Logistics of Love in the Zompoc

by HUNKxTofu

The last remnants of a survivor group find a place to eat, and then more. - Female OC Rangen Survivor/Male OC Rangen Survivor

2. Part 1: Courtyard

II

"Excuse me if this question is excessively chivalrous, okay?" Rama said to Celest.

"Okay," she said, uncertain.

"Are you comfortable sleeping in the same bed with me?" Room #210 only had one bed in it. A large one, though; Rama estimated king-size.

"Yes," she said like he was so stupid.

"Okay," he said.

"How many weeks have we already been sleeping together for?" she said. She didn't mean sexual intercourse, she meant like under lean-tos for warmth because they'd forgotten to bring blankets, and in makeshift shelters and sleeping bags, and a few beds.

"I stopped counting," Rama shrugged.

Celest giggled. "You started counting?"

" . . . No," Rama said.

They'd considered themselves a romantic couple, officially, since all this was merely an outbreak, but that had been during lockdown when nobody knew how contagious the zombie disease was—or whatever the fuck it even was, maybe a fungus, neither of them really understood clearly; people called it "the black fever"—back when politicians and people in power believed normal people would do as they were told for their own safety, collectively or individually. Celest and Rama hadn't had sex yet. They'd naïvely selflessly obeyed social expectations during the first big lockdown—unlike apparently the vast majority of people—and didn't get physically close to one another in that time, despite desperately wanting to. They had some text- and phone-sex but that didn't count. They'd never seen each other naked in person. Even after the apocalypse, when they were effectively free to touch each other and fuck whenever, it'd still not quite happened. Sometimes it was because somebody'd just been killed horribly—ripped into pieces by one of the special zombies, for example—or murdered by other humans, and they were too shocked or horrified or disgusted to want to get it on. Sometimes it clearly wasn't safe. Sometimes one or both of them was or were exhausted. Or whatever. It just kept not happening. Celest wanted it. Rama wanted it. But they didn't need it to live; their relationship was otherwise working for them. They kept each other alive. They trusted each other. They loved each other.

III

So it was no surprise to Rama when, once they made sure many doors were locked and a few noisemaker traps were set and their room's curtains closed, Celest told him she was going to shower first. As in, not together simultaneously.

"Okay, I won't look," Rama replied. His thinking was already past doing anything with her that would feel good; It was still bright enough to read without a light on, he'd re-read their one gun's manual. He knew how to use it, and so did she, but using it safely under pressure was completely different from knowing the dry facts and figures of its operation, practical vs. abstract.

"You can look," Celest said playfully. She hadn't actually told him not to look, in . . . months?, when she cleaned herself or bathed or changed her clothes or put a tampon in or took one out or whatever. She'd learned she didn't need to be ashamed of or hide such things from him—he wasn't into it, but he knew her mystical lady parts were all perfectly natural and found none of it gross or unspeakable. This made her feel incredibly accepted. Now, he couldn't tell if she was joking entirely, or maybe was actually inviting him to watch, or to do more than watch? She wasn't usually so vague about something relatively intimate, if she bothered mention it at all, like this. She'd had him help her put bras on, and take booty-short underwear off, they'd made out together cumulatively for hours, he'd touched her breasts plenty of times—she'd even pulled them out and pushed his head into them once. They'd never gone what he would call all the way, though; no penis-in-vagina penetration or even direct penis-on-vulva contact, he'd never had an orgasm in her presence. She'd touched his dick, vaguely, but never contacted its skin directly. He didn't know why they'd never gone further together. He still wanted to, but it now seemed like it would never happen. Which was okay. They'd both had sex with other people before they'd been together. They'd been friends before their relationship became romantic; maybe she just couldn't, with him. Surviving with his friend-and-sorta-girlfriend was more important to him than fucking her. And she'd never said he couldn't masturbate.

Rama didn't really want to look, but he couldn't help glancing; Celest had left the bathroom door all the way open. Neither of them accidentally left doors open, anymore. Ever. He glanced and saw bare back, sporting—he was used to this now—a wealth of cuts and burns, and despite not really wanting to see anything more, he also glimpsed some side-boob. That's not right, he told himself, looking away. He calmed. Thought about firearms operation.

The water wasn't on yet. She was just taking her clothes off.

"You left the door open," Rama said.

"Did I," she said. Not a question. She was joking with him . . . ? He fantasized that this was a "please come fuck me" challenge, and maybe it was, but maybe it wasn't—"Did I" was hardly consent, far from either explicit or enthusiastic consent. It was also plainly not consent at all, regarding anything he might want to do with or to her. No matter how playful the words sounded. Don't be that guy, he told himself.

"Yep," he said, looking. "Ya did."

She was sliding her pants and . . . were those the black booty shorts? . . . down past her knees at the same time; as he looked she was standing back up, having pushed her pants (grey leggings) down to her ankles already, and letting her underwear fall freely. He'd seen her disrobe before, and she never did it languorously like that—she was doing it slowly. Deliberately. For the first time, Rama actually saw Celest's ass out in the open. It was wonderful. It was perhaps not quite as bootylicious as it'd been months ago when the world hadn't ended yet, but who cared, they'd both lost a lot of fat and put on some lean muscle, by walking everywhere out of necessity, and often running for the same reason. They had to run to survive so much they occasionally ran to build up their stamina—they didn't even call it exercise. "Exercise" was still a pre-zompoc term to them. Celestina's ass looked even nicer with nothing covering it than it did with what he'd thought was her favorite pair of leggings covering it but certainly not concealing it. Or were those yoga pants? Were those both the same thing now? Maybe Rama should've paid attention to fashion, before. Celest didn't care about fashion either, only her own comfort; pants that happened to reveal almost every curve of her ass and legs had simply been in before, fortunately for the male gaze. Well, for the gaze of anyone who liked women, agender. Rama should've paid more attention to fashion in order to . . . what, be able to tell her specifically what to take off? Eh, no, not that big a deal. Stupid. She didn't care. Celest's booty was somehow both skinny and plump, now. Pre-zombie apocalypse standards would've called it skinny, full stop, but pre-zompoc standards no longer existed; given this undead new world, it was shaped well, and "plump" felt accurate. Now that he could see her ass clearly, he noticed it was one of few women's asses he'd seen that looked just as good naked as clothed.

Rama was staring, he noticed.

"Oh, darn," Celest said, ineffectual, stepping out of her clothes and walking naked now. She looked nothing short of fantabulous. She looked directly back at him. Her eyes hungry, and not for food.

He didn't look away. Their eyes met.

"I'm getting the impression I'm supposed to come in there with you," he said.

"I didn't say that," she said, teasing, sashaying toward the shower and away from him. Her hips, how they swung. He wanted to bite a piece of them off. So maybe she was only teasing. Probably. Maybe?

For a hotel, this room's shower had a rather fancy, modern design: no curtains, just two-thirds of the shower closet stall was enclosed by very much transparent floor-to-ceiling-height glass, leaving a back doorway open. This shower was designed into the room, unlike most showers they saw in people's abandoned houses now; those usually seemed thrown into the room wherever, haphazardly. Some against a wall, some free-standing. Some standing-only showers, some bathtubs. Rama wondered if the rest of this bathroom's floor and walls were well-treated for the water that would leak through that very large opening. There was an inch-or-so lip of shower floor, but then it was just open, for around seven feet of height and three of width.

"I said you can watch," Celest said. Oh, that's all she meant, Rama thought. She's teasing me. Which implies "I may let you come fuck me later," like maybe "if you're patient." Somehow he felt his balls were about to turn so blue they'd goddamn fall off. Nothing felt like the right thing for him to do, right now. Too bad he wasn't into voyeurism. So he'd watch, at least a little. And that's all. It could turn into something else, or something more, later. Or not; it would be fine if wherever this went was to nowhere else at all. It would still be pretty fucking cool to watch his girlfriend just vibing without clothes on.

She turned the shower faucet on. Water actually came spraying out of the shower head, readily—no sputtering or banging, and the water was perfectly clear. Clean. Not muddy or dusty. The shower wasn't even loud. It was a quiet, consistent, low hiss. Everything about that was a surprise to Rama.

"It works, baby!" Celest yelped, gleeful; they were having the same reaction.

Rama smiled. "Hell yeah, baby!"

She laughed.

Got damn Celest was sexy, too, even naked. He didn't recall giving his body permission to be aroused, but his dick was resolutely hard now nonetheless. Though if he went right in and started fucking his lady he wouldn't last five minutes. He didn't have a big dick, either. Please don't hate me, he thought, if I can't last long. If we ever have sex.

"I hear you," he said—meaning "Okay, I won't charge in there and shove myself inside of you"—after a few seconds of envisioning fun, very near-future, naughty scenarios with her. It occurred to him: She might have simply not felt safe without both of them in each other's lines of sight. Maybe for her this whole . . . scenario wasn't sexual at all, and he'd imagined all that; maybe she was only kidding about that aspect of it, making fun of him and teasing innocently, playing along with how (possibly, from her perspective) disproportionately excited he was. Which was fair. He felt like she'd caught him masturbating a lot more than he'd caught her at it.

As he stopped speaking, he saw her hop backward, a quick step, coughing out the word, "Hot!" The water hadn't been on long. The hotel had four stories of rooms; they probably had several industrial-scale water heaters so that when every room ran their showers for a while in the morning, or at night, at the same time, everybody could have warm or hot water if they wanted. Or at least many of them could. There probably weren't any other living humans in the building now, or if there were others it was unlikely they'd be showering at this same time, so it made sense to Rama—whose brains in his head were still trying to function fully—that the water would get hot quickly.

Celest seemed both near him and far away from him at once; his eyes could pick out the detail of the faucet: cold was to the right, hot was left, blue and red overlapping arrows. She'd put it all the way on red. After she jumped back she turned it far down in temperature, to about the halfway point.

He looked away—because he noticed his eyes had gone from looking at steam coming off the water, and the faucet gauge, to her tits.

"But, I suppose, if you came in here and had your way with me, I'm in no position to stop you," she said—not looking at him either. It didn't seem like she was only teasing him. Perhaps they were both sexually shy, abashed. She didn't fake-laugh, like she sometimes did. She was fine-tuning the water temperature. She was speaking . . . mostly plainly, not in any particularly erotic-tinged tone; but engaged, not bored. She was mostly thinking about cleaning herself off in a real shower with real warm water. Which if he went first he certainly would be too. Running water was wonderful, luxury now. She sounded like she wasn't thinking her words through as carefully as normal. Maybe she hadn't meant to say that. She might regret it, or change her mind.

Rama grew more confused.

That had to be an invitation, right? Of some kind? Am I an asshole right now for not doing that? Rama asked himself. She sounded like she'd actually meant it—maybe not at this instant, but she'd meant it. Somehow, he could no longer think. At all. To her he'd now seem hesitant, rather than respectful. He shouldn't be so goddamn stupid. His body's limited supply of blood was probably evenly divided between oxygenating his brains and his erect dick right now; that would explain the lack of smart . . . ness.

Maybe she really did want him to come in there, but only to make out and touch each other like they'd already done together many times.

"It is difficult to resist," Rama thought aloud. Somehow his thoughts were coherent spoken, though internally far from any semblance of sense; His thoughts were mostly recollections of Celest's sighs and moans and rapid breaths of pleasure, and what those things felt like reverberating throughout her body in their few other intimate (though not penetrative) moments; and feeling her writhing against him. His thoughts were also imagining holding her down and thrusting his little dick inside of her. "I see . . . many options," he continued. "But I haven't showered yet, today. Or in a few days. So I'm leaning toward . . . doing what I can to preserve your libido and attraction to me, and waiting until I don't smell like ass 'n' blood and putrefaction to figure out . . . specifically how I'm going to sweep you off your feet, and forcefully have my way with you."

Celestina laughed throughout the monologue, sometimes rather hard. Rama didn't even mean to see her boobs jiggle. But once he saw that, looking away became exceedingly difficult. Having his eyes on her naked body didn't seem to affect her; she seemed comfortable naked with him. Which was an achievement itself.

She liked everything he'd just said, even apart from her laughter. Especially the promise-threat of force. He may have imagined that response, though.

