Chapter 5
I’m upset and shaky when it’s closing time and Nell shoos the remaining customers out.
I don’t really feel like fucking anyone tonight, but I’m going to fuck Cade anyway.
He’s not going to leave unsatisfied—not even a single night.
I give him a little smile as I lead him by the hand into my bedroom. I can’t get a good sense of his mood. After the altercation, he returned to take his normal seat in the corner and he stayed there, unspeaking and unsmiling, until I told him I was ready.
He sits down on the bed to pull off his shoes and socks like normal. I unzip my boots and leave them on the floor by the window.
I start to unzip my dress, but he shakes his head soberly and pats the bed beside him.
It’s obviously a summons to sit, so I do. “You don’t have to be worried,” I tell him, trying to guess what’s going through his mind because I can’t read it on his face. “I’m fine to fuck tonight.”
His eyes are more silver than green in the dim light of my room. “Maybe I’m not.”
“Aren’t you? I didn’t mean to act like you had to come up with me. I just assumed… It’s totally fine if you’d rather just go home.”
“I don’t wanna go home.”
“Okay.” I was already on edge from earlier, but now I’m confused and rattled. I shift my hips slightly, peering up at his face. “We can just relax if you want. I could maybe give you a hand job or—”
“No. I don’t want that.”
“Okay.” After a minute, I add, “Do you want to just lie down?”
Finally I’ve landed on a suggestion he doesn’t object to. With a weird twist of his mouth, he adjusts his big body to pull his legs up to the bed. I stand up to get out of the way, and then I climb over him so I can stretch out in the small space between him and the wall.
Hesitantly I rub his shoulder gently. When he doesn’t pull away, I continue, stroking up and down the length of his arm.
“Do you… regret”—I’m weirdly self-conscious and stumble on the words—“anything?”
His head jerks to the side toward me. “You mean dealing with that animal? No. I don’t regret a thing.”
“Oh. Good. I didn’t want you to act on impulse to help us and then wish you hadn’t.”
“No. It wasn’t on impulse.” He shakes his head and stares at the ceiling.
“Things are different now than they used to be. Can’t rely on anyone else to make it safe for us.
If someone’s a threat, they gotta be stopped before they hurt anyone else.
Maybe one day we’ll get second chances and mercy and justice that isn’t so…
ruthless, but that day isn’t today. I didn’t do anything wrong. ”
“I know you didn’t. He hurt Poppy because he wanted to hurt me and couldn’t. He would have done it again and again until he was stopped. But I’m worried the militia might know you’re the one who did it when they find the body and—”
“They’re never finding that body. And they got rules against rape that he broke. Their control here is too shaky for them to strike back at something regular people are all gonna think was totally fair. They’re gonna let it go and pretend the whole thing never happened.”
I believe him. I’m still nervous about the whole situation, but I believe him.
I’m also faintly surprised by his verbal intelligence. This is the most I’ve ever heard him speak, other than his hot mumbles during sex. I always knew he was smart in certain ways, but I never realized he was this good with words.
I wonder why he uses them so rarely.
“Okay. Well, thank you again. It means a lot. That you… took care of it.”
“What else would I do?”
“You could have… not taken care of it.”
“Feel like it happened partly ’cause of me. ’Cause I embarrassed him. Anyway, he woulda done that to you if he could. And no one gets to keep breathing if they have hurting you in their head.”
I should be a little scared. That he’s saying that kind of thing so bluntly. But he’s right about the world being different than it was.
And it makes me feel safe rather than scared.
I squeeze his large biceps before I start rubbing his arm again. “Maybe I shouldn’t take the whole thing so personally. I feel terrible for Poppy, but… It’s more like it feels what happened to her really happened to all of us. I’m not sure if I can explain.”
“I get it. Doing what you do… Nell does a good job setting boundaries, but y’all are still walking a line every night.” He pauses. Then asks in a different tone, “That ever happen to you before?”
“Not like that. Not out of the blue by force like that. Early on, I would sometimes bring a guy upstairs who ended up being rougher than he should’ve been, but I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the signs and I don’t choose men like that anymore.
Plus most of the guys are careful because they don’t want Nell to banish them.
It really doesn’t happen as often as it might. ”
“Was it… hard? When you first started?”
I shrug and shift positions. “I… don’t know.
Not like you’re thinking. I was completely desperate when Nell found me.
I didn’t have any friends or family at Impact, so I was trying to make it on my own.
But I couldn’t. There was no way. I was way more under threat back then than I’ve been since I’ve started working for Nell.
I was mostly glad that I had food and shelter and some measure of protection.
And the customers… well, a lot of them aren’t that bad.
” I tilt my head to smile up him. “And some of them I actually like.”
His eyes are smiling, but his voice growls slightly when he asks, “Some?”
“Well, one.”
He gives a funny little nod. “Okay. Good.”
I giggle. Then I remember what happened to Poppy earlier and I feel guilty.
With a sigh, I tuck my head against Cade, pleased when he wraps an arm around me and scoots me closer.
We lie in silence for a few minutes. Then I hear myself saying, “Did you know that male ducks are all little rapists?”
He gives a slight jerk, clearly surprised by the comment. “What now?”
“Male ducks. They go around raping female ducks all the time. The females will run away and fight back or do whatever they can to stop it from happening, but the males still force themselves on them. Sometimes they’ll gang up and all go at a female at the same time.
Sometimes they end up killing the female.
They’re a bunch of little feathered rapists.
They’ve been doing it for so long that the female ducks’ reproductive systems have adapted.
They have a supercomplex vaginal tract that can stop sperm from getting through, and they can relax their muscles to let it through only if they want to.
So they don’t have to reproduce with every male duck who rapes them. So they can still choose their mates.”
