That had been a safety measure. I specifically searched for a spell effect that would keep the portal open indefinitely until I purposely closed it; I didn’t want the damn thing slamming shut just when someone was trying to step through it. That might have gotten messy.

  She stood there a moment longer before taking a long, deep, calming breath. I couldn’t blame her for being cautious. She was, after all, choosing to trust a complete stranger.

  “Okay then,” she said, her soft pink lips curving into the slightest hints of a smile. “Let’s have coffee.”

  Chapter Five

  We sat at the kitchen table in silence, our coffee mugs steaming before us. She relished every sip she took, holding it in her mouth, then closing her eyes before swallowing it slowly. I imagined she hadn’t had a cup of hot coffee in a long time.

  I watched her, then averted my eyes when she looked toward me.

  She cleared her throat.

  I cleared mine.

  I looked back at her. The moment I did, her eyes shot to the side, evading mine.

  No, I didn’t want to stare. It was just hard not to.

  Helplessly, I studied her face, the smooth lines of it. Her lips, pink and natural, her blue eyes piercing yet innocent. She must have been in her mid-twenties, give or take a year in either direction. Youthful, yes, but with a certain weariness. No surprise there. She’d been on her own, surviving just like I had.

  And yet the end of the world hadn’t dulled her beauty even a fraction. She looked as bright and girlish as any young woman I could recall seeing before the vanishing. Me? I’d certainly aged since everything went to shit. Gray strands streaking through my beard, crow’s feet creeping in around my eyes. I was only twenty-nine, but I could have passed for thirty-five or older.

  I parted my lips, preparing to say something, but nothing came out.

  She did the same, before shutting her mouth and staring back down into her coffee mug. She lifted it to her lips again, sucked down the rest, then put the empty mug back on the table.

  “Another?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she answered.

  I stood up. The legs of my chair scraping against the rustic hardwood kitchen floor seemed as loud as thunder. I took the mug in my hand and felt a strange chill run down my spine when I realized I was putting my bare fingertips precisely where she’d just had her lips.

  I looked down at her. She looked up at me. This time, we held each other’s gaze for a solid second or two before we both looked away.

  She might have been blushing. I knew I’d been.

  I went to the coffee maker. My hands were trembling as I scooped coffee into the filter. Trembled so much that I spilled water on the counter when I tried pouring it into the machine.

  I’d been alone for years, until now. And after that initial cautious, stilted conversation out in my front yard, I could hardly muster a word worth speaking.

  A deep breath.

  Clenching my fists.

  I turned around, determined to say something, anything.

  My eyes met hers again. She didn’t look away. Neither did I.

  “You look…really nice,” I said, each word coming out painfully slow, but I was at least surprised that I got them out without stuttering.

  She blushed harder, her soft pale skin turning bright red. “Thanks.”

  I expected her to avert her eyes again. The chill running down my spine only increased when she didn’t.

  “I’ve been living in a mall,” she admitted, somewhat bashfully. “There’s lots of clothing stores in it. I know, it’s stupid. Dressing up all nice at the end of the world, but…”

  “It’s not stupid,” I said. I stepped closer to the kitchen table. “Like I said, you look really nice.”

  Slowly, she stood up. I noticed her hands were trembling, too. She left her shotgun lying on the floor, forgotten. She stepped toward me, a single step. She was toying with her fingers, pressing them together, before balling her fists and holding them to her chest, over her heart.

  “You look pretty nice, too,” she said.

  I laughed awkwardly, gesturing at my clothes. My dirty jeans and my frayed old flannel, my mud-stained boots.

  “I mean it,” she insisted, taking another step closer.

  I did the same. There was roughly six feet of space between us.

  “I kind of like that ‘farmer guy’ sort of look,” she said, her cheeks turning a notch brighter.

  “And I, um…I really like…”

  “Yeah…”

  As I closed the distance between us, it was like some invisible force pushing me forward, some unseen presence moving my feet across the floor.

  Just like that, we were standing right in front of each other, with her face upturned, looking up into my eyes.