She almost always wanted intimate things done differently—like how he kissed or touched her—but some themes came up repeatedly and frequently, and him being especially assertive or controlling or forceful was one of those themes.

One time they'd both had trouble bringing her to orgasm while he was, at her physical insistence, rubbing her pussy through her clothing—through her entire outfit—early on in their physical relationship she'd told him to restrain her and hold her down so he'd held both her arms above her head and pinned her down with one of his arms and a lot of his mass and he'd sort of loud-near-angrily whispered to her (his boner had felt extremely restrained by his pants at the time), "I'm gonna put my hand under your pants, okay, baby?" She'd cooed / plead, "Yes, please touch my pussy, baby." He'd unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans rather more smoothly than he'd thought himself capable of, then pushed this hand under . . . maybe sort of a half-thong? He hadn't seen the back, but the front of her underwear seemed to cover so little of her flesh that the back couldn't cover much . . . and he'd found a wet, very hot, sensitive area of soft flesh and short hairs eagerly awaiting his attention. He'd tried to adjust his pressure carefully—the jeans kind of counted as a couple of layers, plus one for the underwear (sheer though it may be); what she'd explicitly said felt good to her before would probably be way too much direct stimulation. He'd overcompensated, though; a few strokes later she—writhing against him, panting, moaning, kissing whatever parts of his body (mostly his face) she could reach with her lovely pouty lips—had said, "Harder." He watched her and listened to her and paid full, careful attention to all the feedback she gave him and quickly found the right amount of pressure—around her clitoris, at the time, not directly on the exposed bean itself. Days ago she'd let him use his hands on her with her pussy fully exposed . . . in the dark . . . and he'd touched her clit early on and, totally accidentally, hurt her. She hadn't told him not to touch it directly, and she hadn't taken it personally (she just had him back off for a second and then go right back to it, just not directly so early on) or got mad at him, but he loved her—seeing (well, hearing and feeling) her in pain hurt him too. A minute or so had gone by, and then he'd heard and felt her getting close to orgasm . . . well, he was pretty sure she was. "You can touch it now," she'd instructed, pushing her hips into his hand, fighting his pin of her arms and moaning and melting into him all over. To him their bodies had begun to feel like one combined being. "Soft," she'd added. He was probably excessively conscientious, and careful. She was about to say something but then she was coming, with her body wrapped around him. She later told him it was just him pinning her arms—a sort of seemingly-dangerous-yet-safe restraint, because she trusted him completely, yet also couldn't know exactly what he was going to do or how hard—and holding her down that had done it for her, and she wished he hadn't damned asked her permission to put his hand down her pants. It was fine, and clearly right of him to do it, but it would've felt a little more deliciously dangerous if he hadn't. He'd pointed out that it'd all just sort of happened, and she'd never explicitly consented to anything, and he felt sort of wrong and uncertain going even that far. He'd apologized. She'd been trying to work on consent and communication since, but she forgot sometimes, didn't really think about it normally; and he'd been trying to be less excessively chivalrous as a lover, if . . . that's even what they were.

He now regretted asking if she'd be okay sleeping in the same bed with him.

Back in the present Celest warned him: "Don't make me wait too long, my love." She was beginning to shower—rinsing her hair.

He got a clear glimpse of her tits and even specifically her nipples before he looked away. If he kept watching he'd go mad. Sex-mad. That would probably be fun, and might even be what she wanted him to do, but he wouldn't feel right doing that to her without her clear consent—yet he feared she'd just be annoyed or disappointed if he asked for it explicitly, and also . . . he'd probably come way too fast like that anyway.

"I won't," Rama said. "But do keep in mind that you claimed the shower first."

Celest grumbled incoherently. All he heard clearly was "cunt."

"Speaking of," Rama said, "I'm gonna brush my teeth while you tempt me."

"I prefer the word 'tease,'" she said. She rinsed her hair, but he suspected the way that she posed as she did it was for his visual benefit. He enjoyed it.

"Just remember I'll get you back for it later," he said, digging his hygiene bag out of his huge military hiking backpack.

"Please do, baby," she said. Still kind of turned on—maybe . . . ?—but dividing her attention between that and actually-showering now. She meant what she said.

"Do you need anything?" he asked. His hygiene kit was buried. Which seemed pertinent except for the rare moments of actually getting to shower, like this one.

His boner was ebbing away for lack of indulgence, but not gone, so that was still distracting.

"Yeah, get my shaving kit," she took her face out of the shower-stream to say.

He did that and brought it to her, not averting his eyes but not staring. He tried to see her without taking in details, like the flatness of her belly or how her flesh glistened and gleamed, wet all over, or how much he wanted to touch her thighs and her neck and suck on her nipples.

"Do you like what you see?" she said as she took the safety razor and shaving cream and moisturizer. It was a process. As she spoke, she used her arms, not her hands, to push her tits together. They weren't huge, but they were perfect. Lovely. She'd never taken, or had taken, any of her measurements properly; whatever specific size / volume they were, they were, like, awesome. Perky.

"I love what I see," he said, cursing himself for not really having watched her when she seemed to have wanted him to do so retroactively. He more actively resisted temptation now. Fuck, I just can't win!, is what he cursed, ogling her naked, wet body. "What I see is fantastic." He pulled his eyes back to hers. He spoke slowly, hoping to be heard over the running water, louder in the bathroom: "I want to ravish it."

She was severely flattered. Happy. She set the razor and cream on the higher of the shower's two sparse shelves, at the back of it—on the far end away from the shower head, directly opposite the permanently open shower-doorway—and started moisturizing her leg. She bent over, he suspected, more than she really needed to. Her front side faced him, rather than her back. Somehow he'd suspected she'd point her ass at him. She didn't. "Do I see a hard cock in my lover's pants?" she said, glancing, smiling, yet bashful, as her hands worked on her legs. She liked that? That detail surprised him more than the much larger act of her letting him see her naked as she showered.

He thought: Fuck you're sexy.

He said: "Nah, that's the gun."

She laughed.

"Yeah, it's . . . boner," he said. "The gun's prob'ly bigger."

She frowned. "Honey, I've dick-checked you more than once before, you're fine. No it's not huge, but it's more than enough. And it's bigger than our gun." She seemed sincere, honest, but she was also encouraging him. She really loved him.

"All right," he said, trying to sound certain.

"Now don't watch me shave my legs," she said. Lighthearted, but meaning it. He couldn't see any hairs, close as he was, though he was confident he'd feel them if there was enough that she wanted to shave. He'd touched her (only partially) bare legs and felt short hairs growing on them before. He couldn't say he was a fan of that, but he also didn't give a shit about whether she did or didn't have bodily hair anyplace. He loved her, he'd accept her body however it came to him.

"I won't," he said.

"It's not sexy," she said.

He said, "I'm gonna brush my teeth."

He looked away from her, which was painful—sort of like starting peeing and stopping the flow, but worse—and thought only of his own mouth hygiene. The bathroom sink worked too. He wanted cold water, which didn't seem to affect his lover's (?) shower water temperature. He rinsed his mouth well before brushing. Not too hard. He dimly noticed his erection going away. He couldn't talk, really, and his lady didn't.

She shaved quickly, rinsed her legs, then rinsed her body some more and presumably did some skin care he didn't understand and started shampooing her hair. There were three large bottles adhered to the narrow wall of the shower under the showerhead; he figured they'd be body wash, shampoo, and conditioner. He couldn't read any of them from the bathroom sink, but he wouldn't be able to through the fogged-by-humidity and direct water spray opaque glass of the normally-clearly-transparent shower wall anyway.

He had to focus hard not to watch or stare at Celest. He couldn't help glancing sometimes.

One time he glanced and noticed he'd been wrong: She hadn't gotten any shampoo yet, she'd just been rinsing her hair. No soapy foam or anything. Now she was rinsing dirt and dried blood off herself as he brushed. He spit and said, "That has to feel great, right? To get dirt off?"

Ecstatic, Celest said, "Fuck yes. I haven't felt actually clean in weeks. Oh my god it's great!" She ran her fingers through her hair. He couldn't make out many details of her through the foggy glass, but he could tell she was smiling. Yeah. It would feel amazing. He felt like a dick again for sexualizing all this. She probably hadn't thought about fucking him, or letting him fuck her, at all. She was probably only anxious that he'd expect that of her after she kindly showed him trust by allowing him to see her naked for the first time.

Rama did his best to brush his tongue, and not feel entitled or deserving of anything except not being mean.

"Thank you for agreeing to check this place out with me," she said. "Hey, could you help me wash my back in a minute?" She reached to one of the bottles under the fountaining shower head, pumped, then worked that into her hair: shampoo, this time.

"Sure," he said. "Temptress."

"Tease-stress," she corrected.

"Whatever you say," he agreed. "Fuckin' . . . hot skinny bitch." He forced himself to act normal. She was not in a sexy mood.

"Bitch," she knew, was not normally a word he'd use; he was using words she would. She enjoyed that. It was a sincere compliment, in her personal language. She laughed, delighted.

"I hope you understand I do not want to look away," Rama said. "But I have to, or you'll never finish your shower."

"Nor you yours," Celest said, with a bit of an affirmative nod, grinning. "No, it's okay. I appreciate you giving me space." She didn't mind how excited he'd gotten. She probably hadn't enjoyed it, but it didn't piss her off or make her feel uncomfortable or unsafe. That was a relief. "I wanna . . . do more. With you."

"No problem," he said. He heard the last bit but wasn't certain what it meant, and couldn't think of how to acknowledge it sufficiently, and just in general was thinking far too much and paying attention to her actual communications not enough. "After I brush I'll step out. Then just tell me when I can do your back. Do you want me to close the door?"

"No, leave it open," she said. He looked at her: she was poking her ass out at him. In the negative space inside the shower, not up against the glass wall. It was difficult to resist grabbing.

IV

Rama finished brushing. They had no floss. So he left the bathroom.

"It's not that I don't want you close to me," Celest said as he stepped out. Though he suspected she could use a break from his presence's very close proximity. He felt like he'd never not want to be close to her, though realistically he probably would want a break from her, once in a while, too. Occasionally the just-gotta-survive tasks that took up all of almost all their days now separated them. And they didn't poop or pee together, though they didn't hide such functions from one another. Rama stopped and turned toward her but didn't stare, or even actually look at her to listen. "I just—I want to just feel alone for a minute while I shower. Private. Sorry."

"It's okay," Rama said. "I didn't take it like that. My instinct is to close this," he said of the door. She was watching him—eye contact. He wanted to do whatever she wanted him to, and she'd told him to leave it open, but he tried to imagine how she might want "alone" to feel and something told him to close the door. Regardless of how much less T he'd see in the very-short-term. His balls disagreed with him, of course.

"If you want to," she said. She wanted him to.

Fuck, was I supposed to guess that earlier? Rama asked himself. He felt stupid and insensitive. He stepped out and closed the door.

V

Rama perused their gun's manual. It was a "Springfield Armory XD-M 4.5″ 10mm." It looked sort of fancy, involved, though it wasn't difficult to use. Rama remembered a gun nerd friend of his (who only bought old, military surplus Soviet bloc stuff, like Makarovs and Mosin-Nagant rifles, Rama couldn't help recalling) making fun of the Springfield XD, via Resident Evil 4, because they were supposedly actually some Croatian Glock clone. Rama had never bothered to look into it and sort of regretted that now. The general idea of an XD was called a Blacktail in RE4, Gun Nerd Friend had told him. Rama-and-Celest's gun looked kind of like a Glock, he supposed, but it also had all this extra shit on it, and fancy iron sights that probably weren't even iron. Rama reread the bits in the manual about field-stripping the pistol and putting it back together and loading it.

"Honey, could you help me?" Celest called from out of his sight, enclosed in the bathroom.

He set the gun out in the open (not disassembled yet), dropped the manual, and cracked the bathroom door open. "What with, teasestress?" he said without looking in.

She giggled. "Washing my back!"

"I'm happy to." He started walking in, then stopped himself and averted his eyes. "You're comfortable with me doing that?" he said before he'd go in.

