Page 10 of Trade (After the End #7)

Chapter Five

In the bunker, I’m in good shape. I do ninety minutes in the gym five days a week, with a half-hour session of cardio, and I’m on my feet most of the day in the atrium.

Outside, I’m weak. I can do the treadmill at maximum incline and the stair climber at a pretty high intensity, but I’m exhausted after less than an hour of walking on fairly flat terrain, even with Dalton hiking in front and somewhat clearing a path for me.

The ground is flat, but it isn’t even. Everything is trying to twist my ankle—roots, the tall grasses, loose stones. Muscles in my feet ache that I didn’t even know existed.

It doesn’t help that I can’t focus on the ground.

There’s just too much nature to see. I count three species of oak, two of maple, and at least three pines.

I rack my brain for the names, but then a new tree catches my eye, and I have to figure out if it belongs to a species I’ve already seen or if it’s different.

I start picking a leaf from each new species in order to keep them straight, which takes me off the trail Dalton is blazing, but I don’t want to slow him down, so I try to be quick.

Coupled with squatting to check out moss and smaller plants and flowers, in no time, my thighs are burning, and I’m huffing and puffing like I’m sprinting, not trudging along at two miles an hour.

The first time I ducked off for a leaf, Dalton freaked out and jogged after me, but when he saw that I wasn’t running off, he stopped coming back to check. While I collect leaves, he slips off his backpack, rolls his shoulders, and cracks his neck.

There’s that, too, distracting me from watching where I’m going—his broad back, his ass, the way he strides along. He walks tall. I’ve read that description before, but I’ve never seen it in action. He knows his way, and it’s reassuring.

There are rustles and hoots in the woods as we pass through, and he notices, but he doesn’t startle or tense, so after a while, I don’t either.

I’m about to ask for a break when Dalton breaks from our westward track and leads us to a fast-running stream with a steep bank that hides it from view until you’re right on top of it. He must know the terrain well.

I duck off behind a tree to pee, and when I reemerge, he has climbed down the bank like a mountain goat to refill his canteen. I sink to my butt in the grass and comb my fingers through it as I watch him. The grass is thick and supple and soft. No drought stress here.

Dalton moves with that careless agility you lose at some point in your thirties when you become unpleasantly aware of the fact that you have joints.

His heels slip in the muddy clay, but he’s not thrown in the least. He confidently surfs the mud until his feet find a rock and then bounds back up to solid ground.

It already feels surreal that his dick was inside me.

When I think of him on top of me, my brain categorizes him as a man my age, but as he drops beside me, chugs from the canteen, then wipes the water he spilled with the back of his sleeve, I can’t see him as anything but one of the dozens of male interns I’ve worked with over the years whose energy vastly and dangerously exceeded their judgment.

He doesn’t seem young like them, though. He doesn’t look to me for approval or with any deference at all.

He watches me like I’m a hot meal behind the glass in the cafeteria line, and the server is taking too long to dish. It’s unsettling. Disorienting. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. How I’m supposed to be.

“Here,” he says, passing me the canteen. After his chugging, I’m surprised that there’s a lot left.

My mouth is parched, but he took the water directly from the stream. No filtration, no boiling, nothing. At least it’s moving water.

Dalton shakes the canteen. “You need to drink,” he says like he’s telling me something I don’t know.

“I know,” I snap.

He doesn’t like that. His perfect jaw flexes. I tense. He blows out a breath.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, but not with anger or exasperation like Bennett would say it.

Well, what do you want me to do about it? That was always Bennett’s shorthand that he was done listening to me complain about problems he wasn’t willing to acknowledge or address. Conversation over. No matter how I answered.

But Dalton seems to be really asking, and I’m totally thrown, so I kind of babble, “I don’t want to get sick from the water. Microorganisms. E. coli. Salmonella.”

He nods, takes an orange bottle out of his bulging side pocket, and hands it to me. “It’s fine. I put one of these in the canteen while you were taking a piss.”

My face catches fire. I take the bottle and examine it closely to play it off. Everyone has to pee. It’s no big deal. And why should I be embarrassed with him? He has a shirt covered in his own cum tied to a strap of his backpack, I guess so his other stuff doesn’t get dirty.

I unscrew the cap and peer inside like I’m absolutely fascinated. “What are they?”

