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Five Times Sarah Connor Sold Her Body To Save The World (And One Time She Didn't)
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2010


Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Character/Pairing: Sarah
Rating: NC17 for adult concepts and dark themes.
Spoilers: To 1x03 The Turk.
Summary: A dark exploration of Sarah's story of survival and
utility, told in six vignettes.
Disclaimer: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
Feedback: deslea at deslea dot com.
More fic: http://fiction.deslea.com

Author's Note: For amilyn, who suggested it during a
meta-discussion of Sarah Connor's psychosexual development.





[The Guy With The Truck]

She was seven months pregnant when she decided it was time.

She'd been in Juarez for two months now, and she was a little
ashamed of her own naivete. She'd kind of thought, a pretty girl
alone in the most crime-riddled part of Mexico, she'd be a magnet
for some big strong man with dubious connections. Surely, someone
would swoop her up into their dark world, and she would start to
learn.

But it hadn't happened. She'd been mugged and propositioned,
sure. But she'd also found that the majority of people in Juarez,
as with most other places, were ordinary people with ordinary
lives. And those who weren't, could spot a silly little gringa
who wasn't from their world a mile off.

The fact that her belly had its own zipcode probably didn't
help any, either.

But she had to act. She had to get in somewhere, with someone,
before she had her baby. She knew it as though Kyle had whispered
it in her ear.

She watched. And she decided on The Guy With The Truck.

She'd watched him for a while. He came into the diner a lot. It
was the only diner in town that needed an English-speaking
waitress. Because of the couriers.

His name was Enrique Salceda. He spoke English. He had a large,
extended family with camps on both sides of the border crossing
(and, it was rumoured, a tunnel in between). There were children,
and a mix of women - permanents and transients. The ratio of
women to men made her think they felt safe there. And no woman
ever turned up with a bruise.

As luck would have it, he was gone longer this time, and she
feared he'd been caught. But he came in late one night at last.
Her boss was out of the way, thank God.

"Hola. Donde va, eh?"

The guy peered at her over his coffee. "Niña pequeña. ¿Te
llama?"

"Sarah," she said. "And that's about as far as my Spanish
goes."

"Sarah. I've been in Colombia."

She wondered if it was drugs this time, instead of guns. She
swallowed hard and didn't ask.

"So, what's happening with you, niña pequeña?"

He asked every time, and she was ready. She broke into tears.

"My boyfriend went to prison," she wailed. "He got caught
robbing a liquor store, and he tried to blame it on me. I only
drove the car, honestly, but now I can't go back to the States!"

The guy clucked sympathetically. "What an asshole. There is no
one who can help you, una pequeña?"

"No one." She swallowed. "I like it here, but I'm - I'm having
a baby - and - there's no one to help me-" she sobbed
theatrically into her hankie like the little girl he kept saying
she was.

He patted her shoulder awkwardly. "Una pequeña," he said again.

He wasn't taking the bait, dammit, and she wasn't good enough
to manipulate him into it. All she had up her sleeve was asking
outright. He was a nice guy, as bad guys went, but it was one
hell of a favour to ask.

She looked up suddenly, tears stopping like a faucet. "You
could help me," she said abruptly, like it had just occurred to
her. At his started look, she grabbed his arm. "Help me. Help my
son."

"¿Qué?" he exclaimed, surprised into his native tongue.

"The women in your camp," she said urgently. "They have
children. They could teach me what to do."

The look on his face was clear enough. It said: *Wait. What the
fuck just happened?*

She loosened her grip on his arm. Stroked it idly. "I won't be
big and pregnant like this forever, you know," she whispered.
Years later, he told her how clumsy she was, and how it was her
amateurish desperation that decided him, not her offer.

He extracted his arm. He did it gently. Frowning, he took her
hand. "I'm a one-woman man, una pequeña," he said kindly, and for
one shining moment she thought he was going to help her for free.
"But I have a little brother. He's a nice boy. A little naive,
no? He needs a nice girl like you."

She swallowed. Then nodded. "I'd sure like to meet him."

Nothing was for free.

Nothing at all.



[The Mexican Cop Who Wasn't]

Enrique's little brother's name was Alfonze.

It meant "noble and ready," supposedly, but Alfonze usually
wasn't. He was the weak link in everyone's armour, and Sarah
quickly realised he wound up with her because everyone thought
she'd be the weak link, as well. They hoped, with a woman and
child to protect, he'd dig deep, find some balls, and man the
fuck up.