"You've heard me poop, of course I'm comfortable with you washing my back!" she said. "Get in here and lather me, ya silly man."

"Okay," he said. He felt a surge of paranoia—about zombies, special infected or hostile humans—and brought the gun in there with them, loaded but without a round in the chamber, put it on the sink (with a metal clank he tried to make silent), then took his boots off. Those were still in good shape. He'd throw these socks away, though; both of them had more socks, some of which were clean, and they were nearly the same shoe size anyway. He should burn these socks, actually. He desperately hoped Celestina couldn't smell his feet right now. He rolled up his pant legs. He'd thought to leave home with multiple pairs of socks, but not something essential like a sleeping bag or bedroll or tent or a way to purify water or antibiotics or a large amount of hand sanitizer, of course.

"You might wanna—" she said as she finished rinsing something, brushed water away from her eyes, turned to look at him, and opened her eyes: she saw him prepping to get in the shower and cut herself off. "Oh."

"How do you want me to do this?" he said, approaching.

"Get your hands wet under here—" She gestured to the water pouring forth. For an instant he thought she was going to gesture between her legs. That seemed too rude/vulgar somehow, for her. But no, she gestured at the shower head, the water source. Rama chided himself for the thirsty thought ("Thirsty jail" and "bonk" were the words he chided himself with). "Then soap—" She gestured at the right-most wall pump. The hardest for her clothèd boyfriend to reach. "—and just rub my back. Firmly. Don't be shy about that, seriously. With your hands, because no loofah or whatever. Do your best to get the dirt off, I actually need you to. And dry blood. And whatever else, I don't remember my last shower. Probably lotsa sweat too." She looked away from him. "Sorry."

Rama assessed the logistical implications of that. If he stepped into the shower he'd get his clothes wet. But if he stripped naked he'd smell even worse to Celest than he did now, and she'd probably never want to have sex with him ever then, plus he'd likely pop a boner all over again, despite being not-at-all sexually excited, because his body just fucking enjoyed betraying him and he had an inadequate dick, and all of that was embarrassing. He couldn't win.

"No, I can get—" Celest said, watching him and reading his mind.

She pressed her front side against the interior wall of the shower—the room's wall, not the shower's glass; he could reach his hands past her into the water flow.

"Oh," he said. He did exactly what she suggested. He still had to step into the shower, but he could keep his body out of the splash zone by reaching and leaning. He called it a "smash zone" in his own mind and didn't notice the mistake. He had to lean to get his hands wet, which was awkward but sufficient. He wanted to shove her hard into the wall, hold her there, and fuck her from behind until she came, screaming, on his dick. He could come, too, after that. He wanted to shoot his load inside of her, but he shouldn't. Maybe he could pull out and spray it on her ass. Rama shook these thoughts away quickly. Plus he wasn't gonna just shove it in; he'd want to make out with her and taste her pussy and get her good and wet and ready and primed first.

"Still excited to see me?" she said to him, looking back over her shoulder toward his crotch as he backed up. She backed away from the wall and pumped body wash into her hands three times from one bottle: Alice Co. Botanicals Moisturizing Hand Body Wash, he read on the bottle; lavender & eucalyptus. She scooped that into his hands.

Stop fuckin' thinkin' about fuckin', he shouted internally. Accepting the body wash, he looked down at himself hardening—saw his pants tenting forward. "God dammit," he thought aloud. Then he looked back to her eyes. "Apparently. I promise I'm not—"

"It's okay," she said. "It's like you're rising to the occasion automatically, just from my proximity." She was mildly nervous, looking down at his stupid goofy erection. Well, erecting; mostly there. There was no way the size intimidated her. She'd told him she hadn't had sex with anyone else while they were officially together (he wouldn't have cared if she had, and didn't expect her not to have—it didn't seem official to him until they could touch again, after the last real lockdown—and hadn't asked); it was possible it had been as long for her, since she'd last had sex, as it'd been for him since the last time he'd had sex. More likely she was more nervous about having sex with him in general than any part of his anatomy, or its dimensions in particular. Maybe it was more like self-consciousness about her own body, or her smell or taste or something else specific. Her legs were clean-shaven and looking incredibly smooth now, so it couldn't be that. It was possible that she was and had been for the last bit thinking about fucking him as much as he'd been thinking about fucking her. Anticipation. That seemed unlikely to him. But if it were true it would be cool. Rama loved that smoothness of her skin, but he really didn't care, or expect her to shave her legs for him, and he would never ask or pressure her to do it, or even suggest she should. Especially not for him. He didn't shave his legs. Though he would if she asked him to. Fuck!: he needed to shave, or at least trim his beard, before he showered. (This thought began the abatement of his embarrassing erection. In addition to, he presumed, his embarrassing body odor and general dirtiness. Too bad shame ~ embarrassment ~ humiliation wasn't a kink or fetish for him.)

"I'm sorry," he said, ashamed. He remembered to soap up his hands, and did that.

"No, it's okay," she said. "I like it! Really! I'm excited too, I just wanna get clean first." She meant all of that, which astonished him. It also hugely relaxed him. Not that she lied at him a lot or much at all, only that she . . . still liked him after all his horniness thus far in this hotel room. Maybe she even still wanted to fuck him. "So I feel good," she added. She paused, crossed her arms over her breasts to cover her nipples, and said—shower water still running, pouring down on and over her—"Um. I was too anxious to say before. I've wanted to fuck you since we set our stuff down in this room. But . . . I really do feel gross. So I'm sorry if I led you on before, I didn't mean to."

"You didn't," Rama said. The rest was far too much to process immediately, though he did pause for an instant. "And I was way too thirsty."

She giggled. "I was too. But . . . I wasn't ready yet," she said. "I'm not now, either."

"I didn't think so."

"Soon," she said. "Just not yet. I got a ladyboner too, it wasn't just you. Like when you came in to do my back right now, I could feel myself get wet, just watching you walk toward me. Um . . . my pussy, I mean, I know I'm standing under running water." She giggled. He smiled. "So. I—I'm sorry I'm taking it so slow, I don't mean to tease. I promise I'll make it worth your while."

"Okay," he said, understanding and believing and trusting her.

"I'm so relieved you let me get all that out," she said, visibly relaxing.

He felt like such a jerk, that she'd been anxious with him, especially anxious about sex. As if she'd have to do it with him. He wanted to, of course, but he didn't need to. He also felt like a jerk that she felt relief that he'd merely allow her to express her thoughts. Don't be like that, he told himself.

"I appreciate you explaining that, to me," he said. "I—we don't have to do anything. But I don't want you to think I'm not interested. It's just . . . I don't want you to think you have to do anything with me. I feel—no, I felt, like a huge jerk. Now I feel okay. I think you feel a lot like I do."

"Like you badly want to, but you need to relax first?" Celest said.

"Exactly," Rama said, shocked. He would've worded it, almost verbatim, as she did, had he tried to put it succinctly.

"I wasn't gonna do it before shaving my legs. So I'm glad I got to do that. I should stop wasting water." She took a very deep breath. Then another. Then she was chipper again, her normal self with him. "Okay. Okay. Get over here 'n' wash my back, sweetie."

She put her back to him. He lathered up his hands and got to genuine work, started rubbing body wash into her previously-sweaty back. He had to concentrate to keep it utilitarian, clinical. Dirt and some dried blood came off her flesh with little effort. She was quiet; she let him do the work without further needling. She told him to rub it in a little harder, since they didn't have a sponge or anything, so he complied until he found the right pressure. It was hard to do it well on somebody else, he didn't know his own strength that well except against undead.

The bodywash's scent wafted up to Rama. It smelled good. He didn't remember what lavender or eucalyptus were supposed to smell like. Lavender was a flower, but what he smelled didn't seem flowery; it was fruity. Her legs would smell like that. And her back. Probably most of her body. He couldn't smell anything but the, presumably, eucalyptus and water, now. Wasn't eucalyptus supposed to be poisonous to humans, or something? Nah, that was probably wrong. Or venomous? No, that described an animal. Maybe the poison bit was just the oil from the leaves if you refined some specific part of it, or the bark, or . . . whatever.

"You have no fat on you," he observed aloud, before he could stop himself, as he worked.

"Thank you for noticing, my love," she said, flattered and encouraged. He hadn't meant it as a compliment. They'd both been rather sensitive about their weight and body image before the zompoc.

"You're welcome," he said, working. "Just you rinsing in running water already did a lot of this," he observed idly. There were plenty of variously scabbing-in-progress cuts and some burns remaining, but most of the dirt and dry blood was gone. He hadn't seen her back so clean in a month. He hadn't seen her back naked ever, though. Her skin looked lovely. They'd both deliberately tanned, occasionally, during breaks. They were outside almost all the time anyway, may as well try to bake evenly. Neither of them looked very pale anymore; her untouched relatively-alabaster-pale was lightly bronzed, now. She was Hispanic, just not dark—not dark enough not to burn, not dark enough that if any part of her got sun the rest didn't show pronounced paleness. As far as he could tell he didn't look (relatively) pasty, anymore, either. He hoped he didn't. "I'm glad I can look—I mean contribute—" He joked. She grinned. "—but I can't help feel supercilious. No, that's not right. Superficial? No. Kinda. Or . . . ancillary? That sounds wrong too."

Celest giggled along with him. He always felt like he sounded clueless and stupid and he tried not to think about speaking too much, but sometimes his trains of thought happened out loud anyway. He worried this would frustrate or annoy Celest, but when she acknowledged it at all she still always seemed to find it endearing, or amusing. He often felt just a few words away from her abandoning him forever, before. Now he knew she wouldn't do that to him, but he still did his best not to be an annoying traveling companion. They were together nearly all the time.

"Oh, honey, you really do overthink everything," she said in a sweet tone of "awww," finding him adorable.

It occurred to him that she probably hadn't needed him in here to do her back at all.

"Just . . . stop worrying," she said, before he could think of how to respond out loud.

"Oh, here's something," he said, of some maybe-dirt he could actually clean off, which he'd missed before because he'd been subconsciously avoiding looking down, booty-ward. He had to rub, but barely. "I think it was dirt." It was very close to her ass. A few inches above, to the left of the small of her back. Rama had to pretend not to notice her butt dimples, which he'd seen a few times but forgotten about until this moment. Not a good time to remember them. He'd just tricked his boner into going away. And . . . what a nice, now very lean, yet plump by current malnourished-and-gaunt societal standards, ass she had. He kept speaking to keep his mind off that: "Or maybe motor oil, from that time you artfully dodged one of the dog-types."

Celest chuckled. "Artfully dodged" was code for "mostly fell" though she'd done it—successfully—to avoid taking any damage from the grunting, wild four-runner-type zombie. They hadn't come up with a name for its type they liked yet. "Four-runner?" Rama thought. That's already more natural than "dog-type."

Rama's hands moved without his conscious involvement: He simply needed to touch and hold and love Celestina's ass. At once, her warm, fleshy ass was in both his hands and he was feeling and kneading and rubbing and squeezing both her cheeks. Celest sighed, surprised perhaps but enjoying it, and then she hummed. It was both a small moan—so Rama believed—and a growl, a warning about the barely-suppressed hunger she was trying to keep contained. Just like him. "Baby," she breathed, after a second or so of the flesh of his hands contacting that of her booty. Within his mind Rama wanted to think of it as her dump-truck booty, but her butt wasn't really that big or voluminous, it was just her ass and he loved her so it was great. By the time Rama even noticed what he was doing—he didn't remember choosing to touch her ass—she spoke again, this time in clear warning: "Baby." Not a warning of "stop touchin' them buns," but of "stop or you're gonna get fucked, but it'll be better if you wait, like I'm trying to." He thought.

He removed his hands as quickly as he could, which wasn't instantaneous. One of them slapped her ass sharply as they left it. He wasn't sure if he did or didn't mean to do it. It kind of just happened. He couldn't stop himself. It was already over by the time he noticed he'd done it.

Celest moaned and staggered forward into the shower's stone inner wall. He hadn't spanked her that hard; her knees buckled. She caught herself with her arms, so she didn't hit the wall, but then she began to fall. She yelled, this time in genuinely fearful surprise.

