGMS Issue 41 by IGMS

Author:IGMS
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hatrack River Enterprises
Published: 2014-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Francis groaned, feeling like his skull was three sizes too small for his brain. His mouth was full of dust and glue. He cracked open his eyes a fraction. The back of Reeva's head was visible through his narrowed eyes. He closed his eyes and reached out to stroke her back. Not smooth skin. Ridges of hard flesh. Scars.

He snatched back his hand, images of the war AI strobing through his head. Reeva's screams. The adrenaline woke him, cleared his head of half-dreams. It wasn't Reeva lying naked in the bed next to him. It was Wahid.

He fully opened his eyes. It was still dark. He was lying naked in a large bed. There were no sheets. Wahid lay on her side next to him, facing away. Across her back were old white scars, like a tiger's stripes.

He sat upright, breathing hard. He'd seen such scars before. Always in corporate meat-puppets, typically Somalian boys paid by a corporate in return for allowing their bodies to be wet-jacked by a war AI. No, Wahid couldn't be one. Wet-jacked boys were always jittery, the commanding war AI pushing their adrenal centers harder than the body could handle. Wahid had none of the same aggression and herky-jerky movements. The scars must have come from something else.

Looking away from her scars, he became very, very aware that she was naked. Her body was hard and lean, like a long-distance runner. Before the priesthood, he had liked that in a woman. His body responded, despite the thumping hangover.

He rolled over to sit on the bed's edge, trying not to look at her, his head swimming with pain. The bedroom was sparse, a wooden chest and a rocking chair the only other furniture. The only decoration was a ceramic statue of Ah Muzen Cab atop the chest, its many arms open wide in benediction.

He scanned the bare wooden floorboards for his clothes and spotted Wahid's bra draped carelessly across the back of a chair. He started reciting his hail Marys. His own clothes were nowhere in sight.

He switched on his earworm.

"Annie?" he whispered.

Only static.

"That figures," Wahid said. He turned to see her watching him with a wry smile. "Take a man to bed, and in the morning, he calls you by the wrong name."

He averted his eyes. "Last night, did we . . ."

"What do you think?"

He felt his cheeks flush and he stood. Hell, all of him from head to foot was probably tomato red. "I think that I'm a priest and that I shouldn't be here."

She looked away from his face, slowly and deliberately downward. "You're also a man. Quite a man."

"Where are my clothes?"

She sat up, her hair falling across her breasts. "Are you sure I can't persuade you to come back to bed?"

He fixed his eyes away from her, on the floor. "I already have enough to confess when I return to the monastery."

"Stay for breakfast. Let's talk about you and how you'd fit into Temptation in the long-term."

"Why?"

"I like you," Wahid said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

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