“No.” Her trembling hands obsessively rub the material of her pants.
If only suffering was like venom, to be sucked and spit out. I’d do it without hesitation. “How long has this been happening?”
“Since Detroit, I guess.”
“Do you get the nightmares too? Flashbacks?”
She nods. “It has to stop. I need to make it stop.”
“I’m not sure it does. It can get better, but I don’t know if it ever stops.”
“I’m tired,” she confesses in a whisper. “I’m so tired, Lucy.”
In an instant, my heart is torpedoed down the center. I want to get in the car and drive until we cross into California. Settle somewhere peaceful and quiet, where the ocean laps at the shore and our only worry is how to get sand out of our hair. But one look at the warrior in front of me and I know that isn’t in the future for us.
I cup her jaw in my hand and stroke her cheek.“So shaken as we are, so wan with care. Find we a time for frighted peace to pant and breathe short-winded accents of new broils to be commenced in strands afar, remote.”
The touch grounds her and she stares into my eyes with an undisguised vulnerability. She knows that I see her. That I saw her, back in Detroit. I saw the decisions she had to make, the death she wrought, and I’m still here. Taylor closes her eyes and leans into the contact to let what pitiful consolation I can provide soothe her troubled mind.
“Sometimes, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
I’m not shocked she feels that way, but I am shocked to hear her say it out loud. My thumb rubs her cheekbone. “Yeah? Want to run away with me?”
A genuine, sad smile comes to her face. “What a life that would be.”
I walk away a few paces to give her room to breathe. Trees nearly touch the sky here, thin branches outstretched to the clouds. This is a majestic continent, I’m quickly learning. It must have been wonderful when it was connected together, free to travel from rolling plains, to awesome mountains, to frothy oceans. From lakes shimmering in the sunlight, to rivers rushing south, to grassy farms and sand-covered deserts. One people, connected by their government and their beautiful land. But others drew lines between them, and disjointed what was meant to be whole. Here we stand, humble as we are, trying to mend what is broken when we are broken ourselves.
“Let’s go.” Her voice beckons me to the car and I buckle in to the passenger seat. Taylor pauses, arms taut with her fingers drumming the steering wheel. “I—I can’t talk about it yet, okay?”
“I am your friend, not your therapist. If you want to talk, great. If not? That’s fine too. Either way, I am here for you.”
“Okay.” The car rumbles to life again, leaving behind no dearth of destruction. “Thank you.”
I nudge her and smirk. “Yeah, whatever. Don’t go soft on me, hero.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, princess.”
Stacked like packhorses,we trudge the many, muddy miles from our abandoned car to the cabin. Taylor knows its location, nestled somewhere in the blank space between lines of longitude and latitude on our map. Above the trees, the sky glows in watercolors of pink and blues, like a mass of taffy stretched as far as the eye can see. Taylor stalks ahead of me with her rifle in hand, alert for predators.
Finally, the cabin peeks out from between a thick circle of trees. It is less a cabin than it is a two-room shack made out of logs held together by sheer will. The air inside is damp and musty, almost offensively reeking of mold. Quite literally only two rooms exist. This main room with a fireplace, a beleaguered couch, a cot, and a pathetic excuse for a kitchen with an icebox, sink, and a stove.
“Wow, I didn’t realize we walked so far we made it to the year 1735,” I say as I plop our stuff down near the door.
Taylor chuckles and shares my grimace. “Yeah, this is a bit sparse, huh? At least it has a bathroom.” The optimism fallsfrom her face when she opens the sodden wood door to the lavatory. “Yikes. Better than going outside, at any rate.”
“Is it?”
She glances again into the bathroom and closes the door. “Not really. Thankfully, it’s only for tonight. I will get a fire going so we don’t freeze to death, and you can get settled on the cot.”
Taylor heads out into the waning sunset and I watch her through a pockmarked window. At home my view was largely the tops of other buildings. If I leaned down, I could watch Underclass folk bustle in huddled masses and the Upperclass slide past them. It was crowded, and lonely. Outside this window is a beautiful forest with frost-tipped trees, insulated from the world, like living inside a painting. And a single woman stands center, heartily chopping wood. It is decidedly less lonely.
The raw power subsumed inside her body consumes my attention. The ferocious show of strength and handiness is so attractive and blatantly arousing, my breath grows shallow. No stranger to my baser instincts, I’m not worried. I’ve been a stupid, horny mess for Taylor since the day we met and that attraction has only grown stronger with time. What worries me is the grip of possession and affection taking hold of my senses. This feeling is multiplied tenfold when she abruptly stops chopping wood and clutches the gunshot wound on her shoulder. In a fury she attacks the next log, trying to prove pain doesn’t exist. But it does, and soon she stops to collect the wood.
I stop and collect myself. What the fuck am I doing? I’m messing this all up, is what I’m doing. The plan, if there ever was one, was to try and convince this woman to not kill me. The plan did not include her rooting inside me. The plan did not include handing over my heart in exchange for longing and lack of reciprocation. The plan did not include betraying my father to chase the skirt of the enemy. The plan was to go home.
But now. Now, she walks through the door with arms full of firewood and a tired smile, and my plans seem insignificant in comparison. What is home, anyway? A city I stole pieces of due to an overbearing parent? No, that is not a home. Home is where you are loved, where you are safe, where you are most yourself. Home is where the warmth comes from within. Not a place, perhaps, not even a feeling. Home is anywhere I can hear her heartbeat.
Her expression grows concerned as she crosses the room to the fireplace. “Is everything okay?”