If he'd thought, he would've responded too slowly; Once Rama saw her stagger forward initially he almost went to catch her, and his thinking about accidentally slapping her ass slowed him beyond functioning. As soon as he could tell she was going to drop down hard, he let go the reigns of his body and mind—gave himself his head, ironically to do something not for himself—so when she actually began to fall he actually caught her, under her armpits with both his arms on the insides of his elbows, immediately. He didn't feel her full weight fall for a fraction of a second. He stepped one leg between both of hers—not to make more contact with her, but to distribute her weight more so he didn't tip over and fall with her—and jammed his foot up against the wall where it met the floor to keep them both from falling.

Luckily he didn't slip, and he had a secure enough hold of her to keep her from falling, regardless of what her skinny body tried to do as a result of gravity and physics.

They remained standing. Well, he did. She was midair, suspended in his arms and with some of her weight on his leg under her, for a moment before she recovered. She seemed incredibly light. She'd lost a lot of weight, and he'd gained muscle. Still surprising.

Rama brought Celest back up to her feet, carefully, about two seconds before she was ready, so he just held her a moment longer until she was. She took a deep breath—"You got me?" "Yeah."—then arranged her feet beneath her.

"I'm okay," she said. He released her slowly. She wasn't difficult to hold up. She stood securely on her own before he let go.

"I am so sorry," he said. Given how strong she now knew he was, he sounded surprisingly gentle as he said that. Not that he hadn't helped her climb up things or get down from things as they tried to survive post-apocalyptic life, just that . . . this was different. She was extremely vulnerable.

"That's why you don't tempt fate," she said, laughing now. She looked back to him over her shoulder. At his arms and shoulders and hands. "Wow, you got strong."

He smiled, flattered, and uncomfortable with that. "I guess," he said. "I don't feel very different."

"I loved the . . . " she said, turning around to face him. He didn't even think to look at her naked body, which he would notice later; he looked right into her eyes. He was looking there when she began turning. "When you—touched my butt. But—"

"I know," he said, apologetic.

"Heehee. I said 'butt,'" she said. Not a normal joke for her. He'd heard her make that joke maybe once before, and they'd known each other for . . . a year? He couldn't tell how long it had been anymore.

He grinned. "Again, I apologize. I mean that. The booty was too good!"

Celest laughed, kissing Rama. There was love in it, but she was tempering her flame, as he was also trying to, so it didn't linger or go deep. Though they both clearly wanted it to.

"Thank you," she said. She knew he meant it, even with the memez of it. "I know. We were both—delaying gratification so well, too." She hugged him without thinking.

"Yeah, we're fuckin' pros," he said, hugging back with no hesitation—although he was clothed and dry, until the hug, and she absolutely was neither of those things. He noticed feeling odd at the same time she did—

"Rama, no! Your clothes are soaked!" she said, releasing him, feeling bad for him and shaming his lack of situational awareness all at once.

"Shit," he acknowledged, no longer touching much of her (though they were still quite close) but standing under the shower's constant spray of water as much as she was. Only she was dressed for it.

"Welp, best get 'em off," she said, grinning. She didn't really want him to, but she still grinned as if she did—she really committed to the bit.

He started stripping.

VI

"Do you wanna . . . shower with me?" she said. No, invited. And she meant it. "It's okay if you do."

"I absolutely do," he said, tossing his shirt into the shower's back corner—the least wet part, and out of the way if you were showering. "Want to. But I shouldn't," he continued. "It's . . . " He shook his head and rinsed some dirt and sweat off himself. He felt filthy, gross, like she'd be disgusted if she could smell him over the water and eucalyptus. He backed away from her, as far as he could without getting out of the shower.

Rama noticed: Celest was totally checking out his body. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been looked at that way by anyone. Or the last time he'd noticed it, anyway. She watched him not just with attraction, but with hunger. It had been some time. It felt nice. Exciting. Nope, he cursed at himself. Think of how bad I smell, he told himself. Assuming. He couldn't smell himself, or anything unpleasant, but he comfortably assumed he smelled cringe at best.

Celest blinked—like shaking her head—and looked up at his eyes. "What?" she said. She'd not been listening. Unusual. She'd been staring at him instead, maybe pondering things to do. But women don't stare at me, he thought.

"There is nothing I want to do more than shower, with you, right now," he said, undoing his pants. "But I can't. Or, shouldn't. I want to try—but I know I would never get to actually showering with you. I can't control myself that well. So—" He gulped and pulled down his pants and boxers at the same time, to get over the fear.

"Okay," she said, smiling and looking at his dick. It was soft, for the moment. She might never have seen it before. Her eyes went wide, gleamed. "Yeah. Me too," she said, still eyeing his dick. She tore her gaze away from him. "Fuck."

"Precisely," he said, dropping the rest of his clothes into what became a small pile at the back of the still-running shower. She laughed at his word choice. He stepped out.

There were about six large towels on a metal-shelf-stylistically-mixed-with-rack fixed to the wall, so the rack was right by where he'd step out of the shower.

Rama took a little towel because all the dirt and dried blood on him was going to stain and ruin whatever he dried off with and he wanted to save a large towel for himself for later. He dried hastily, trying not to think about fucking Celest. Trying to think about anything else so his dick would stay soft. He looked at the shower towel rack: No, there were only two large towels, plus one other medium towel, and two little ones.

"Your dick looks great," she said. She seemed to mostly mean it.

"Thanks," he said, still trying hard not to let that part of him get hard. But hearing her say "dick" out loud made it challenging. It was lovely that she'd even said those words together in that order. It wasn't big.

"I love you, Rama," she said to his back. She sounded lusty to an extent that surprised him.

"I love you too," he said, looking at her. By "too" he was looking at her tits against his own conscious will. He felt his dick shifting with increased blood flow. He had to take a breath. Cold showers. Zombies. Lack of air conditioning, he told himself. "So, do your thing." He had to close his eyes. "Take your time. I'll shower next. I wanna shave, too." He gestured at his beard. She didn't like how it felt while kissing, though she liked how it looked.

"I would really appreciate that," she said, like she had badly wanted him to shave but was too afraid to ask him to. Which was probably true; he couldn't remember her ever having asked him to shave, or even clearly implied or suggested it.

"Then I'll be sure to do it," he said.

Celest said, "You talk so weird. I love it."

"Thank you?" he said.

She smiled. And looked at his dick. Then back up to his eyes. "I love everything about you."

He smiled. And enjoyed the implication. She meant it. He looked over her whole body. "I love everything about you too."

She blew him a kiss.

He was dry enough. He needed a haircut too. He pretended to catch her kiss at a distance and put it into his heart through his skin. He held his towel in an elbow. He pretended to yank his heart out with his hand and shoot it at Celest with a tiny bow. She pretended to catch it, then eat it and savor the taste. Not the response he'd expected. Then she patted her heart like that's where his came to rest. They were both laughing by then. Still both naked. Which made it funnier, at least to Rama. Shower still running.

He put a towel-like-rug at the foot of the shower—the medium one; it had intermittent raised bits on it like it was supposed to function as a rug like this—so they wouldn't slip, and so spilled water wouldn't spread far. By the shower's open design, there would definitely be spilled water, even with only one person in the shower as it ran.

"Once I'm showered," he said, "I hope you'll still want to at least make out with me, if I'm being hon—"

She cut him off: "No, you're gettin' fucked today, sexy."

"I accept that," Rama said, surrendering as if he wanted otherwise. Being called sexy as a term of endearment felt really nice, and weird. Almost like she'd misspoken.

"I don't even care if you fall asleep during," she threatened, joking. "I hope you don't, but if you do I don't care. I'll stop when I'm done, Imma get mine. And that could take a while."

"I'm good with that," he said. She was happy to see he felt the same—that he'd be sure she busted a nut too. Not just him.

"Miles to go before you sleep," she said.

He laughed. She did too.

"Is that a reference to Death Proof, or Southland Tales?" he said. Myriad other popular media presumably repurposed the Frost ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," 1923), but in that moment Rama only recalled it occurring in two films that they'd watched together.

She just smiled, and said, "Come here, kiss me again before you close the door."

He didn't hesitate; he just started walking toward her, quickly. Both of them still naked. Shower still running.

"No wait don't!" she said. He halted after "no" and before "wait," which was a rather exciting surprise to her. If he could respond that quickly to her like this now he'd probably handle consent well, like if he did something she didn't like or if she was just done and wanted him to stop, or whatever exactly. He'd always been good with consent in the past; sometimes maybe a little too assertive or fast, but if she said no (unless she'd explicitly told him something like "tonight 'no' doesn't mean no" before) he didn't beg or plead or keep going, he just stopped. But just sort of foolin' around was pretty far removed from going all the way. Which they were going to do. He didn't hesitate after this no. Full marks, good form. Very good form. She looked away from his dick. She adored his paying attention and responsiveness. He was definitely getting his dick sucked tonight. Full treatment. He was worth the effort. She felt herself smiling at this, excited, and hoped he couldn't tell why she was smiling. "It's—" she non-started. "Best not tempt fate."

"Again," he said, and then he agreed, "Right."

"I really didn't need you to do my back," she said. "I just wanted you close to me."

"I wanted that too," he said. "And I wondered about that. I was trying not to overanalyze everything."

"That's probably for the best," she said. They both giggled. "I'm glad you did too, it was good, better than I would'a done, but . . . I wouldn't have been able to resist either."

"That—I feel better, knowing that," Rama said.

Celest smiled.

"Was that a trust-fall?" Rama asked out of nowhere.

"Nope," Celest said, knowing what he meant. She sounded embarrassed. "That, uh . . . If you must know, you made my lady parts sing, and then my knees gave out. So I fell. Happy?"

"Sorta."

Celest laughed in a tone of "you dog!" and said, "Uh-huh."

"Not like that!" Rama said. "I'm just—pleasantly surprised—that I can have an effect, on you, like that. I didn't . . . " he trailed off.

She could tell he meant that, and wasn't thinking "yeah I'm so hot and big-dicked," or whatever, he just didn't believe he did / had / could have such an effect on her. It was sweet. He didn't know how much she loved him.

"Oh, honey!" she said. "Of course you have that effect on me! I love you, so of course it's gonna be good, but you're fuckin' sexy, too."

Rama smiled. "I should go."

"Yeah."

Rama picked up their gun and went to leave the bathroom and close the door, then stopped himself. "I'll keep this with me, okay?" he said, about the gun. He gestured with it to be clear, but he was also careful to keep it pointed away from her and himself.

"Sure," Celest said.

VII

She wasn't much longer; the water turned off, and a few minutes later she came out with her hair wrapped in a towel. She was carrying another towel, and she was still naked! except for the hair-towel. Somehow her nudity, removed from the bathroom, hit different. It was shocking, and somehow not even erotic. For the moment. She didn't normally walk around naked. Somehow he'd expected her to leave the bathroom fully-clothed. He'd never seen her naked before today. Rama's dumb dick started hardening anyway, of course, independent of his mind and heartbeat. Which she would still see if she even looked his way—which she did—because he was naked too.

"I didn't wanna get my other clothes dirty," he said as she noticed his mutual nudity. His dick was still largely soft when she looked directly at it. He looked away and tried to think about other stuff: getting to a new place and assessing how badly populated it was with zombies, and often even special zombies. That did it. Dick soft. You had to run on all cylinders at once to survive against a dog-type, or a tank that got close.

He'd been cleaning their XD-M pistol, which was one of the least sexy things to do he could think of. They tried to avoid firing it at all, so it wasn't filthy, not even inside the barrel. But it kept his mind off sex, and they had fired it (at a—he reminded himself to try the new name—four-runner) since he last cleaned it. He wouldn't let himself sit down—the room and bedsheets and other sitting furniture was all clean, and he was filthy, unlike their gun's interior parts.

