26

kestrel

IT WAS A stupid idea, and I could have told Paladin that. If he'd asked me before he did it, I would have told him not to go through with it.

However, he did it anyway.

He went to all of the unattached women and told them to go and pick out a house for themselves and to go to him or Clementine if they couldn't work out any conflicts that they had between themselves.

And then he told the wolves that they got to live in a house at the will of the woman who lived there. He said that if he heard they were using force or coercion, he would take it upon himself to make them sorry.

There was practically a damned mutiny right then. They hated it, and they hated him, and they refused to do it, so he told them to get out of the subdivision and come back when they could get on board with the new way of doing shit.

Then he let Red and Griff out, told them what he was doing, and said that if there were houses left, Madrigal and Noah could each have one, but it was up to them who lived in the house.

Red thought it was batshit insane, just like I did, but Griff thought it was brilliant. He got all excited and shook Paladin's hand and said he should have done this himself and babbled a whole bunch about everything .

After that, I was stunned to see that half of the men had not actually left the subdivision, but were, instead, going to talk to women who now had houses, and the women were letting them in.

The other men did leave, which confused me, because I would have figured they'd just fight. Of course, they were all weirdly frightened of Paladin, something that I guessed I hadn't quite understood. They also seemed to believe that Paladin could shift into a wolf at will, not just at the moon, which wasn't true, but Paladin was not disabusing them of this notion.

Anyway, after that, we all went back to the farmhouse.

I said that the guys were going to be organizing and they'd come and fight us here.

Paladin said that was a possibility, but he didn't seem particularly worried about it.

The farm had been neglected for days, so we all had things to do. We checked the chart that Clementine had made and we all got to work.

I was busy until evening, and when I came back into the house, Paladin was in the kitchen mashing potatoes. The whole house smelled good, and he said he had a chicken in the oven.

I took a shower, because I was dirty. By the time I was done, dinner was ready.

We ate, and Lazarus and Paladin got into a conversation about how behind we were on plowing the fields that needed to be turned over for spring, like everything was back to normal.

Clementine was quiet, but she ate a lot.

I, however, pushed my food around mostly. I felt antsy. This was not over. It couldn't just be over. I still felt keyed up.

"I need my own room," Clementine announced.

"Fuck," said Paladin. "How have we not given you a room?"

"Well," she said, "I was sleeping in the sun room with all of you. We've spent every night together since I got here. And I'm not saying we can't just do that tonight again. I don't mind if we do that, in fact, but—"

"No," said Lazarus. "No, you could stand a night alone."

Clementine speared a green bean. "Okay, I thought we talked about this."

"None of the other rooms have beds," I said. "So, why don't you take my room, and I'll sleep—"

"No, that's not what I mean," said Clementine. She turned to Paladin. "We can take a bed from the compound house, right? And I was thinking that I could have that room on the bottom floor next to the bathroom. You guys don't have anything in there except that treadmill which looks broken."

"It is," said Lazarus, nodding. "I had this idea I was going to fix it, but that hasn't happened."

"You can put it somewhere else, Lazarus," said Paladin. "Work on it there."

"Totally," he said with a shrug.

"We don't have to do it tonight," she said.

"What did you and Lazarus talk about?" I said.

Lazarus sighed. "Look, you three want to go fuck out your trauma together, fine. I just don't function that way. I need time."

I glanced at Paladin and then down at my plate. I felt embarrassed and stupid and ashamed.

"So," said Clementine, "then that works. Lazarus gets time, and if you two want to sleep out in the sun room with me—"

"We're just all pretending like nothing fucking happened?" I exploded. "I don't get you people."

I left the room.

I went to my own bedroom, despite saying Clementine could have it. I collapsed onto my bed and tried to make out the tangle of my emotions, but I ended up falling asleep. I hadn't slept well in days, and we'd been doing labor on the farm all day .

clementine

AFTER WE CLEANED up after dinner, I went to check on Kestrel, but he was asleep. I would have gone after him right away, but Paladin and Lazarus said that after Kestrel exploded, he was less than rational, and they knew from experience to let him be. He would just tell me to go away, anyway, they said, that he'd want time alone.

When I came back downstairs, Lazarus had disappeared too.

Paladin was sitting at the coffee table in the living room, scribbling on a notebook. He looked up when I came in. "Hey," he said. "I feel like an ass. I can't just volunteer you to be the leader of what is essentially a very small government. If you don't want it, we need to figure something else out. You're in no place to decide right now, though, so I thought I'd try to figure out what exactly needs sorting around here. I never really thought about it before. But I have this list of resources and the biggest problem, I think, is that everyone squabbles over them. The way Griff and people like him usually do it is to say that the leader essentially owns everything and that all of the resources are centrally controlled. He has the right to take anything and everything from everyone, at any time, and no one is allowed to say no. And what he gives us in return is order and protection. But there's a better way, and I'm sitting here trying to remember why the Russian revolution failed and why communism doesn't work and wishing I paid better attention in history class."

