Day 200~
Eve
I’m cleaning the kitchen when I spot Adam rushing toward the house. He has something in his hands, a bundle of some sort, grayish brown with some red at the top—
I gasp and run outside to meet him, my eyes torn wide with disbelief at the sight in front of them.
“Is that—” I call out to him the moment he’s within earshot.
“And there are more, too,” he exclaims, just as ecstatic.
I reach him and touch the feathery heap, just to prove to myself that it’s real, and it croaks out its beak in response.
A chicken.
All parts of it are in place, beady eyes where they should be, no missing limbs or exposed bones—it’s just a normal, regular-looking chicken.
“I could cry right now,” I confess and beam up at him through my tears.
“They must have escaped from one of the nearby farms. There are like a dozen of them in the woods,” Adam explains, handing the animal to me. It doesn’t seem to resent being handled, so maybe he’s right and it’s used to people.
“Okay.” My brain immediately switches to action mode. “Grab one of the sacks of grain from the barn and spread it near them. We need to lure them in our direction.”
“What, you mean we aren’t going to manually catch each and every one?” he questions dryly, but the smile on his face is too happy for it to have any bite.
We’ve been planning to utilize the empty barn to build a pen, anyway, even if we didn’t know if we’d be able to find any chickens. We’d only just talked about it a few days ago; them appearing almost feels like a miracle. I’m still not much of a believer, but I’ll take any blessing I can get.
“You got it?” he asks as he steps away, looking at the bird in my arms. “I’ll go siren song the others with some grain and dirty talk.”
I snort out a laugh. “Go, chicken whisperer. I’ll be waiting.”
“I’m proud of us,” I say softly as I look up to him from my reading corner.
Not that I’ve been free to do much reading, but I still try to journal, even if it’s sporadic.
My notes are mostly practical, now, keeping track of our stocks and planning future crops, but the day-to-day writing doesn’t allow me to see the bigger picture of the weeks and months passing by.
I’ve started some kind of a monthly planner in the kitchen for that purpose.
We spent the day herding chickens, slowly luring them to us using old grains and cooed promises, and winding up with a good number of them in the barn.
We plan a library trip tomorrow, to learn how to take care of them better, but since they have water, food and shelter, and they’ve made it so far out in the wild, I think we’re in the clear.
“I’m proud of us, too.” He swirls his whiskey and smiles at me. “Why are you so far away from me?”
I smirk and make my way to the couch, situating myself on his lap.
“We’ve been working so hard.” I lean my head on his shoulder. “We deserve… I don’t know. Something.”
A break or a vacation isn’t an option, and we both know it.
There’s always something to be done around the house, and most of those tasks revolve around the upcoming spring and getting the land ready for sowing.
Planting a whole field of wheat or corn isn’t necessary, because we won’t be able to consume it all, but even just learning how to operate the reaper took us days.
And then there’s the garden. And now, the chickens…
“Maybe we can spoil ourselves with something,” Adam offers, his arm wrapping around my back. “I think I’ll get that Harley we saw in town last week.”
The thought of him on that bike makes my stomach flip, and maybe I’m a bad partner, but it’s not in an ‘I’m worried for his safety’ way.
“That’s a good idea.” I try to keep my tone neutral. “What else?”
“Hmm.” He tilts his head at me. “Maybe you can give me that lip piercing I’ve been wanting.”
I blink. “Like, right now?” We raided a jewelry shop the other week, and he grabbed a box of body piercings, but I forgot all about it.
“Why not?” He drains the last of the whiskey and pushes to his feet with me in his arms. “You know your way around a needle.”
Not five minutes later, he’s already seated near the dining table and I’m wiping a pad with disinfectant alcohol at the bottom corner of his lip, but when it’s time to actually do it, my gloved hand quivers.
“I can’t,” I blurt out, tossing the needle to the side. “I can’t! What if I injure you?”
“Love.” He grins and I blush, because I always do when he calls me that. “The injury is kind of the whole point.”
“You know what I mean.” I cross my arms with frustration, my bottom lip jutting forward as I sulk. “What if I cause irreversible damage? What if you can’t use your mouth anymore?”
“Oh.” His grin turns sly, devious. “So it’s the usage of my mouth you’re worried about.”
“No, that’s not—”
“You’re right. Too much of a risk.” He nods as if agreeing with something that I never said. “I can’t take the chance of never being able to fuck you with my tongue again.”
“Adam,” I chastise as if there’s someone who can hear us. But there isn’t; he’s the only one to witness my flushing cheeks.
“What?” he asks innocently, but that smirk betrays him. His hands snake around my waist. “Just looking out for you. I know how much you like getting your pussy eaten—”
“Shut up,” I groan and then encourage him to do exactly that by pressing our mouths together.