"Okay," she said, completely understanding, going to her big hiking backpack to . . . pick out clean clothes, he guessed. Her tone of voice told him she thoroughly enjoyed seeing his exposed naked body at least as much as he enjoyed seeing hers, and that she didn't give a good god damn why he was naked so long as he was naked around her. He definitely looked at her ass and her vulva and her, what did you call it, her back-thigh gap as she bent over, knowing exactly where he was, even though he'd been telling himself for at least three seconds before that, "Don't stare! Don't watch!" So he thought about mêlée-fighting zombies. Which was to be avoided if you could help it—zombies in general were to be avoided—but also one of the more quiet ways of taking them out, if you made sure they didn't roar. Neither of them were skinny and fit enough to have a true thigh gap, but she was closer to having one than he was.

Rama reassembled the pistol, which was clean now: slip barrel into slide, put recoil system back on the barrel, compress spring with control (he actually had to focus on this), put slide assembly back on frame, pull it back to the rear, lock slide rearward, rotate disassembly lever counter-clockwise, unlock slide. He added a step to that, "slowly let slide go back forward," to keep it silent. Well, near-silent. He racked it a few times to be sure it cycled properly—it was all good, and very much unloaded. They didn't need to oil it further. It was worth being very careful with the gun, plus he'd looked at her pussy and needed not to think about it—so he filled his gaze with steel. He put a loaded magazine back in the firearm.

"So this is now loaded with a magazine," he told her, showing her, "but there's no round in the chamber." He was instinctively as well as consciously careful not to point the muzzle at either of them, or put his finger on the trigger. He'd known about gun safety basic-basics before the apocalypse, but their former group of friends and friends' friends hadn't, which had caused two deaths that they were sure about, plus more because of the noise those had made. "So if you need to shoot anything you have to pull the slide all the way back and release it first."

"Is the safety on?" she said.

"This gun doesn't have any external safeties," he said. "You just point and shoot."

" . . . I knew that," she said, giggling. She'd fired the gun maybe four times. Most times she'd forgot to put earplugs or any hearing protection in, though in fairness on at least a few of those occasions neither of them had had the time to put any hearing protection in; it'd been pretty much "fire or the screamer shouts" or "fire or the four-runner tackles and starts attempting to disembowel one of us." He'd fired their gun slightly more than her, and he'd forgotten hearing protection plenty of times too. Gunshot noises, as boring as they were (just "Pop!," nothing exciting as in movies), were surprisingly loud and painful, especially if guns went off inside.

"Right. So just remember to pull the slide, then it'll fire," he said, giggling with her, but trying to be careful to clearly not make fun of her.

"Okay," she said, looking between their gun and his gun.

"Are we good? Do you want it to be unloaded?" he said.

She knew how to use it without him telling her anything, he just wanted to be extra-clear that it was loaded but not pull-the-trigger-and-it-goes-off loaded. She was even less hasty to use it than he was, he believed more out of fear than respect, but whatever, they were both prudently cautious with it. The Springfield, that is.

"No, that's good," she said. She gestured at one of the two nightstands—by their large hotel bed—the one closer to the bathroom. She looked away from him reluctantly and dug into her bag again as she said, "Will you put it there, please?"

"Sure," he said, and then he did that. He managed to mostly not look at her. They were both still naked. Together. In the same room. Tiddies.

VIII

Rama semi-packed the handgun cleaning kit away—it would do if they had to leave in a hurry, but it wouldn't for indefinite storage—and dug out his shaving kit. It was a lot like Celest's. Cheap. He'd trim the forest about his face first with a Wahl electric trimmer he'd had since pre-Z, and wrap that hair up in a paper towel or twenty and throw it away, then clean up, then put on shaving cream and actually shave with whatever safety razor he'd found most recently. This one was Gillette, and brand new when he found it. Somehow he kept thinking the electric trimmer's internal battery would die, but it still hadn't. He used it rather briskly now. Horny. He kept having to re-focus. He'd only had the thing for about a year, so as long as he found a place for it to charge it shouldn't become completely dead, but still. He'd plugged it in to charge before Celest started showering, so he could use it cordless now. It was less annoying that way.

Before he got started he checked with Celest, with too much anxiety: "I'm gonna shave then shower. Is there . . . anything else you want me to shave?" He gestured broadly at: chest hair, pubic hair, leg hair, chest hair. He couldn't reach the back hair but meant it as an option for her too, he'd just need her to do most of that work.

"No," Celest said, visually examining him since he welcomed it. "Shave, no. Your man-bush looks good to me. Stop looking at it, Celest," she said, clearly to herself, while looking at his man-bush.

She still stared for another few seconds, then looked away grinning.

"You can trim if you want, but don't shave it," she continued, idly poking through her bag. She looked like she just wanted to be doing something asexual with her hands. And eyes.

"Okay," Rama said. He looked at his man-bush. "We actually prefer the term 'mush.'" Celest giggled. It looked a little too bushy—too much—to him. He'd trim, and try to do it with restraint. He'd never got good at trimming his pubic area evenly. He didn't want to end up with bald patches. If he did he—now—would just end up anxiety-mild-panicking and shaving the whole goddamn area whose absence would look weird with the rest of his profuse body hair—not to mention probably looking juvenile to Celest, which was no.

"Whatever you do, try to wash well," she said. "I don't wanna be finding hairs in my mouth." She fake-giggled self-consciously, a not-quite-clear "haha."

"Don't you?" he said, kidding. What he really meant was "Tell me how they might get there." All the sexual acts he'd thought or fantasized about with her were him doing things—giving—to Celest. He hadn't imagined receiving anything. Until now.

"Maybe," she said, grinning. "Depends on how good you are." She turned to face him. "If you're worthy." She'd already decided he was worthy, but it was still fun to tease. Didn't want him to take anything for granted, because it wasn't.

"A man hopes to be worthy," he said. He hoped he sounded somber or capable, and not too cocky. He felt competent, confident, capable, though not like he'd make her squirt within a minute of vaginal penetration, or penetration alone, or whatever else unreasonable, unlikely, and presumably impossible and impractical.

Celest smiled and just looked into his eyes for a moment. Then she seemed to recognize the bit and said, "Was that a Game of Thrones reference?"

Rama smiled back. "Yes."

"Nicely done, sir."

"Would it be weird if I told you to kiss me, like you did before?" he said.

She dropped what she was doing and walked—normally, not even excessively or exaggeratedly swinging her hips—toward him. "Not at all," she said.

He juggled his probably-excessive shaving kit to touch her, during the kiss, before she reached him. He didn't even look at her boobs, an obvious mistake. He finished shuffling his kit just in time to take half a step toward her before she met him. Not a great ratio to her multiple full steps toward him. Though he loved that she'd come to get him. It was nice to feel wanted. That didn't happen much. Maybe he should ask for it more; she might not know how much he liked it—for her to initiate contact between them in general, especially affectionate contact; more specifically, kissing her, touching her, just being near her, and her kissing him and touching him at all. He wasn't sure what love languages even were, but his seemed to include touching.

Rama used his free hand to hold Celest's face. Which was ridiculously beautiful. Had a slight glow. He intended to properly fuck Celestina, but not at this second; all he meant to convey with this kiss was love.

Whereas Celest's kiss to him was a promise of sex.

Not that she hadn't made a verbal one earlier, though that could've been a joke. He'd stop if she said no, but he knew her well enough to know she probably wasn't going to change her mind about doing it with him in general; maybe to certain positions or acts. She only absolutely set her mind on things that really mattered to her; she didn't mind being convinced to change her mind about trifles, like should we take a break right now or try to find tonight's shelter before noon, or which shirt do my boobs look better in, or do we need these lettuce seeds more than these tomato seeds or these cilantro seeds (lettuce, obviously; and cilantro was right out).

Their bodies met briefly and clashed deliciously, apart from just hands. She hadn't expected to feel love in this, or for anything but his lips to touch her. And he hadn't expected to feel lust, she could tell from his reaction. They were both surprised with each other, and clearly liked it.

Rama held it for a moment, letting her lips open his mouth and her tongue slide in slowly, tantalizingly, persistently. Rama felt himself buzz.

Rama responded immediately, stroked her tongue reciprocally with his, and simply enjoyed the kiss for a few seconds. After that he leaned into it, physically and emotionally, and tried to meet Celest's energy. After he did that she relaxed hers some to match his. They met about halfway and the kiss got even better.

Rama couldn't fully press up against her with all his shaving gear (and he didn't want to shove his face into hers too much because his beard would be scratchy), so he was sort of three-quarters profile to her against his side, also partly so she wouldn't feel him get hard again whenever that inevitably happened—he'd expected a more sexually innocent kiss, but just assumed it'd make him pop yet another awkward boner anyway . . . but that's not what Celest came to this kiss with. And when he noticed the soft flesh he felt against his chest was one of her breasts, and when he felt her pelvis lightly grind into his thigh, his dick definitely started hardening again. Also, they were both naked, and she was warm, exceptionally so against his thigh. Rama had pushed his tongue into her mouth, and was dragging his against hers backward, when he heard and felt a small moan come out of her mouth (though her lips were sealed against his), even apart from the way both of their breathing had already become faster, heavier.

Rama felt Celest begin to pull away, and did the same himself. It seemed ungentlemanly not to; like otherwise he wouldn't be giving her space she seemed to want. Their mouths' parting made some noise, but all he noticed was feeling the loss of his hot, wet physical attachment with her.

"Sorry," Celest said, looking away, breathing hard, calming herself. Not embarrassed, though. She shouldn't be, of course, though Rama felt embarrassed at himself somehow.

"Yeah," Rama agreed, doing the same with his own body. "Best not."

"I shouldn't've—"

"No, it was nice," he said. "I should . . . get to shaving. Tell me if people come near, or anything."

Celest replied but stumbled over it: "The only people—gonna be . . . coming—we're—me and you." His love had rolled a natural one on her metaphorical twenty-sided die on a speech check. Which wasn't rules-as-written for skill checks, of course, but their first Dungeon Master had run all 20-sided die rolls that way. Rama found this hugely endearing because he was used to being the verbal stumbler, if anyone was. Partway through stumbling over her words, she leaned into her stumbling. Became a parody of herself. Soon they were laughing together. She could tell he wasn't judging her or laughing at her. He laughed with her. She liked that a lot. He really liked her.

"Hell yeah, sister," he said, in a bad but enthusiastic Hulk Hogan impression. He high-dived her. She laughed, enjoying this, meeting his high-five with gusto, and taking great comfort in his presence alone. He never judged her for fumbles. He started laying out paper towel lengths over the bathroom sink. "Want me to close the door?"

"Only if you want to," she said. He was pretty sure she meant it. Not certain. "You hafta let me watch you shower, though. At least a little."

"It's only fair," he said. "Sure. I won't pretend to understand the appeal—for you—but I don't wanna discourage it."

"Come on, you're hot!" she said.

"Where do you want me to come?" he said, pretending he'd actually misunderstood.

"Depends on how good you do," she said, teasing, giggling, and largely maintaining eye contact with him. A touch of self-consciousness, something like embarrassment. Absolutely sexual, too.

"That's fair," he said.

IX

Shaving took Rama longer than he liked. But he did a good job. No hiccups, only detail, careful not to miss anywhere. He needed a haircut. Or at least for his lady to help him with the gross-because-of-hair-growth back of his neck.

"How's this?" he asked Celest—once he believed he was completely done, trimming and then shaving completely and having checked for any spots he missed at least twice—from the bathroom doorway. She'd watched some of it, and seemed to approve of what she'd seen. He hoped his shave job entire met with her approval, because if it didn't he wasn't done yet. He was still naked, but she had a full outfit on: a short crimson skirt he'd forgot she had, running shoes, a bra, and an Ameri-Do-Te ("best of all, worst of none"—a satirical martial art) T-shirt, the women's design, tapered at the waist and nearly cap-sleeved. Or . . . was that style called "babydoll?" Did people use that term anymore? Had they ever? Whatever, she was adorable in it. She was so skinny now. He was too, though; they matched now, as they had pounds before. He observed her outfit, rather removed from her previous one—birthday suit—and noticed their contrast and said, before he could stop himself, "I'm underdressed."

"Don't you dare put so much as a stitch of clothing on!" she said pointedly. She meant it, but was kidding about her word choice.

"Okay." He didn't know what to do next. "I forgot you had a skirt."

"I keep looking for times to wear it, but it's never the right time," she said.