  I reached forward, brushed my hand against hers. The silence between us pulsed, pregnant with an acute sense of tension that had blossomed quietly, almost imperceptibly, until now I could notice little else.

  As my hand brushed against her hand, she caught my fingers in hers, hooking them together.

  “You can, uh, go back through the portal whenever you’d like,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I should probably get going…”

  Yet we stood there, our fingers hooked. The silence continued to pulse like a heart filling with blood, about to burst.

  Without thinking, I put my free hand on her waist, on that sliver of pale skin between her blouse and the denim skirt. I pressed my thumb into her hip bone lightly, felt her flesh yield to my touch, smooth and cool and supple, gentle flesh, a woman’s flesh.

  Suddenly – jarringly – Morgan’s hand shot toward my wrist, catching it tight in her grip, and I expected her to push my hand away from her bare skin.

  But she didn’t.

  She instead wrenched my hand down between her knees, jerked it up under her denim skirt, gasping quietly when she felt my fingertips brush against the soft cotton of her panties, between the smooth texture of her inner thighs.

  With that, the artifice of whatever we’d just been doing fell to pieces, glass snapshots from a shattered mirror falling uselessly to the floor as we indulged something raw and primal simmering between us.

  I pushed her onto the table. The legs squeaked and groaned against the hardwood floor under her slight weight and Morgan released her fingers from mine then shot her hands up, into my hair, clenching it in her fists as she pulled my mouth to her own.

  Our kiss was as aggressive as it was desperate, two lonely mouths searching for some kind of sustenance after years of famine. Our tongues met. I pulled her body tight and warm against mine and she felt natural in my embrace, like we’d known each other for years.

  Under her skirt, I opened my hand wide and gripped her inner thigh, squeezing, indulging in the smooth texture, the feminine softness.

  Morgan grunted against my mouth, thrusting her tongue harder against mine. She grabbed wildly at my shirt, unfastening the buttons, tugging and pulling until the flannel began to tear.

  I slipped my other hand up the back of her blouse, felt the soft contours of her back, of her spine, then shifted my palm across her ribcage, rounding across her upper abdomen where I felt her diaphragm shifting rapidly with every breath.

  She tugged at me again, almost violently, making our teeth CLACK loud as a gunshot. She tilted her head to the left. I tilted mine to the right. She gasped with her lips on mine, a warm gust that delighted my tastebuds – her breath was fresh, the aroma of her mouth delicious – and I tugged at the soft fabric nestled between her thighs, felt the faint hints of wetness already dotting the cotton.

  It was more than mere lust between us. More than just years of loneliness finally coming to an end.

  It was quiet, yet thunderous. An unspeakable thing that we nevertheless shouted silently. We broke our kiss then suddenly went still, our wild hands freezing where they lay.

  For a moment that felt both longer than it should have but also painfully brief, I stared into her blue eyes – ocean-blue jewels nested in the whites, eyes that said more than words ever could – before I slowly pushed her back onto the table.

  Her blouse rode up her flawless midsection as she lay back, her head cocked up, her chin buried in her sternum as she watched me slide down toward her waist as I pulled more eagerly on the fabric between her thighs.

  I caught her panty strap in my fingers. She nodded breathlessly in silent consent as I tugged them down her gently trembling thighs. The panties were black lace, soft, see-through, and I gently threaded them down her legs and over her knees then, finally, tossed them aside.

  One hand on each creamy thigh, I put my lips to the inside of her left knee, kissing pensively, patiently, then cupped her flesh as I moved my hands down toward her boots. I began to kiss higher, just above her knee, inching up toward her thigh, unzippering and removing each boot from her feet without so much as glancing at what I was doing.

  Her boots hit the floor. Her feet clad in ankle socks, she shifted them, rested her soft heels upon my shoulders, the jewels of her eyes studying me with muted lust as I moved my lips to her other thigh, kissing the inside of it, nibbling that soft creamy flesh as I shifted her denim skirt higher up over her hips.

