Humanity (13 page)

He noticed immediately, and his breath
caught. It felt as if the air thickened between us as we stood there, looking
at each other. His eyes slowly focused on my mouth. My heart sped.

What would it be like to kiss Gideon?

“Whoo!” A shout from the other end of the
rink.

I jumped back from Gideon, pulling out my
gun and pointing it at the intruder.

The boy, probably about fifteen, cackled
at me and raced off.

I didn’t shoot; I placed a hand to my
forehead and looked at the ground, the hand holding the gun falling to my side.

“Sometimes I can almost forget there’s
other people in the world,” Gideon muttered, looking after the boy.

“Yeah. It makes me uncomfortable. Look,
can we finish checking the shops? I know I wasn’t keen on it earlier, but I
think I’d like to get out of here.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Gideon replied,
heading for the entrance to the rink, which was now nearby. “We’ll start down
here and work back up to where we were upstairs. Sound good?”

“Yeah, that sounds fine,” I said,
following him. He didn’t try to take my hand again, and we began looking
through the stores. A lot of them on this level had nothing to do with
clothing, which made our job significantly easier since we didn’t have to check
the storerooms for those – most of the stuff was useless, items that wouldn’t
help us survive in any way.

Again, though, the clothing shops were
all picked clean. The only thing useful we found was a single lighter.

Gideon flipped back the lid, and it
caught fire; it was full to the brim with fluid. He smiled at it. “Always
useful,” he murmured, then pocketed it. “Anything else you want to see?” he
asked.

I looked around at the empty food court
we currently stood in; not even a whiff still remained of the smells that had
once existed here.

“No,” I said. “Let’s get back to the
forest.”

“Sounds good to me.” He headed straight
for the exit, and this time he walked through the broken doors rather than holding
them open for me. “Unfortunately, though, that forest ends here.” We started
walking away from the mall, following the exit signs to US-5.

“Can we get back into a forest the first
opportunity we get?”

“Of course, if that’s what you prefer. It
might be a few days, though.”

“Fine. Where are we going to sleep
tonight?”

“I seem to recall us enjoying the ‘under
the bridge’ option,” he said, smiling at me.

I shrugged. “I prefer ‘under the trees,’
but sleeping under a bridge is a good option if there aren’t any trees.”

“This is Oregon; I’m sure we can find
some trees by the road.”

“Alright. It’s not the same as a forest,
but I’m sure it’ll be nicer than a bridge. Nothing against bridges, of course.”

“Of course,” he replied. He took my hand
again.

~ * ~

We walked a few miles, through the city
and onto the freeway. We stopped when Gideon walked up to the base of a large
pear tree, peering upward.

“Anything in there?” I asked, standing
off to the side.

“Yes,” he replied, immediately hoisting
himself into the branches. “And they’re very ripe,” he called, “so I’m going to
carefully hand each one down to you. Can you come here?”

I came to stand by the trunk, taking off
my pack and setting it on the ground. I
 
looked up at him as he plucked a few light red pears from the leaves. He
leaned down to me, handing over each one in turn, and I carefully set them down
on my backpack.

“Is your arm okay?” I asked, watching as
the injured arm stretched out to grab fruit.

“It’s doing fine. A little sore. Why? Do
you care?” He waggled his eyebrows down at me, and I rolled my eyes.

He continued to hand the fruit over; we
had a collection of fifteen when he climbed down.

“What about the others?” I asked, looking
up and spotting at least five more.

“Not ripe yet,” he replied, easing himself
down against the tree and biting into one of the pears.

“What is it with you and ripeness? We can
pick them now and wait for them to ripen, then eat them in a few days when
food’s a little more scarce.”

“Candace, sit down and eat.”

“But I seriously want to know what’s
wrong with picking them now. You can’t expect me to want to leave them for
someone else to find.”

“And why not? They’ll be tastier that
way.”

“But
we
won’t be the ones eating them.” I sat down beside him, taking a pear and
sinking my teeth into it; juice filled my mouth.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he
replied. “How many pears can you really eat?”

“A few days from now, plenty more than
these fifteen.”

