You know the feeling, right? You left the room twenty minutes ago, to hunt for a corkscrew, and when you come back, the girl you and Husband #1 just rescued from being trafficked as a sex slave is in a towel. Something has happened. Something went down. That tight, knotty thing in your gut is pretty sure that the thing that went down is sex, even as your brain scoffs, no way. But, says the knot, yes way, oh yes way.

You could be anywhere on the planet (okay, I guess the sex-trafficking thing might limit it a little, so let’s say any seedy-where), but it so happens that you are in Morocco, in the port city of Ceuta, in a small, family run hotel. It’s not expensive, but it’s nice, lots of greenery and flowers on the grounds, a pool, a fountain… a little island of lovely in the midst of what actually is  kind of, at least in parts, a seedy place. It’s a port city, like I said—you can smell the salt water pretty much anywhere you walk. And hash, and spices, and coffee and maybe a hint of sewage, but only when the wind blows a certain way.

The three of you are in the rescued girl’s room—she has a name, it’s Sophie, which is derived from the Greek word for wisdom, though she is definitely not wise. You and Husband #1 are lodged in a different room, just down the hall. You are paying for both rooms, or rather your travel fellowship is. Husband #1 has traveled here with you, from Granada, where the two of you still live; we’ve done a bit of a rewind from the West Village where I left you a couple of weeks ago. This so that I can explain to you, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, why I got nervous in said West Village apartment when he went out on some errand or other and then stayed disappeared for hours on end…

Husband #1 has come with you to Morocco (where we will be for the next several posts; Morocco is a lovely place, and I do hope you enjoy it) in order to ‘help’ (ehem) you do comparative research into the floral ornament of medieval Islamic buildings in Morocco. The idea is that he, with his genius-artist’s eye, will photograph, with the expensive camera you have purchased with a chunk of your grant money, the medieval buildings you have come to study (photographs taken by an artist, a real one, lucky, luck you). You have planned your itinerary carefully, and have budgeted equally so (travel grants to graduate students don’t tend to leave a lot of margin for freewheeling expenditure, and they don’t factor in sidekicks).

And now, apparently, you have two sidekicks.

After the events that went down on the ferry, you couldn’t just leave Sophie wandering the streets of Ceuta (though maybe you should have), so she came with you to the hotel and now she has a room. Sophie is blowing both your budget and your itinerary, and quite possibly (insists the knot in your gut, which you just as insistently ignore) your husband as well.

And whatever she’s doing or not doing, it is kind of your own fault. You rescued her on the ferry, on the way across the Straits of Gibraltar, so now you feel kind of responsible for her, though you also kind of feel taken advantage of (why isn’t she in more of a hurry to get back home?). On the ferry, you spotted her seated at the bar. Young, pretty, strawberry blonde, busty and oh-so-pale. Flanked, a little too closely, you thought (though you punctiliously ran your impressions through a political-correctness filter: two dark men, one very pale girl, correct-correct-correct, still looked fishy), by two youngish Moroccan men, whom you identified as such by their accented French and, yes (cringe), the white athletic socks they wore with their leather dress shoes. The shoes-and-socks combo resisted the political-correctness filter, but you shoved it through anyway. You remarked to Husband #1 that the girl looked uncomfortable, that something there wasn’t right. He, you noticed at the time, was focused, not on the potential danger in which the girl had placed herself (you would later learn that she had come on vacation with the man on her right, whose acquaintance she had made in a discotheque in Brussels, where she is a hair dresser, a mere four days earlier), but on her (young, attractive, very-different-from-you-though-you-are-not-exactly-chopped-liver) person.

More specifically, he was focused, in the bar, as he is now, in her room, on her white, firm, abundant cleavage, and you wonder what she is doing wrapped in a towel. A red towel. Why the color registers is unclear to you, but you really, really know that the towel is red. That knot in your gut, as you stand in the doorway to Sophie’s room (a room that, let’s mention once more, you’re paying for, because the men, once you got her away from them, which was a really dangerous thing to do, it only occurs to you now, they had guns, the men kept her bags and ergo her money and her passport), in the beautiful late afternoon light spilling in from the balcony, corkscrew in hand (you’ve had to use both your French and your Arabic to explain to the attendant of the dusty, not-yet-open bar downstairs that you have a nice bottle of wine, from the duty free, that you would be happy to pay a corkage fee—that’s your cater-waiter past talking, she had no idea what you were talking about, she merely wished to be assured that the corkscrew would be returned in time for the bar to open because, apparently, they only possessed one), is screaming at you that these two have just had a quickie. And your head is screaming back, no effing way, you were gone, like, twenty-minutes tops.

