Page 13 of Trade (After the End #7)

I take his hand. He leads me away from the copse and back to the way he’s making through the hilly meadow toward the faraway lake.

We trudge through the tall grass in silence for a while, but then he points to a particularly tall tree shaped like a flame.

“That’s a cypress,” he says. I’ve seen them before in a painting in an art book. I thought it was surrealism with the swirls and bright colors, but the artist wasn’t making it up, not much. The tree’s needles are that green, and as daylight fades, the sky is that blue.

My heart breaks a little to mirror my broken brain.

All of this was here the whole time.

And the total mindfuck is—if my husband hadn’t ruined my life, I would’ve never known.

* * *

Dalton’s demeanor changes as night falls.

He grows quiet and urges me to walk faster.

He hasn’t let my hand go except to scratch his nose or adjust his dick.

His face is grim, and when he hears something he doesn’t like, he stops in his tracks, squeezing my hand so I’ll stop, too.

I don’t know what specific sounds alarm him.

There are so many chirps and hoots and snaps and honks.

I thought there weren’t any animals except for the birds and squirrels, but it’s clear from the racket that the woods and fields are teeming.

When it’s almost too dark to see two steps ahead, Dalton veers off course and leads me down a slight slope to a small clearing nestled against the side of a steep hill.

I have no idea how he found it in the near dark, but the way the nook is positioned, it’s protected from the wind and surrounded on almost all sides by the hill or trees.

“You can sit,” he says, dropping his backpack and cracking his neck. “We’ll sleep here.”

I sink to my butt and stretch my legs straight in front of me. As soon as the weight is off them, my feet begin to throb. I was vaguely aware that they hurt, but now I feel every chafed bit, every twinge. I untie my laces and yank my swollen feet free. My socks are damp.

Exhaustion drapes over me like a weighted blanket.

My last ounce of energy leaked out when I took off my boots.

All I can do is watch Dalton make camp. He gives me the canteen, and while I drink, he gathers branches from under the nearby trees.

I can’t see him, but I hear twigs snap under his boots and the curses he mutters under his breath after a dull thunk.

He builds a log-cabin fire just like in Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft, laying two parallel sticks as a base and placing tinder and kindling in between to make a box. He lights it with a ferro rod from his bulging side pocket. Once he gets the flames going, I scoot closer on my butt.

It’s getting cold, almost as cold as the walk-in refrigerator in Food Services. We went on a school trip to the kitchens in fourth grade, and the undisputed highlight of the day was being allowed into the refrigerator for a few seconds.

He grabs a few more things from his pack and then collapses next to me, totally unconcerned with personal space.

“Eat.” He passes me another parchment-wrapped package and grabs the canteen from the ground between my legs. I’m too hungry to complain about him being too close, and besides, the fire is beginning to warm my feet, but the rest of me is shivering. It’s nice to have a warm body beside me.

There is more jerky in the package, and it tastes even better now that I’m starving. I tear through it so quickly that I almost don’t save him any.

“Here,” I offer the last strip to him. He shakes his head. His mouth is full of something.

I start to rewrap what’s left, and he grabs my hand. “That wasn’t enough,” he says. “Finish it.”

My temper flares. “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m old enough to be your mother.”

He snorts. “Take it,” he says, grabbing my hand, curling open my fingers, and pressing pieces of what he was eating into my palm.

I sniff it. It smells sweet and has a dry, rubbery texture. I lick a slice with the tip of my tongue, but I don’t taste anything. “What is it?”

“Dried apple.”

I’ve had apples, but only a few times at Administration parties. One Christmas, all of us kids got our own baked apple that had been stuffed with brown sugar and raisins. To this day, it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever eaten.

I pop the apple into my mouth and chew. It’s tough, and not as sweet as I remember, but it isn’t soaked in melted sugar and butter either. It’s so good that I hum. Dalton sucks in a breath. Maybe the hum did sound more like a moan. He dumps the rest of his slices in my hand.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask before shoving another piece in my mouth.

“Yeah. I am,” he says. His voice is gravelly. The fire lights his face as he watches me chew. His eyes are dark pools, his lips slightly parted.

