“Johnny, listen, I may have been a crazed little sex machine all those decades ago. Remember, I said decades ago, so don’t you go getting any ideas now, mister. I’ll admit that I was a bit of a wild child, but you were the enemy. So, no, I never thought of you like that. Never.”

“Really, you didn’t? Geez, I was hot back then, Annie. You should have thought of me like that. Look at all the women I was with.”

“And look at all the guys I was with. I mean, none of them mattered. I liked treating them as though I was on a good hunt and coming in for the kill. Ah, that’s decades ago, and this is stupid talk. Let’s call it a day.”

They hugged each other one more time. Annie turned and blew a kiss Johnny’s way as she stepped into the cab. Johnny pretended to catch it and smacked his hand against his lips.

That night, Annie lay in bed trying to figure out why she had never thought about Johnny that way. Why had she never tried to get him into bed the way she had all the other men who were in town. Why had she never been attracted to him. Was she attracted to him now? she wondered. She didn’t think so.

He came into her dream that night. The dream that had haunted her for so very long. The dream that had kept her medicated until she left the North. Antidepressants through the day and Zopiclone through the night. That was how she had got by after the rape. She had lived a life of no feeling. No feeling sad. No feeling mad. No feeling anything. The drugs kept her in a zone of nothingness. When she had moved to the small town, she had stopped all of it. No more feeling nothing, but now the feelings had come in so intense and sleep had become her nemesis. The hardest thing she did was try to sleep. That’s why she walked and walked every day. She tried to walk her way into exhaustion. She tried to walk her way into sleep.

The red beards began to appear again at night. They would laugh as they grabbed at her breasts and pulled on her pubic hair. They had the teeth of wolverines, which they bared every time they wrestled with her. All three of them on a cloud above the ocean and the two red beards assaulting her. She wrestled and fought and hit at them, but they laughed even harder. They would turn her over onto her belly and fuck her from behind doggy-style and laugh the entire time.

Tonight, Johnny appeared with a spear in his right hand and he stabbed at them over and over again. There was blood everywhere and she was crying out to him. Johnny finished them off and came over to her. He cuddled her nakedness and rocked her gently in his arms. He lifted her face to his and kissed her.