“Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
“KFC?” Not what I expected to hear.
“No. Kentucky Fried Chicken. The way it used to be when we were kids. Crispy skin, gravy, coleslaw, the whole shebang.”
“Back before fast food became too fast to be good.”
“You’re there,” he says.
“I’d kill for pizza.” The words pop out easily, and then in a flash I realize what I’ve said. I should feel bad and I do, but I can’t help myself, I start to laugh.
Nick throws back his head and lets out a belly laugh.
“Shit. Could I be less sensitive?”
“Gallows humor, baby. It’s good to get that out.”
When, I wonder, did I go from
“Don’t worry, it was funny.” He pats his lap. “Come here.”
“I’m your appointed therapist. It would be unprofessional.”
“Where’s the harm?”
“I could love you and then you’ll be gone or you could love me and then White Horse gets me and I die. That’s the harm. We’ve been hurt enough. All of us.”
I look away because I’ve said too much. I intended to close a tiny window and wound up throwing open a door.
Nick doesn’t speak. His boots fall from the desk; he rises from the chair and moves around the desk to my side of the barrier.
“You sound like Oprah.”
“Dead. About a month ago.” Morris bounces in through the open door and stops. “Am I interrupting?”
I look at Nick. He’s watching me, waiting for my cue.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “I kind of think you are.”
“About time,” she says.
He touches me then, and I am lost in him forever, though I do not speak the words.
We make love at the end of the world, but we don’t pin a name to what we do. Lack of a label makes it no less true. The love is there in his hands as they clamp my hips hard against him. It’s there on his tongue as he sets me ablaze with explicit descriptions of all the things he wants for us. His eyes shine with it when he understands I’ve let down all my walls for him and only him.
Love fills all the gaps in our souls.
“I have to go,” Nick whispers in the dark one night.
“What?” I prop myself up on one elbow and try to look as serious as I can with bare breasts and hair styled with an egg beater. “You can’t just leave.”
“If there’s even a chance my parents are alive, I’m gonna take it.”
“What if I want to come with you?”
His fingers stroke the curve of my hip.
“You’ll be safer here. At least I’ll know where you are.”
“None of us are safe anywhere.”
“I won’t risk you.”
“Look around, Nick, don’t be naive. We’re all at risk.”
He grabs my arms. His fingers press hard against my flesh.
“Do whatever you have to to survive, Zoe. You’re the best thing in my world. Don’t fuck it up by dying.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
His fingers unhook themselves from my skin. He buries one hand in my hair. Holds my face with the other. And this time when he’s inside me he roars until he’s empty and I am full.
In the quiet afterward, I stay close to him, half hoping our bodies will melt together so we’ll be bound forever.
“Don’t go where I can’t follow,” I whisper. “Please.”
I will stay awake. I will. But sleep snatches me and drags me far from him. When I awake, it’s in a warm bed with a stone-cold Nick-sized patch along the length of my body. The frost spreads until it holds my heart hostage in its crystalline grip. Nick has left, I can feel it.
I can’t hate him for leaving me. How could I when all I’m capable of is loving him?
“What is it?”
I stare at the envelope in Morris’s outstretched hand. She waves it at me like I’m supposed to do something clever with it.
“It’s a letter.”
“Is it a bill? Because the utilities haven’t been all that reliable lately.”
She flips it at me. “It’s from lover man.”
“Nick?”
“Unless you’ve got another one stashed away.”
I snatch the envelope from her hands, pinch it between a finger and thumb. “He left.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
“I tried.”
“And he said no?”
So I fill her in on our pillow talk and watch as she shakes her head increasingly fast until I’m sure her head will pop clean off her shoulders.
“Shit, girl. You’re gonna follow him, aren’t you?”
With fingers stiff from anger, I stuff the letter into my pocket. “When hell freezes over.
“You’re gonna follow him,” she says.
“Fuck him.”
“Right now, that’s just the anger talking.”
My anger talks a lot once I get to my room and hermetically seal myself off from the compassionate world. Mostly it rants and raves about what a jerk Nick is for leaving, for not giving me a chance to go with him. He started this. He made the first move. He made me love him.
God, how I love him.
We’d been building up to this from the day I walked into his office with a head full of worry about that damn jar. I laugh bitterly because the jar started all this: the end of the world and me falling in love with Nick. With one smooth move, it destroyed, built, then devastated.
I fall to my knees, bury my face in my hands, and sob.
Delphi is more than ruins and remnants. There’s a souvenir shop, its postcards long gone, having fluttered off in a stiff wind, or perhaps decomposed into a pile of colorful pulp before being rinsed away by a cleansing rain. The rack still sits outside the shop, rusted and ready for new stock. One firm push would force it to turn with a reluctant squeal. Branches and leaves blow through town, past stores with names that mean nothing to me. I can guess, though, what they used to contain. Through one window, a baker’s peel is visible, long and leaning against the bakery wall. Four other walls hold up a roof from which meat hooks descend, brown with stale blood.