I’m suddenly aware of a needy tenderness between my legs. Back by the dogwood, I’d been into it, more into it than I’ve been with Bennett in years. Why did I stop? Because I want to be in charge?

I’m on the Outside in the middle of the dark, hours from the bunker, alone except for the man who bought me. I have no food of my own, no tools, no water. I’m not in charge.

My brain yo-yos again from excitement to confusion to an instinctual fear that makes me feel very, very small. Is the yo-yoing because of the oxygen from the fresh air? Or because my whole schema is broken? Up is down; good is bad; everything I thought was true is a lie.

And every few minutes, I have an epiphany about something that’s been staring me in the face all along.

Like, for example, all of the kids didn’t get their own baked apples.

Just those of us who lived on the upper levels with dads who were heads of department.

Cecily has never had an apple, nor Amy or Alan or anyone I worked with in the atrium.

Not Meghan.

She might get an apple now, now that she’s got herself a head of department, and she’s out of the unmarried dorm.

Now that she’s safe.

Like I was.

I pass the last two slices back to Dalton and wrap my arms around my knees.

The fire has grown, and it heats my front, but I still shiver.

I watch numbly as Dalton tucks away the empty parchment and removes a rusty tin from his pack.

He pries it open and grabs a handful of the contents, dried herbs that tickle my nose, and tosses them onto the fire.

As it burns, a thick smoke rises into the air, and I can tease out the notes—rosemary, lavender, and cedar.

We grow the herbs in our kitchen garden exhibit, and we have a dwarf cultivar of Atlas Cedar in our tree collection.

I always thought it was funny as a kid—having a dwarf version of a tree named for Atlas.

We’d never even consider drying and burning them.

Dad’s voice echoes in my head. Fire, airborne disease, and panic.

The smell is lovely, though, sharp and heavy and sweet.

“Are the herbs religious?” I ask. I know white sage was used in rituals by indigenous peoples of North America, and Catholics burned frankincense and myrrh, made from resin harvested from the Boswellia tree and Commiphora myrrha, neither of which we have in our collection.

The first gen believed religion inevitably creates schisms, so those practices weren’t passed down to the second gen.

“No. They keep the bugs away.” Dalton looks over and his lips soften. “And they smell good.”

They do. I breathe deeper to take more in and end up yawning like a sea lion.

“You’re tired,” Dalton says. He unstraps a rolled blanket attached to the top of his backpack and spreads it on the grass between the fire and the steep, rocky base of the hill.

I don’t argue about sharing or taking his bed from him or demand to know his intentions. I just immediately lie down on my side, facing the fire. I’m bone tired.

“Got your knife?” he asks.

I’m confused, but I take it from my pocket. I should have figured he wasn’t going to let me keep it.

“Put it here while you sleep.” He sets it a few inches from where my hand rests on the scratchy wool. “If shit goes down, you don’t want to have to dig around in your pocket. You want your weapon at hand.” He says the last part like he’s quoting something he’s been told many times.

He settles himself a few feet away, rests his back against his pack, and crosses his long legs, propping the heel of one boot on the toe of the other.

His striking profile is backlit by the fire.

If you ignore the body of a Greek god and focus on his face, he could be a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a woman, the lines are that dramatic, that strong.

He unsheathes his machete and lays it at his side. My sense of self-preservation finally pipes up loud enough to break through my exhaustion.

“Why do we need weapons at hand?” I squint into the woods, but past the fire, it’s pitch black. I can hear the occasional hoot or honk, but the crackling of the wood covers any possible rustles or snaps.

“Scroungers,” he says.

“Aren’t you a scrounger?”

He shrugs. “Not that kind.” I wait, but he doesn’t seem inclined to elaborate.

“What would they do?”

“Kill me. Take my shit. Take you.”

My blood runs cold. “But you’re not that kind?”

He shrugs again. “Not usually.”

What does that mean? Oh God. How did he get the hundred barrels of oil? “Did you kill anyone for the oil?”

His jaw tightens. He turns his head away from me, glaring into the fire. “What does it matter?”

“It matters.” My voice rises.

He glances over at me, as grim as when I first saw him, then turns back to the embers.

