Amber nodded. She wasn’t naïve. “Then why did he invite me out here for tonight if he knew that?”
“I imagine he felt that alleviating your loneliness was more important than getting laid.” Her eyes turned to Amber’s again. “You worry that they will discover something about you that will drive them away from you. Something scandalous? No,” she seemed to think aloud, analyzing Amber as they stood waiting for their drinks. “Deceptive. Unforgiveable.”
“Well, when you say it like that, I might get worried,” Amber chuckled.
“You might be shocked at what those young men can forgive.”
“You sure about that?”
Lorelei nodded. “I’ve had personal experience.”
“What did they have to forgive you for?”
“All that I am,” Lorelei murmured, accepting the drink from Ahmed with a smile. Her first response wasn’t meant to be heard, but Amber caught it. The second came out clearer: “We didn’t meet under ideal circumstances.”
“But you’re seeing one of Jason’s friends, right? That’s how you met them?” asked Amber. “How did that come about? I mean, I haven’t met him yet, but you seem like the kind of woman who could grab any man she wants.”
“That is more of a story than I think we’d care for tonight, but if you want the simple answer? I can talk to him as I had never been able to speak to any other. Alex has wit and courage. I liked the look of him. He overcame every obstacle that life offered. There are of course a dozen qualities of relevance. But if you ask what first made me give him a chance, and what keeps us together from day to day? He listens to me, as he did from the start. He accepts me for what I am, and has never asked me to change.”
Amber chewed on that, glancing back at the guys again. “That’s what makes him stand out? I mean judging by his friends, you probably don’t come from the same social circles.”
“Not remotely.”
“You don’t think another man might have all those qualities?”
“Surely there are others,” nodded Lorelei. “They missed their chance.”
“Hey, Lori, back again,” came a male voice. The two looked up to find a tall, muscular man looming behind them, his smile not quite as broad as his chest. He had to be proud of both. His teeth were laser white. His shirt spread unbuttoned at the top, showing off both his gold chain and the dark chest hair threatening to explode from his pecs. She caught an accent that she could not immediately place as the handsome stranger said in a great voice, “I’ve missed you so much. Why do you never come around anymore?”
“I was here only last week, Emir,” Lorelei answered. “You don’t remember?”
“Ah, every night without you is like an eternity,” he said, so smoothly Amber guessed he must have practiced it. The next line was dismissive rather than grandiose: “Besides, you were with that boy you keep hanging around with.”
“We are rather fond of sharing our time together,” Lorelei smiled patiently.
“Sure, but you could maybe share a drink with me, eh? Maybe let me take you out some time? He’s not here now. How serious could you and your boy be?”
“Quite serious. I don’t think I’ll take you up on your offer, Emir.”
“What’s the matter?” he scowled, though trying to maintain a cheerful tone, “you afraid you’ll like it? Or maybe you’re afraid he won’t?”
“Emir, I’m not interested, and that alone should settle the matter. But since you asked,” Lorelei smiled sweetly, and then stepped closer, putting one hand on Emir’s chest, right over his heart.
Amber leaned in to hear what Lorelei said, but it all came out in a different language. Is that Arabic? Amber wondered. Turkish? Regardless, her words took the wind from Emir’s sails. His eyes went wide with disbelief and even fear.
He stepped aside. Lorelei walked past. Amber followed. They weaved through the aisles of pool tables. As before, Amber knew that most every man watched Lorelei pass. “What did you say to him?”
“Emir obviously grew up believing that women don’t know their own minds,” Lorelei shrugged. “Were I interested in investing the time, I’d correct his error. I find him annoying, though, so I put things in terms he’d understand.”
“What was that?”
“I told him that the last time a man wouldn’t leave me alone, my love followed him into his home and stabbed him in the heart. Right in front of all of his friends.”
Amber almost tripped. “Is that… wait, really? He believed that?”
Lorelei grinned over her shoulder. “Why shouldn’t he? Don’t you?”
* * *
Not for the first time, Alex regretted putting his photography class ahead of his social life.
“In contrast to modern American policies, photographs of the dead were not forbidden or banned by the Allies during the Great War,” droned the lecturer. Above and behind him, black and white photographs of hospital scenes and lifeless soldiers laid out in rows flashed past.
“Plenty of examples can be found in the archives, from the war’s beginning in 1914 right through ‘til its end.” The lecturer clicked through more black and white tragedy. Alex cringed.
His photography professor pitched this as a study of the growth of camera technology, and a way for students to earn some extra credit. The various sign-in sheets in the lobby and the bodies packing the auditorium suggested that plenty of classes from other schools had similar interests. Alex had all his assignments in, but his attendance had grown spotty as of late. He needed the points.
He didn’t need the First World War. Somehow, nobody thought to note that little detail in the lecture title. His professor conveniently glossed over that.
“Naturally, photographs of the action as it happened on the front lines were difficult to arrange,” said the lecturer. “Equipment was clumsy and not particularly quick to operate like cameras today,” he said. “Naturally, you don’t see many views of the battlefields at night. Flash photography could cause all sorts of potential problems among armed, jumpy men,” he added with a chuckle.
“Laugh it up, ye fookin’ cunt,” Alex heard someone mutter bitterly. He blinked, turned his head this way and that-and found the people on either side staring at him.
The girl to his left leaned in across the empty seat between them. “Hey,” she smiled, “are you Irish?”
Alex looked back to the screen. He saw more devastation, of course. This had all started out with photos of parades and men in dress uniforms-just like the war itself, he remembered, though the photos lacked the full color of memory.
Chelsea fawned over how he looked in his uniform before he shipped out. She said all he needed were some medals.
Alex rubbed his eyes. Who the hell was Chelsea? An image flitted through his mind, but it was of a photograph, not the memory of a face. He saw Chelsea’s wedding picture by the light of an overhead flare, lying in some mud. He smelled dead flesh.
The lecturer droned on. Alex raised his head to try to follow. Disjointed as his thoughts were, he couldn’t tell what might be real and what might be imagined.
Then he recognized the shattered hillside, the broken and dead remnants of a forest, and the ruined walls of a house that inexplicably stood while everything else had been blasted away by artillery.
Soft light swept into the auditorium as a door opened in the back. He cringed out of reflex, almost ducking behind the seat in front of him. Then the door fell shut with a loud slam, and reflex took over. He squatted down in front of his seat and threw his hands over his head.
“Woah,” said the girl to his left.
“Hey, what the hell?” hissed the guy on his right.
Alex looked up. No one else ducked. There were just people sitting around his trench without helmets or guns, all looking at him like he was mad.
No. Not a trench. An auditorium, at the UW.
Oh shit, Alex finally realized. He looked to the screen to see a landscape of mud and craters filled with water. He felt himself drowning.