“Maybe I am a threat to you,” she said, her voice even. “Not because I want to be, but because of the situation. So? You’re a professional. Do what you have to do. Eliminate the threat.”
She took a step closer, close enough for me to smell her, to feel something coming off her body, heat or some electrical thing. I felt another adrenaline rush spreading through my chest and gut.
“No?” she asked, looking into my eyes. “Why? You know how. Here.” She reached down for my hands and brought them up to her neck. Her skin was warm and smooth. I could feel her pulse against my fingers. It was beating surprisingly hard. I could hear her breath moving in and out through her nose.
I hadn’t meant to bluff, but somehow I had. And now she was calling. Fuck.
But she wasn’t completely sure of herself. There was that rapid pulse, and the sound of her breathing.
And of mine, I realized. I looked for some way to regain the initiative, regain control of the situation. But looking into those blue eyes, seeing her face framed by my hands encircling her neck, her expression simultaneously fearful and defiant, I was having trouble.
She lowered her arms to her sides now and tilted her chin slightly upward, the posture maximally submissive, and yet, somehow, also mocking, insolent. I looked down at the shadowed hollows of her clavicles, one side, then the other, and was almost defeated by the thought of how easy it would be to sweep my hands down over her shoulders, catching the material of the dress on the way, bringing the garment and the lingerie beneath down to her wrists and belly in one smooth motion, exposing her breasts, her skin, her body.
It was there if I wanted it. I knew that, and I knew this was by design, our moves to be choreographed on her terms, where she would offer what I wanted like a kind homeowner offering milk to a starving kitten, maybe petting the little stray on the head while it greedily lapped at the leavings.
I was suddenly angry. The feline imagery helped. I removed my hands from her neck and took a careful step away from her. My mouth had gone dry. I picked up my Laphroaig. Took a swallow. Sat back down, as casually as I could.
“I was right about you,” I said, leaving her standing there. “You really can’t help yourself. This is all you’ve got.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction, and I knew I was right. I’d competed against guys like this in judo. They had one money move, a technique that always worked for them, but if you could get past that one, if you could survive it, they were off their game and couldn’t recover.
“What’s it like?” I went on, feeling more in control now. “Can you even talk to a man without trying to give him a hard-on? What are you going to do a few years from now, when your pheromones start to dry up? Because there’s nothing more to you. Maybe there was, a long time ago, but there’s nothing left now.”
Her eyes narrowed more and her ears seemed almost to flatten in an oddly feral attitude of anger. Good, I thought. I needed that.
“Are you going to sit down?” I asked, gesturing to the couch. “I’m not going to fuck you. And I’m not going to kill you. Not here, not now. It took all afternoon to get rid of that guy from the elevator, and I’m not going through that again tonight.”
She smiled in a way that made me wonder if she had just imagined herself killing me, and dipped her head toward me as if to say, All right. Touché.
She moved back to the couch and finished what was in her glass. I picked up the bottle to pour her another. She raised the glass as I did so and I noticed that both our hands were shaking. I knew she saw it, too.
“Why don’t we call that one a draw,” I offered.
She smiled and took a swallow of what I’d poured her. “I think you’re being generous,” she said.
“I’m being honest.”
She smiled again, a little more brightly this time. “You’re good, you know. Exceptional.”
“Yeah, so are you.”
She took another swallow and looked at me. “It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if we’d met under other circumstances.”
“You want it to be more interesting than it already is?” I asked. We both laughed, and the tension broke.
Then we were silent for a moment, maybe collecting ourselves, adjusting to the new dynamic. I decided to try to keep things comfortable for a while, thinking it would be useful to make her feel good after that harsh exchange. I was aware that I also just wanted the exchange to be comfortable, that I didn’t want to spar with her and certainly didn’t want to fight, and I wondered for a moment where my decision was really coming from.
“You know, you almost dropped me in Belghazi’s suite,” I said.
She shrugged. “I had surprise on my side. I don’t think you were expecting much from a naked woman.”
“Maybe not. But you used what you had at your disposal, and you used it well. Who trained you?”
The question was straightforward, and I knew she wouldn’t take it as another attempt to glean something revealing.
She looked at me for a long moment, then said, “It’s Krav Maga.”
Krav Maga is the self-defense system developed by the Israeli Defense Forces. These days it’s taught all over the world, so experience in the system certainly doesn’t mean the practitioner is Israeli. But Delilah already knew that I suspected her nationality and her affiliations. In this context, her acknowledgment served also as a tacit admission.
I wondered how best to pursue the slight opening she seemed to have deliberately created. I said, “I like Krav Maga. It’s practical.”
“It’s all in how it’s taught,” she said, nodding. “And how you train. Most martial arts are taught as religions. They’re about faith, not facts.”
I smiled. “People need to believe something, even if they have to invent it.”
She nodded again. “Even if it’s wrong. But we don’t have that luxury. We need something that works.”
We. She was getting ready to tell me something.
But don’t push it. Let her get to it the way she wants to.
“How’d they train you?” I asked.
“You know how. A lot of scenario-based conditioning. A lot of contact. My nose was broken during training, can you see it? I had it fixed, but you can still see the scars if you look closely.”
I looked, and saw a hairline mark at the bridge, the remnants of a bad break repaired by a good plastic surgeon. It wouldn’t have meant anything if you hadn’t known to look for it.
“Sounds pretty rough,” I said.
“It was. They took it further for me than for most because my missions are special. I’m alone in the field for a long time, usually without access to a weapon, or at least not to a traditional weapon.”
We were silent again. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you?”
“Mostly judo,” I said. “The Kodokan.” If she’d trained in Krav Maga, she would know both.
She looked at me. “I thought neck cranks were illegal in judo.”
“They are,” I said, seeing that I’d been right about her knowledge. “I learn the special stuff elsewhere. Books and videos. I used to practice it with a couple partners who shared some of my interests.”
“What else?” she asked. “The way I saw you move, you don’t learn that doing judo as a sport. Even with the extra books and videos.”
“No. You don’t. It helps to have spent a decade or so in combat. You develop a certain attitude.”
Silence again. Then she said, “So you are who I think you are.”
I shrugged. “I think you know part of it, yes.”
“Well, you know part about me, too.”