Chapter 1: The Soldier in His Screen
The room smelled of soap and damp wool. The towel hung over the chairback was still wet, a cold, forgotten ghost. Gavin Russell was naked on the bed, the flickering single bulb above him casting jittering shadows over the landscape of laundry and half-empty energy drink cans that covered his desk. He was twenty-eight, lean, and quietly going out of his mind.
His phone glowed in his hand. Reddit. A mindless scroll through a blur of memes, tech arguments, and political noise. A practiced distraction from the hollow, staticky feeling in his chest. His other hand absently over his cock, rolling it between his palms.
He was waiting on the silicone sleeve of his Fleshlight on its charger. He figured it was still cool, impersonal. He would eventually shove it between two pillows, trapping it, using the pressure and the friction of the fabric to try and simulate sex. A procedural step.
He kept scrolling.
His thumb stopped. His breathing shallowed.
It was a photo from a subreddit he didn’t remember following. A combat photo, gritty, high-contrast. A woman stands on a rock in a scrubby, sunlit landscape, holding a rifle across her body. She wears a brown headscarf with goggles on top, a dark sleeveless top, fingerless gloves, fitted dusty black tactical pants with ribbed panels and green strap details, and lace-up combat boots. A belt with pouches and gear sits at her waist, and a holster is strapped to her thigh. Her stance is upright and confident. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking past it, towards something unseen, her profile sharp and unyielding.
The caption was just a name and a location. Samira Rafiq. Rhyhan.
It was her eyes. Even in profile, the defiance was a physical thing. Calm, focused, and almost unreal up close. Like she knows exactly what she’s doing and doesn’t need to prove it. Gavin’s pulse spiked, a hard, sudden thump in his throat that had nothing to do with the pornography he’d been skirting. This was different. This was a jolt.
He zoomed in. The texture of the keffiyeh wrapped around her neck and shoulders, the pattern of the weave. He imagined the grit caught in the cloth. The scent of smoke and sweat. His mind, always a filament too hot, bypassed rational thought and went straight to a crude, visceral cinema.
The fantasy was sudden and violently specific: his fingers catching the fabric of the keffiyeh, pulling it slowly away from her skin, the resistance of the knot. Her watching him, those dark eyes not softening, not yielding, just seeing him.
The complete, terrifying silence between them, a canyon filled only with the sound of ragged breath and the rustle of cloth. Separated only by a language barrier, by everything. Fucking her in that silence. A brutal, wordless transaction of heat against the cold background of war.
“Fuck,” he whispered to the empty room. The word evaporated into the damp air.
The warmth between the pillows was no longer an abstract goal. It was an urgent necessity. His skin felt too tight, too sensitive. The fantasy had its own physics, its own gravity, pulling at the centre of him. He pulled the fleshlight from its charger. It was warmer now, enough to confuse with body heat.
He prepared it with a detached, clinical efficiency, the motions rote from countless other nights to other girls. Squirt of lube, a smooth twist to distribute it. The slick, artificial sound was loud in the quiet room.
He kneeled before the pillows bunching on the bed. The flickering light played across the ceiling. He kept his gaze on the phone screen, now dark. He tapped it back open.
He positioned himself, the warmth he knew would be a shocking contrast to the cool air of the room. His every sense felt hyper-alert: the prickle of the sheets against his knees, the faint chemical cherry scent of the lube, the damp wool smell from the towel, the relentless tick-tick-tick of the flickering bulb.
His mind was a split screen: the clinical awareness of his own bedroom, and the vivid, dust-choked alley of his fantasy.
He took a sharp, shallow breath. The pressure built, a tight coil in his gut, fueled by frustration, by loneliness, by the raw, inconvenient spike of want that the photograph had ignited.
He was about to enter. He leaned forward, settling his weight onto his elbows, the pillows bunching around the synthetic flesh. He closed his eyes. The damp wool, the flickering light, the laundry—it all dissolved.
In his mind, they were soldiers tucked away in a safe house in the mountains, laying in her bed. He’d just finished going down on her. He was naked. She was naked all but her keffiyeh. The rough fabric was still draped over her shoulders, a stark, gritty contrast against her smooth skin. He slowly entered, simulating the missionary position. The warmth from the device was her now. He slowly thrusted, nuzzling into her shoulder, his lips against the hollow of her throat. He could smell imagined dust and gun oil and her.
He moaned in English, a ragged, “God…”
She shuddered beneath him. "Naeam..." She moaned in Arabic, a low, pained sound that tightened his stomach. He couldn't understand it, but it was music all the same.
The fantasy was a perfect, airtight circuit now, humming with a dangerous current. He winced, eyes closed. He realised there would be no condoms. He instantly throbbed, stomach sinking at the risk of impregnation. If she would even consider it a risk.
"Christ," he begged.
"Ya 'iilahi..." she rolled her eyes.
He maintained his stamina, breathing, trying not to climax early, dragging the fantasy out, making it hurt, making it mean something it couldn't possibly mean. His hips moved with a slow, deliberate grind against the pillows, the synthetic warmth a poor substitute for the violent, living heat he imagined.