Sarah outgrew him quickly, but in the complex social strata of
the Salceda family, she couldn't leave him behind. Not without
leaving the mother and sisters she counted on to get her through
John's baby years.

When John was two, an operation went bad. It was Alfonze's, of
course. It wouldn't have happened on Enrique's watch. Sarah was
there, on lookout duty, and one minute the cocky, clueless
bastard she'd come to despise was blundering around like an
idiot, the next a goddamn cop had him and Hernando against a
wall.

For one fleeting moment she considered leaving him there, but
he had been kind to John and he was her admission ticket to the
Salceda operation. And Hernando, the baby brother, was twice the
man Alfonze was, and if he died, she thought it would just about
kill everyone who'd been good to her.

Grimly, she went in there and made the offer. If the men went
free, she'd do anything he wanted. Anything at *all*.

It turned out he wanted quite a lot.

Alfonze, the bastard, watched the fake cop shove it up her ass
like he was watching the football. Hernando stood there with his
eyes closed, wincing every time she cried out in pain. Sarah
gritted her teeth and bore it, told herself it could be worse.

It got worse when he pulled out and tried to make her clean him
up. At that point, Hernando snatched the gun from that cheap fake
holster of his and blew his brains out. The cop collapsed on top
of her in a wet, bloody heap.

For long, long seconds, Sarah beat back at his chest and
screamed at his glazed expression. She had blood and brains on
her face and his jizz on her back and she felt like she was
drowning, and Hernando wasn't getting him off her because Alfonze
tried to high-five him and he'd punched him in the jaw.

Hernando helped her at last.

He cleaned her up, and he held her, and he said he was sorry he
didn't kill the guy sooner. And the last thing, the very last
thing she wanted was to be held, but she let him, because it
seemed to help him, and because she didn't want Alfonze within a
mile of her.

From that day on, she was Hernando's. Alfonze disappeared. No
one told her where he'd gone and Sarah never asked.



[The Jamaican Airline Dude]

The Cuban operation was a mess from the start. The only good
thing about it was the choppers.

It was Hernando's idea, and it was actually a pretty good one.
Fly in medical supplies, fly out cigars. Castro was big on
healthcare and the US embargo made supplies expensive. For Sarah,
who struggled with the ethics of a lot of their operations, this
one had the added bonus of appealing to her social conscience.
But crossing the sea was a logistical nightmare. Neither of them
could fly - it wasn't something normally needed in the Salceda
operation - and they didn't want to involve anyone who did.

There was also the small problem that neither of them had a
helicopter.

That problem, at least, was solvable. There was a Jamaican
airline that had just declared bankruptcy. It seemed like there
was one every week, prompting Sarah to wonder out loud just how
many Jamaican airlines there actually were. Hernando laughed and
John laughed too, clapping his chubby little hands in delight.

So Sarah bought a dress and Hernando bought a suit and they
flew to the administrator's office in Panama, speculating on the
way that the administrator was a shelf company and the airline
would soon be reborn, debt free. If that was the case, they
expected an easy transaction.

The helicopter would not be a problem, the airline dude said,
stretching out in an office that looked extremely temporary. It
was an elegant building with views of La Ciudad, but there was no
fitout. Like it had been rented yesterday. Of course, in view of
the desperate need to satisfy creditors, they would like a cash
sale.

That wouldn't be a problem, Hernando said, and it was agreed
that Sarah would deliver the cash to the office. The airline dude
would authorise release of the chopper by phone. Hernando would
then take delivery at Albrook airport.

Sarah wore the same dress, but this time she wore lingerie
beneath, bought at La Orda on the way. Her regular, sensible
underthings were tucked into her purse.

She made the agreed trade first. She didn't want to compromise
the chopper. Choppers were harder to get than flying lessons.

"Release the package," the airline dude said into the phone,
holding it so Sarah could listen in. She bent forward so he could
see down her dress. She heard someone in the foreground and
Hernando in the background and that was good enough for her. She
nodded and reached across him and took the receiver out of his
hand. Put it back where it belonged with a lick of her lips.

He tugged her hard against him. "My name's not really Javier,"
he said. "It's Jorge."

