Chapter 15: But... I haven't done anything for you yet.
The bath was a religious experience. The water was bitingly cold, as he'd warned, but Skylar didn't care. She used a sliver of the precious soap she found, scrubbing away six months of grime, sweat, and terror. The feeling of being clean, of the water rinsing the filth from her hair and skin, was a luxury so profound it brought tears to her eyes. She stayed in until her teeth chattered and her skin was pruned, then stepped out, shivering but feeling more human than she had since the world ended.
She dried herself with a clean, if threadbare, towel and dressed in the least dirty clothes from her pack. The simple act felt like a rebirth.
Feeling refreshed in a way she thought was lost forever, she opened the fridge. The hum of its motor was a symphony. She took a bottle of water and a can of beans, then went to the small table, pushing aside a leaning tower of books to make space. As she ate, the quiet of the cabin settled around her, and her eyes drifted over the titles she had displaced.
Principles of Electrical Engineering. Practical Hydraulics. The Home-Scale Wind Power Handbook. Advanced Human Biology.
Her chewing slowed. Her gaze swept the massive wall of books again, really seeing them this time. Not as clutter, but as a library. A curated collection. And the single, burning question, how do you have power? suddenly had an answer. He hadn't just found this place; he had built it, or at least maintained it, using the knowledge in these books. He wasn't just a brute survivor; he was an engineer, a scientist in a world that had forgotten science.
The realization was a lightning bolt. Kaelen and his men were strong, but they were brutes, living in the stone age because they only knew how to take and break. Nate was different. He knew how to build. He knew how to make the old world work in the new one. He wasn't just surviving; he was living.
A cold, clear calculation solidified in her mind. She couldn't let him send her away. She couldn't give him a reason to. Her body, the only currency she had truly understood, was the key. She had chosen Pierce for his money and his world. She would choose Nate for his knowledge and his sanctuary. The transaction was the same; only the currency had changed.
Just then, the hidden entrance swung open and Nate stepped back inside. He saw her at the table, clean, surrounded by his books.
"So," she said, her voice carefully neutral. "You've been all alone in a cabin like this for months, reading your books, while the rest of us struggled like we were in the stone age."
He didn't even look at her as he walked towards the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head. "Like I told you before," his voice was muffled by the fabric, "we lived in the same world. The reason they lived like that was a lack of knowledge. We live in the 21st century, Skylar. All of that knowledge," he gestured vaguely at the bookshelves as he disappeared into the bathroom, "is available."
Thirty minutes later, he walked out, steam curling from his skin, wearing only a pair of dark boxers and drying his hair with a towel. He moved with an unthinking familiarity that was both jarring and intimate. He went to the fridge, took out some salted pork and water, and settled onto the couch in front of the large, dark television screen. He just sat there, eating, staring at the blank screen as if he could see a picture only he remembered.
Skylar watched him. This was it. Now or never.
She stood up, her heart hammering against her ribs. She walked over to the couch and, before he could react, she swung a leg over him, settling herself onto his lap, straddling him.
He froze, a piece of pork halfway to his mouth. His body went rigid with confusion and surprise. "What are you doing?" he asked, his voice low and wary.
"Don't you remember our agreement?" she said, her voice softer now, trying to sound seductive despite the tremor of fear underneath.
He stared at her, his expression unreadable. "But... I haven't done anything for you yet."
"Yes, you have," she whispered, leaning forward slightly, her hands resting on his bare shoulders. He was warm from the bath. "You brought me to this place. That is more than something."
She held her breath, her entire future hinging on this moment, on whether he would accept the payment she was so desperately offering.
The cabin was utterly silent, save for the faint, steady hum of the refrigerator. Nate didn't push her off. He didn't pull her closer. He was a statue, his body tense beneath her, his eyes searching hers with a look of profound, almost clinical confusion. The piece of salted pork was still clutched, forgotten, in his fist.
The agreement. In the blood-soaked armory, it had been a blunt, transactional thing. A means to an end. But here, in the quiet warmth of his sanctuary, with her clean and perched on him, it felt different. It felt real.
