Page 16 of Trade (After the End #7)

I guess those are the magic words. The wave crests and then crashes. The best feeling ever explodes through me, then explodes again, a chain reaction. A scream escapes my lungs. My toes curl. My pussy squeezes his fingers.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, and slides his fingers out of me so he can shove his hair out of his face—so he can look down and see me better.

I blink up. My inner thighs are shaking. That was the best orgasm of my life.

He grins. Oh, my goodness. He has dimples. I had no idea.

“You liked that,” he says. Again, a statement of fact, not a question.

“You did, too,” I huff, pushing myself up on my elbows so that he has to sit back up. I’m coming back to myself now. Feeling naked on the ground at thirty-nine years old. Foolish.

“Yeah.” His grin morphs into a smirk.

I grab for my coveralls, but they’re out of reach, and he’s still kneeling between my spread thighs.

“Hey. Not so quick,” he says and, with a mind-blowing acrobatic backbend that engages every single one of his rippling stomach muscles, he grabs the willow crown and places it gently on my head. “Queen Glory,” he says.

I stick my tongue out.

He laughs softly and does the backbend again to grab my coveralls, slower this time, watching me gawk at his abs as he does it. My cheeks heat.

He helps me get my arms and legs stuck in the right holes and zips me up, stealing a kiss before he draws me to my feet and adjusts my crown.

“Drink.” He passes me the canteen and hikes his backpack onto his shoulders. He swings by the creek for a refill before we start on our way again. We seem to have dallied away the hours when the sun was directly overhead, but it’s still warmer than it was in the morning, and my energy lags.

Dalton is less inclined to walk ahead, strolling only a few feet ahead and pointing out things of interest as we pass. We’ve seen most of the flora he knows by name, so he’s taken to pointing out fauna.

He spots several bird species—a mourning dove, a whole flock of starlings, and at least three different taxa of black birds, all of which he calls crows. We hear a woodpecker, and although he leads us on a stealthy detour to see it, we don’t find it before it flies away.

And then there is the turtle. He spots it by a stream when he’s refilling the canteen, and we spend a good long time watching it meander on its way toward wherever it’s going. It clearly has a destination in mind, but it moves as lazily as a cloud.

I love the clouds. I spend so much time watching them pass overhead that I get an ache in my neck. They don’t look real. No illustration or movie could have possibly conveyed how they hang above you in space, and sometimes sail along, blown on a wind you can’t even feel on the ground.

For some reason, they remind me of the minke whale skeleton that hangs from the ceiling of the display room of the Department of Zoological Preservation. When I was a kid, I’d stand under the bleached bones, look up, and pretend I was an aquanaut on the seafloor.

I traipse along, at this point fueled by nothing more than wonder and astonishment, and my chest aches.

What were we doing? Dad and my teachers, spending all that time teaching us about every plant and animal that used to exist, making sure we knew that we exist to commemorate them, that what used to be was so much greater and more important than what is.

And all that time—life was out here all along, and not bones and dust, but real, living things, making their way about their business, oblivious to the people under a mountain so worried about a past long gone by.

Did it ever make sense?

“Has the Outside always been like this?” I break the silence to ask Dalton, who is strolling beside me now, wearing his pack on his front to give his back a break. Another man would look silly. He looks adorable.

“What do you mean?” he asks through a mouthful of what smells like apple. He’s got the front pouch of his pack open, and he’s snacking.

“Like . . . green and alive. We were always told—well—it was understood that everything had been destroyed, and there was nothing left but barren dust and destruction.”

The crease between his eyes appears. “But you all have seen the Outside. Your guards. The women. You know what it’s like out here.”

I shrug. “No one talks.”

He clearly doesn’t understand, but he decides to answer my question.

“It’s always been like this since I was born.

Dad never said it was any different when he was young.

There’s plenty of destroyed and abandoned shit, though.

Not so much here in the valley, but everywhere else.

Stuff’s not dusty, though. Mostly, it’s covered with vines.

Kudzu. That shit will grow up your leg if you don’t move fast enough. ”

“And there’s water?”

“Yeah.” He refocuses on my face. “No one ever told you what it was like Outside?”

I shake my head, but a memory floats forward in my brain.

Dad, sitting next to me in my cot, me tucked under the covers and him on top with his boots hanging off the edge.

He never took his boots off until he got into his own bed in case Administration called him out for an emergency.

He hated untying them just to have to tie them up again.

Our bedtime routine always involved poring over whichever book had caught my interest. He’d flip to a random page and ask me what I knew, and I was so proud to spout off all the facts I remembered so easily.

He’d pipe in with anecdotes and tidbits he’d picked up.

If a blue crab lost a leg or claw, he could grow it back.