  Her bare stomach fluttered and trembled, each goosebump vividly visible. I kissed higher up her thigh, so close to her bare sex that I caught the delicious scent, fertile and raw, the scent drawing my lips as if her dew-covered entry had its own gravitational pull.

  I slid my hands up the outsides of her thighs, curving downward along her hips until I was gripping the sides of her ass cheeks, supple-soft, cool to the touch but also, somehow, just as warm.

  Shifting my eyes, I gazed upward, toward her bare sex, freshly shaven, her labia like pink flower petals damp with early-morning dew. I slid my right hand off her ass, over her thigh, trailing my fingertips across that soft trembling skin until the pad of my thumb rested over her clitoris, a deeper shade of pink, bordering on red, eager and slightly engorged.

  I shifted my gaze back to Morgan’s face. Propped slightly on her elbows, her face twisted with quiet impatience as she watched me, gnawing on her bottom lip. I bead of anticipatory sweat trickled down her cheek.

  Suddenly, she reached back down toward me, caught my hair tight in her fist, then impatiently yanked my face toward her mound with an audible gasp.

  When I kissed the lips between her thighs – lightly, patiently – her body went rigid. A sharp, high-pitched gasp emerged from her lips and she clenched my hair again, so tight and sudden that I felt her fingernails scrape lightly across my scalp.

  Her heels still balanced on my shoulders, she opened her legs wider, shifting herself down, closer, and I parted my lips softly and brushed my tongue across the pink-red rosebud blooming at her sex.

  She came almost immediately, the force of her trembling body causing the table to buck, my forgotten coffee mug skittering across it before tumbling to the floor, shattering. Her wide open thighs suddenly shut tight around my face. I held her hips tight as she writhed them in a fluid, yet quick rhythm, grinding her pink wetness greedily against my lips.

  I pulled back, my beard soaked. I lay my right hand open across her quivering abdomen, just over her jeweled belly button, and I felt the jade stone jolt with every thunderous heartbeat.

  Here comes the awkward part, I thought to myself. Now that we’d given into that sudden burst of desire, there’d likely be some prolonged awkward silence, maybe punctuated with half-assed justifications about how we could –

  “On the floor,” she moaned as she slipped off the table, pushing me backward, her arms tightening around the back of my neck as I fell lightly backward, her body pressed against mine as we went to the floor, her thighs shifting as she straddled me.

  Her orgasm hadn’t dulled the sharp edge of her lust one bit. Her kiss was almost violent in its insistence, our mutual desires manifesting in a point of singularity pulsing between our lips, and I wrapped my arms tight around her bare waist as she kicked her feet at my hips, trying to force my jeans down through force alone.

  “Fuck,” I gasped, releasing one hand from her bare waist, fumbling feverishly at my belt, at my button and zipper, her bare sex grinding against the tent forming in my jeans, her wet lust dotting the denim.

  As I shimmied my jeans down, then my boxers, Morgan thrust her right hand down between us, pushing between our bodies until she found my erection and gripped it ravenously, with mounting impatience. She shifted herself upward – never breaking our kiss, mind you – and before I had a chance to prepare myself, I groaned when I felt my tip breaching her sex.

  She thrust down onto me. I pushed up into her. Her wet inner embrace overtook me with all the subtlety of a car crash. It all unfolded in snapshots of sensation, wet and tight, constricting, the gasping breaths and our hands grabbing, clutching, cupping bare flesh and grunting like animals as she shifted her hips, like she wanted my erection to reach up into her heart.

  Then, she put her hands on my chest and pushed backward, upright, still writhing her hips but gasping with sudden shock as she came again. I held her by the waist, growling, trying to hold back my own release, but her tightness, the way it closed greedily around me…

  I tried to warn her. “I’m about to…”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care…”

  I shot upright along with her, into a sitting position, and pulled her body against mine, my mouth pressed tight to her throat, growling and ultimately groaning loudly as I gave myself over to the overwhelming sensation, spending myself inside of her with a shuddering orgasm.

