Chapter 11
I decide before bed that evening that I’m going to see my mother one more time, so Ben and I wake up at dawn so we can start off as soon as there’s some light at the horizon.
We’re not taking anyone else. It’s easy to fly beneath the radar if there’s only the two of us.
I put on the little dress again along with a red wig I always wear for the particular fake identities we’ll be using, and Ben leaves off his heavy belt with all the holsters as well as the strap for his rifle.
He wears a flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed hat he borrows from Georgie.
He looks like a village trader, and I look like his little wife.
We can’t drive one of our vehicles. That would get attention for sure.
And we can’t go to one of the administrative outposts scattered throughout the villages and hire a motor to drive us.
We have forged papers that have always passed as real, but we’d need credits or a bribe for the hire, and that would be another level of administrative scrutiny it’s simply not worth risking.
So we’ll have to walk the thirty miles and, if we’re lucky, someone on the road will give us a ride.
Because we’re walking, I wear more normal hiking boots instead of the cute little shoes I wore with this dress on the night we took the outpost. I also plait the long red hair of my wig into two braids so it doesn’t constantly get in the way.
“Even overlooking the red hair, you don’t look quite right without your gun,” Ben says when we head along the trail through the woods so no one will catch sight of us leaving the outpost by the main road.
“And you don’t look quite right in that ridiculous hat.” He knows I’m teasing, but I smile anyway. “And you can be damn sure I’ve got my pistol and my knife holstered on my thighs beneath this skirt.”
“Ah. Glad to hear it. I’ve got a gun on both ankles and knives under my sleeves.” He pushes up the cuff of his flannel shirt to show me one of them. “Still feel kinda naked without my rifle.”
“I bet you do. You look kind of naked without it too.”
He twitches his eyebrows but doesn’t put his dry rejoinder into words.
Just as well.
We don’t need to bring actual nakedness into the conversation. Not after yesterday.
Ben has been acting perfectly normal, and so have I.
But inside I keep remembering.
I keep wanting to do it again.
“Maybe we can pick up a ride along the way,” Ben says, changing the subject with his characteristic relaxed ease. “Gonna be a long, shitty day otherwise.”
We’ve walked thirty miles in a day many times, but it’s not normal for us, and I definitely prefer not to.
“You sure your ankle is up to it?” Ben asks after a minute.
“What?” I blink because I genuinely forgot I twisted it several days ago. “Oh yeah, it’s been better for a couple of days. Can’t even feel the strain anymore.”
“All right. Good. ’Cause I sure woulda hated havin’ to carry you on my back.”
I laugh at the image, as he intended me to do, and I take his arm briefly as we walk.
He glances down with a wordless inquiry.
“It’s nothing,” I tell him, answering the question he never put into words. “I’m just glad you’re with me. For this trip.” There’s a weird catch in my throat I didn’t expect. “And for everything else.”
The morning is long and tiring. The roads in the Central Cities are never very crowded this far from the Capitol or the other major cities because so few villagers own motors.
No one travels for the sake of traveling in the working class.
If someone with a desk job moves up enough, they might earn enough credits to afford a motor.
And those with government jobs often get them as perks.
But otherwise only the top tier do much traveling.
A village girl like me should have lived and died within the walls of one small community.
But my life has never followed a predictable path.
The only motors that pass are hired ones, driving higher-class people from city to city.
They don’t stop to see if we need a ride. They don’t even slow down.
We also encounter a few transport trucks. Those drivers are working class. They slow down and move over to give us room as we walk. A couple of them even offer friendly waves.
But by noon we’ve walked almost half the day’s distance, and we’ve had no luck with a ride.
“We should stop and eat and rest for a while,” Ben says when we reach the top of a hill and stare down at a long stretch of road before us.
“I’m okay,” I tell him.
“I know you are. But we’re ’bout halfway there, and that looks like a good place over by the creek. No reason to kill ourselves gettin’ there in record time.”
“Yeah.” I exhale, excited by the prospect of a real rest. The cluster of trees Ben pointed out looks shady and secure. “You’re right. We can take thirty minutes.”
“Or even an hour,” he drawls with a twitch of a smile.
“We’ll see.”
The spot is a good one. We’re able to wash up in the creek and stretch out on soft grass in the shade of the trees. We eat our sandwiches and apples, and then Ben takes off his flannel shirt and rolls it up into a ball.