I settled down next to him, smiling. I looked over his list of resources. Food, shelter, farm equipment, clothing, government rations, etc. He had written down women with a big circle around it and put an X over it.

"Uh, we've been treating women like property," he muttered.

"No, I got it," I said, smiling at him. "Stalin."

He raised his eyebrows at me.

"The reason the Russian communist revolution failed is that it stopped being communism—well, if it ever was—and became a dictatorship under Stalin. And the same thing happened with the French revolution and also in China. It happens on a small scale, too. Like, um, the Manson family."

He furrowed his brow. "Huh. So, if you have a loose collective without a leader, then a leader just takes it over."

"Usually under the guise of peace and love and togetherness," I said. "And people are so tired of having to take care of all the minutia of whatever government is that they let him do it."

"People like a leader," he muttered. "Of course. It's that way in all of nature, isn't it? Most animals organize themselves into hierarchical social structures. So, we can't just be a loose anarchical collective who all get along, can we?" He took the paper back and circled the women thing again, thoughtfully. " Can we?"

"Why'd you decide to give the tithes the houses?" I said. "Why me as the leader?"

"I was thinking about bonobos," he said. "I mean, sort of. Like, there are some animals who organize themselves in matriarchal societies, like whales and stuff, and some people think bonobos do, but it's not really like that. The bonobo structure is as patriarchal as the chimpanzee structure, but the females have a certain social status that is different."

"Bonobos are… monkeys?"

"Primates," he said. "Us, bonobos, and chimps, we all descend from a common ancestor. You can see us in both of them. We're less ruthless than chimps, but we're less peace-and-love than bonobos. With bonobos, the females protect the younger females from unwanted attacks from males and they socially shame and ostracize males who behave badly. They also solve all conflicts with group sex, essentially."

I laughed. "Um…"

"Yeah, well, that's probably not what we're going to do out here." He snorted, rubbing his forehead.

"Well, that was what I wanted to do this evening," I said, gesturing at the ceiling.

He looked up at me. "Did you really? "

I bit down hard on my lip.

He reached out and covered my hand with his own. "Clementine, I need to apologize to you for what—"

I pulled my hand back. "I've had it with all of you being guilty. Stop it. That's not helping. None of you did anything to me. It was Red. It was those wolves. And the hell of it is that no one did it because of me. It happened to me, and I was just a pawn in big power scheme that was all about personal issues between Red and Griff." I thought about it. "Really, that's kind of all you need to know about history, though, anyway. You don't need to have paid attention in class. That's history. Powerful people do things for personal reasons. People without power get screwed."

He chuckled.

"I mean, I feel like that's why it might work," I said. "We—tithes—we can never shift into wolves and we can never have whatever power it is that the werewolves have. That power isn't your choice, I get that it's as much of a burden as it is an advantage, but if we made some sort of concession to it, it would do a lot to making us all feel more equal out here."

He nodded. "Yeah, exactly."

"Is this when you tell me your theory about menstruation and evolution?"

He laughed, scratching the back of his head. "Clementine, we need to focus on this." He pointed at the resource list. "One thing I'm not good at is focus, at least not on the thing I want to focus on."

"Executive function damage," I said briskly. "I probably could have gotten ADHD meds as a kid, but my stepmother wouldn't let me have them, because she said that medication was terrible and awful and convinced my dad that it would warp me. Really, she just didn't like it whenever I got any attention at all."

He tilted his head. "You never talk about your family."

"Neither do you," I said. "Anyway, I figured out ways around the meds. Maybe she did me a favor, because I found ways to accommodate myself and still be functional. I don't know. One thing I never did get was attention. Until…" I lifted a shoulder. "You guys."

"How could anyone look at anything besides you?" he breathed, reaching out to brush his thumb over my cheekbone.

I smiled at him, awash in a feeling of warmth and wondrousness. I leaned in to kiss him.

But he shuttered, ducking down his head, pulling his hand in. "Except I didn't look at you. They took you, and I let them take you."

"And then you saved me," I said.

"No, I did not," he said fiercely. "No, I didn't go there to save you. I went there for recon. I was so into my little strategy game that I had reduced everyone to pieces on a chess board. It's what I do. It's why I can't be a leader, because I go all ruthless like that. It's the thing about myself I hate the most. I hid from it for years. I buried it, pretended it wasn't there. Now, I don't think I know how to stuff it back in, but I also don't know how to accept it about myself."

"Stop," I said. "You're doing it again. The guilt, Paladin, all of you, the guilt ."

"But Clementine, I should have—"

"Who cares?" I threw up my hands. "It happened the way it happened. You can punish yourself forever, but it'll never make it happen any differently. I still love you, and you still love me—"

"Yeah, but why? Neither of us even chose that shit."

Now, I was hurt. "You said you did. You said that you would love me if I wasn't a tithe, if I wasn't a woman . You said—"

"I could not remember what I had done when I said that."