“Fourteen.” Gideon discarded the core of
his first pear, taking another.

“Great. Fourteen. You know what? It
doesn’t matter what you want to do. I’ll wait until morning, and, before we
start walking again, I’m going up there and picking the rest of those pears.”

“They’ll just get squashed and juicy in
your backpack; they’ll make a mess of things.”

“They’ll still be calories,” I told him.

“Not worth it,” he murmured, his eyes
focused on my chin as juice dribbled down.

I lifted my hand to wipe the juice away,
but he caught it, interlacing his fingers in mine as he set his pear down and lifted
his other hand to my chin, his calloused thumb soft as he wiped it away
himself; he sucked the juice off his thumb, eyes still trained on my mouth.
Then he looked into my eyes.

My heart sped up again.

With one hand still wrapped around mine,
he placed his other hand along my jaw, laying it there and fitting it to the
shape of my face. His eyes were locked on mine, and he leaned in closer. I
could feel his body heat emanating from him.

I couldn’t think clearly. What was
happening?

“Slap me if this isn’t okay,” he
whispered, his eyes going back to my mouth.

Then his lips touched mine in a soft,
gentle caress.

Chapter 12

I slapped him. I raised my hand upward,
and slapped my palm against his cheek. He immediately flew away from me,
shifting his body a foot further from mine than where he had previously been
resting.

“Sorry,” he muttered, not making eye
contact as he hurriedly finished his second pear. He threw the stem into the
street, then pushed himself down so that his back rested on the ground; he closed
his eyes.

He wasn’t going to eat any more?

I looked down at the rest of my first
pear, and understood why he wasn’t still eating. I had lost all interest in
food; I followed his lead, finishing the pear before laying down for the night.

“Gideon?”

“Mmm.”
“I just don’t know, okay?”

“I know.”

I
didn’t
know. How could I let the man who’d killed my parents
kiss
me, no matter how close we’d become?

Maybe I’d wanted him to kiss me. Maybe
I’d wanted him to hug me. But what did it all
mean
? What did it mean for me to kiss the man who, just a few short
weeks ago, I had wanted dead by my own hands? How messed up was that, anyway?

My gut clenched as I remembered the look
on my dad’s face when he’d found me with my last rapist. He hadn’t even been
able to look at me directly. Gideon was nothing compared to that – this was a
completely different situation – but how would Dad look at me if he knew I was
starting to have feelings for the man who killed him?

I fumbled with the bracelet, running it
through my fingers and feeling the weight of Gideon’s necklace as I did so.

I
wanted
to be closer to Gideon. With our bodies laid out in different directions
around the base of the tree, I had the strange desire to adjust myself so I was
laying lengthwise beside him.

No one wanted to be alone. Wasn’t that
the reason I hadn’t killed him in the first place? But I felt so much
guilt
, even thinking about letting
myself become closer to him. How could I?

I rolled to my side, the guilt the last
thing I felt before I drifted off, my parents’ faces still burned into my
brain.

The next morning, as Gideon loaded his
backpack with the uneaten pears we still didn’t seem to be hungry for, I
climbed the pear tree and wordlessly took down the seven remaining pears,
carefully packing them in my own bag. Gideon didn’t comment on this, and we got
back on the freeway and continued walking.

We walked. For days, we walked. After a
while, we left the freeway behind because it became more winding than was
efficient. We came across one mall, searched through it with no luck, and kept
walking. We walked along smaller roads, camped under trees and bridges, and
kept walking. We didn’t say much. Was there anything to say? We knew each other
well enough that our routine flowed together, not much communication necessary.
Pick the tree or bush of whatever fruit it had, shoot that rabbit hopping
across the road, set the bottles out to collect water. There was a rhythm to
it, and speech was hardly necessary for us.

At first, Gideon kept some distance
between us, probably not wanting me to get the wrong impression about his
intentions. After a couple days, though, we began walking closer again. We
slept several feet away from each other at night, but became more comfortable
with the occasional elbow bump or nudge – though each one sent shivers up my
spine.

After a week, we met more trees.

