He did not think he had imagined that as an insult. She had meant to be insulting because he had spurned her other efforts.
He rubbed a hand over his face, as if by doing so he could wipe the memory.
He was not going to be satisfied, he realized abruptly, to simply have her around to warm his bed—if he ever managed to get back into it with her—or to have her doing the womanly sorts of things that made a home.
True, that was mostly what he had thought of—the many things he missed about having a woman around. But he also missed conversation.
He had not truly had one since he had lost his family. Almost the only time he even heard a voice was when he spoke aloud to himself. Beyond that, there was the occasional challenge—‘I will kill you if you come one step closer!’ or ‘touch that and you die!’, but his world—his life—had become an endless quest for survival and nothing more. There was noliving. There was only continuing to breathe.
It flickered through his mind to take her to the abandoned city, but not only was that not likely to impress her a great deal since it was crumbling now, it was not worth risking her life to soothe his injured ego.
The disease that had wiped out his civilization might have died in the many years that had passed since it had ravaged his world, or it might have simply stopped because they had abandoned the cities and all contact with others.
There had been no deaths in his village from the pandemic, but they had been a good distance from the closest city and had closed themselves off from others and he recalled that the elders hadstillfeared it would follow them and wipe out the village.
As it happened, it had been marauders instead, but the point was that it was possible the threat still existed—that it might have when he was a child and might still be waiting only for victims to begin again.
And, unfortunately, if that was the case, then it was also not safe to take things from the ruins.
His village had not been contaminated, but then the marauders had killed everyone and taken everything of any value or use that they had not destroyed.
Would the woman know how to produce things for use and comfort if he could provide materials to make them, he wondered?
Somehow, he doubted it.
Very few of his own people had had useful skills after the fall. They had not had nearly as advanced a civilization as the woman appeared to come from and yet they had grown so used to buying or trading for goods made by someone else that very few retained the knowledge to make things they needed. They had had to relearn by trial and error and the results had not been particularly satisfactory.
The few things made in the village compared very unfavorably to the things they had been able to get from before the fall.
And he did not even have those skills.
He, and everyone else that he had come upon, relied upon scavenging to get what they needed.
So … he had nothingsto show the woman his people were not stupid animals and he could not speak to her to convince her, he thought with disgust.
Well! She could look down upon him, damn her, he thought angrily!
He was a survivor! He had proven his right to live by developing fighting skills and devising weaponry! He had proven his right to live by becoming a fair hunter and gatherer!
He might be a shit cook and mostly render whatever he found into a nearly inedible mess, but he was notbornto such a role!
He had mastered the manly skills! One could not excel at everything!
That was what a male sought a mate for! Someone to share the burden of life.
Someone tolightenthe burden.
His anger waned. His thoughts shifted.
He had not thought that he would have a mate as his father had.
The women of the village had either been raped and killed or carried off by the marauders.
Gone were all of those he had once known and he had not seen a great number ofkerriessince—most of which were male—because, he supposed, most of the females were killed off by the males fighting over them. Or possibly they died in childbirth since there were no physicians to care for them. Or maybe the few males that managed to acquire a mate kept them locked away and hidden to keep them safe?
After a few minutes, he dismissed the mystery he had no way of solving and redirected his mind to his current dilemma—or what he saw as the current problem.
It was not just that Ah-na must look down upon him and consider him unworthy—although that was certainly important as far as he was concerned.