"Maybe after we clear the whole place?" he said. "If we decide to."

Celest shrugged, keeping it on for now. Then got up off their bed; she'd been reading a mass market paperback, but he couldn't tell which. They had a few. She aimed her crotch at him so he could look up her skirt as she got up. He watched, and felt like sort of a jerk for it though she'd obviously intended for him to watch. He was pretty confident she'd put a thong on. She walked toward him.

He put up a hand like "get no closer." She stopped; she was confused by this. He explained: "I just smelled myself. You can't get close."

Smiling, she said, "Did you fart?"

"No," he said, "I—sweat. And zombie blood."

"Oh, I'm used to that," she said, waving a hand. "I didn't smell any better before, either. You didn't seem to mind my stink." She walked toward him again, slowly. "So it's the least I can do not to mind yours." She rolled her hips. Not fair.

"But you'll—" He non-started, ripping his eyes away from her body's features to her eyes. "Your vagina will seal itself!"

She laughed—and stopped again, fortunately. "I don't think so, but I don't want you to feel uncomfortable, so—" She gestured at her feet, where she'd stopped. "Turn?" she said, and gestured for his head to turn.

So he turned it, right, and then left.

"Nicely done, my love," she praised. "I really like that I get to see your face now. I wanna touch." She smiled. Looked at him quietly for an instant. "Let me do the back of your neck." She gestured at hers.

"You . . . actually want to?" he said. He definitely wanted her to touch him. He desperately wanted the back of his neck shaved, too, but he knew he wouldn't be able to do it perfectly by himself and he kind of didn't want to draw any of her attention to what to him seemed like a gross, hairy mess.

"Yeah," she said. "And I'll like it better without hair there."

"All right," he said. "But you have to plug your nose the whole time, and . . . not breathe."

"Deal," Celest said. "But if I pass out you have to catch me—again—and then . . . resuscitate me with your dick." She grinned.

"I'd be only too happy to do that." He smiled; she giggled.

"Good."

"I'm gonna turn the fan light back on," he said, meaning the one in the bathroom.

"Okay," she confirmed. They were both very sensitive to noise now. Noise drew Z. This fan was rather quiet, though.

He switched the fan on.

She touched his skin appraisingly, pleased. "Your face is so smooth," she said. "And warm." She kissed it in a few places, then got to trimming the back of his neck clean. He'd normally put after-shave lotion on after actually shaving (not just trimming with an electric razor), but he had none, so while he worried about her getting a shaved or trimmed facial hair of his in her mouth he at least didn't have to worry that his skin tasted funny, or like something not meant to be ingested anyway.

Celest electric-trimmed his neck clean, and got it done far faster than Rama expected her to. He supposed it helped a great deal when you could easily reach somebody else's body to do it, and also use both your hands to do it. And freely see the trimmed area. He was pretty sure she didn't smell his stink, somehow. He hoped. He didn't smell it either, but she had a better sense of smell than he did. His seemed to have been muted somewhat by the smells of the zompoc: fire, blood, burned hair, human bodies torn apart, internal organs putrefying in open air, burnt gunpowder.

She brushed the last of the hairs away, then kissed the back of his neck. He knew she didn't like to get hairs in her mouth any more than he did his, so for her to kiss it meant she was sure it was trimmed, and brushed, clean. Which in itself made Rama feel a lot more comfortable with his body than he was an hour ago. He'd never liked being hairy. As she kissed him, a hum came out of Rama, which was a surprise to him.

She hummed back, content. "All clean," she said, then stepped out of the bathroom.

X

Rama thanked Celest, then turned on the shower. There was still warm water. He'd try to be fast—he'd only wash his entire body two or three times. As part of showering, before he got going, he went to the bathroom door to close it.

Celest was on the near-side of the bed, sitting on the edge, legs crossed and looking fabulous. As he—still naked—went to close the door, she looked up from her reading and said, "Why are you closing?" She wouldn't normally speak like that; it was some kind of mistake, Rama noticed, but she seemed unaware of the mini-fumble (no "the door?" at the end). He wished he hadn't noticed when he misspoke, so he ignored it.

Rama answered, "I can't shit in a perfect square!"

She laughed and said, "Oh, sorry," then looked away like it was okay that he closed it now.

He stopped closing the door and said, "I'm kidding, I'm just self-conscious."

With a smile, Celest said, "Leave it open. Unless you're gonna poop."

"Okay," Rama said. "I don't—I'm not—just gonna shower." He couldn't keep himself from smiling, though he didn't feel sexy the way his lady absolutely had been while she showered. Some of that had been performative, maybe for him though he hoped for herself somehow too, but some moments he'd seen of her showering had seemed candid.

Rama began showering, with the bathroom door almost all the way open. The water was still warm when he got in. Hot, actually; he had to take a minute to find a temperature that didn't feel burn-ey.

Partway through his shower—he'd only showered his entire body once or twice—he called out to Celest. Without noticing she was already standing in the bathroom, watching him, because his eyes had been closed for a while. He'd begun with his armpits—he did both of those about five times before anything else—then (not because he expected her to closely interact with the area, but simply because he was sure it wouldn't smell good if she got anywhere near it if he didn't conscientiously wash it when he had the chance) the taint area, then his forehead which seemed to have about two layers of extra skin worth of dried sweat and dirt and flecks of zombie blood on it.

He felt much lighter and more aerodynamic after he cleared off his face.

He'd also done his hair twice, though it was relatively short. Then he'd done his entire crotchal region twice (including the taint, again, of course).

Thoroughly.

"What's up, good-lookin'?" she said.

He tried to accept the compliment, but couldn't, feeling too ugly; the best he could do was to sort of ignore it. Which seemed slightly better than rejecting it. She sounded too close to be on the bed and he wondered why she'd be elsewhere. She hadn't mentioned any undead or living people getting near the place. "I'm a little anxious," he said. "I'm kinda—feeling like I should jerk off—"

"No," Celest said.

Rama finished: "—so that . . . whatever we do, I won't come in thirty seconds."

She said, "Don't. Okay, two things. First, don't jerk off without me. If you do it alone that's just a waste of perfectly good cum." He felt his dick twitch with sudden alertness. He loved that—her being (relatively) graphically sexual with him. "And second, anyway: Don't even worry about that." She really meant that, which made him feel much, much better about everything. "Just don't be done after your first, my love."

They both smiled.

"'The first time' implying . . . I'll get to come more than once?" Rama asked, raising an eyebrow. Only after he did that did it occur to him she might not be able to see him, wherever she was. Though she was probably in the bathroom.

"Yes," Celest said. "If you want to. And if you play your cards right."

They beamed at each other. Well, Celest beamed at him, and he beamed, but his eyes were closed and he didn't really look at Celest because he was rinsing behind his ears again.

Celest strode further into the bathroom and stopped by the rather thin rug by the shower—still running smoothly—with her shoes on and told him, "Get over here and kiss me."

He believed he still had some soap on him somewhere, so he gave himself a quick all-over rinse and wiped water out his eyes and turned the running water off, saying, "Okay, but I'm not done yet."

"I'll only be a second," she said. "I just need a kiss from my man. You didn't need to turn the water off, silly."

He largely exited the shower, though he didn't go past the rug. He hadn't toweled himself off at all.

She put her feet up against his and held his face in both hands—he instinctively put his hands around her waist—and said, "I love you," into his eyes on the way in, then she kissed him. She pushed her tongue through his lips immediately, and fluttered hers. He was so not expecting anything like that that he couldn't think of what seemed a fitting way to respond immediately. He tried to meet her enthusiasm and energy and began to, but after maybe two seconds she'd removed one of her hands from his face and grabbed his dick with it. He'd felt her hand going low but didn't suspect that's what she'd touch. She couldn't possibly, he'd thought, imagining perhaps his belly or chest or maybe she was just going to balance herself against the shower's transparent inside wall, or . . . something else not so fun. Her hand's flesh wrapped around his dick, though, and squeezed and stroked and pulled—and, bizarrely, his dick not only was soft when she first seized it, but it stayed soft for over two seconds thereafter. Her hand felt cool. She'd only ever barely touched that part of his body before, and then only over clothing. He'd thought that she was either afraid or uninterested. Or was the word "disinterested?" Not what he wanted, anyway. He believed she wasn't a virgin, but maybe she found penises gross or ugly. "Penii?" Maybe she'd only been with uncircumcised guys. Anyway, she wasn't uninterested; at least in his dick, she was interested. Very.

Celest kept on kissing him, though. And kept stroking his cock, assuring and massaging it to full hardness. He didn't want it to get hard right now—it seemed inappropriate somehow (not that he thought to ask her if such was or wasn't, or what she wanted); naturally, his dick responded very quickly. To her insistence, not his will. Of course. His cock quickly grew rigid. He felt himself groaning. One time she squeezed his cock's head and he simply had to break the kiss for an instant to groan again and say, "That's so hot." She hummed, agreeing and resuming their kiss. Her other hand balanced herself against his shoulder, and pulled him deeper into the kiss, against her. His hands—arms—were both wet, he shouldn't be touching her, yet he felt one of them grabbing one of her tits over her clothing, and the other roaming over her back. Whoops. Her thumb rubbed over the head of his cock; he heard and felt himself moan softly but sort of deeply into her mouth. She moaned, softly, back. She enjoyed making him feel good. He didn't even have to touch her.

But she just kept kissing him; lingering, keeping it going, on and on. Which he hadn't expected at all. Simultaneously worse and better, she also kept stroking his cock, which (he didn't dare look or touch it to check) had to be at full hardness by now. Even without looking or touching it, it seemed to feel somewhere beyond full harness. It felt like it would cut rock.

If he didn't stop soon, he wouldn't stop. So he had to pull back, and push her away gently but decisively with this hands. She didn't seem to want to stop. And he definitely didn't. He was ready to fuck, but he really wanted to finish washing off all the dirt and blood and gunpowder and whatever other crap first so she wouldn't retch if she tried licking his balls, or sucking them, or wanted to kiss his back or a thigh or something, or was just in a position where she'd smell any of that awfulness—he didn't know what she might want to do, or not do. Not that he'd assume she'd want to do any of that; a man could hope, though, and anyway it seemed impolite not to be ready for such things. Rama pushed her away. Her head and mouth, really, not her entire body. He didn't have that much willpower.

She released his cock on her own initiative.

XI

Her mouth popped off his, receding.

"You gotta stop," he told her. "No, we. We gotta stop."

"Are you . . . close?" she said, sounding anxious.

He was so far away from anything resembling close to orgasm the question bamboozled him. He was silent, baffled momentarily, and then he said, "No, I just . . . am starting to get rather involved," he said, breathing hard. She was too. What he said seemed a succinct way to describe everything that he felt happening and wanted to do right now. "If I start—"

She giggled. She'd had approximately the effect she intended, though she'd been hoping he'd let her keep going until he came. She hadn't expected herself to get so into it. She said, "I had to get you back for touching my butt." She laughed.

He smiled, nodding. "That's fair," he said. "Or—not really, but sort of. I think? I dunno, I can't make any judgments right now. I'm thinking—we need to secure this place better before we can relax. I mean, you had to exact revenge on me. It wasn't fair that I touched your booty, though I didn't do it entirely consciously, or with malice aforethought." She laughed at that. She'd definitely planned this making out and giving him a handjob—or at least the first few minutes of one, if not to release / happy ending—and she'd planned to minor in some kind of law study, maybe criminal justice. He kept jumping between thoughts; he was flustered, which she found adorable: he said next, "And I'd do it again." She chortled. "I'm sorry, I just don't want you to feel embarrassed about that. Not a fair equivalent. Or to have felt embarrassed, I guess."

"That's not your fault," she said. "It was cheating and very naughty of you to touch me, obviously, but you didn't want me to fuckin' fall over like a . . . dumb-dumb."

"I didn't," he said, "'Tis true."

She grinned. "I like your dick," she said, looking between it (still fully hard) and his eyes, biting her lip. As she looked she began reaching to grab it again, but stopped herself before her skin reached his skin. She wasn't trying to instill confidence in him, or make him feel better about only having a little one, she just wanted to fuck right now. She was talking dirty to him.