She pulled at the wraparound fastener at her waist. Let her
dress fall open. "I don't care," she hissed. "Don't tell me. I
don't want to know."

"What do you want?" he wondered, nudging his knee between her
thighs.

"I want to fly," she whispered as she leaned back on his desk,
tugging at his tie.

So he fucked her across the desk-that-wasn't-his, and then he
made a call, and Sarah learned to fly.



[The Ex Green Beret Guy]

The Ex Green Beret Guy was officially the scariest guy Sarah
had ever met.

He wasn't the most evil. Not by any stretch. But he came back
from a top secret mission that he Just Couldn't Talk About with a
bad case of Seriously Fucked Up.

She debated whether to risk having him around John, but he was
nice enough to the Salceda kids, and the chance to get ahold of
his training was just too good to pass up. Hernando was ready to
settle down, and he knew she wasn't the settling down type, so
she went with his blessing.

Hooking up with him wasn't difficult, and it wasn't even a
chore. He had that old-fashioned gallantry that soldiers
sometimes had. She didn't actively enjoy it, but it was easy.
Hernando had been hard work towards the end. They'd outgrown each
other and he hadn't wanted to face it.

Getting him to talk, though - that was tough. He'd been trained
not to talk. Trained by the very best.

Methodically, ruthlessly, she beat down his defences. Mentally
filed away every weak spot she found, then pressed them
relentlessly, then comforted him. Made him rely on her. It was
psychological warfare.

It was cruel.

She was playing with fire. Messing with the mind of a damaged
and dangerous man. A man who shared a house with her son. She'd
pushed him to the precipice, and it was time to move in for the
kill, while she still had any kind of control at all.

She sent John to spend the night with the Salcedas. Just in
case.

She rode him that night, in every way. Controlled every move.
Controlled *him*. Every time he came close, she pulled back, til
he was reaching for her, grasping. Begging. He *needed* her,
couldn't she *see* that? Every dark secret, every lonely memory,
every fear hung there in the room as she taunted him, offering
him the comfort of her body then snatching it away.

It was the ugliest thing she'd ever done to another human
being.

At last, she let up. Let him flip her over and get on top of
her. Let him fuck her, hard, plunging into her warmth over and
over. He was weeping and whispering her name and pledging his
allegiance to her and he couldn't get enough of her. Couldn't get
enough of her *ever.*

He was a decent man, and he was hers. Allegiance irrevocably
bartered for her body, and for the desperate need to be warm.

Sarah didn't sleep that night.



[The Kuna Woman]

John was seven when she finally cut ties with the Salcedas.
Hernando died in a courier run gone bad, so she and Enrique were
the only believers left.

Enrique was in Colombia. There was too much heat for him in
Mexico, so he crossed the Darién into the South. And Sarah had
never liked the South.

She had money, so she and John roamed for a while. They lived
in a cabana in Baja. Then another in Bocas. Then, after a couple
of months of sand and warm salty water and healing fresh air, she
began to think in earnest about her next move. And it dawned on
her that there wasn't one.

There was nothing left to learn.

Sure, she didn't know *everything*. She couldn't pilot a
submarine or launch a nuclear missile. But as for anything she
could learn from the guerillas of the Americas? She'd seen it
all, done it all. She could fly a helicopter, crack a safe, build
a bomb, and almost anything in between.

There was nowhere left to go.

It occurred to her that she could go back to the States.
Getting fake IDs was child's play for her now, and so was money.
She and John could train, and wait quietly for the war.

But she knew in her heart she couldn't do that. There were too
many machines in the States, too many computers. People had them
in their own homes now. Even some Central Americans had a
Macintosh or PS/2 (although mostly in the really good
neighbourhoods like Balboa). It made her nervous, almost to the
point of panic.

She didn't think anyone in Bocas had one, except for that kid
John played with. But that was a ten-year-old Atari, good for
games only, and even Sarah wasn't scared of those.

She could run her own operations now, she supposed. All the
things she shrank from - the hard drugs, the people smuggling
with complete disregard for safety, the robberies targeting
little mom-and-pop shops - she could stay away from that now. She
could rob the big corporations with good insurance, she could
stay away from cocaine and heroin, she could smuggle people in
air conditioned trucks. She could do it right.

Do it right? Who was she kidding? She'd been a drug mule, a gun
runner, a gun-for-hire, a glorified prostitute. Do it right, my
ass.

