She held him silently as the elevator ascended, pressing her head into his chest. They made love for hours on his rumpled bed, and then she fell asleep in his arms. As the motorbikes began whining underneath his window and the sky began to gray with the first hint of dawn, she awakened, grabbing his wrist and staring unbelievingly at the dials on his watch.

“Oh, this is very bad. Now I will have to tell my mother!”

“Should I come with you?”

“And then what?”

She sat on the edge of the bed, watching him. As she looked down, her hair fell forward, resting on her high, rounded breasts. She ran a finger along old shrapnel scars that still pocked and gouged his legs.

“What is happening to me?” she said. “I’m very afraid. Are you going to leave me?”

“I can’t leave you, Van. We aren’t even together.” He saw the hurt in her eyes and took a few strands of her hair into his fingers, gently pulling until she had turned her face toward him. “This is why I didn’t want to make love to you. I like you too much.”

“You like me too much? Then why don’t you want to love me?”

“You’re too young.”

“No, Cong Ly! In Viet Nam, I am almost too old!”

She was right about that. In Viet Nam, women were usually married by their early twenties. “Okay, I said that wrong. You haven’t seen enough. You’ve been through a great deal with Francois, and you need to calm down before you decide to be in love with anyone else.”

“Maybe we will be in love?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But not yet.”

“That was honest,” she said. “So I don’t feel bad.”

He watched her for what seemed to be a long time. She avoided his eyes, her fingers still playing along the edges of his scars. Finally something broke inside him, so real that he almost heard it.

“No promises?”

She gave him a little smile, as if accepting a truce. “No promises.”

“Would you like to go to Bangkok?”

She looked at him as if he had offered up a dream. “Of course!”

“Can you get a visa?”

She had obviously thought about visas many times before. “I know a man at a government travel agency. A friend of the family. It is difficult, you know, because of the political situation. Almost no one can travel outside the country unless they are part of a political group. But there are ways. My father is trusted, so that would help. And it will cost me a hundred dollars. Under the table, you understand? But, yes, it is possible to get a visa.”

“Can you get a visa today?”

She smiled impishly, her face filled with an unfathomable excitement. “Do you have an extra hundred dollars?”