Page 18 of Beacon

The next morning,I’m cleaning up the oatmeal pot after breakfast—Mack cooked it so it’s only fair that I clean—when he returns to the kitchen carrying two big plastic bottles.

I glance over my shoulder to check them. One is lotion and one is body wash. A name brand from before Impact. As I give the pot a final rinse and set it on the drying rack, Mack starts packing the bottles into a bag.

He reads my questioning look. “Gotta go get more provisions.”

“Oh, okay.” I assume he’s planning to trade the toiletries for food, and I’m intrigued since I had no idea he’d made any connections with other people around here.

I’d left my jacket hanging on a kitchen chair yesterday evening, so I pull it on. Then I quickly plait my hair intoone long French braid, securing it with the hair tie I slipped over my wrist earlier.

Mack’s eyebrows lower. His eyes narrow. He clearly wasn’t expecting me to come along.

I meet his frown with a level, matter-of-fact look. “Are we going to have this conversation every single day?”

There’s a moment when I really don’t know how he’ll react, but then he shrugs. “Fine. Your choice. We’re taking the quad.”

I use the bathroom quickly while he finishes getting ready and meet him outside where he’s gassing up a four-wheeler-style ATV with some of the stored gasoline in Chloe’s grandpa’s storage tanks.

He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I until he swings his leg over to settle in position. I straddle the seat behind him.

“It’ll be safer for you here, even by yourself,” he mutters.

“How dangerous is it on a scale from one to ten?”

He pauses, and I wonder if he’s tempted to lie to get me to stay. He doesn’t. “Maybe four since we’re on the quad.”

“Okay. I’m coming with you.”

He shrugs again and puts the vehicle into drive.

And we’re off.

In the year after Impact, when civilization as we knew it gradually crumbled into chaos, food wasn’t the only thing hard to come by.

The basics of hygiene and self-care got more and more scarce.

People started to stink.

At first it was really noticeable. I’d gone through twenty-three years of life around people who generally showered and used deodorant. Strong body odor, when I encountered it, was startling and unpleasant. And one of the trivial things that made life even harder post-Impact was that everyone, everywhere smelled.

Including me.

What I didn’t expect was to slowly get used to it. As the months passed, I focused on people’s smells less and less, until one day I woke up and realized they don’t really bother me anymore. Occasionally I’ll encounter someone with a particularly foul fragrance and want to shy away, but generally body odor blends into the background of life. An additional detail of identity like height and the color of one’s hair. Life is rawer and grittier and dirtier than it used to be, and the fragrance of the world has changed as much as anything else.

But Mack’s scent… That’s different to me.

Riding behind him, every breath I take is filled with him. No matter how long it’s been that he’s been absent, I could recognize how he smells anywhere. It’s not very strong this morning since the air is cool and he showeredearlier. I can smell the soap on him, but beneath it there’s an undernote of something warm and base and natural.

Mack.

It does something weird to me as he drives us over the same trail in the opposite direction from the one I took to get here. The scent provokes a pressure, a tightening below my belly. It isn’t lust or arousal, but it’s akin.

Like all my female parts are trying to curl into him. Grab hold of him.

It’s highly disturbing, but I can’t breathe through it or talk myself out of it. It makes me press up against him closer than necessary and squeeze my arms around him tighter.

He doesn’t talk at all as we drive through the hilly woods, but he also doesn’t pull away from me even slightly.

We’ve been going for about twenty minutes when he says without warning, “Head down.”

---