And anyway, she thought, what self-respecting thug was going to
work for her? At the end of the day, she was still a woman. Any
half-decent thug would take her operation over and make it his.
She knew that because it's what she'd do. What anyone would do.

And that was when she realised there was still something left
to learn after all.

*****

Her name was Allegria and she was a Panamanian indian of the
Wounaan tribe.

Her name wasn't really Allegria, of course, though she spoke
both English and Spanish fluently. She had a Kuna name but she
wouldn't say what it was. Just like she didn't wear the
traditional dress. But she wore the jewellery and even if she
didn't, her albino skin and her angular features and the way she
chugged away on Chi Chi all conspired to give her heritage away
on sight.

But hiding her heritage wasn't the point, and she would have
done a serious injury to anyone who suggested it was. Not that
anyone would have dared. Allegria was a white indian, a moon
child, sacred defender of the eclipse, and it didn't matter that
she hadn't been back to the tribe in years, that her living was
made running drugs across the Darién Gap and not defending the
moon from a dragon. In the Darién, the old beliefs died hard, and
not only among the Kuna.

"It's about keeping a reserve," she mused, tracing circles over
Sarah's back. "It's about keeping people at a distance. You want
them outside. You never let them under your skin."

"You let me under your skin," Sarah retorted mildly.

"You're different. You're passing through," Allegria murmured,
planting a kiss at the base of Sarah's spine. "And anyway, you
can do this and still have your reserve. You don't have to hold
back everything. As long as there's something. Something that's
just yours."

"Really?" she said doubtfully. Kyle was just hers. Was that
enough?

"Of course," Allegria added, "mystique helps, too."

"You've got that built in," Sarah said irritably. "We don't all
have tribally-significant albinism to fall back on."

"Oh, please. For all you know, I could be a white girl from
Kansas."

Sarah turned her head and stared. "You're *not*."

Allegria's look was mischievous. "No. But I could be. You
wouldn't know. Mystique can be created. You've been creating one
all along."

"I don't understand."

"The lowered lashes, the submissive tilt of the head to the
primary partner? It's quite an art you've got going there, you
know. It's easy to seduce a man - or a woman," she added with a
laugh. "It's harder to do it without pissing off their spouse."

Sarah frowned.

"The main thing is, never doubt your authority. I don't. You
know why? My people have been matrilineal for centuries. Don't
even think about it. Believe it's your birthright, to run
whatever you're running. Because Allegria, the Kuna moon warrior
told you so." And she laughed uproariously, and chugged back some
more of that godawful Chi Chi.

Sarah did believe it. But not because Allegria the Kuna moon
warrior told her so.

She believed it because she was John Connor's mother.



[Andy]

"I've got the guts of three X-Boxes and four Playstations
daisychained together in there. Plus some seriously modded-out
code that I swear came to me in a dream."

Playstations. Jesus. "And all this to beat another computer at
chess?"

Andy Goode looked at her sidelong. "None of this to beat
another computer at chess."

Sarah's heart sank. "Then what?" she asked. "What are you
doing?"

What the hell are you doing, Andy?

He told her, and what he said was scary enough. Would she
believe the Turk had moods? You bet your ass she would. But it
didn't matter, not really, because it wasn't the heart of it.

The heart of it was, Andy was in an eight year love affair with
the song in his head. And he wouldn't rest until that song came
to life, and killed them all.

The danger wasn't the Turk. Not really.

The danger was Andy's obsession.

"You talk about it like it's human," she whispered.

Andy shrugged. "You never know."

In that moment, Sarah knew with dark certainty that it was
over. Even if she told Andy the truth, even if she could get him
to believe it, he would protect the Turk. He would protect it
like his deadly lover or his misbegotten child. He attracted her,
and she knew she attracted him, and in a different life, she
thought they could have loved each other - but he would never
love her more than the machine.

Andy Goode had to die. And if she didn't do it, then Cameron
would.

There was something hard blocking her throat, and it wasn't
until she swallowed that she realised it tasted of tears.

"What?" Andy said. Jolted out of his reverie. "Too far? What is
it?"

She forced her face to form a wide, toothy smile that felt
horribly false.

"Nothing," she managed. She nodded to the path ahead of them.
"Nothing at all."