  Chapter Six

  I was out back, by the cooking pit, flipping two flank steaks in a skillet over the crackling fire. Both came from the same cow – a big plump one I’d slaughtered back in the winter – and I’d taken them from the freezer the other night to defrost, so it was a quick cook job.

  As I gave the steaks another moment to marinate over the fire, I turned around and craned my neck back, looking up at the rear deck, up on the third floor.

  Morgan was sitting up there. Had been for about twenty minutes now, leaning back on a foldout patio recliner with her bare feet resting on the railing, letting the mountain air blow through her naked toes.

  We hadn’t spoken much since…you know. I mean, what did you say to a stranger after something like that? Making small-talk just didn’t feel right, yet I didn’t know the first thing about her.

  I had vegetables going on another skillet – asparagus and broccoli – as well as potatoes boiling in a pot over the fire. All of it grown in my garden, of course; it wasn’t like you could score fresh produce at the supermarket anymore. I heaped the vegetables onto our plates then drained the potatoes and slathered them in butter then added salt and pepper. By then, the steaks were done, medium-well, with just the slightest char at the edges.

  I took the plates upstairs, slightly nervous, still not sure what I was going to say.

  The third-floor deck looked out over the rolling hills, the mountains. Birch and spruce and maple and pine trees, more than you could count. Otter Pond to the west, just down the western slopes, a green-blue swath showing through the tree branches. Eagles were a common sight up here. You’d see golden eagles and osprey and even bald eagles flapping lazily over the trees before dive-bombing into the hills, vanishing for a heartbeat behind the brush before zipping back into the sky, a field mouse or hare or some other fuzzy unfortunate twitching bloody in their beaks.

  I went inside then up the stairs, fetching two cold bottles of Coke from the fridge along the way. (They were four-and-a-half years past their expiration date, but then again, so was every other soft drink on the planet.)

  I knocked on the doorframe before joining her on the deck, not wanting to take her by surprise. She still had her feet up on the railing. She looked back at me, reclining in the chair, a soft, tentative smirk on her lips.

  “Mind if I join you?” I asked. “I brought lunch.”

  One golden eyebrow shot up over a blue eye, a sunrise over water. “Is that…?”

  “Steak,” I smiled.

  Her mouth went slack, flabbergasted. Her eyes opened wide in disbelief. She pulled her feet off the railing and tucked them under her, turning, curling up onto her knees as she stared at me over the back of the recliner, her fingers gripped tight on the edges.

  “Steak?” she asked.

  “Steak,” I repeated, laughing. “It just finished defrosting earlier this morning.”

  “Where!?” she gasped, growing tense on her knees, blinking rapidly, like the steak itself might have been some kind of illusion.

  On cue, one of cows out back let out a throaty “MOO!”

  “One of those,” I smiled. “I slaughtered a big one last winter. The meat should be more than enough to get me through the rest of the year.”

  Probably enough for two, I wanted to add, but didn’t.

  I stepped forward, arm outstretched, and she took the plate almost reverently from my hand. The silverware lay just next to the steak, the juices running over the blackened char marks where the pepper had crackled in the skillet. She flipped back properly into the recliner, her blue eyes still regarding the meal with muted disbelief.

  “You just met me and you’ve already served me the first hot, homecooked meal I’ve seen in years,” she said with a bewildered chuckle.

  “I like to make a good first impression,” I laughed.

  She smirked, running her hand through her hair, her fingers running through the bright gold strands like harp strings. “Well, you knocked this one out of the park,” she said, then fixed the plate on her lap, balanced on her thighs, before tentatively taking the knife and fork in hand.

  There was another folding chair sitting on the opposite side of the deck. I pulled it closer to her recliner then sat down, my own plate on my lap, but I didn’t lift a utensil yet. For now, I was content watching her enjoy her plate.

  She held the steak in place with the fork then took the knife and plunged pointed serrated steel into the meat, the charred outer layer opening to the deep red, juicy interior as she sawed the knife straight through, down to the plate.

 

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