He’s wearing a gray crewneck under it so it’s not strange he’d take off the heavier shirt. But I eye him questioningly as he positions the shirt behind me.
“Use that as a pillow,” he tells me.
“I don’t need a nap.”
“Just a rest.” He grins. “Look how temptin’.”
I shake my head disapprovingly, but I lie backward, my head hitting the rolled shirt perfectly. It is nice and soft for a pillow. And if it smells like Ben, that’s not unpleasant.
I like how he smells. It’s familiar. It makes me feel safe.
“Now you don’t get a pillow,” I say.
“Don’t need one.” He stretches out beside me, one arm bent up and beneath him for a headrest.
We lie in pleasant silence for a few minutes.
Then he asks, “You upset about your mom?”
I shrug and turn my head to see his expression. “I don’t even know. I’ve spent most of my life not being close to her. So it’s not… I mean, I don’t feel good about it, but it’s not traumatic. It doesn’t feel like grief.”
“Okay. I’m sorry though.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry you didn’t have a mom you can really grieve for. It’d be hard to lose her. So damn hard. But you’d’ve had a mom you could love all this time.”
I’m not sure why my eyes burn, but they do. “Yeah. Thanks. Maybe it saves me right now, but it sure wasn’t great all this time. Knowing she never loved me very much. My father did though. He loved me. He loved us.”
The pamphlets my father wrote were, on the surface, simply recounting pre-Fall history in the hopes it wouldn’t be forgotten. They were popular because he was a good writer, and even the younger people who were never taught to read liked to listen to them read in community gatherings.
But slowly it became clear that the pamphlets were doing more than telling old stories from history. They were questioning our current situation and our current government. Every tale of a nearly forgotten revolution had direct application to our own world.
With every new one he wrote, people would talk. People would question.
He wrote them anonymously, of course, but word got around in our village, as it always does, that he was the author.
Then one day my father was dead.
For no fathomable medical reason.
We knew. Everyone knew.
Anyone who speaks out, even as indirectly as my father, is silenced one way or another.
“I know he did. He’d’ve been real proud of you. Not just for all you’re doin’ but for the person you are. He’d’ve been so proud.”
“Shit, Ben, if you make me cry, I’m seriously going to hit you.”
He chuckles. “Sorry ’bout that.”
“But I got the idea from him. To change things. To try to make it better here. I got the idea from him.”
“I know you did.” He’s smiling at me, his head turned toward me the way mine is toward him. “You think I don’t remember every little detail about you?”
I shrug again, this time slightly self-conscious. This moment feels intimate in a way we almost never are.
“And now,” he goes on, saving me from the moment the way he’s saved me from so many other things. “Now I even know how you look when you come.”
I gasp, flushing hot and laughing and excited all at once. I swat at his chest. “That’s not appropriate talk!”
“Why not? Just sharing all I know about you. What did I do wrong?”
“You know what you did. We agreed not to do that again.”
“Hey, I didn’t make a single move.”
“You brought it up. You made me think about sex again.”
“And…” His eyes are glinting deliciously, irrepressibly.
“And now I can’t think of anything else!”
“Well, there’s an easy solution to that problem.”
The excitement that sparked from his initial comment has exploded into a full-fledged compulsion. I sit up and move toward him. But before I touch him, I ask, “Do you think we should?”
“Why not? Did yesterday damage anythin’ between us?”
“No. Not at all.”
“We both had a good time. I don’t see any reason not to do it again. But it’s up to you. I’m easy.”
“I’m not sure I’d call you easy.” I grin down as I move over him, my chest over his and my lower body beside his.
“Sure, I am. I’m as easy as it gets. You wanna fuck, you got a fuck. You wanna keep me at arm’s length, I’ll fall in line. The only thing I’m never gonna be easy about is you leavin’ me behind.”
“I haven’t done that yet, have I?”
“Nope.”
“So I don’t think it’s likely to happen.”
“Good.” He’s raised his hand to my face, brushing his fingertips over my cheek and then moving them to my hair. He runs his hand down one of the braids of my wig with a particular smile.
“What are you smirking at?” I ask.
“Nothin’.” He lets go of my braid. “Just that my mom always wears her hair like that.”
I gasp, remembering the pretty, laughing, warmhearted woman I met and got to know during our year in the wilderness. A woman who always wore her hair in two long braids. “Shit!” I hurriedly start pulling out the braids of the wig.
“What are you doin’?” he asks, overcome with laughter.