Page 47 of Trade
I feel raw. Peeled. Tender. Excitement thrums in my belly, and it has to do with being here, but it also has to do with him. This is what I thought falling in love would be like when I was fourteen and fifteen, and I thought it would be the best thing that would ever happen to me. I’d meet a man, and he wouldseeme, the real me, all the parts of me that no one else noticed but that I knew made me special.
I’d tell him about the plants and trees from the Before, and he’d understand that I was talking about, well, magic, a whole world of growing things, spreading as far as the eye can see, no end in any direction.
He’d listen to me. He’d be strong enough that nothing about me would make him feel small and act big—not my temper or my brains or my needs.
I’d meet him, and I wouldn’t feel alone anymore.
Like I don’t feel alone now.
It’s impossible, right? I snuggle closer, and Dalton tightens his arm around me.
“This can’t be real,” I whisper in the dark.
“Why not?” he whispers back. “It feels real to me.” He knows exactly what I’m talking about. Of course he does.
“We’ve only known each other for, what, three days?”
His shoulder shrugs, lifting and lowering me, like the gentle surface current when the wind skimmed the lake. “I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. Makes it feel longer.”
“That long, eh?” I have to make a joke. There is too much in my heart. If I look at it head on, it’ll tip over and spill.
He reaches down and tickles my ribs. I shriek. He hauls me half on top of him and growls, “You might have some years on me, but I’ve got fifty pounds on you easy. Best watch yourself.” He nips my ear. I squeal. He smacks my bare butt and then rubs away the sting.
I relax on his chest, letting the rise and fall lull me. We lie like that a while, and then he speaks. “I don’t know who my mother is, except she lives at the cathouse at the Mill. The women there keep the girls, but almost all the boys they give away.”
“How can they do that?” My mind boggles.
His voice is hard and even, but I can feel his heartbeat speed against my breasts. “They can’t teach a boy how to survive. They know that. So they pick the man they think is a good bet, and if he agrees, they give him a baby.”
“So your father wasn’t really your father?”
“Odds are against it.”
“But he took good care of you?”
“Yeah, as good as he could, but life is hard if you’re not in a town. I know you can’t tell by my size now, but we starved every winter until I got big enough to handle myself scrounging. Once they give a man a child, the women won’t see him anymore—it hurts them too much to let their babies go again—so my dad didn’t see a reason to go to the Mill. We mostly traded on the fly, if we ran into someone amenable. Just as often we’d end up fighting, and to the winner went the spoils, you know?” I don’t, but I’m getting the picture. “And then Dad died.”
He’s quiet for a minute. I wrap my arms around his neck. He burrows his nose into my hair. I do understand that.
“I don’t know how you live in the mountain, but you look fed, and I don’t imagine you’re ever alone.”
I shake my head.
“It can be lonely out here. Even when Dad was alive, we were on our own, right? It’s a good day if you eat, if you wake up in the morning, if the fight or the fall of the cold doesn’t kill you.”
I nod. This is the Outside that I always imagined.
“When you came out of the mountain, when I saw you, I felt for the first time in my life that there might actually be good shit in the world. Not just survival. Not just living to fight another day.”
I didn’t feel that way. I was terrified. But now? I understand exactly what he means.
I fold my arms, leaning on his pecs so I can look him in the face. “When we were kids, we would sneak into the access ducts.” The crease on his nose appears. “They’re like pipes with ladders that go all over the bunker, big enough for a person to navigate. That’s how techs access the ventilation system and plumbing and that kind of thing. We’d get in there and climb to the very top level. There were these huge vents up there, like ten feet across, ten feet wide, with these massive black rubber louvers. We’d get up as close as we could, stick our heads between the louvers, and breathe as deep as we could. The air was so fresh.”
Not anywhere near as fresh as it is out here, but if you could get a good lungful, it would still go straight to your head.
Dalton strokes my spine and listens.
“It was the best. And then at some point, around when I graduated school and began my internships, I gradually stopped going. I haven’t been since I was eighteen or nineteen.” I do the math. “Until three days ago, I hadn’t had a breath of fresh air for twenty years.”