"So, it was a lie?" I looked down at my hands.

"Maybe all we do is lie to ourselves," he said. "Maybe we can't live with the truth, so we have to lie to ourselves."

My stomach turned over. I felt ill. For the first time since coming out here, I wanted to leave.

The silence that settled over us felt like death .

Or… it did for a while, and then I started to hear the sounds of the night filtering in from outside, the sounds of insects and the wind in the trees. I wasn't dead. We were all alive, and everything around us was alive, too.

"Okay, look," he said suddenly. "Maybe it was a lie then, because maybe I was a lie then. I wasn't telling myself the truth about myself. But it's not a lie now. I do love you. I would love you no matter what. I can't make myself understand why I didn't behave as if that love was as important to me as it is, though. I betrayed you, and I can't forgive myself for that."

I looked up at him.

"Lazarus wanted to go after you," he said. "Kestrel, too."

"But you're the one who did go after me," I said.

"No, I'm telling you, I went there without the intention —"

"But you're the one who got me out of there. You're the who ended it, all of it. You're the one who overthrew Red, and you did it without even hurting anyone, Paladin. You did it with words."

He sat up straight, stricken, simply staring at me.

"You think you're ruthless, and maybe you are, but you didn't kill anyone and you didn't rape anyone. Intention matters, sure, but I think actions matter more."

He thought that over. He bowed his head.

And then, we talked about resources, and we talked about leadership, and we came up with ideas for how to trade food for gasoline and how to distribute the government rations in ways that were fair and balanced.

We talked for hours, scribbling on pieces of paper and making lists and little flow charts when we were trying to explain to the other how this or that would work.

We both got excited, and we laughed and punched the air and grinned when we found solutions. At one point, I leaned over and kissed his cheek, and then I pulled away and we looked into each other's eyes.

And then we kissed on the mouth.

And then I tackled him backwards onto the floor, and he just lay there, staring up at me as I straddled his body .

I ran my hand over his chest, like I'd done last night with Lazarus, up and down, each stroke of my hand going lower, until I touched his crotch.

But he was soft.

I didn't care. I undid his pants and he let me and I took him out and started attempting to tease him stiff.

He watched me, his breath catching in his throat. "You sure this is what you want?" he breathed.

I nodded, one quick, brisk nod.

"It was only two nights ago," he said.

"If you don't want it, I'll stop," I said, even though—selfishly, maybe horribly—I didn't want to. I hoped he wouldn't tell me to stop, even though I knew that I would never cross that line with him. If he said no, I would stop.

"I don't want it if you don't want it," he said with a self-deprecating laugh.

"I want it," I said.

His cock jerked in my hand, but he was still only half-hard.

"I want…" I felt shy. All of this, with them, the entire time, it had seemed as if it was about them using me for their pleasure, as if I'd been robbed of all my choices and all my agency to belong to them. But then, I'd actually been robbed of my choices and actually been violated, and I realized that the reason I liked being a tithe was because it gave me freedom . I was forced to have pleasure, forced to have orgasms, forced to go out into the wilderness and surrender to the decadence of three men who were devoted only to me . Being a tithe had stripped me of agency, but it had given me the freedom to prioritize myself. I let go of his cock and flopped down over him, catching myself on my hands. We were nose-to-nose. My voice went breathy. "I want to take what I want, Paladin. I want to give in to my desire and surrender to it. And I want you to give me that. I want you to let me take what I want."

He sucked in a breath and his eyes went half-lidded in desire. "Fuck, Clementine, I am yours . Do what you want with me. "

When I touched him again, he was like a rock. He made a little noise in the back of his throat as I explored his erection, moving his hips against my touch. When I looked at his face, he had thrown back his head and his eyes were closed.

I toyed with him, watching him shudder and sigh, and I liked that. "Open your eyes," I murmured. "I want you to watch me take off my clothes."

He grinned, opening them immediately.

I tugged off my shirt, and his grin widened.

I took off my bra and dangled it over his face and dropped it on him.

He pulled it off, his grin going lazy. "Am I allowed to touch you?"

I thought about it. "No."

He liked that. He cradled his head with his hands and wriggled his hard cock at me while I removed the rest of my clothes. I left him mostly dressed, just his erection sticking out of his unzipped pants, and I slid my wet opening down on top of him.

The moment he filled me up, I came.

We both made a desperate little noise.

He tried to sit up, but I put a hand on his chest—a gentle hand, he could have stopped it if he wanted—and I rode the hard, thickness of him until I came again.

And then I bent down to capture his lips, and he wrapped his arms around me, and then everything changed. Then we were together, almost merged, his body buried inside mine, a joining that slipped into us and filled in all the cracks of us, making us into something else, something that was the sum of both of us, something luminous.

I cried out against the smooth skin of his neck as I felt the tremors of his climax inside me, all through me.

It was bliss.