A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Lola pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. The full width of it was still sticky with heat, just as it had been when she had felt it some ten minutes prior, as well as the time before that. His eyes continued to dart about under his eyelids, his left thumb occasionally jittering, twitching his hand about on the floor next to hers. She wondered if he would wake up in time. And whether that would even be for the best. Wake up for what, she asked herself? In time to see everybody and everything die? No; it wouldn't be worth the effort. She sorely wanted to see his eyes again, though.

Simon walked past and touched a bottle of water against her shoulder. It hung there, tepid and numb against her bare skin, until she realised what it was and took it from him, trying not to make too much contact with his fingers as she did.

"Don't waste any on this dickhead," he said, and walked off again.

It was a strange thing to say during humanity's last hours, Lola thought – a random bout of hostility. She had a growing suspicion that Simon wanted to be more than just one of her travel partners and that he was therefore jealous of the unconscious boy in some way. Envying the nearly dead in a nearly dead world struck Lola as being a stupid position for anyone to be in, and the thought sent her a twang of judgemental pity along her spine. Simon was overly nice to her – too nice by far – while being flatly apathetic towards everyone else.

Though she did not consider herself at all mysandric, Lola did not fully understand men, either. She had only managed to glean a few hard facts from their world in her 20 years of life, a recurring one being that overly nice men were rarely looking for just her friendship. And that tumbling thought process, brought on by nothing but one antagonistic utterance from Simon, triggered something in her. A cold state of awareness grabbed her. She swung round to recount the distribution of males to females. Their improvised camp had 17 inhabitants, 18 including the unconscious one by her side, nine of which were young women. Half and half. She became worried that she was separated from the gaggle of her own gender by too much of a margin, even if that margin was only 20 metres. The top of a mountain now seemed an unnecessarily isolated place to be during the end of the world. It was the first time that the grim possibility of rape – of forced sexuality – had entered her mind.

In her four sexually active years she had been with only three men, one of which she now considered expedient to felling a barrier and not much more – a drunken fumble that acted as a gateway to better things – and a further two whom had each provided much more loving experiences. But all three forged fond memories, ones that she could now draw upon whenever the situation called for it. She didn't deem herself to be either a prude or a nymphomaniac, her libido dwelling in the unremarkable middle ground, but she knew that most men did not have the liberty of such a large spectrum to identify within, nor did they properly understand that women were able to fluctuate between each polar state from both moment to moment and week to week, rather than settling rigidly as one or the other. They did not seem to understand the subtlety of it all. As such, and despite herself, she concluded that there probably was ample cause to fear Simon and the rest the men about the hilltop, if only on the grounds that they were male and she was female, and that it was the end of the world and they were now cut off from any flavour of rescue. The guilt at doubting her own friends' morality wrestled with the fear that she might actually be right, and the latter was, fleetingly, winning. A clot nestled in the back of her throat and she became enveloped in thin sweat. She should have stayed in Vang Vieng. The town would have been safer. She had been a fool. Or was this an overreaction? Maybe everything wasn't as dystopian as it could have been? No one had motioned towards anything hostile, after all. These warring thoughts scared her. She resolved to re-join the group of women sat by the largest of the three tents. Simon, for whatever reason, clearly didn't enjoy her devoting her time solely to the unconscious man. She put the water in her bag, picked up her sunglasses and began to slip her feet back into her sandals when something brushed her leg. It was the boy's hand. It had flailed into her with a sudden burst of life before falling to her lap in stasis. She picked the wayward limb up gingerly by the wrist and placed it back at his side, holding it for slightly too long. There was an unusual feeling to his skin – or not to his skin, exactly, but to their skin together. She drew her index finger across her bottom lip to try and recreate it but that felt utterly numb by comparison, so she continued to stare at him, as she had been doing ever since the guys had brought him up from the truck, forgetting all plans to do anything otherwise. She had not moved from his side for four hours, though she did not wholly know why.