“Go dormant?”
“Yes. They’d get really slow. Easy hunting.”
He laughs. “You have the instincts of a survivor.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. I wasn’t very good at surviving in my world. I’m not sure I did…”
I stop talking because I know he doesn’t want to hear about what I was like. I don’t even want to talk about what I was like. I want to breathe this fresh air, eat this fresh food, and speculate about the winter which might be coming.
I want…
I’m surprised by what I want, but it’s so clear to me. He’s already been more intimate with me than any man I ever met. I already feel safer with him, even though I know there are sides to him I have not seen. I can sense them lurking in the darkness of his eyes, a sort of unknowable perversion which reaches out to me from time to time with tendrils that I can’t see, but can feel. King Rex is a mystery, even more than I am.
I want to fall in love with him. I want to sleep with him. I want to feel him inside me and I want him to take all the me-ness out of him and replace it with him-ness. That’s probably not a healthy sexual urge, but fuck healthy right now. This place, it’s all about survival.
“There are some more rules you need to follow. Actually, there are many. But I will begin with one. Do not ever leave the compound without being mounted, or without my company,” he says. “You are too slow on foot, and you mimic the natural prey of the dinosaurs, being small and fleshy.”
I’m not that keen to go rushing out into dinosaur country — and it is all dinosaur country. “That’s fine.”
“Good,” he says, pleased with my promise of obedience. “Now, we will extend the garden beds, using freshly dug soil mixed with dinosaur dung…”
“Gross.”
“It may be gross, but the dino dung is an excellent fertilizer, and the atmospheric carbon levels here are such that the plants grow quickly massive.”
I feel a conditioned pang of guilt at the mere mention of carbon. According to everything I’ve been told over the last however long, high carbon levels basically mean you should probably hurl yourself into a meat grinder and be done with it.
“Well, that’s not politically correct.”
He looks at me with a confused expression. “What kind of politics are you talking about?”
I let out a giggle of glee as I realize it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter even a little bit. I don’t have to give a shit anymore about a thousand allegedly important issues, all of which somehow disenfranchised me even more from my own experience of existence.
“I just can’t get over how fucking free we are. Do you know how amazing this place is? Do you know…” Suddenly, there are tears coursing down my cheeks as emotion overwhelms me. I feel as though I’ve been freed from a cage I didn’t even know I was in, a little box which kept me in a never-ending state of vague anxiety about everything. There’s a chance I’ll be eaten alive here, but that’s already less stressful than all the things I was guilty of not caring enough about before.
We spend the morning gardening. I've never gardened before. I always planned to. Once I bought some seeds, but they’re probably still sitting in the kitchen drawer of the apartment I was in the process of being evicted from.
Working the soil with my hands feels good, but the view is even better. Rex’s arms and shoulders and back all ripple with every motion he makes. He is a muscular Adonis, an alien god of pure carnal delight. I find myself responding to him with the kind of desire I previously reserved for movie stars. But he’s right here, next to me. I can almost reach out and touch him, though I don’t, because I’m far too nervous to make the first move.
“Have water,” he says, pushing a cured skin flask over to me. “Or you will dry out.”
There’s no chance of that. I am wet as hell. I can feel my thighs slipping a little with every move I make. I’ve never had sex before. I think I want to have it with him. I wish I knew how to seduce a man, but I’ve always been too awkward and most men are usually way too forward and kind of lecherous and not nearly as hot as Rex.
A little nickering sound distracts me. There’s something moving just outside the row of sharpened stakes which separates Rex’s compound from the rest of this wild world. I peer between the stakes, and let out a little gasp of delight.
I am looking at a very tiny horse. It’s about the size of a large rat, or maybe a small cat, but it is definitely a pony, though it does not have hooves. It has three perfect claws on each foot, and it makes me think how much cooler and/or terrifying modern horses would be if they had clawed feet. I want it immediately. I want it to be my pet forever, and wear little jackets and… none of that is going to be. It looks at me and nickers, then trots away at a perfect gait.