I’m staring up at the ceiling now the way Cade was earlier. Something heavy has settled in my chest. “I don’t know why I thought of that.”
“I do.” Cade reaches down to find and hold my hand.
“Yeah.” Emotion is shuddering in my throat and behind my eyes, but there are no tears. There never are anymore. “We can’t control what happens to us. And the weaker we are the less we can control. If Impact taught us anything, it’s that.”
I don’t know why I’m saying this, why I trust this man enough to verbalize something so deep.
“We have to live with what happens to us, but we can still hold on to whatever small bits of power remain to us. They can’t take everything.
Female ducks refuse to relinquish the one power they have left.
They get to decide who fathers their offspring.
And maybe we can do the same thing, even as we grapple to stay alive in this hellscape.
We can still hold on to something—a core part of who we are. Our souls. Or something.”
Cade makes a gruff sound in his throat. A very slight shudder runs through him. Then he says, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”
I’m too emotional now. I’m not used to it, and I don’t know what to do with it. So I give my head a little shake and ask, “What did you do before Impact?”
Cade must know I’m intentionally changing the subject, but he goes along with it. Maybe he needs to talk about something lighter too. “I was in the Navy for ten years. Then I came back home to run our hardware store.”
“Your hardware store? You owned it?”
“Yeah. It was my family’s store, and I took it over when my dad retired. Nothing special. Just a small-town hardware store.”
“Did you like it?”
“Sure, I did. I could help people. I was part of the community. It got decent business, so it never felt like a struggle to keep going. I’d’ve been happy to do it for the rest of my life.”
“Where was it? Around here?”
“Nah, farther east. When everything flooded, I came out this way.”
“And you’ve been living in the hills? Scavenging and hunting and stuff?” This is always what I’ve assumed about him, based on what he brings to trade with. Danny always calls him the woodsman, and that’s exactly what he feels like to me.
“Y-yeah. Pretty much. Scraping out a life like everyone else.”
“You weren’t tempted to join the militia?”
“No fucking way.”
I sniff and cuddle into his warm body. “Good.” Then, after a beat, I ask, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Were you married?”
“What? Yeah, I was for a while. Got married in my early twenties, but the marriage was a bust in less than five years. I had a few girlfriends after that but nothing serious.”
“Oh.”
“What about you?”
“What?”
“What about you? How old are you? Were you married? What were you doing before Impact?”
“Oh. I’m twenty-seven. I never married. I dated occasionally, but I mostly just kept to myself. I was an accountant.”
“Really? So you’re good with numbers?”
“Yeah, I am. Not that it matters anymore. Talk about an obsolete job. But I made pretty good money for what I needed. I just had a small apartment and not much of a social life. The only family I ever knew was my grandfather, and he died when I was in college. So I just wanted to keep my head down and do my job.” I sigh and stretch my legs, rubbing one of my feet against his calves.
“I guess that’s why I was in such a bad position after Impact.
I didn’t have people. And we need people now to survive. ”
“Yep. But you got them now, right?”
“I do?” I lift my head to look down at his face.
He frowns at me. “Sure. Seems like Nell and Pete and Danny and everyone here cares about you. Seems like they’re your people now. Aren’t they?”
I’d never actually thought about it before. I blink down at him as I say, “Oh. I guess they are.”
He smiles just a little, and I smile back.
“I don’t know why I’ve never thought about it that way, but I think you’re right. Maybe having people and taking care of them is another way to hold on to the parts of us that are important—no matter what crappy situation we’re stuck with.”
“That makes sense to me. And so is the way you go out on the roof every night and draw the stars and their stories. That’s you being you, no matter what you had to do earlier in the day.”
“Maybe that’s right.”
“Do you want to do that now?”
“Go out on the roof? Right now? What will you do?”
“I could go with you, unless you don’t want me to.”
“You sure you don’t want to fuck? Because I’m happy to—”
“No way. I wouldn’t anyway ’cause I can see clearly you’re not in the mood. But honestly I’m not either.”
“In that case…” I’m weirdly excited as I climb over his body to get off the bed, going to open the window as he hefts himself to his feet too. I grab my sketchbook and pencil before I climb out the window, and then I snicker as it takes some doing for Cade to get his big body out the opening.
He manages, however, and then he settles himself beside me, staring up at the stars the way I do.
As I start to draw, he asks questions about the constellations, so I tell him what we’re seeing. Then I tell him the stories as I draw. We stay out there for almost an hour before a sound from inside reminds me that Cade isn’t allowed to stay all night.
“Guess it’s time for me to get going,” he says, clearly reading my mind.
“Yeah. I’ve had a good time though. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making me feel better.”
He shrugs off the thanks, but he’s smiling sheepishly down at the roof tiles as he climbs back in the window.
He puts his shoes and socks back on and then digs into his pack.
“I don’t need a tip tonight,” I tell him, realizing what he’s doing. “I didn’t do any work.”
“I got something for you anyway. You can call it a gift.” He pulls out a stack of notepads still bundled together in shrink-wrap.
I gasp when I see them, raising a hand to cover my mouth.
“This was the best I could find on short notice, but I’ll keep my eye out for real sketchpads. But you can work on these, can’t you? Even though they have lines on them?”
“Of course I can. Thank you so much!” My voice squeaks slightly. “I can’t believe you—”
Shit, that emotion is rising up to my throat again.
“It wasn’t any trouble, and you said you needed more. I’ll keep looking for something better, but for now… here.” He thrusts me the bundle of pads.
I accept them with trembling hands. “Th-thank you. So much.”
“You’re welcome.” He looks as self-conscious as I feel.
He clears his throat. I squirm slightly. Then he finally huffs out, “See you tomorrow,” before he leaves the room.