He is less shy afterwards. I cling to him like a concubine. Like a meek woman he’s clubbed and dragged back to his cave. Though it’s the other way around, more like, yeah? I am his, entirely. My life literally in his hands. And he knows this. Oh if Barry could see me now! Or his mum, my God! That two-faced twat.

We use a kind of sign language to talk. I point to myself and then point outside. “Go far,” I say.

He nods. “Me,” he says, and holds the club to his chest.

“My protector, yes.”

He left to gather supplies, and I clung to him desperately and cried, begging him not to leave without me. Fearful he’d get hurt and I’d be left alone out here all over again. I began this journal to occupy my mind, but then, thank God, he did come back, and now we must go. To where, I don’t know and hardly care.

The thing about that book is that it doesn’t end. The story begins when you set it down, I think. And now I’m the heroine in some unlikely love story with a plot I can’t follow. My destiny unknown.

Once again swept up in a dangerous, warlike love here at what may be the end of my life, or perhaps a new beginning.

I’ve seen death and rejected it. I choose life, and whatever it may bring.

And now I’m no longer afraid.

Love to whomever is reading this. May you find a protector to lead you back home.

xoxo,

Priscilla Y.

P.S. Tracey, you owe me a fancy meal if I ever see you again, my love!

* * *

Were I to try to swallow the coagulated paste in my mouth, I’d have choked. I stood from the couch and stared at its stained cushions as though they were contaminated. The same spot those two unlikely lovers had first fucked. Arsenic could have been flowing from the water tap and it wouldn’t have mattered. I had to lube the pipes in order to breathe. Christ, what had I got myself mixed up in?

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Here was when I began to worry Al wasn’t going to return. Same as that chick’s friend Tracey from the journal. Whether it’s real or not, I don’t know. But I assume it is. The fucking cabin is being patrolled, that’s for sure. Those feral fuckwads out there looking in. So what, am I going to have to mate with some half-human she-mutt to escape this place? Priscilla was right about one thing, the plot in my personal story had thickened. I don’t think mine’s a love story, though.