Tabula Rasa(11)
“It’s not important.”
“No, I want to know. What were we fighting about?”
Trevor looked like he was scraping the bottom of the idea barrel for any convenient lie to feed me. “It’s not worth upsetting you.”
“Right, because why upset me when our life is so perfect and serene?”
He growled in frustration. “Fine. You asked for it. I got snipped because you kept miscarrying, and it was hurting you every time you lost a baby. So I got the snip so you wouldn’t have to keep going through that. We had a stupid argument about something not important that wound back around to that and how you thought I resented you or some other bullshit. As if we’d want a baby now in all this, anyway.”
I didn’t say anything. I just looked down at my plate and started eating.
***
Months passed in the abandoned theme park. It felt like a combination of camping and the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Things started to become normal somehow. I started to feel stronger. Whatever may have been wrong with me had seemed to clear up on its own with time. The romantic dinner that night had been a turning point of sorts. It didn’t do anything immediately to make me want to get closer to Trevor, but oddly, time did.
The isolation of no other human companionship quickly grew to be too much for me. Feeling or expressing anger or disdain toward him only left me by myself with no one to talk to or seek comfort or reassurance from. Without Trevor, I’d die out here. I didn’t think he was going to just up and abandon me, but there is a sort of clinging desperation that begins to take hold when your waking reality is only one other person in the world. It was like Trevor was the only other person still alive on the planet. It probably wasn’t true, but it felt true.
Suddenly that person begins to seem almost perfect—your soul mate—the only person you could possibly have ever ended up with even in a sea of billions to choose from. We didn’t have much real sexual chemistry—or at least there wasn’t any on my end. But he was comfortable, like a favorite pair of sneakers.
Little by little the off feeling about him started to dissipate, and I began to be convinced that it had only been due to confusion brought on by my fall and the shock of waking into the world as it now was.
His annoying traits receded into the background, and we actually started getting along. I could see glimpses of what I must have seen in him before the collapse. I could even see how we might have ended up together in wedded bliss, a bliss that had seemed unthinkable as even a minor feature of our past when I’d first opened my eyes inside the pirate ship.
The weather turned colder, and we brought our blankets and pillows to set up camp in the grand dining hall of the restaurant where we could use the fireplaces to keep warm at night. It didn’t get too incredibly cold, but it got cold enough to be uncomfortable without the added comfort of heat.
Trevor had decided it was safer than running the heating/AC unit year round. He wanted to give the unit a break, he’d said. Because if that thing broke down and he couldn’t fix it with what was on hand, we’d be fifteen levels of f*cked when summer reached its zenith.
I never questioned why he seemed to do both the hunting and the cooking, as well as the cleaning up. I asked to help, but he’d push me away, as if he didn’t trust my involvement in the process. It created a sort of crushing boredom, and once I’d read all the books in the cabinet, the only thing left to do was f*ck—something he seemed quite content with.
We’d begun to do it with the frequency of rabbits—mainly because it kept him happy—but without the procreative results.
Trevor came in loaded down with an armful of firewood and threw a few more logs on the fires. Both fireplaces were lit. They were located in the room such a way that we could set bedding up in the middle and have warmth seemingly from all sides.
“There. That should last us a while.”
He joined me on the blankets. We’d created a pillow fort with all the pillows, not only from the tower, but from the guest rooms on the floor below it as well. We’d taken the comforters off the beds so we could make a thick, plush mattress to lie on and cushion against the hard floor.
“Trevor?”
“Hmmm?”
“When will we move on? Look for more people, I mean?” I felt if I spent even one more day here, no matter how much I’d grown to care about him, that I’d lose my f*cking mind.
His eyes narrowed, and I was sure the fight was about to start again. He seemed so insecure about the possibility of joining another group of survivors—as if I would only stay with him as long as he was my only option. As if I’d jump on the cock of the first new man who dropped his pants. I didn’t understand the depth of his insecurity. There was nothing physically repulsive about Trevor, and he had the one thing most random men out there wouldn’t have... built-in birth control. And given the new state of things, that made him the safest man in my world.
Plus there was the months he’d already taken care of me, fed me, kept me safe, kept me from going completely insane. He was dependable. I could count on him. I knew he would protect me from whatever hardships this barren wasteland of a world brought our way.
Though, if I couldn’t sustain a pregnancy, maybe birth control wasn’t a worry anyway—depending on how early the pregnancies ended. I’d never asked about that. The whole topic seemed like a very sore subject with him, and I didn’t want to rile him up. However either of us had once felt about it, not being able to have kids was a blessing now.