Satisfied, he walked ahead of her. Took the fork towards
Mountain Top Lagoon. She felt for the handgun at her back and was
comforted by its weight.

*What are you doing?* part of her screamed at her. *All these
years, you've never killed anyone - and now him?*

*Cameron will hurt him,* another part of her said calmly. Like
a cool flannel on a fevered brow. *She'll scare him. I won't.
He'll never even see it coming.*

*Let her! You can't save him, so save what's left of yourself!*

"You okay?" Andy asked. "You're quiet all of a sudden."

She forced herself to answer. "Yeah. It's just pretty up here."

She couldn't remember the last time an outsider cared if she
was okay.

But that was the problem, wasn't it? He wasn't an outsider. Not
really. He didn't know her name or her story, but somehow she'd
let him in anyway.

Shit.

On a sudden impulse, she took his hand. Tugged him against a
tree. Kissed him, hard. The gun bit into her back and she was
glad she hadn't flicked off the safety yet.

He gave a muffled sound of surprise. Of half-protest. He
returned the kiss, sort of, in a clearly-out-of-his-depth kind of
way. She supposed that sexually aggressive women weren't frequent
visitors to his world.

He learned fast, though. She wasn't surprised. Shaking hands
tugged at her shirt. He reminded her of that guy in Nicaragua,
the one who taught her to hotwire cars. To this day she suspected
she'd been his first. And this guy was a lot like him. He kissed
her, yes, but her tongue explored his, not the other way around.
He was too busy feeling to try to dominate her.

A nice guy, the guy in Nicaragua had been. But just a guy. She
thought she might have stolen his guns when she left him, but she
couldn't remember for sure.

"That's good," she whispered, pressing her breast into his
palm. She remembered doing this in Nicaragua, just like this. She
couldn't remember who with, but she remembered her shirt pulling
up and the bark pressing into her back and looking up into the
tree canopy when she came.

"Whoa," he whispered, and at first she didn't register it. And
then she did, and it wasn't the guy in Nicaragua. Any of the guys
in Nicaragua.

Oddly, it was Charley's voice she registered first. And then
she really heard it, and it was Andy.

"Whoa," he said again.

"You don't wanna?" she said shyly, and for an awful moment
there she didn't know whether she was play-acting or saying it
for real. Her world was spinning and collapsing on itself. A
hundred anonymous moments were collapsing in on the man in front
of her and she couldn't get her head around why it wasn't going
to script.

He gave a diffident little chuckle. Reluctantly, he drew his
hand out of her shirt. "Yeah, I wanna."

She was still reeling. It was starting to dawn on her, what
she'd done. What she'd tried to do.

She'd tried to depersonalise him. By fucking him. So she could
kill him.

Oh, my God, she thought. Tried to wrap her head around it. That
was...well, it was a kind of rape, wasn't it?

Was it?

She burst into sudden, absolutely genuine tears.

"Hey, hey," Andy said. "It's not that I don't want you or
anything-"

Self-preservation kicked in. She had to stop him, she thought,
before she blurted out why she was really crying. If she did
that, she really would have to kill him.

"No, Andy, I know that. I'm sorry," she said, wiping her eyes
with her palm. She threw in a downcast look for good measure,
thinking frantically. Groping for her next move to mask her
colossal mistake. "I just - I've got a bad habit of getting into
things too soon. It's stupid. I promised myself I wouldn't do
that this time. And look at me. It's the third time we've met and
I've got you up against a tree." Saying it, it dawned on her what
it must look like. She said slowly, "You must think I'm a total
slut."

"Wow, do you have a case of 'nice girls don't'," he commented.
"I don't think anything of the sort."

She stared at him. Blinked a couple of times. He'd blindsided
her as sure as a thwack to the side of the head. "What?"

"I think you're a beautiful woman who I would like to have a
few more dates with. And then, if they go well, I'd really like
to take you to bed, in a bed. In case you hadn't noticed, us
computer nerds aren't the outdoorsy type."

She laughed in spite of herself. Jesus, here she was
self-flagellating, and he'd made her laugh. She really could have
loved him.

She was also just about half-insane. She'd lived through
knowing about the end of the world, being chased by machines from
the future, selling her body for morsels of knowledge, taking a
lover who died in front of her *before he was born* for fuck's
sake, raising that man's child, and years of her life in a prison
hospital while their son was in foster care. And she was just
about to lose her mind over feeling up Andy Goode in a nature
reserve called Mountain Top Lagoon with no fucking lagoon in
sight. She opened her mouth to speak, with no idea of what
lunacies would come out.

