9| You know what I’m doing

9| You know what I'm doing

OTTILIE

K NOX DROPS ME off the Alweston's. He leaves to go empty another weapon's locker, and I go straight to my computer up in my bedroom, ignoring Gran.

Five hours pass.

I write sixteen pages for sixteen different scenarios. Sixteen different talking points. Sixteen different arguments. Sixteen different emotions and concerns.

When I come up for air, the house smells of food.

I find Gran in the kitchen standing over a pot.

"Potato onion soup," she says when she sees me.

"It smells good," I say.

"You wrote." She puts the lid back on the pot with a cast iron clatter and wipes her hands on a dishtowel.

"Yes."

"Gina had cancer." That word echoes like we were just transported to the tunnels.

I have the same sense of yawning cavernousness. "Why didn't tell me?"

Gran tosses the dishtowel onto the counter. "She was scheduled to have surgery in January, but it was postponed. She had no chance of surviving in this world, and she knew it. She didn't want you to worry, and yes, we assumed she might be exposed, and she understood."

My memories have painted the old world in rosy hues, making it hard to imagine Gina being sick. I keep thinking of the time before a place of order, where things made sense.

I pull out a chair at the table and sag into it. "Why tell me know?"

Gran folds her arms, resting a hip against the counter. "Apparently you've been worrying that I'm about to send you or Knox off to your deaths." She makes a come-on, Ottilie face. "What is the point of any of this if I let people I love die? You're the only two people in the world I trust. You're the most valuable humans on the planet to me. I assumed you knew that."

My arms cross on my own, and she puffs out an exasperated breath.

"Things have truly deteriorated worse than I ever imagined if you truly think I'm lying now."

I force my arms to unfold. "It's not that I think you're lying. I just … where did you send her?"

Her chin lifts. "I'll tell you when I'm ready."

"Why keep it a secret?"

"Because you'll be a stronger writer if you don't know."

I look gloomily out the window where her target from earlier sits in the dim dusk light. More dark holes near its center from shots she landed.

"Do you ever worry no one will follow you? That you're not the leader we need right now?" She flinches, and I decide to keep going, the vision of Mustache Man fresh in my mind. "That they won't listen to a sick elderly woman when there's a big angry man with a gun barking orders? He'd be so much easier to listen to."

"Every night before I fall asleep." She sighs, looking away. "I wonder if after the apocalypse. Will they cleave to a general? Someone hardened and stoic? Or will they turn toward a zealot? Someone shouting about fire and brimstone. And I arrive at the same answer every single time."

"What's the answer?"

"They need someone with a strong plan. And I have it."

A bunch of guns hidden away, a bunch of food, and plans to bury bodies, and get water processing going. It's the same plan anyone would have. Politics isn't about the plan. It's why politicians rarely talk about policy. No one cares and it doesn't really matter. What matters is the tone they set.

And she knows it.

It's why she wants my words so badly.

It's my turn to lift my chin. "Someone answered the post-its in the Capitol."

She takes a seat. "Who?"

"Lavinia Hope. And she didn't just answer. She took down your name and replaced it with hers."

Gran's eyes gleam.

She knows the name, too.

"What do you remember of her?" she asks.

"Air Force during the war. Ran a hardline campaign, defending our shores, rebuilding, bringing our focus back to home. She won in a landslide, along with a lot of other senators running on isolationist rhetoric."

"Yes," Gran agrees. "They were able to ride in on post-war exhaustion, economic fears, and grief. I remember her as a redhead with a blunt way of speaking that many voters interpreted as authenticity."

I say, trying to remember a single moment of any of Lavinia Hope's speeches and failing. "Was it authenticity?"

"Maybe. She's clever, determined, and good with a crowd. All of which is an asset. She's another one who'd make a formidable enemy but a more formidable ally." She makes a couple of notes in her notebook before shifting her focus to me. "You're growing more confident, my Tilly. I can hear it in your voice."

My cheeks warm.

"Is it because of him?"

The side door opens at that moment, and Knox walks in with a five-gallon water jug in each hand.

He sets them on the counter.

"Just be careful." She makes a we-can-finish-that-conversation-later face . "News, Knox?"

Knox fills a glass at the water jug we set up on the counter, and swallows it down in three gulps, then refills it again.

