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  “Looking primarily for female survivors or other shifter men to add to the community, there was maybe just a bit of hesitation, but I think they were going to let me come back with them anyway. Then when I said I was a doctor, that really sealed the deal. And since then, I've been fairly happy here, building the new life that I wanted."

  "You haven't been completely happy here, though?"

  Chris had been wearing the hint of a smile on his face, but now that smile changed to a slight frown, and he took a sip of his tea before responding.

  "I really love this community, and I respect and admire Nick and Blaine. I've made a lot of friends here. I like helping to save lives and heal the sick. But I guess I'll just say that something is missing for me...or maybe someone.

  “See, men may be the majority in this village, but there aren't any other men who prefer men romantically, like I do. And believe me...I've done a bit of discreetly sussing out info and even just being fairly direct with some of the men I've befriended.

  “But unfortunately for me, it seems that the shifters in this community are just about as woman-loving as they come." Sighing, Chris lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. "So it goes, though. I guess I can't have it all. If I did, I might die of happiness, and then who'd be the village doctor?"

  I smiled, though I was sad for him. I supposed I could only hope that at some point in the future, new shifters or regular men might join the village, and that one of them might be the someone that Chris was hoping to meet.

  Seeming eager to change the subject from his love life to something else, he soon asked me to tell him how I had come to live in Helena. I told him the brief version of the story, and the very brief version of what I'd discovered about Nashville that morning, telling him about my weep-fest and saying that I just didn't want to cry anymore.

  Chris said he understood, and a short while later, he actually had me laughing about something, which felt incredible, just to laugh with a friend in the comfort of a home with electric lights and full creature comforts. I hadn't enjoyed electric lights since I'd left the rink in Detroit.

  For that first week in Helena, I hardly saw Nick and Blaine at all, to my disappointment. With some “Borderlines trouble," which I didn't even fully understand, having happened while they'd been gone, they had a lot of issues to deal with. They were often beyond the village walls, patrolling the perimeter of the village, or up in the guard tower with binoculars, or leading their men in surveillance missions to the areas around Borderline, an aptly-named village right on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee.

  I ended up moving in with Chris. Next door, Tracy, Trent, and Donovan all moved into a house together right away, and near the end of the week, Tracy told me that Trent and Donovan had asked her to marry them.

  Almost on the edge of my seat at Chris' kitchen table, I asked Tracy what she'd said. "And are you positive that you love Trent and Donovan, and they love you?"

  Smiling, Tracy shook her head. "Yes, to all those questions. Yes, I said yes to the proposal...which by the way, they're going to get us all rings sometime very soon, but being that there isn't a jewelry store here in Helena, it may take a second.

  “But, anyway, yes, I love them both. And yes, they both love me. At least they both said they did last night when we were all snuggled up in bed together after a marathon lovemaking session; but they both looked really sincere, and the three of us have had some really sincere little moments together that make me think we have the real deal together.

  “And, Eva, not to switch back to the bedroom stuff, but I'm not kidding...when I say marathon lovemaking session...I mean marathon. Has anyone told you about shifters yet? About them having increased drive and stamina in the bedroom and all that? If no one has, I guess now you know, and let me just say that it's all a hundred percent true.

  “Shifters are just...I guess I'll simply say that everything can get kind of crazy in the bedroom. In the best, best possible way. I'll also say that if we wanted to use 'ringing a bell' as a metaphor for something else...well, I 'had my bell rung' three different times last night."

  Briefly, I thought about the possibility of sharing a bed with Nick and Blaine and having them work together to "ring my bell," maybe even multiple times. Even just the thought caused a wave of butterflies in my stomach and made my face instantly warm.

  Fanning it with a folded linen napkin, I asked Tracy if Trent or Donovan had said anything to her about when their group, led by Nick and Blaine, might return home from a patrol run that evening.

  Tracy smiled. "Oh, yeah. I'm glad you reminded me. That was the other reason I came over today. Super early this morning, Nick saw me out watering the flowers, and he asked me if I knew what some of your favorite foods are. I think he and Blaine are planning on getting home from patrol early this evening and having you over to dinner tonight. Which, by the way, you know Blaine just moved into Nick's house yesterday, don't you?"

  I actually didn't.

  "Which makes me think that they might be planning an invitation for you to move in when they have you over for dinner tonight."

  "Oh."

  I thought about the ramifications of that, about what might very soon happen if I moved in with Nick and Blaine. I thought about what might happen even at dinner that evening. After grabbing a half-full glass of ice water from a coaster, I guzzled the contents in one long, icy gulp. And though the liquid cooled my throat and stomach, it didn't do much to cool some kind of intense heat that was building somewhere very low in my belly.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I wanted Nick and Blaine to make love to me. Physically, I wanted that. Mentally I wanted that. Maybe even from the very first day I'd met them. And maybe I wasn't quite ready for it to happen right that very night, but I felt like I wanted it to happen sometime soon. Maybe after I'd moved in, which I'd decided I was going to do if Nick and Blaine asked me to.

