My answer is a resigned shrug.
Cade usually stays until closing, so I must have scared him off tonight.
Later, the young militiaman leaves my room after fifteen minutes of basic, unimaginative missionary.
He wasn’t all that big, and he was trying not to be too rough so he wouldn’t be barred from getting a fuck in the future, so I’m not even sore.
I clean myself up and take the used condom downstairs because I don’t like it sitting in the small pail in my room until morning.
Nell has a huge stockpile of condoms and birth control aids, and she doles them out to us whenever necessary. Some of them are past their expiration date, but they still seem to work. I haven’t gotten pregnant or gotten an STD since I started doing this.
One of the hard-and-fast rules in the Pub is that no fucking is done without a condom.
I have no idea what will happen when Nell uses up her stockpile or the ones we have are no longer effective. No one is manufacturing new supplies in this world. Everything we possess was made before Impact.
But that’s a worry for another day.
None of the other girls wanted to room with me when I started working here, so Nell gave me the worst room by myself. It’s barely big enough for the single bed and has a deeply slanted roof so I can’t even stand at full height on one side.
I don’t care. I prefer to have my own room, and there’s a dormer window that opens. When I return to my bedroom, I climb out the window with my sketchbook and sit in my favorite spot on the roof where three slopes come together to form a secure corner.
There aren’t any clouds tonight, so the only thing obscuring the stars is the layer of dust in the atmosphere from the initial asteroid impact. Even on the other side of the world from where it hit in Europe, we’ve been pummeled by one climate disaster after another in the aftermath. The entire eastern seaboard has been hit by consecutive hurricanes—so vast and so unending that the whole coast is now underwater. The hurricanes must still be happening because every month we get heavy rainstorms that last for days. A lot of the valleys and lowlands are flooded now, even this far from the coast, and no one can live too close to the river.
The Pub is built on higher ground a fair distance from the river, so we only flood when the rains stay too long.
Everything on the planet has changed, but the stars are still the same. I sketch out all the constellations I see, naming them as I do, and then drawing out little scenes from all the stories my grandfather told me about them.
I do the same thing on every clear night, taking an odd kind of comfort from the familiarity, the one part of the universe the asteroid didn’t destroy.
I stay out on the roof, drawing and looking at the stars until I’m too tired to do it any longer.
It’s only then that I climb back into my tiny room and go to sleep.
2
The next dayis my day to clean the outhouses.
We’ve gone almost a year now without any indoor water or electricity, so we use basins filled with well water in our rooms and have a row of outhouses out back for toilets.
One more delightful feature of this new world.
Because cleaning them is the worst of all the chores, Nell puts the servers on a two-week rotation for outhouse duty.
In the mornings, I have all my regular chores—helping prep food or clean the main room—so it’s late morning before I can even start on the outhouses.
Today they are particularly disgusting. Customers are always using them, and some of the guys are clearly suffering from unresolved issues with their digestion. So I tie a scarf around the lower part of my face in an attempt to mask the smell and get busy.
Even with only one break to eat lunch, it’s late in the afternoon before I’m done.
I feel sick to my stomach, and I’m exhausted. Plus, it starts to rain as I finish the last one and gather up my stuff.
I’m walking back, holding a mop and a big bucket of cleaning supplies, when someone comes up behind me. Without a word, he takes the bucket from my hand before I can even register here’s there.
I jump in surprise but realize it’s Cade before I react any further. Giving him a sheepish smile, I say, “Thanks. If you got here a couple of hours earlier, you could have helped me clean.”
He makes a huff of sound. I’m not sure if it’s amusement or just general acknowledgment that I spoke to him.
“Looks like more rain,” I say, glancing up at the dark gray of the sky. “Is it ever going to stop?”
