Page 75 of Poster Girl

He makes it sound easy, and maybe it is.

Easy—

She lifts the hem of her sweater over his hands, so his fingers are on her bare skin. His hands are cold and steady. She leans down and slides her fingers into his hair, all the way to the back of his head.

Easy—

Her hand tightens, holding him still as she kisses him. He surges up against her. He feels his way around her rib cage, to her back. He tastes like peanut butter. His breath stutters when she straddles him, sinking into his lap. It was never like this, before, before she let herself want things just to want them. No tally of right and wrong, good andbad, desirable and undesirable, onlythis,unwatched and uncounted, the taste of him, the warmth of him. How careful his hands are as he takes off her coat, tugs her sweater over her head. How he pants against her throat like he can’t stop even to breathe.

She’s bare, and the night is cold, but not the fire and not him. His hands clutch at her thighs. His head tips back against the pile of clothes they left behind, exposing the marked expanse of his throat. The end is near here, too, the all-too-breakable skin dotted with bruises from what might have been a tragedy. She touches them, lightly, as the two of them move together.

For the first time, she doesn’t think of what came before.

She’s only here. Only now.

She surfaces from sleep and, for a moment, before she opens her eyes, she forgets that she killed a man the day before.

Then she feels Alexander’s hot breath against her face and the weight of him against her, and she jerks awake. Alexander is crawling out of bed and tripping, naked, across the dirt as he tries to put his pants on. She snorts with laughter, and he turns to look at her, eyes narrow.

“You laugh now,” he says, “but when I refuse to hand you your clothes, it won’t be half as funny.”

She sticks a foot out from the sleeping bag they used as a blanket, and grabs her pants with her toes.

She dresses under the blanket for warmth, then wanders into the trees to find a stream that looks clean enough to wash in. The sound of moving water isn’t far. She crouches beside a brook nearby and splashes her face; she wets her fingers and rakes them through her hair. She sits back on her heels and looks up, into the spiny branches of the Douglas firs and the pale clouds beyond them. She thinks of the man from the Army lying in the dirt with arms outstretched. She shudders, once, and then she can’t stop shuddering, sinking to her knees in the dirt, her palms flat in the water.

When she returns to camp, her hands red from cold water and the hair at her temples damp, she doesn’t say anything about the episode.Alexander has a peanut butter sandwich ready for her. They eat sitting side by side, their shoulders brushing when they move.

“I hate peanut butter,” she says. “We get it all the time in the Aperture—nonperishable, doesn’t need to be refrigerated. I’m so tired of it.”

“Were you just fucking with me when you said you missed Arf’s?” he says.

“I was definitely fucking with you,” she says. “But no, I love those cookies.”

He reaches into his bag and takes out a bundle of tinfoil about the size of his fist. Inside it is a stack of butter cookies shaped like cartoon bones.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“I think that was the first time I’ve ever heard you curse,” he says, as she takes the cookies from him. “Also, these are the most boring cookies you could have chosen.”

“Susanna and I used to break them in half,” she says, demonstrating by snapping one of the cookies down the middle. “And whoever got the bigger half made a wish. Of course, she knew where to hold them so she always got the bigger half—”

“Oldest trick in the book.”

“But sometimes she let me have it.”

They pack up and bury the ash of the NeverFail log. The sun is out. Grace Ward is ahead of them, the bait on the end of a hook. Sonya ignores the sting of her blisters and the deep ache in her legs and tries to keep up with Alexander’s long stride.

The Triumvirate has likely accessed her Insight footage by now, and can piece together where they are from what she sees. Sonya and Alexander got a head start yesterday, since her Aperture pass was good for twelve hours, but the faster they move, the better.

“I keep trying to figure it out,” Alexander says, after a while. “Why the Army would be involved in any of this. And I keep coming up with nothing.”

“I don’t think we’ll know until we find out where Grace is being held, and by whom.”

“It’s a good thing we have your Insight footage,” Alexander says. “Simple enough to prove you acted in self-defense.”

She looks up at him. “I’m going to be in the Aperture for the rest of my life. I’ve accepted that.”

“Well,” he says, just as evenly. “I haven’t.”

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