"I'm very happy to hear that," he said, noticing: She hadn't laughed at its size! A good sign. He felt too insecure to indulge in dirty talk. "Do you actually like it?" He looked at it. Maybe it'd grown four inches since he last looked. No, it hadn't. Though it was still quite stiff. He didn't feel good about it.

"Oh yeah," she said, "I love it." She seemed to mean it. "I wanna suck a golf ball through that thing."

They laughed together.

"That sounds both amazingly pleasurable, and incredibly painful," Rama said. More laughter, from both of them. "I nonetheless appreciate the sentiment." She smiled. "Part of me wants to eat a golf ball to find out." She laughed. He looked at his dick again: still hard, though no longer throbbing. "You're not disappointed? It kinda curves up, it's not massive."

"If it was massive it wouldn't fit in me," Celest said, hopeful, undeterred, thirsty. "That's no fun; limits our options. You won't need much length to hit my G-spot. And I think the curve might help that."

Rama made a "Score!" gesture. Celest giggled. Feeling like his penis wasn't tiny. It was probably small—he wasn't about to measure it—but Celest was at least pretending it would be big enough for her. Well, sufficient. That helped. It was really nice of her, too.

"And look on the bright side," she said. "I just . . . gave you a handy for a minute or two, and you told me you weren't even close. Was that true?" she semi-accused for dramatic point-proving purposes.

"It's true I wasn't even close," he said. "As if by magic."

She grinned. He was fine, but he seemed so anxious. It was endearing. She was anxious too. He really cared about her. She already knew that.

He had to be feeling at least close to as anxious and uncertain as she was. Rama said, "But are you sure that was a minute? It only felt like five seconds to me. Maybe ten."

"Pretty sure," she said. "Two minutes. I didn't watch a clock, but I was trying to time it. Or, time you."

He smiled. Something about her testing him sexually was exciting. She was probably inflating her numbers. He hoped she really was okay with and into all of him. He feared she was just momentarily rationalizing away things she'd be angry about later when he disappointed her, or specifically came early, or whatever.

"I knew you weren't gonna come that fast!" she said, smiling back. "But it would've been okay if you had. Cuz you're with me, and I love you."

"That's—that helps," he said. "I'm feeling a lot less performance anxiety." He took a deep breath.

"Good," she said, grinning. "Don't."

"I love you too," he added.

She smiled. "I don't want you anxious. I want you to make me come." He smiled. He wanted her to feel good too. "Do you—You like me, right?"

"Yes," he said, like it was terribly obvious. Maybe it was. She doubted herself sometimes. "I like you very much. And—as best I can tell, given all the trauma and horror of the last couple months—I'm in love with you, too."

She smiled nervously. "Do you like my . . . body?" she said. Somehow self-conscious now that she was spiffy and clean and fully-clothed. Whereas she hadn't been when she was both filthy and naked. Odd. It was like he was seeing the real her now. He hadn't seen that person—showered, clean—in months.

"I wanna fuck the shit outta your body," he said. "Yes, I like it." There was hunger in his eyes.

She liked all of that. She wanted to make a joke about "let's not make me poop during sex" but instead asked about her fear: "But you're really attracted to me, physically? You don't think I'm fat?"

"I really am," he said, "and you're not fat." She was glad he answered her seriously. He'd been serious before, but his wording had been kind of jokey ~ thirsty, and she wanted sincerity, which he seemed able to sense. "I'm sorry, I should resume showering. I don't know how much longer we'll still have hot water."

"Okay," she said. "It's just . . . I used to have some more bass to me? Before? Y'know? I liked my body more then. I feel like skin and bones now. My body image is all fucked up. You still . . . want me?"

"Celest, I want you badly," he said. He restarted the shower, reset the handle to the temperature he'd liked. The water was cold at first. He physically cringed; she giggled, then apologized for giggling. "Yes, I want you. I did before. And I do now. I don't like your body any less." He'd shampooed his hair at least twice already, so he moved down to his face with the it'll-probably-be-itchy-but-that's-better-than-being-filthy-and-sweaty-and-oily-and-bloody-and-smelling-of-burnt-four-runner-hair hotel bar soap. "I'm having a very tough time resisting . . . jumping your bones."

"Yeah?" Celest said playfully, liking that. She knew he was attracted to her before they'd both lost a ton of weight—before the zombie apocalypse—but she couldn't tell if he was all that attracted to her body now. If he could still get off on it. She remembered getting an early impression that he seemed very interested in her mind—he genuinely liked just talking with her—but she wasn't sure if he liked her boobs (before or now), or legs, but also hated her ankles or knees or neck, or whatever.

"Very yeah," he said. "I'm not even trying to, but I keep imagining these scenarios of me fucking you." That seemed to excite her. "It's exceedingly difficult to not—" He took a breath. " . . . throw you down and have my way with you."

He heard Celest humming. She sounded excited. He couldn't really hear her breathing. He opened his eyes and looked and got soap in one his eyes and saw her palming one of her tits through her shirt and bra. Her other hand was at her crotch. She was into this too. That was really hot.

"Yeah?" she said, in a tone of "go on."

"For example: Until just now I was trying not to think about fucking you," he said, rinsing his face off so he could try to rinse the soap-pain out of his eye. It was annoying and stinging, and helped him keep his hands off his cock. An excellent distraction, however accidental. "But my dick's been very hard since you touched it. Not even getting soap in my eye abated it."

"You got soap in your eye?" she said. "Poor baby. Would sucking on my titty make it better?"

Wow, she got turned on quickly. Or . . . no, she was probably already excited, and wanted to work past feelings of inadequacy or something first. He could certainly relate; he'd just done the same thing.

"That would make it much better," he said. He noticed he was touching his dick—still hard—and stopped himself.

"Did you see me touching myself?" she asked him. It seemed abrupt somehow, as if irrelevant. She asked it with a tone like she hoped he had, though, and a touch of "you're not supposed to look" as a joke, all with of course a general overarching theme of naughty, exciting sexual excitedness.

"For an instant," he said. "I feel dumb. Totally worth it."

"Is that how you got soap in your eye?" she said, joking, in a completely non-sexual tone.

"Yep," he said, trying to forget he had a dick and focusing on rinsing his soaped eye.

She went back to the thirsty tone now: "You weren't supposed to see that," she said, very pleased that he had. "Naughty boy."

"Maybe," he said. Head done; he moved down to his neck. Deftly avoiding touching or squeezing or stroking his dick any further.

"God dammit you're sexy," she said. New tone of voice, like she was letting herself get too into this and whoops. "You got me rather wet, my love."

"I'm sorry; I shouldn't have touched you, while I was all wet," he said in a tone indicating he knew what she meant.

"No, I meant . . . something else," she said, giggling.

"Oh," he said, still joking about his perception of her body. "Were you referring to your mystical lady parts?"

She laughed. "Yes, I was. I'm glad I'm not wearing underwear."

Damn, he'd been wrong, then, about when she gave him the upskirt view—no thong. Unless she was kidding, or lying. He rest his head against the shower's wall—the solid one away from her, not the glass one toward her—and groaned. He felt himself squeezing his cock with one hand and broke it off. The touching, not his cock. "Don't tell me that." Why did you put a bra on, though?, he wanted to ask. He'd certainly felt one on her under the merch shirt.

"You have a right to know, sexy," she proclaimed, teasing. He turned around, resolutely not masturbating—though it would've been great—even for an instant, and saw her wiping a hand on her right thigh. She was right-handed. "You have these effects on me, you big, strong man." They both laughed. He thought for an instant that she felt embarrassed, but no, she didn't. Good. She was just sharing information with him right now. Her delivery was silly, because that was fun and made sharing easier.

"I'm only . . . like three inches taller than you?" he said, resuming not looking at her, or even in her direction.

He moved on to washing his chest for the last time. Fortunately his nipples were insensitive. If he could just not think about sex for a damn minute.

"Closer to six, I think," she said. They giggled. "Maybe seven."

"That seems a little much," he said.

"I told you not to get insecure around me," she scolded. Not mean, but like she really wanted him to be mentally healthy around her, to have a positive or at least neutral body image.

"I'll try not to," he said.

"That's a good dick," she said. He glanced at her: she was pointing at it. "It's gonna be plenty. Maybe even more than enough."

That started to feel like exaggeration. He felt like she was trying to build him up to a realistic image of himself, though, not just make him feel good. He tried to simply accept. "Thank you."

"No, Rama: Thank you," she said. They laughed together. "I'm pretty sure I can fit that whole thing down my throat."

He was hanging on every word of that last sentence. He could tell where she was going with it, yet the entire time was confident, "Ain't no way she's gonna allude to deep-throating my cock." But then she was alluding to deep-throating his cock!

Rama groaned and thumped a fist against the shower wall.

Celest laughed loudly.

She left him alone, he believed. He didn't check. A few minutes later, sure he wasn't being watched, he was trying to wash his back properly—he'd only done it superficially before, not the entire area—and couldn't reach anything, when he heard her chime in, "Let me help you with that."

"Are you sure?" he said, feeling . . . ugly somehow. Not even vulnerable, but like he was still dirty, gross. He couldn't smell himself, but maybe she would. He was so distracted by that he never thought to ask "How'd you know I was having trouble washing my back?" Of course he hadn't closed the bathroom door, but still. She had better things to do than watch him shower. Like . . . whatever wonderful women who also happened to be very pretty did when no one was looking.

She did to his back largely what he'd done to hers, minus groping. She was more focused. Or maybe more self-conscious. His cock got hard from it all over again just the same. She noticed—she seemed to find it cute, funny, loving, affectionate. He began to apologize, but she interrupted, "I got turned-on when you washed my back!"

"I'm proud to hear that," he said. "I don't know why I'm embarrassed by this. You don't seem to mind—"

"I don't mind," she added.

"I'm not even thinking about sex," he said. "Only 'oh God I hope I smell okay to her' and 'fuck I'm fuckin' hairy, I hope that doesn't gross her out completely,' and some self-loathing at how small my dick is."

"Don't!" she said, very firm. He was taken aback. "I acknowledge that it isn't gigantic," she said, "but it's, seriously, going to be fine. Touching my clit does a lot for me, and penetration . . . doesn't. I'd be more concerned about thickness than length, and your thickness is great."

He smiled.

XII

Rama should've brought his change of clothes into the bathroom. He felt self-conscious yet again leaving the bathroom naked, and finding his lady Celestina fully-clothed outside. He was dry and quite clean this time, at least. That was a huge relief. He felt human, though still embarrassed in a way he couldn't explain. He threw on the first clean whatever of several clothing items he found in his own hiking backpack. "Rama?" Celest said. He had on boxers and a pair of cargo shorts when—

Abruptly, Celest grabbed and squeezed him. A low-key bear hug. Not sexy at all, though Rama wasn't sure about that for five or ten seconds, like maybe she meant it to be sexy somehow? But no, he noticed, he was merely stupid and thirsty. This was something else, and to him it came out of nowhere. She was crying, quietly. The last time he'd looked at her she'd seemed neutral at worst; normal.

She nudged him to rotate toward her and he did and her head dove into his chest. He felt hot tears against his flesh, and her hair poking him, and he felt silent sobs, before he put together that she was weeping.

He wrapped his arms around her; he'd try to find out what this was, or was about, later. When he understood she was crying, he tried to hold her back as tightly as she was already squeezing him. He placed his hands and arms carefully. He had time to. He made it a warm, firm embrace. After a few seconds, it seemed like a good idea to stroke her hair, so he did that. It would've soothed him a lot. He hoped she didn't mind it.

Then Rama noticed he'd popped an especially inappropriate boner. Celest started crying harder—hopefully nothing to do with his at-best-average dick size. No way he was going to let her go now if she didn't let him go first, or say something, but he couldn't stand awkwardly with his pelvis way back to protect her from his awkward erection, either. So he released one of his arms and re-aimed his stupid fucking dick down against his leg so it was no longer stabbing into Celest's . . . belly, maybe? He hated himself right then. "I'm sorry," he said, even sounding embarrassed. "I'm not excited at all."