  I wanted us to spend more time together than we'd spent the past week, which I was sure we'd do if I moved in with them. I wanted whatever affectionate possible-relationship-type-thing-ish that we'd developed to move forward. Then, if things felt good moving forward, I wanted things to move forward further still.

  I just didn't want to humiliate myself in the bedroom. The very thought made me cringe inwardly.

  It wouldn't have been far off the mark to say I was woefully sexually inexperienced, bordering on near-virginal. With my Olympic training consuming all my time, I hadn't even started dating until age nineteen. I hadn't found a steady, serious boyfriend that I'd really liked until age twenty-one, after my second Olympics.

  I'd even briefly thought I had loved this particular boyfriend, whose name was Jason, a recent college grad who worked in finance. However, the night I'd decided to sleep with him, I'd ultimately realized that I didn't love him and he didn't love me.

  At his apartment, we'd tumbled into his bed, naked. I told him that I wanted him to make love to me, but that I was nervous, and I wanted to fool around a lot more first, until I felt like my body was completely ready. Saying that he understood, Jason had started kissing me again, rolling on top of me and parting my legs. I'd thought he'd moved into this position just to further turn me on, maybe by letting me feel his hardness rubbing against me. However, before I really knew what was happening, Jason had penetrated me in one fast, incredibly painful movement, making me cry out, and not with passion.

  Seeming to interpret my cry as an encouraging signal, he'd immediately set about basically jack-hammering me, causing me more pain, until I finally managed to croak out the word stop. Frowning, Jason did stop, looking thoroughly confused.

  "What? You don't like that?"

  "Take yourself out of me and get off me right this second."

  He had, asking what he'd done wrong. "Didn't you like that?"

  "No. I told you to wait until I was ready."

  "Well, I just thought you meant you wanted to kiss more...and we did."

  Already picking my clothes up off the floor,
I glanced over at him. "I'm taking a cab home. Don't ever contact me again."

  He hadn't, seemingly knowing what was good for him.

  I'd bled and cramped for hours after the horrible experience, which I knew was normal to an extent, but my level of bleeding and cramping seemed maybe a bit excessive. I'd almost called my doctor's emergency line before it all had finally stopped.

  Afterward, I'd just wanted to put the whole unpleasant ordeal behind me. Jessica and Ebony had wanted me to tell the police what had happened, to see if Jason had committed any crime, but I declined, really not thinking that he had. I thought he was guilty of being a horrible listener and communicator and absolute scumbag, but I knew those obviously weren't crimes that could be prosecuted in a court of law. And truly, I just wanted to move on.

  For the two years after that, I didn't date much, being so busy with the rink and training for my next Olympic bid. The few men I did date just didn't strike my fancy very much. Then, the virus had hit, and I certainly hadn't found any romance out on the road.

  So, that was how I'd come to Helena at age twenty-five, having no further sexual experience than having lost my virginity to a man who'd went on to jackhammer me for ten seconds or so until I'd ordered him off.

  I felt like I'd have no clue what I was doing in the bedroom. Would Nick and Blaine think I was odd? Would they become frustrated by my lack of experience and my just plain not knowing how to do some things? These were questions that had begun to float around in my mind. Part of me intuitively felt like they'd both be understanding, no matter what, but I just wasn't sure. And I knew I needed to be in order to green light the three of us becoming closer in the bedroom department.

  After Tracy left that day, I busied myself working at the community chicken coop, collecting eggs and distributing them to all the houses who liked egg delivery rather than picking up their own eggs. Next, I did some work in the community garden, then joined an all-female crew who were repairing one section of the village walls. Made from strong timber, this section had nonetheless become cracked, and I asked Kathy how it had happened.

  She said that it had been caused by Borderliners attacking the day Nick and Blaine had left on their supply run and had found me as well.

  "The Borderliners had probably been watching...then had seen them leave. So, they thought they'd send a message by trying to knock down part of our walls.

  “There were only five or six of them...all wolves...so they didn't have the numbers to do any real damage, and the folks that were here were able to run them off easily enough...but I do know that incident has caused Nick, Blaine, and the others to be on extra high alert lately. We've worked too hard to build this place to see it all come crashing down now."

  "What do you mean? How many Borderliner shifters are there all together?"

  Sifting through a can of nails, Kathy made a faint scoffing noise. "Too many. Hundreds. Maybe three hundred."

  "And why do they want to attack us here?"

  Kathy lined up a nail and pounded it in with a large hammer before going back to sifting through the nail bucket again, answering my question while she did so. "To make a long story short, Wesley Archer is the leader of the Borderliners. He's also an asshole. He's basically got all the survivor communities in Tennessee working for him now, using violence to keep them all in line.

