(Author's Note: I'm female, but the main character is a guy, seeing his girlfriend through jealous, helpless eyes... Kind of my thing. =) The first chapter is a setup for all the wickedness to come. Hope you enjoy!)
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My girlfriend's name is Molly. She's Irish, nineteen, and for the last three months, we've been keeping the most fucked up secret either of us can imagine.
Our problem first started when I took her to my uncle's farm. He lives in South Africa, not far from the border with Zimbabwe, and he's one of the few white farmers still in business down there, with a huge staff of black African workers. We visited in the summer, late August, and the humid heat was an absolute bitch. I spent the entire time sweating. Molly was as pale as any Irish girl ever was, and made sure she packed enough high-factor sunblock like it was the most precious resource on Earth.
On our first night there, jetlag sent Molly crashing early, before the sun had even set. I stayed up with my uncle, drinking on the porch, looking over his fields and to the forested hills beyond.
"Did you say you're going walking up there?" my uncle gestured with his beer can.
I sure wasn't going to sit around watching shitty foreign TV, or helping on his farm. This was supposed to be a vacation. "That's the plan. Molly's big into hiking."
My uncle took another swallow of his drink. "Where'd you find her? Sweet little Irish thing like that."
"She came over to the States to study. A sociology scholarship."
He snorted at that. "All about helping people and understanding them, huh? Some men are just assholes, Luke. Helping them is a waste of fucking time, if you ask me."
I hadn't asked him, and I didn't much care about yet another racist conversation about how lazy his black workers were. I was glad Molly was asleep; she'd have argued with him until dawn if she heard him speak like this. Racism was one of her hot buttons. That was Molly in a nutshell: solving the world's problems, one smile at a time.
"You want to be careful with her," he said, tossing his empty can in the trash and popping a fresh one.
"Careful? Why?"
He gave me a look that called me an idiot without him needing to say it. "You ever read the crime statistics for South Africa? This isn't the West. The men are like fucking animals. Forty percent of the women here have been raped at least once. And the boys love their gang rape here, kid. It's part of the culture. They call it 'jackrolling'. It's just a fucking game to them."
I wasn't sure what to say. Maybe he was telling the truth, and maybe he was just trying to squeeze in a few more racist cracks. I drained my own beer and reached for another.
"I'm sure it's not that bad," I said quietly.
"Oh, yeah?" He seemed more amused than annoyed, but his words still made me shiver. "You take that lovely girl too far from the farm, and you'll see how bad it can be." He took a drink, shaking his head. "Just look at her. Well done on scoring a beauty, but you better watch where you go while you're here. Especially up in those hills. That's close to the border."
Now I knew he was lying. Tensions with Zimbabwe had died down a few years back; it'd been all over CNN.
"Whatever," I said, not wanting an argument. "It'll be fine."
I was grateful when Molly interrupted us a few moments later. She walked out onto the porch in the sweltering evening heat, offering us both a smile, still looking sleepy.
"You coming to bed?" she asked, her soft voice and accent forever making her stand out, no matter whether she was in downtown New York or here in the middle of nowhere.
"Yeah," I said. "In a few."
She kissed my cheek and headed back inside. I watched her bare legs beneath the oversized shirt she wore. Like most girls, she considered it her God-given right to steal her boyfriend's shirts and sleep in them. She was tall for a girl, about five-nine, with her legs slender and toned from horseriding back in Ireland. Her lush red hair was down around her shoulders, like it usually was when she was ready for bed.
My uncle watched her leave, too. He paid as much attention as I did, and gave a low whistle once she was out of sight.
"Those legs..." he chuckled.
"Her father owns a stable. She rides a lot, and walks a lot."
"And those fucking tits," he added. "What's the reason those things are so nice?"
I shrugged. "Luck of the Irish. How am I supposed to know?"
"Big and juicy for such a skinny little thing. They bounce real pretty."
"Yeah, yeah." I liked guys to look at her, to desire what I had, but he was getting annoying now. "I'm headed to bed. Night, Uncle Mark."
"Sleep well, eh? And remember what I said."
Racist asshole, I thought.
"Sure," I said.
* * *
We went for our first walk the next day. The afternoon sun had no mercy at all, but we dressed for the weather.
My uncle saw us on the porch. While Molly was busy checking her bag, my uncle nodded over to my distracted girlfriend, and shook his head at me meaningfully.
"I'll send a guide up with you," he said. It was obvious why: as soon as he saw what she was wearing, he started to worry about what trouble we'd find. She didn't look like danger to me. Molly was in tight little jean shorts that left her slender legs bare and hugged the peachy curve of her ass, but she was hardly dressed as a slut. It was summer in Africa, for fuck's sake. What did he expect, jeans?
Her sneakers were white and new, but we'd written them off already -- neither of us cared about messing our shoes up on a hike. Her top was a thin cotton blouse tied up in a knot above her belly button, leaving her navel bare to the light breeze. Her tummy piercing, a little emerald in a gold ring, winked in the sun. The blouse was unbuttoned enough to show a deep slice of cleavage, down to the crucifix she wore hanging between her breasts.
"You should probably cover up a bit, sweetheart," my uncle said.
"It's too hot," she complained with a smile. The light kiss of freckles on her nose only added to her girlish grin. "I'll be fine."
Our guide was one of my uncle's farm workers, who introduced himself as Kej. I didn't know if it was a nickname or not, but as he shook my hand, then Molly's, it was clear he only had eyes for one of us. When we started walking, he probably thought he was hiding his glances pretty well. Molly didn't seem to notice any of them.
I did, though. The way his eyes drifted to her gently shaking cleavage, or the way her bare legs moved...
Now my uncle's paranoia had ruined what might have been a sweet hike up into the hills, for somewhere romantic to make love. We had this guy hanging around us.
I forced a smile and carried on.
* * *
We'd been up in the hills almost four hours when we finally saw another group. Until then, we'd seen a few farmers lower down close to the fields, and a few workers and women chopping wood and picking fruit, but the first sighting of another group had me nervous. Molly didn't seem bothered -- she even smiled and waved to them on the path ahead -- but my uncle's warnings were coming back to me.
"We should not pass them," Kej said. Hell, he looked more nervous than I was.