“Forest?” I asked, watching as the road
wound into the woods.

A corner of Gideon’s mouth lifted. “Yes.
What you’ve been waiting for, right?” He offered me a hand, as if he were escorting
me from civilization and into wilderness.

I glanced around at the deserted
buildings around us before taking his hand. I grinned back at him.
“Definitely.”

He pulled me into the trees but, as we
walked, never let go of my hand; it was the first time he’d done so since the
kiss.

The forest wasn’t perfect – asphalt broke
it up every two miles or so – but it was nice to be away from the reminder of
what civilization used to be. Try as I might, I couldn’t see what Gideon saw –
I couldn’t see beauty in the ruin.

Gideon was getting physically stronger;
we managed seven miles that day before finding a nice space between the trees,
only a few paces away from a creek, and settling in for the night. We didn’t
have a reason for a fire that night – we usually saved those for if we needed
to cook meat – but Gideon built one anyway because there was a chill in the air
that hadn’t been there before.

“Winter,” he muttered as he piled in the
branches, urging the flames to grow.

I sat on the other side of the fire, watching
as he worked. “I could get us more wood,” I offered, feeling useless; making a
fire wasn’t a three-person job, so I had usually watched as Dad and Mom quickly
put it together.

“Naw, there’s plenty here. Just give me a
few more minutes.”

I rested my chin on my knees as he
worked, then met his eyes over the flames as he took a seat in the grass.

“Sorry I’m so useless,” I told him.

“You’re not useless,” he responded,
surprised.

“But it seems like you do all the grunt
work around here.”

“That’s because I’m the guy. You’re - ”

“A skinny teenager, I know.” I rolled my
eyes.

“Er, no. I was going to say you’re just
as hard working, but I’m able to do things more efficiently because of how big
I am. You always step in if I need help, and you’re good at jumping to do any
tasks that you can. Besides,” he grinned, “you make my job easier just by being
around.”

I tried to pretend my face wasn’t turning
red. “You’re job being ‘the guy.’”

“No. My job surviving. I enjoy your
company, remember?” he wiggled his eyebrows at me.

“Yeah, yeah. That doesn’t mean you can’t
survive without me.
You
know how not
to rely on others for contentment.” We both knew I was too scared to try.

“That doesn’t mean I
want
to,” he replied, his gaze steadily meeting mine.

I looked away.

He yawned, then stretched out on the
grass. “You sleep well, Candace,” he said.

“You too, Gideon.”

He felt so far away. It had been a while
since we’d had a campsite arranged like this – each of us on either side of the
fire. The last several nights in which we’d had a fire at all, the arrangement
of each area had been a tree or a bridge, with the open world beyond the fire.
We both had preferred to have our backs to something solid, and so slept on the
same side, though with several feet between us. Most nights, we hadn’t even
started a fire, and the lack thereof somehow caused us to sleep closer –
though, still, several feet between us.

“Oh, forget it,” Gideon muttered,
grabbing his backpack as he pushed himself to his feet. He rounded the fire and
threw himself down a few feet away from me, settling on his back. “This okay?”
he asked.

“Yes, fine,” I replied, silently both
relieved and thrilled – relieved because I didn’t have to worry about how far
away he was, and thrilled because he had been feeling the same way as me about
the distance between us.

The fire cracked, and the sound of a few
crickets joined the sound of our breathing. I listened to it all, concentrating
on relaxing, concentrating on clearing my mind. The wind blew; I shivered.

Gideon’s breathing was steady. I couldn’t
tell if he was sleeping, mostly because I hadn’t trusted my judgment on the
matter ever since realizing he was aware of my bracelet.

I was cold. How could he sleep with the
chill? The fire helped, but not nearly enough to allow me to sleep. As the cold
crept in each fall, it took my body several days to adjust to the change before
I could completely relax in it. Usually, though, like last year, I had more
layers – I currently still only had a thin shirt with one sleeve entirely missing,
as well as a very sparse, sleeveless shirt under that.

My parents had also always made sure to
find us a well-built building to sleep in each night – even if it was only for
one night before we moved on.