  “Basically, any time a new community is formed, he approaches them and gives them a choice. Give him half their goods and assets...clothing, women, building materials, food, livestock, you name it...right then, and then continue to give him 'tributes' of fifty percent of their food yield monthly, or else he will send his army in to kill everyone in their community.

  “And being that Wesley Archer has the largest shifter army in the area, most communities obey him, not wanting to be slaughtered. Some don't obey him, and they do get slaughtered. In this way, his community has not only been able to survive the apocalypse, but thrive in it."

  With a light sheen of perspiration breaking out on her forehead in the late day sun, Kathy paused again to hammer another nail, then went back to rifling through the bucket.

  "Anyway...these days, Wes Archer is wanting to expand his reach a bit, into Kentucky as well. He gave Nick the choice to have this community obey him or not, and Nick said not, knowing that we'd all probably half-starve to death handing over a monthly fifty percent of our agricultural yield.

  “That would include the garden, our chickens, our cows in the dairy barn outside the walls, the fenced-in orchard just to the west of the village, and all the grain silos the community has claimed as well. Almost needless to say, Nick was obviously not about to just hand over half of us women, either."

  "So, Wesley Archer's attempt at 'slaughtering' us was just to have a half-dozen wolves head-butt a section of our walls?"

  Setting five long nails in an empty paint tray, Kathy stifled a laugh. "Oh, no. This recent thing was just Wesley letting us know that he's still thinking about us. The 'slaughter' attack was several months ago."

  "And what happened? I mean, other than the fact that everyone was not slaughtered."

  "Well, some were. No women or children, thank God, but Nick lost five of his best men, and one of our expectant mothers lost one of her husbands. Wesley's side lost more, though. Nick and the others made fourteen kills, I believe. In the end, Wesley pulled his men back. Good thing, too. I still had some bullets for my gun at the time, and I was about to hop right on out the gate and put them to good use."

  "So, women here don't fight?"

  For the second time, Kathy stifled a laugh, then banged in another nail before responding. "Good Lord, no. Not in shifter fights. When we have Husker hordes pushing against the walls, threatening to make them fall, us women who are very experienced in fighting Huskers are allowed to fight, yes.

  “But shifter fights...absolutely not. And why would we? There's nothing regular humans, whether women or men, can do against shifters. It might be different if we still had ammo, but we don't. No one really does anymore, not even Wesley, with all his other wealth."

  "But us regular humans could still fight shifters with other weapons...like arrows, and knives, and even screwdrivers, if need be."

  After wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, Kathy went back to rifling through the nail bucket. "Eva, please think about what you just said. Please just really think about it. While keeping in mind that shifter lions and tigers not only weigh several hundred pounds each, but they're also stronger than regular wild animals. And you would actually try to go after one with a screwdriver. They're not Huskers. They're faster and stronger...much faster and stronger."

  I did think about what I'd said, and I did suppose that it had sounded pretty stupid. Yet, I hadn't really appreciated the tone Kathy had taken when responding to me.

  With a sigh, she suddenly tossed a handful of tiny nails back into the can and slumped against the finished portion of wall, mirroring my pose. "You really don't need to be worrying about all this Wesley stuff. He may try a 'slaughter' attack again at some point in the future, or he may not. He may decide that trying to expand into Kentucky was a bad idea, as was messing with us Helenians.

  “If he does attack again, he'll probably at least give Nick one last chance to 'pay him tribute,' so at least because of that, we'll probably have a heads-up if another large-scale attack is likely to be coming. And if one ever does come again, Nick, Blaine, and the other men will handle it. Do you understand?"

  I understood that I just really, really didn't like the tone that Kathy took with me sometimes. Especially when I'd done nothing to deserve it. And especially when I'd never heard her take this particular tone with anyone else but me.

  Before I could respond to her question asking if I understood her, she abruptly pushed off the wall, yanked off her work gloves, and put them in the nail can. "Mind finishing up my section? I'm just too hot out here. Need to go lie down."

  I said sure, and she began walking away, but turned after a several
paces and began slowly walking backward.

  "Oh, by the way...when I saw Nick near the orchard today, he asked me to give you a message. He said that he and Blaine will pick you up for dinner at seven tonight. My advice is that if you have a dress, you should probably wear one. Make yourself look presentable."

  "Now, Kathy, what the...what the hell."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  My what the hell, which I'd said a bit louder than I'd intended to, had made two women sorting through a tool box maybe ten feet away whip their faces up.

  Slightly embarrassed, I walked over to Kathy to get out of their earshot, folding my arms across my chest.

  "Don't 'I beg your pardon' me. What the hell is up with all your little comments to me...all the comments about 'little girl,' and 'do you understand me,' and 'make yourself look presentable.' You're so rude to me sometimes, or maybe patronizing is an even better word, and I want to know why. And you're going to tell me right now."