"Last of the guns from Hoover Building are moved."

"Thank you," Gran says.

He finishes a third glass of water and sets it down on the counter. "Someone is breaking into police and federal cars."

"Why?" I ask.

"Guns. Precinct weapons lockers are almost impossible to get into. Even we don't have those access codes." Only officers in charge of those lockers would have had them. "But the trunks are easy to break open."

"You think it's Hope?" Gran asks musingly.

It would make sense. Once of our first moves was to begin gathering the guns to keep them out of the wrong hands. Hope could have had the same inclination.

"Or the people at the White House?" I offer.

Knox does one of his universal shrugs. "I'm sure we're going to find out at some point."

More unknowns.

That's part of life now, getting used to unknowns.

Though, Gina was sick.

Maybe the difference is just that after the plague, there are more of them.

"I'm going to go edit," I say, standing up.

I EDIT UNTIL MIDNIGHT, words flowing like water coming from my fingers, all my constipated emotions uncorking, arguments emerging, barely pausing to eat the soup Gran brings me.

I write speeches about gathering children to protect them from predators, and about putting the dead to rest, about rebuilding the parts from the past we liked, and scrapping the things we hated. I write about hope and a beautiful future—like Gran said.

We have a clean slate here. A fresh start.

We're free, I write in my favorite final burst of inspiration. We're free of all the things that held us back in the past—greed and bureaucracy, hate and division, oversight, red tape and even speeding tickets—it's all gone. But that freedom came a terrible price. And we cannot waste it. We must honor the dead by building a better, brighter future.

I leave the laptop at her spot at the kitchen table.

She'll read them over breakfast.

And then I creep silently through the house.

The floorboards in the hallway creak as I tiptoe past her door and hesitate just outside Knox's.

He told me to kiss him.

He's made it clear he's interested.

He held my hand.

He told me he liked me.

I turn the handle, and the door slides inward.

It's dark, the moon shining in through a pair of wide, mullioned windows.

His eyes are open wide in the silver light, aimed dead on me—a gun, too held in his hand, also aimed dead on me.

"Ottilie." He flips the safety with a snick, sets it back on his nightstand.

I pad across the floor until I'm standing over him, my toes curling into the soft carpet.

Very slowly, tentatively, as if afraid I'll spook, he lifts the blanket silently.

I climb under the blankets against the warmth of his body. The covers rustle as our bodies find their way into one another.

His arm wraps around me, hauling me close, so his chest settles against my back, his chest rising as he breathes me in with a sound that mirrors the relief I feel to be touching him again.

His lips touch the top of my head.

"Was that a kiss?" I ask, voice breathy and faint.

His lips.

I want to feel them.

So so badly.

He rumbles out a sleepy negative. "First kiss is on you."

My stomach twists. "It felt like a kiss."

"If that's what a kiss feels like to you, we have some serious work to do."

His bigger body is curled behind me, his arm around me tight. Right where his groin presses against my bottom, I can feel him, thick and hard, and it has rational thought fleeing my mind, and a stuporousness, a desperate need taking its place, a full body flush.

Hot, desperately hot.

I wriggle, and it makes it worse. So much worse, that thick, hard weight of him shifts, ends up resting, hot and heavy, throbbing tangibly, against my bottom.

I'm excruciatingly aware of it.

Desperately aware.

Fixated on it.

His chest rises and falls behind me, air wafting in the cold air to feather across my ear, my neck, my back.

He pulls his hips away, the hot length of him leaving my bottom, taking the tantalizing promise it offers away from me.

The air and the covers and our breathing settles.

It goes cool around us, dark.

But I'm still hot.

So hot.

Desperately so, distractingly so.

So much it's not clear thought that has me sliding my hand down into the waistband of my sleep pants, down between my legs; it's instinct.

He's the one who told me to remove the sock from my mouth and say what I had to say. I assume that means I should also do what I need to do.

"What are you doing?" Knox asks. His voice isn't sleepy anymore.

Not at all.

"You know what I'm doing," I whisper back.

"I really don't, Ottilie. What are you doing?"

My breath is coming so fast, dizzyingly fast, so fast if we were standing, I think I'd fall over. "I'm thinking of you."