Her keffiyeh scratched his cheek. Her hands were on his back, not pulling him closer, but holding on. Her legs tightened around him, a sudden, visceral clamp of muscle that drove him deeper into the warmth.
He gasped, the sound sharp in the quiet room. He inhaled the scent of the room, its stale energy drinks, damp wool, the faint plastic of the charging cable, the sweat of his sex, uniquely male, uniquely lonely.
“Fuck. You like it baby?” he groaned into the hollow of her throat, a rhetorical plea lost in the fantasy.
“Astaghfirullah,” she breathed, a pained whisper against his ear. He pictured the translation: I seek forgiveness from God.
He thrust harder, the pillows shifting silently. “You want this, don’t you?”
“Aiwah,” she gasped. Yes. Her head tipped back, exposing her neck. “Aiwah, min fadlik.” Yes, please.
The friction was perfect, agonizing. “Tell me you feel it.”
“Ana bahebak,” she cried out, the words a frantic, foreign rhythm against his shoulder. He saw the translation in the dark behind his eyelids: I love you.
He knew it was a lie, a fiction, something the real woman would never say. But his hips didn’t care. They pistoned into the synthetic heat, chasing the counterfeit confession. “Again.”
“Bahebak,” she sobbed, the plea cracking. I love you. He saw a hint of her tears, imagined their salt on his lips.
His own breath came in ragged hitches, syncing with the flickering bulb. The coil in his gut wound tight, a spring about to snap. He was almost there, balanced on the edge of the crude lie he’d built for himself. He groaned in frustration, wishing he could kiss her. He decides in his fantasy to flip her onto her stomach, needing to take her from behind.
The movement was clumsy in reality, just a shift of his weight and a re-adjustment of the pillows. But in his head, it was a violent, possessive turn. His hands guided her hips, pressing her down into the rough canvas of a cot. The keffiyeh was tangled beneath her. Her back was a tense, sweat-slicked arch. This was better. This was distance and drive. He entered again, a sharp, claiming thrust. “Is this what you want?” he rasped.
Her face was turned to the side, her cheek against the fabric. Her eyes were open, staring at the wall. “La,” she whispered. No.
He drove into her anyway. The rhythm was rough, a means to an end. Her silence was a gulf. He filled it with the sound of his own breathing, the wet slap of his skin against the pillows, the creak of the bedframe he imagined. “Say it,” he demanded, his voice breaking.
“Bahebak,” she choked, a into the canvas. The lie was ugly now. It was the only thing that worked.
It was the only thing that worked.
His hand fisted in the sheets as if gathering coarse fabric and thick, dark hair. In the fantasy, his fingers twisted into her keffiyeh and the roots of her hair, holding just tight enough to tilt her head back. He laid his chest over her sweat-slicked spine, pinning her down with his weight. The synthetic warmth pulsed around him, a cheap mimicry of a body. “I’m gonna come,” he warned, his voice a strained whisper into the quiet of his room. He pictured her flinching, her muscles locking. “I’m gonna come right inside you.”
He imagined her face then, a conflict of surrender and shame twisting her features. Her eyes would screw shut, trying to block him out, but her hips would push back against his, a betrayal written in the arch of her spine.
A low, guttural sound escaped his lips, part groan, part defeat. The fantasy was crumbling at the edges, the reality of the damp towel and the flickering light seeping back in. He was just a man alone, fucking a void. His breath hitched.
“Samira,” he uttered, a foreign name that tasted like dust and desperation.
He imagined Samira moaning a final Arabic moan. "Asmat. Khudhha." Shut up. Take it.
He groaned louder and louder. The climax ripped through him violently, a sharp, hollow contraction. He shuddered, his forehead pressing into the cool pillowcase. For a few seconds, there was only the rasp of his breathing and the dim pulse of the bulb.
He lay there, spent, the warmth turning to a tacky chill against his stomach. The fantasy evaporated, leaving a residue of shame. He was just a guy in a messy room, sticky and alone.
Gavin carefully extracted the fleshlight from between the pillows, avoiding eye contact with it. He walked to the ensuite, a short trip of cold laminate under his feet. The bathroom light was harsh, clinical. He cleaned the silicone under the tap with a mechanical thoroughness, watching the water run milky then clear.
His reflection in the mirror looked tired, a little vacant. Boy-next-door face, now just a guy who needed a shower. He thought about the girl from his film seminar, the one he’d ghosted after two dates. Her texts were still unanswered. You’re warm, until you’re not, she’d said. Whatever.
He padded back to the bedroom, the towel on the chair now a cold, damp corpse. He chucked the clean fleshlight into the bottom drawer without looking, a soft thud against a tangle of cables. He needed to do laundry. The smell of damp wool and sex was a physical presence.
He grabbed his phone from the rumpled sheets. The screen lit up, still on the reddit post. Samira Rafiq’s defiant eyes stared back, untouched by his pathetic drama. He thumbed the ‘save’ icon. A hollow click.