"Do you know why your mother gave you to me?" the man with the onyx eyes and deep voice asked. His lightly calloused hand slid down her arms, stroking as he spoke, to entwine with her fingers and then up again. Slow rhythmic strokes.

Nita was confused. This man wished to buy her. That she understood. But not for pleasure like Serena was bought two years before by a younger man from the city. Nita would be a wife, her mother explained.

She studied this strange man with his gentle touch, who had laughed when she asked about his fields. Nita was strong and had been taught well the duties of wife, yet he told her that she would not be cooking for him.

A moist breeze drifted through the open window of her family’s hut, riffling the curtained door between the two rooms. The thin cotton of her dress clung to her in the heavy humid air.

His eyes glittered as he slipped one long finger under the thin strap of her dress. Nita didn’t understand many things, but her sixteen years had taught her some ways of men. They liked touching women. She had seen this at the market, male hands slipping under the skirts of village girls and the flushed pleasure in the men’s faces – the playful horror in the girls as they slapped away the seeking hands.

A strange tightness between Nita’s legs tugged at her when she would see this.

"Are you afraid?" the man murmured, lifting the strap and letting her dress slip off her shoulders with the movement. The tattered lace edge hung off the small swell of her breast just short of her nipple, which poked high against the worn fabric. No man had seen her, but she was curiously unafraid. The man smiled, and although he was old – older than her uncles – she liked the rough shadow of his beard and his lips, soft-looking against the dark male features.

She knew now he would touch her, and she knew little of this. Only once had she seen.

It was in their hiding cave that she saw her brother with Serena. He was eighteen, and he had boasted that he had long given up the foolish cave games of his childhood. Nita was disappointed, but she went alone. It was then that she saw them.