“You don’t want to know,” he mutters. “You want to live under a mountain and have your food and fuel delivered to your door. You’re so attached to your easy life that poking your nose out into the real world for a few hours is fucking terrifying to you. ”

“You have no idea. And it’s not ‘a few hours.’ It’s to be raped and maybe beaten or murdered.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what you people do to us.”

“We trade.”

“How is it a trade? I didn’t get any oil. No scrip. You saw them push me out. Who traded, Dalton? Not me.”

He sits up with bent knees, tensing, scowling. “You let me do it.”

Shame and fury flood my veins. The cold and my aches and pains and fear vanish. “What would you have done if I’d fought?”

“Your people never fight.”

I want to fight him now. I want to punch him in that perfect, pretty face like in movies. “You mean our women. And if that’s true, why do you beat them?”

“Beat them?” He scoffs, incredulous. “Bullshit. We don’t hurt you. Remember the rules? No leaving marks. No scrounger would risk his ability to trade.”

“I’ve seen the women when they come back.

Black eyes. Broken jaws. Nails ripped out.

” I’m standing now. Shaking. Yanking at my own fingers to show him, to force him to look, to admit it, the utter horror hitting me like it never hit me in the bunker when I was ushered with my tea into the back corners of dimly lit dorms surrounded by frightened whispers.

He’s standing, too, shoulders squared, chest rising. “No scrounger did that.”

“What makes you think they wouldn’t? They’d kill you. Take me. You said so.”

“No man would hurt a woman. Do you know what you’re worth?”

“A hundred barrels of oil,” I snap back, hysteria edging the bitter satisfaction in my voice as I land the point.

“Exactly,” he shoots right back.

We’re panting, glaring at each other, furious.

Well, I’m furious. The muscles in his neck strain, and his nostrils flare.

It looks like anger—it would be on Bennett or any man in the bunker—but Dalton isn’t pacing or gesturing or even raising his voice.

His boots are planted in place, even though he clearly wants to move.

His eyes flash, and he’s breathing hard, but he keeps his arms very intentionally loose at his sides.

He’s not restraining himself. He’s bracing. Because I’m attacking him.

Of course, Outsiders hurt us.

But what if they didn’t?

Cecily’s voice echoes in my mind. When they open the door, do what they say. Don’t fight them. What if she didn’t mean when they opened the door to push you out? What if she meant when they let you back in?

A wave of nausea rolls through my stomach. It’s too horrible.

As horrible as pushing a person you’ve known all your lives out of the bunker to be raped?

It can’t be true. My brain grasps wildly for proof. “You broke the rules. No talking. No giving me things. Give me back when you’re done.”

Dalton says quietly, the edge in his voice almost gone, replaced with the gruffness he had at first, “We’re not done yet. Are we, Glory?” He’s really asking.

“You’ve killed people? For oil?”

“I’ve fought people to keep what belongs to me.”

“And you killed them?”

“If I had to.”

I feel so alone, so lost and confused, like my ability to know what’s true and what’s right has been broken beyond repair. “But you won’t hurt me?”

“No.”

“And you won’t let anyone else hurt me?”

“Never.” He doesn’t put any extra sincerity in his voice like Bennett does when I have a moment of insecurity.

Dalton answers the questions like I’m quizzing him or like he’s making a report.

Did you mulch the orange trees? No. Did Food Service say when they’d have more eggshells for the fertilizer?

Never. No more or less than the facts as he knows them.

I sink back to my butt. Slowly, Dalton lowers himself to the grass. We watch each other warily.

I lie back down. He turns his head to watch the fire.

The embers crackle and spit. Strange animals call out in the night.

I rest my head on my outstretched arm and my other hand near the knife.

“If I had known it wasn’t a trade, I wouldn’t have done it,” he says, gruff and grudging.

I can’t see his eyes, only his tight jaw and rigid shoulders.

“Nothing is the way I thought it was,” I say to his back. Maybe because it makes me anxious to think he’s mad at me, and I feel compelled to ease his mind somehow. Maybe because he’s the only person I can tell.

I fall asleep thinking of what I should say next, and whenever I wake up, he’s there—leaning against his pack, drowsing or poking the fire or staring at me.

I don’t feel safe. Not at all.

But I feel seen.