The spring peeper produced a natural antifreeze so it could freeze solid in winter and wake up come spring.

There was a tree called the giant sequoia, and not only was its bark fire-resistant, but fire itself opened its cones to release seeds.

Several times, I’d wake up hours later and find him still poring over the pages, tracing the pictures with his fingers. Lovingly. Longingly.

Did he know this was out here?

Suddenly, my view changes, like I’m at the eye doctor and he adjusts a dial on his machine and asks, “Which is better? One?” Click. “Or two?”

Maybe Dad didn’t want me to be the head of department because he knew what was out here, or he suspected, or he had no idea, but he still wished this for me.

An impossible dream. I was always so mad because what was he doing all those years if not preparing me to take his place?

But he wasn’t teaching me to push paper and compile budgets.

He was teaching me the medicinal properties of plants, which are edible, which are toxic, how to help things grow.

Scarification. Stratifications. Cuttings.

How life survives.

There have been so many times since he died that I’ve wanted to have just one more conversation. Mostly I wanted to have one more cry where he tells me everything will be okay.

But maybe if I did get that last conversation, he wouldn’t tell me that at all. Maybe he’d tell me to get out and run.

“Hey,” Dalton says. He’s watching me with concern, always watching me. “Come this way.” He leads me off the course we’ve been taking through the middle of a meadow to a cluster of trees atop a low hill.

I’m too lost in thought to question what we’re doing until we’re standing at the foot of a huge sugar maple with a split trunk.

It’s at least twenty feet tall with a practical ladder of branches and boughs.

Excitement swirls in my stomach, and I look at Dalton.

His lips curve. He’s thinking what I’m thinking.

“I’m going to climb it.”

“That’s why we’re here, Queen Glory. There is what’s left of an old building maybe a quarter mile to the south. You should be able to see it if you get high enough.”

“You can drop that queen business,” I say, gauging the tree’s layout. He picked a good one, although how he managed to pick it out while staring at me, I couldn’t say.

“Hey, now. You’ve still got your crown.” He’d attached it to his backpack with a carabiner when it started to annoy me.

“You’re a terrible flirt.” I wedge my boot in the split of the trunk.

“To be fair, I haven’t had any practice,” he says, seizing my butt with both hands without warning and boosting me up into the tree. “You’re the first woman I ever really talked to for more than a few words.”

I turn to stare down at him. He grins up. There are those dimples again. “Seriously?”

“I’ve always been lucky,” he says. “My very first woman, and she’s a queen.”

I make a barfing noise, and he chuckles, pleased with himself. “Do you know which direction is south?” he asks.

I don’t, but I’m not admitting it. I focus overhead, looking for a handhold. I’m spoiled for choice. This is almost the Platonic ideal of a climbing tree.

I haul myself up and up and up. At one point, as I’m considering my choices, Dalton calls up, “Make sure the branch is thicker than your bicep.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I call down. I can hardly see him through the foliage. The next branch I pick creaks a little, so I quickly hoist myself to a stronger one.

“Make sure it’s thicker than my bicep,” he calls.

“Yeah, yeah.” I’ve hit a point where there is a gap in the leaves and the valley unfolds in front of me. Even though I’m winded, my breath catches. The greens. The silvers. The blues. I never could have imagined.

“If you turn your head ninety degrees to the right, that’s south.”

I pretend I didn’t hear him and turn. It takes me a second to find the building from the Before.

He was right. It’s nearly covered in vines, but there are a few patches of gray concrete visible once you pick the square shape out of the wilderness around it.

Only the walls remain. It’s being reabsorbed by the earth.

I’m about to ask Dalton if he knows what purpose the building served, but distant movement catches my eye.

Much closer than the building, but still at least a mile away, a hulk of metal creeps along where the grasses meet the woods, heading away from us, toward the mountain.

I catch glimpses through the growth. Glass. Wheels.

“Dalton,” I call down. “I can see a truck.”

“Down. Now,” he barks. Instantly, he becomes the man I met outside the bunker. As I climb down, he’s unsheathing his machete. When I’m about ten feet from the ground, he snaps. “Stop. Stay there. Keep silent until I come back. You have your knife?”

I nod, suddenly filled with icy dread. Despite the hard mask he’s wearing, I know him now, and I can see the flicker of fear in his eyes.

“Anyone finds you, you run, understand?” he hisses. “If they catch you, use the knife. Aim for the soft shit. Eyes. Throat.”

I crouch on a branch, holding tight with shaking hands. “Don’t go,” I whisper, matching his lowered voice.

“If I don’t come back, take the pack and go back to the mountain,” he says, and without another word or glance, he disappears into the trees as silent as a ghost.