“Chlorine dioxide.”

“So it’s safe to drink?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s safe.” He’s sitting right next to me. Our arms are pressed together.

His bent knee is in my space. He smells like dirt and sweat and a whiff of the sex we had earlier, but that could be my imagination. Or the shirt.

I pass the bottle back, take the canteen, and drain it. The taste is weird, but sweet Lord, it hits the spot.

Dalton digs in his Aladdin’s cave of a pocket and fishes out a crinkled scrap of aluminum foil. He smooths it, taps a few pills out of the orange bottle, and wraps it carefully into a little pouch.

“Here.” He holds it out to me. What is he doing?

“You’re giving me something?”

His mouth quirks, and the hint of a sparkle lights up his deep brown eyes.

“Fuck the rules, Gloria,” he says.

I blink, temporarily thrown, and I look at him again, closer than I have yet. Who is he?

Upper levels don’t swear, not in public, certainly not in front of women.

Sometimes a grunt from the lower levels will let a curse slip where they can be overheard, and they’re always quick to apologize.

Some of the boys go through a phase in high school where they swear among each other, but by the time they enter a profession, almost everyone considers cursing déclassé. Bennett never went through the phase.

There aren’t levels out here, and Dalton’s clothes are worn, but he’s clean, and he doesn’t have a grunt’s deference—or the thinly veiled resentment that simmers in some of them. Again, my brain doesn’t know where to slot him.

Tired of waiting, he slips the packet of pills into the pocket of my coveralls that’s already stuffed with leaves.

“I guess you want something for them,” I mutter because somewhere along the line, I’ve lost the ability to think before I speak.

I watch his expression change as he processes the words, the hint of humor disappearing, speculation darkening his eyes. Crap. He wasn’t thinking about our trade. My dumb mouth put the idea in his head.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah.” His gaze drops immediately to my chest. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

I wrap my arms around my knees and clamp my thighs together. I don’t want to lie down again. Why did I say something? How do I reverse this?

“I don’t want to take my clothes off,” I say, staring at the grass.

“All right,” he says, standing to move in front of me. His hands go to his buckle. He’s already hard. His cock is nearly busting his zipper open. He’s so much bigger than Bennett.

Dalton’s pants drop to his ankles, no hesitation, no showmanship, and he strokes himself, not that he needs to get ready. He’s good to go, his cock pointing straight up, rosy red and veined.

Bennett is only this hard first thing in the morning now. Later in the day, it takes him a little while to warm up. At least it does with me. Maybe he gets instantly hard for Meghan.

Did he come to me after he was with her?

Why am I thinking about this now?

I have a job to do. I’ve got to earn some chlorine dioxide. Based on last time, all I have to do is put in three or four minutes of work. I don’t need to make myself hurt and angry while I do it.

I rise up on my knees and wrap my hand around the base of Dalton’s cock so I don’t choke. I learned that trick early with Bennett. He never got a good sense for the limit. He always got so excited that he’d ram himself down my throat if I didn’t throttle him, so to speak.

I bend forward. Let’s get this done.

Before I can get my mouth on him, Dalton makes an odd, strangled grunt. He fists my hair and gently draws my head back.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “Stop.”

I blink up. He’s staring down, of course, like he’s never seen anything like me before. I sit back, resting my butt on my heels.

He brushes a lock of hair behind my ear. “Let me just be here a minute. Okay?”

I nod, confused. He keeps petting my hair, smoothing it. His fingers wander to draw a line along my jaw and brush across my lips. I leave my hand wrapped around his pulsing cock.

Behind him, the stream babbles along. I’ve heard the sound before in the nature audio mixes the commissary sells as a sleep aid, but reality is different, because the rushing noise isn’t isolated, it’s the melody in a whole composition, and if you listen, there are a hundred other parts—birdsong in the distance, the whisper of wind through the grass, the faint swishing of boughs and branches against each other.

I still can’t see the sun, not the yellow ball from pictures, but there’s a warmth shining down from a particularly bright patch of blue sky.

I tilt my face to bathe in the light and soft breeze while Dalton looks down at me.

I don’t know what we’re doing. I’m supposed to be disgusted. Ashamed. He’s supposed to be in a hurry to take what he wants. To use me.