"You brought me to safety," she murmured, her voice a low, deliberate thrum. She let her fingers trace the line of his collarbone, feeling the solid muscle and bone beneath his damp skin. "You gave me a bath. You gave me food that wasn't scraps. You gave me a locked door." Each statement was a bead on an abacus, tallying her debt. "That's more than anyone has done for me in a very, very long time."
Nate's gaze flickered away from her eyes, down to her mouth, then to the curve of her neck where her pulse hammered. He was a man who understood systems, cause and effect. He had provided resources, safety, sustenance, shelter. In the brutal economy of this new world, she was presenting the logical form of repayment they had agreed upon.
But logic was warring with something else. Six months of absolute solitude. Six months of seeing humanity only as a threat, as rotting flesh hungering for his own. The touch of another person, warm and alive and willing, was a seismic shock to his system. It was a vulnerability, a complication, a risk.
He could still shove her off. He could coldly remind her that the deal was for the journey, and the journey was over. He could re-establish the distance, retreat back into the safety of his own company.
But the warmth of her was a siren's call to a deep, frozen part of him.
Slowly, hesitantly, his free hand, the one not holding the meat, came up. It didn't grab her. It didn't caress her. It simply settled on her hip, a heavy, uncertain weight. It was the first voluntary, non-violent contact he'd had with another human being since the world ended.
His eyes met hers again, and the confusion was still there, but it was now mixed with a dawning, hungry awareness. The caution of a feral animal presented with an offering.
Skylar saw the shift. The moment his hand touched her, she knew she had crossed the first, most difficult barrier. She leaned in closer, until her lips were inches from his, her breath ghosting across his skin.
"Our deal," she whispered, the words a final, soft reminder.
That broke the spell. The word "deal" snapped things back into a framework he could understand. A transaction. An exchange. Something with rules.
He gave a single, short nod, his jaw tight. The hand on her hip tightened its grip, pulling her firmly against him. The piece of salted pork dropped from his other hand, forgotten on the floor.
It wasn't about passion. It wasn't about love. It was about the fulfillment of a contract, the settling of a debt, and the desperate, lonely hunger of two people who had forgotten what it was like to not be alone. In the quiet, electrified cabin, surrounded by the ghosts of a dead world's knowledge, they began.
The piece of salted pork hit the floor with a soft, dull thud. In the profound silence of the cabin, the sound was like a starting pistol.
The last vestige of hesitation shattered. That single, pragmatic nod was all the permission he gave himself. His hands, which had spent six months gripping tools and weapons, came up to frame her face. They were rough, calloused, but his touch was surprisingly deliberate, almost reverent, as he tilted her head and closed the final inch between them.
The kiss wasn't gentle. It was a collision. Six months of silence, of fear, of utter isolation, erupted in that connection. It was desperate and hungry, a raw exchange of need rather than affection. Nate's body, which had been a coiled spring of vigilance, now thrummed with a different, more primal tension. He kissed her like a man drowning, and she was his first gasp of air.
He pulled her tighter against him, his arms locking around her back, crushing her to his chest. She could feel the solid, unyielding wall of his muscle, the proof of a survival honed by relentless hardship. And pressed against that hardness were the soft, heavy weights of her breasts, the sensation a shocking, forgotten luxury of flesh against flesh. He could feel her soft breasts through the lace bra. Even through their clothes, she could feel the hard points of her nipples, tight with a mix of the cold and a sudden, fierce arousal, rubbing against the hard plane of his chest with every frantic shift of their bodies.
He broke the kiss, his breathing ragged, his forehead resting against hers. His eyes were dark, the pupils blown wide, all calculation and caution burned away by a more immediate, biological imperative. He didn't speak. Words were a currency that had no value here. Instead, his hands moved from her face, sliding down her back, over the curve of her hips, pulling her even more intimately against the rigid proof of his own need straining against his underwear.
It was intense, it was passionate, but it was a passion born of starvation, not romance. It was the frantic, clumsy coupling of two survivors who had found, in each other's bodies, a temporary, desperate sanctuary from the hell outside the door.