7| Nancy Alweston’s silk pajamas

7| Nancy Alweston's silk pajamas

OTTILIE

H ALF AN HOUR LATER , having ransacked Nancy Alweston's closet, I return to the kitchen.

Knox is drinking coffee, sitting at the table, looking out the window where Gran is firing a silenced gun at a target one of them must have set up in the backyard.

Her posture is good.

So is her aim.

The share pfffft of the silenced bullet hits my ears, and a black hole appears in the center of the bullseye.

Knox's gaze slips to me, up and down the pair of silk pajama pants I found in Nancy Alweston's closet drawers. They're far too short, but they're the loosest item of clothing she possessed. Even her sweats were too tight. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet. Even in flats, I was head and shoulders taller.

The pajama pants stop above my ankle and cling uncomfortably, riding up.

"You feeling okay this morning?" he asks

"I just chugged two bottles of water with electrolyte packets. I feel fine." I follow his gaze down to my sock-covered feet and shrug. "I'll borrow Gran's coat and her shoes. Mine are still too wet. I'm assuming we're going out? For new clothes and then to the Capitol?"

His mug scrapes on the rough table, and a second later, he shoves his chair back over the stone floor, and he's up. "I checked your gun. It's dry now." He pulls it from a secondary holster on his belt and hands it back to me.

I shouldn't be surprised. He's always thoughtful. But still. "Thank you."

The gun is warm from his body.

I find myself continuously looking at his shoulders as I lace on Gran's slightly too-small shoes and shrug on her too-small coat and follow him to the front, where Gran locks up behind us, then down the drive and out onto R Street where we turn right and head toward Wisconsin Avenue, and the markets and boutiques there.

The rain has quit, and the sun has melted away most of the ice, but we're cautious as we pick our way over slush-covered rubble and leaves. The water level has receded, the rushing rivers of last night receding to slushy mixtures that funnel toward storm drains that are no longer backed up.

We stop at the corner edge of a gift shop, looking carefully up and down Wisconsin Avenue at the covered boutiques, restaurants, and offices that line that road, interspersed with bare-branched trees and cafe-style seating.

Empty.

A ghost town.

Ninety-nine percent dead.

Everything is different now.

No more hiding in back rooms, hunched over a computer, making strings of words for someone else to read. Not in this strange new world.

I study his body language, the way he's angling himself along the wall for concealment, and I mimic it, keeping my head back, trying to think like him, observing the street carefully, looking for changes in silhouettes, shifting movement in the shop windows.

"Teach me," I say.

He must understand because he doesn't ask what I mean. "Check the rooflines, edges of corners, the glass. Check it all once, looking specifically at places people hide, then unfocus and just let your brain seek movement, anything out of place. Then again, in more detail." He points to the top of the roofs, low apartment buildings, townhomes, legal offices. Some have former windows, others are flat. "Eyes out of focus, then eyes in focus," he says.

The only movement is in the barren branches leaning into the wind and the slow drift of gray clouds against the silver sky.

I'm looking at the buildings.

But he's looking at me.

And then we're staring at each other.

So close.

Here, face-to-face, in the light of day, I meet him squarely. I have the urge to flinch, like always, a million questions rushing through me, wondering what he thinks when he looks at me, if my hair is messy from the wind, or my face red and blotchy from the cold, does he look at me and remember the feel of my most secret places pressed against him in the night? Did he kiss my temple last night? It felt like it, but maybe I was confused from too much cold blood to the brain? Did he whisper that he liked me, too? Did I imagine it?

Gran said to search my soul, and I find myself doing that now. I didn't imagine it.

"People get hurt less when everyone is careful," he says.

"I'm always careful," I whisper. "About everything."

"I haven't always been," he murmurs back, and his hand lifts very, very slowly and tucks a stray strand of my hair behind my ear. "Not with people outside work. Not in the past. But I'm trying now."

"Me too." I shiver when a gust of wind blows up the thin silk of Nancy's pajama pants.

He clears his throat. "Let's get you inside and into warmer clothes."

T WENTY MINUTES LATER , I tug a thick wool sweater off a stack of them on a table in a boutique, trying not to look as Knox peels his fleece over his head. As he does, the t-shirt under it pulls up, revealing a swath of neatly defined back muscles and smooth skin. I vividly remember the feel of him under my fingers, the way it had my low belly clenching, hot and empty, yearning for his touch.

I drape another sweater over the stack of pants over my arm and carefully smooth away invisible wrinkles. We need weeks' worth of clothes since washing is challenging now. For Gran and me, and they should be clothes that send the right message.

"I've been wondering if I owe you an apology," he asks.

"For what?"

"That wasn't how I imagined taking your clothes off the first time."

"Oh," I say.

He imagined taking my clothes off .

I take an odd moment to look into my past and wonder what the old version of me would have said, tucked into her business suit and heels, drafting up a speech. She'd have been … scandalized.

"No need for apologies."

"Good." His belt buckle clinks as he undoes it, wool-covered shoulders rolling. He drops his pants, revealing long, muscular legs, covered in just the right amount of dark hair.

I'm not sure if he's taking off his clothes in front of me because he's already seen me naked, so who cares? Or if it's a challenge, or a way to even the scales, or just because the world ended, so why stand on ceremony?

I find myself setting down the stack of clothes and shucking down Nancy Alweston's silk pajama pants.

I don't have any underpants on.

He looks my way, sucks in a sharp breath, then jerks his gaze away sharply. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Yes," I say, tugging on a pair of soft black pants that are tight at the waist but loose everywhere else. It's a relief to be back in clothes my size.

"I heard you and your grandmother talking, and I know what she wants, and I know what I want, but I'm not sure I know what you want."

"What I want?"

"Out of this? Just to help make all her dreams come true? Or something else?"

"I ..." I don't know. I reach for an oversized mock-turtleneck sweater and hold it loose in my hands. "What do you want?"

He takes off his other sock and stands in just his briefs and the wool sweater, feet spread on the boutique's wide plank wood floors. "I asked first."

My throat feels tight, so I pause, thinking, looking down. So many questions swirling.

I used to want to be the best speech writer in the country. I dreamed that someday students in classrooms would watch Gran's speeches, and they'd read the words and they'd talk about them, learn from them. That if my speeches were enough, people would still want me.

I thought maybe I might teach someday.

But we're a long way from having classes on speechwriting.

And Gran … I'm not even sure I want her to be the president anymore.

President of what?

It all feels like a farse.

"I don't know. Everything I wanted no longer makes sense." We don't even have a dialysis machine right now, and she needs one. "And Gran … will people even follow her? "

A sixty-year-old with a bad kidney claiming to be President of the United States of America after a catastrophic plague means about as much as the cash money sitting in my wallet sitting forgotten somewhere—which is to say nothing.

"Right now," I say. "All she has is a title. There's no power in a title. Not on its own. You need people who believe it first."

I look down at the turtleneck in my hands and the too-small sweater of Nancy's that I'm wearing and shrug. He's already seen me naked. He's half-naked, too. It's the apocalypse, and there's no changing rooms in here. Why not take our clothes off whenever?

No ceremonies, right?

No sock in my mouth.

New rules to learn in a game I've never played.

I lift the sweater up, turning away from him in a gesture that feels coy. I turn partly away and let the top slip off my shoulders like a snake shedding its skin. I slip my hair over one shoulder. "We need to give them a vision of a future they want to live in."

I pull the turtleneck on, and when I look back, I catch him pulling on his own clothes. Biceps flex and shoulder blades ripple, and my mouth goes dry.

"You need to give them one?" he asks. "Or you need to find one yourself?"