Gideon’s body was warm. I knew because of
the heat that came off him every time he came near me. Oh, for some of that
warmth right now.

Maybe if . . .

No. That was ridiculous. Why would I ever
get that close to him? The hug was a one-time thing, and if I didn’t even feel
comfortable kissing him, why would I decide to sleep directly beside him?

I rolled over, facing away from him,
hugging my arms around myself and trying to think about something other than
how warm Gideon could make me.

Several minutes later, I gave up. Heart
hammering, I crawled those last few feet over to him and carefully lowered
myself beside him, the fabric of my clothing barely touching the bare skin of
his arm. Heat didn’t exactly emanate from him in this position, but I
did
feel warmer.

He kept breathing deeply.

At this proximity I could see the goose
bumps along his arm, making the hair stand up on edge. He
was
cold, even with how serene he looked.

After a few moments, I edged closer,
pressing into his arm.

“We’d be a lot warmer if you let me hold
you,” he murmured.

I jumped away from him, startled. “You’re
awake!” I accused.

“How could I not be? You’re breathing
really heavily, and I can feel your heartbeat.”

I sat over him, frowning.

He shivered. “Hurry up and make a
decision, because neither of us are getting any sleep this way.” His eyes were
still closed, making him seem very nonthreatening.

“Fine,” I muttered, settling in beside
him again. He lifted his arm and, after a moment of hesitation, I drew all the
closer. He set his arm along my back, wedging me between his arm and body. This
was
definitely
warmer.

He inhaled deeply, his breath on my
scalp. Was he
smelling my hair
?

I didn’t really want to draw attention to
that right then, though, because I was so warm and cozy beside him. My entire
body began to relax, and I slowly drifted off.

~ * ~

The sun beat into my eyelids, and birds
twittered in the trees. Part of me thought
breakfast
,
and the other part of me tried to remember what the warm bulk was that I was
lying beside.

Gideon
.

“Oh!” I shot up, glancing down at him;
he’d turned over in his sleep so that I’d been lying against his back just now.
I hurriedly scooted away from him, to where I’d left my backpack the night
before, still wearily watching him for movement.

He shivered in my absence, and
immediately blinked awake. He looked around at me with blurry eyes, his hair
standing up at angles.

“Restroom break,” I informed him,
shouldering the backpack and walking away from him, into the denser trees,
before he could say a word.

Sleeping
next to him last night meant nothing
,
I told myself as I went through my morning cleanup routine by the creek,
nothing at all. Don’t think about Dad’s
face. He’d understand that you were cold. DON’T THINK ABOUT IT!

I massaged my temples as I returned to
the burnt out campfire. Gideon nodded in greeting, meeting my eyes only briefly
before returning them to his gun, which he was currently loading with
ammunition.

“Did you hear the birds?” I asked, looking
at the gun in his hands.

“Yes. They’re that way,” he nodded
northeast. “Just a few trees away, though pretty high up.” He stood, gun
loaded. “Wait here; I’ll just be a minute.”

I didn’t argue, mostly because I didn’t
want to scare the birds; he walked off, careful of his footsteps, and then I
heard several gun fires. A few moments later, Gideon returned, dead birds in
hand. We rebuilt our fire and cooked the four birds he caught before starting
south again. He didn’t say a word about sleeping beside each other the night
before, and I didn’t bring it up. However, my father’s face kept replaying in
my head.

That night, Gideon and I laid down a few
feet apart, the fire built as large as we dared with the proximity of the
trees. I shivered some more, and I felt like my thoughts were very loud as I
considered the option I’d taken last night.

“It’s not a big deal,” he murmured. “It
doesn’t have to mean anything.”

I sighed, then scooted closer; his arm
immediately wrapped around me.

“We need warmer clothes,” I told him,
snuggling in.

“I have another mall in mind; we’re
heading towards it now. If we get back on the main road it’ll take us less
time. . .”

“How much less time?”

“Maybe a day.”

“Naw, not worth it.”

His arm tightened around me. “Fine by me.
Who needs clothes, right?”