What if Katie had come here after her death?
What would I do if I ever crossed paths with her on this world?
I had fallen in love with another woman now… could I even go back to Katie?
And if I could… would I?
The marriage vow was, Till death do us part.
Death had definitely parted us. At least once, maybe twice.
…or maybe not.
What if death had brought us to the same place?
What would I do if given a second chance?
The possibility seemed insane to me – or rather, it made me feel insane to keep thinking about it – and so I pushed it out of my mind.
But it took me a long while to fall asleep, and my dreams were uneasy.
15
We continued the next couple of weeks in domestic bliss. Lots of sex, which became even more passionate and emotional for me as time went on. Turns out that I really was falling in love with her.
I finished Lelia’s bow, then made a dozen arrows for her as well.
After I explained what I wanted, she wove together thin, pliable branches into basket-like quivers, which we carried the arrows around in.
We practiced continually until we became pretty damn good. In fact, I brought down a buck on our fifth attempt at hunting. Unfortunately I only wounded it, and we had to track its bloody trail for two hours before it finally bled out. I wasn’t happy about the suffering I’d put the creature through, and resolved to get better – but still: we managed to feed ourselves for another week based solely on weapons we’d created ourselves.
And Lelia continued to teach me things about this new world I had come to inhabit – mostly about new berries, herbs, and nuts. It seemed that only a handful of different trees could exist far up in the timberline where my cave was. The farther down the mountain we went, the greater the variety of plants there were to find.
The entire time, she learned English at a faster and faster clip. I was constantly amazed at how retentive her mind was when it came to vocabulary and grammar – and how quickly she could make intuitive leaps in a language she’d only started learning a couple of weeks before.
And with more time spent together, it was inevitable we would argue. We had a couple of spats about the proper way to do things – how to clean the buck I’d killed, for instance. But the friction would soon resolve, and we would go back to a far more pleasurable type of friction later that night.
But I started catching her staring off into the fire more often, a cloud of melancholy hanging over her. I would hold her or try to make her laugh, and she would shake off the sadness with a smile and forced cheerfulness… but I knew it never went away. Not entirely.
I knew what she was thinking about, because she wore the same look as everyone else who has lost someone. Whether she was thinking specifically of her mate or her female tribeswomen, I didn’t know… but I was well acquainted with what she was feeling: grief. It had been my constant companion ever since the day Katie died. It had gone underground when I came here to this new world, and had lessened dramatically once I met Lelia – but the sadness still came and went. More than once, she caught me staring off into the fire, too, and tried to distract me with a kiss.
It usually worked.
But she had replaced what I had lost.
I might have been able to replace the man she had once known – but I couldn’t replace her tribeswomen.
And so my brain toiled day and night with exactly how we might go about reuniting them.
Finally, about two weeks after she’d told me, I broached the topic over dinner. We were eating a third deer we’d killed – courtesy of Lelia this time.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Yes,” she said immediately, and grinned, scrunching up her nose adorably.
We had a little in-joke about the phrase ‘I have a question’ leading to sex – mostly because I had asked it a lot when we were first beginning to explore each other’s bodies.
I have a question – does that feel good?
Yes!
I have a question – do you like this?
Yes!
So now, when I asked an open-ended question, she playfully acted like I was going to ask about sex.
I liked that game, because it often DID lead to sex.
But not this time.
I smiled at her. “Good, but I have a different question. How would you feel if we left here and went looking for the women in your tribe? The ones you got separated from?”
She stared at me for a moment in confused silence.
And then she burst into tears.
“Hey – hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, taking her face in my hands and staring into her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she sobbed, but she smiled.
“Are you sad?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Happy.”
“Happy that we’re going to go find them?”
“Yes… and no.”
“So you’re happy about something else?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
I was thinking, Oh, she secretly hates it here. She hates this cave, she would rather be out in the wild –
But she smiled through her tears and say, “You love me.”
I stared at her. “What?! Of course I love you – why would you think I didn’t?”
“I do think you love me, but… you will go find people you do not know… you will leave home… for me. You love me.”
Now I understood.
I smiled back, tears misting my own eyes. “I would do anything for you, babe. Anything.”
She kissed me hard, her tears salty on her lips.
But contrary to normal practice, we didn’t proceed directly to the baby-making.
We began talking about what finding her tribe would entail.
How would we eat?
“Berries and food we gather,” Lelia said, completely unconcerned.
Where would we spend each night?
“In caves or in trees.”
I was reasonably sure I could figure out the shelter situation on the