As the indignant knot in your gut wants to know when you are going to start standing up for yourself, Sophie is saying it was really hot, so she just stepped into the shower. You register that her hair is not wet. Nor are there drops of water on her lovely shoulders, but then of course she might have used a shower cap (though there is no shower cap in your room, this isn’t the kind of hotel that gives you shower caps as a matter of course), or she might have just dried herself off really well.

That is totally, totally possible. Of course it is.

Rather than call anyone to the carpet, or start asking the very obvious questions you might very well ask, you would be absolutely entitled to ask them, you opt for opening the bottle of wine. As you expertly remove the little circle of foil and sink the point of the corkscrew into the pale, yielding flesh of the cork, Sophie dresses in the bathroom. You note that she has left the door slightly ajar, because Husband #1’s eyes keep sliding over that way. You pause in your bottle-opening task, which is much more difficult than it should be (the hotel’s one, precious corkscrew is a cheap, flimsy one; you will definitely return it, but quite possibly in pieces), and look down. Your breasts are nice, they are firm, they are perfectly nice, but Sophie’s are big. You know that Husband #1 has a thing for breasts.

Because you have already started reading his diary.

Sophie is back, she is dressed. She is wearing tight jeans and a ridiculously low-cut top. You’re in Morocco.

You reserve comment. Not wishing to draw Husband #1’s attention to the top (red, like the towel), which is a stupid reason to reserve comment, because of course 100% of his attention is already on the top, and what it (just barely) contains.

You crack a pistachio, pour the wine, and suggest going down to the street fair that has sprouted outside with the suddenness of mushrooms after a soaking summer rain. You can, you reason to yourself, have dinner at one of the food stands (which, you calculate, will be cheaper than the restaurants to which you have taken Sophie and Husband #1, both suggested by Husband #1, for the past two nights).

The three of you finish the wine and leave the room, laughing–you translate Sophie’s comments to Husband #1 and vice versa, so that they can laugh.

And you laugh too.

Because, you cogitate as you and the other two components of the trio descend the stairs, nothing went down here, right? It couldn’t have, right? She wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Right?

Of course right. They can’t even talk to one another: Husband #1 speaks only Spanish, and Sophie only French. You have been simultaneously translating their every interaction since the three of you got off the ferry and approached the seedy gendarmerie to report the almost-crime.

They’d have needed you, right? To have sex? Or at least to get started?

One thing you do know (your hand in your pocket, fingering change, as you eye the array of felafel stands, which would be the cheapest?): you’re three days into your Moroccan sojourn, six days into your budget (Husband #1 and Sophie wanted to score some hash and so you did—operative word being you, because, you know, you speak all the languages), and you’ve yet to lay eyes on a single medieval building.

Dear, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, the events described in this post are as real as that zit on your chin (don’t pop it; seriously, don’t, just don’t). But they also became art, in the form of a short story entitled “Maison des Oiseaux,” published two summers ago by the wonderful Missouri Review (can I brag just a teensy bit and tell you that it was a finalist for their Jeffery E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction…?). And they must have liked it kind of a lot because they then published it again, as “Featured Prose” on their website, back last fall. I include a link (once more here in case you didn’t click on the one two lines up): I truly believe you will  greatly enjoy.

Certain of the facts related in this post (which is slightly shorter than my usual offerings because I really, really want you to click on that link up there and read that story, you will not be sorry, I pinky-swear and cross my heart!) were changed. Yes, art can imitate life, but sometimes real shit is just too weird to turn into fiction.

In the next post, I will relate to you how I actually did get manage to get rid of Sophie (no, I didn’t to do her what the fictional protagonist of the story, Della, my stand-in, does to the fictional version of Sophie, who I’ve named Joseline…though I did maybe fantasize about it just a little). And Husband #1 and I will be on our merry Moroccan way. Research! And he helped!

Come on back next week and hear how… And in the meantime, have a lovely seven days and nights, and try not to love too badly (y’all can leave that to me).