What came out was perfectly sane. "Well. I think I should go
home and nurse my pride, so it's all healed up in time for our
next date."

"If you want. Walk with me?"

She shook her head. "I'll stay here a while, if that's okay."

He nodded. "As long as you're sure." He queried softly, "Can I
call you?"

She met his gaze fully for the first time since it happened.
"I'd like that. Andy."

He beamed that kid-like smile at her, put his hands in his
pockets, and he left her there.

His whistle drafted back on the breeze behind him.

She watched him go, and when even his whistle had evaporated,
she let out the breath she hadn't known she was holding. Sank
down to the base of the tree. Shudders rippled through her body,
and it wasn't until she felt fresh tears on her cheeks that she
realised they were sobs.

*Wow, do you have a case of 'nice girls don't.'*

That was all wrong. Nice guys like Andy and Charley and Kyle
didn't want...

Well, they didn't want women like her.

It wasn't just the sex. They didn't want women who'd blown up
factories or knew how to build pipe bombs, either. What was the
line? "Guys don't make passes at girls who kick asses." And no,
in her experience, they really didn't.

But the sex mattered. It mattered a lot. It was something she
knew instinctively without needing to be told.

But Andy didn't care. Maybe he'd care if he knew the full
circumstances and extent of it - but then, maybe not. She was no
longer certain of that.

And somehow that was messing with her head.

*I don't think anything of the sort.*

She could feel her carefully-constructed world collapsing
around her. The lives of Sarah Connor and Sarah
Insert-Pseudonym-Here were on a crash course, and not only did
she not know how to stop it, she didn't even know which was which
anymore.

It was all wrong. Sarah Connor was supposed to be the nice
girl. Kyle's girl. Sarah Pseudonym was supposed to be the bad
girl who Got Shit Done, and if that meant using her body, so be
it.

Only Sarah Pseudonym grew up. And now Sarah Connor was the
lunatic who'd fucked anything that moved and Sarah Pseudonym
dated nice guys like Andy.

And now Andy had seen a little bit of them both. And the world
should have shifted on its axis. But it hadn't.

In fact, the only person who seemed to have a problem with all
this was her.

The essential divide in her was beginning to close, she
thought, and that idea scared the hell out of her. Because if it
closed, she'd have to deal with...well...whichever of them was
the bad girl.

She knew conceptually that the whole bad girl thing was as
misogynistic as the ugliest men she'd slept with. But she also
knew that whichever Sarah did those things, wasn't a person she'd
ever wanted to be. She'd been a romantic girl who wanted to find
The One, be a wife and mother, in that order, and have an
ordinary life. And she had made peace, more or less, with The One
dying before her eyes, and with raising their son on the run, but
she'd never made peace with some of the things she'd had to do
along the way.

A little knowledge was a bad thing, she thought. She'd spent
enough years in therapy to understand the exact nature of her
constructed duality. In her experience, psychiatrists had an
unhealthy fixation on all things sexual, and Sarah Connor and
Sarah Pseudonym had been trotted out for analysis many times
before. Indeed, she had encouraged it. She could defer discussion
of the truth-or-otherwise of her delusions for weeks with a
single, mournful reference to selling her body.

And in all those years of analysis, not once had the
foundations of her world budged an inch.

Andy Goode had taken an axe to it with a throwaway remark.

Doctor Silberman told her to introduce Sarah Connor to Sarah
Pseudonym once. Sarah had told him that was stupid and refused to
speak for the rest of the session. She wondered now what they
would have said if she'd done it.

She suppressed a smile. They would have said, *I don't like you
very much.*

But maybe they just needed to be in the same room. Maybe that
was what he was getting at.

Maybe that was what Andy did for her.

"Silberman, you asshole," she said out loud in wonder. "You
were good for something after all."

She looked up at the canopy of trees over her head. She
remembered the guy in Nicaragua and the way he surprised her by
making her come. She remembered Andy's hand under her shirt and
the way a little part of her really had wanted him to touch her
breasts.

*They're in the same room,* she thought in wonder.

If she could save a tiny part of her own mind, she thought,
maybe she could save Andy, too.

END