She said nothing. She cried. He couldn't figure out why, if it was anything specific. Given their present circumstances—presumably everyone they'd ever been friends with or known or were related to or had loved had died badly and recently; world ended, stinky zombies—she didn't need to cite anything specific, and neither did he, he just happened not to also be crying for the moment. All he was sure about was that Celest was letting something out. She'd relaxed enough to process things; wasn't in 100%-survival-mode like they normally needed to be and almost always were.

Another . . . minute or three later, Rama was near being able to let himself cry too—it would've been healthy for him, certainly—and his boner had receded, blessedly, to an approximately flaccid status—when Celest's weeping ebbed away. Quickly, though not instantaneously. He felt her returning to normal.

This is surreal, Rama thought. I think I've now experienced every feels in here. His feels, not Celest's.

Celest backed her head up a half-inch to look at his face. She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand before he noticed it. Rama got one of his hands on the other side of her face. Which was very smooth, and warm. She leaned into his hand.

"Sorry about that," she said, sounding a little froggy, looking like she felt as self-conscious about crying as he did for his awkward boner, and looking into his eyes and away from them almost equally.

He saw another tear slide out of her other eye and wiped it away.

XIII

"It's fine," he said. "I am sorry that . . . boner." He had to just blurt it out.

She looked at him like he had nothing to apologize for, which was almost exactly the opposite of the reaction he'd anticipated. That was so cool and gracious of her he felt himself seemingly fall in love with her all over again. She understood he really hasn't been sexually excited then; she wasn't judging him.

"It's okay," she said. "You didn't start humping me, or anything."

"Yet—" he began to joke.

"And I knew you weren't excited," she said. She paused. "Did you just say 'yet?'"

He grinned, embarrassed. "I did."

"Naughty boy," she fake-scolded, poking his chest. Which was still naked. At least his ass wasn't still hanging out.

"I was about to let something out too when you stopped," he said. "Uh, crying."

"Really?" she said. "It's okay if you need to cry too."

"Yeah," he said. "I can't now. It's gone."

She hugged him, kissed him on a cheek. One of her hands dragged fingers around his back—soothing him. It was so sweet of her. "That . . . sounds really sad."

He shrugged. "I . . . try to be, but I'm not good with emotion."

"I know it's weird that we were just talking about cum 'n' stuff and when you got back from showering I cried," she said. "If it was me coming out of the shower and you crying I might've popped a confused boner too."

"There are easier ways to tell me you're a size queen," he said, grinning—joking. He was pretty clueless, but not so oblivious that he thought she cried at his unimpressive dick size.

She giggled. "I told you it's fi—oh, you're kidding," she said. "Good! I'm glad you can joke about it. You have nothing to worry about. Okay?"

"Okay," he said, still working on accepting that. He'd been laughed at before, but not much. As far as he knew from what he'd been told, his dick size had never been a real problem before with his sexual partners. He kissed Celest's cheek. "It felt like my body betrayed me. Getting hard then. I guess it was like confused intimacy," he said. "You're really not upset? It seems horrible of m—"

"It's fine." She languorously leaned into his chest and kissed his left breast just above the nipple. Big wet smooch.

Her man groaned. Or maybe growled. Celest wasn't sure which.

"I can't help it," she muttered. "I got this nice chest in front of me." He smiled. "I'm still turned-on too. Sorry. The . . . loss of civilization and society hitting me again just took precedence, for a bit. I had to let something out. I'm sorry."

"Ah," he said. "It's fine. Don't apologize."

He meant it. She appreciated that. "I wanna ask you something weird," she said.

He tried to imagine what might be weird to her.

She said, "Can you just hold me for a minute? Like a full minute. Seriously."

"Sure," he said. He didn't mind at all.

XIV

She let go of him, then led him by the hand to their room's wheeled desk. She pulled it out, put her back to it and sat on it, then scooted backward until she found a spot she liked and opened her legs and pulled him between her legs and drew him into a hug. He didn't consciously notice her opening her legs until later, when she closed them around him. Not tightly, but still. It was challenging.

"Lemme just—" he said, going with all of it. But he had to pre-shift his dick for whenever it inevitably hardened again to avoid stabbing her with it. So he pulled his pelvis back and adjusted so he didn't roughly jostle any of her fun bits, even if he wanted to, with the way he shoved his aside.

"Why would you—" she started saying. "I don't mind feeling your dick pokin' into me."

"It seems rude." He couldn't get past the embarrassment of his disobedient dick. He'd try to fake it until he make it. Made it. "Well it's done," he said. "I'll just see what happens when it—"

"Happens."

"Yeah," he said.

"I seriously just want you to hold me for a while, this isn't a . . . move, or anything," Celest said. "I need to feel held right now. By you." He made sure he was holding her then. "Yeah," she said. It was odd to hear her voice behind his head, yet with her body in front of his. And it was wonderful to simply maintain a hug with her for a long time. "And I wanna hold you, too."

"Okay," he said. "That thing of you not minding my stupid dick poking you is obviously too good to be true, though."

"I actually like it," she said. "Kinda. Not while I was spilling my guts on you a second ago. But pretty much any other time. I like your dick. I love you." She grinned. Well, he expected that's what happened. She had her head buried in his shoulder. He felt her words hit his skin at the same time he understood what noises he was hearing. "And I like that I keep turning you on."

"Yes, but sometimes it just happens, when I'm not turned on," he said. "That . . . has to send you the wrong message."

"I can tell when the residual you is turned on, and maybe wants to fuck—" They giggled. "—versus your . . . penis is just hard," she said. "I know."

"I know you're smarter than me. It just—you could misinterpret. The possibility makes me anxious. I don't—"

"Please just stop talking—"

"I'm sorry—"

"—about your dick, I was gonna say," Celest said. "It's distracting me. Talk of it, I mean, not so much the thing itself."

They laughed.

"Me too," Rama said.

Celest moved her head to kiss his neck, once, briefly.

"I'm not sure you're taking this seriously," she said.

"I am, I'm just—" he said. "I can't trust my own body."

"I trust it," she said. "And I trust you. You're not gonna try to put it in me when I don't want you to. I wouldn't stay with you if I didn't really trust you."

"I know," he said. "And, good." He just held her. He kissed her head through her hair. "You shouldn't have to—"

"Stop," she said. So he did. "You are no longer allowed to worry about popping boners with me, boo." She kissed his chest. Not sexually. Lovingly. "Only if we're around other people. No, just women. No, men too, I guess. They might misunderstand. Anyone other than us."

"That's fair," he said. "You're super-cool."

"That's true," she said, then giggled. He did too.

They enjoyed each other's silence and company and embrace for a long time.

"I've never really thought about your hair color before," Rama said, noticing it for what seemed like the first time. He stroked her hair. Long, soft, clean now, reaching maybe 8 inches below her shoulders. "It's . . . red like dying embers."

She hummed. It felt like she was smiling. She was pleased. Not exactly agreeing, but sort of.

"I've always liked it," he said, still stroking her hair. "I just never . . . picked out that detail. I don't really see details like that as separate from you, even though I know they kind of are, like hair color or length. It was just . . . part of you." He kissed her forehead. "God I'm stupid."

"Don't say that."

He wondered what her heritage was like, to be Hispanic with naturally scarlet-colored hair. It was possible if improbable that she'd been coloring it this whole time and hiding it from him, but like, she hadn't hid it early on when she got winded from barely running at all, or when she got so scared she shit herself one time, or a plethora of other things she might've wanted to hide from him, so her dyeing her hair ever seemed far too inconsistent for her to hide from him. Not that he'd think differently of her if she did that and wanted to. There's no way she has a consistent source of new hair dye, he decided. Plus her eyebrows matched and her roots were always the same color as the rest of her hair, if less sun-bleached and dried-out.

He went on as if she hadn't spoken: "For a while just staying alive's been most of what I thought about. When it was still only an outbreak I was thinking, What does she want from life? I wondered what you wanted to do after college. Specifically, I mean. How does she respond to our—then—culture's stupid bullshit nonsense ideas of gender and expectations; I wonder what she thinks of things and how she makes decisions internally, what you feel."

She hummed along with him, listening but not participating. She forgot he called himself stupid.

Silence for some time.

XV

"Do you ever worry about—what other special zombies there might be in the future?" Celest said.

"I'm not sure what you're asking," Rama said.

"We think we've seen all of them for now: normal ones, the dog type—arguably the worst—then what else . . . the big explosive tumor type, the big tanky fucker, and the screamers without arms," she said. "'Megaphones?' Nah, that sounds dumb. And I don't remember what 'phon' means by itself, like etymologically. It probably just means 'sound' or something but I can't remember for sure. My point is, months ago, everybody thought just normal zombies were the only type there'd ever be. Everybody knew that, back then. Now there are several very different types. Or, their behavior is different. From each other. What's it gonna be like a year from now? Or six years? There could be hundreds of different, shitty types, also blatantly stolen from Left 4 Dead with no real in-fiction justification offered. Or the Return of the Living Dead type that don't die. I'm more afraid of that stuff than anything else."

Rama hummed along with her. Hardly committing to anything, but clearly listening.

Celest continued, "But even then, the few types we already know of—that we can't come up with good names for—if we're not careful, any one of those could kill us."

"That's why we help each other," Rama said. "We both do our best to stay alert. And not let each other get hurt."

"I'm just afraid."

Rama stroked her hair and kissed her nearer ear through it and said, "Nothing's gonna hurt you, baby."

Celest hugged him tighter for a moment, then relaxed back into their already quite close embrace.

Later, Celestina leaned back and caressed Rama's face. She touched his lips. She loved his lips. And now since he shaved she could really both see and touch them. Even the skin under the hairs he'd shaved off was tan now. Like hers. She kissed him.

XVI

Celestina held the kiss for about five seconds—Rama participated equally, without trying to escalate or hurry to anything else, merely letting himself enjoy it, feeling her body and her lips—then she broke it off and without pausing or transitioning said, "I have an idea."

Rama knew it wasn't going to be anything directly sexual before she went on. He was starting to get into it, but he actually did not have a boner at the moment, and anyway he didn't mind the subject / activity change.

"Can we watch some TV and cuddle?" Celest said.

"Sure," Rama said. He would've said yes to almost anything she might've asked, but, "That sounds really nice."

"Yeah?" she said. She hadn't thought he'd go for it; she was overjoyed that he did. She'd been prepared for him to ask for something like "lemme bust a nut first" or "blowjob then cuddle," though she really didn't want him to make such a request.

He said, "Yeah," sounding like he'd enjoy cuddling with her almost as much as she would with him.

"Will you let me up?" She was still sitting on the table, and he was still standing, in her way, between her legs.

He thought she only wanted him to let her go and get out of her way. Instead he picked her up—one arm on her ass, one going up her back for support—and rotated himself. A noise of pure joy came out of her. After that she also laughed. He adjusted his arm under her ass to low on her back so she could stand of her own will. And still laughing she did that. They went in to kiss each other at almost exactly the same moment and met softly. Brief. Mouths semi-open, no tongue.

Celest found the TV's remote in one of the nightstands, saying, "There probably won't be anything on. But it would be cool if there were. Maybe the TV has some kinda DVR on it, or a Fire Stick or something."

"I wouldn't even have thought to check that," Rama said.

"I'm . . . super smart," Celest said. "I have an INT of ten."

A Dungeons & Dragons reference—playing that pencil-and-paper tabletop role-playing game together was one of their early bonding activities, at the beginning of the spread of whatever the fuck it even was (Celest tended to default to calling it "zombie plague," and Rama "zombie virus," although it was probably neither, and its common American English name was "black fever") before it was called an outbreak internationally, happening worldwide seemingly at random. Celest and Rama had both shown up—as strangers, to each other—in person to a community college's (obviously) now-abortive attempt at an RPG-playing club. They lived in the same city but hadn't gone to the same high school. They immediately liked one another, connecting initially through goofily-made movie references. Rama had believed she had liked him as just-a-friend; he'd been wrong. She was attracted to him on sight. Though she didn't think she'd fall in love with him, or that they'd stay together after the end of the world. Or really, of modern civilization. She knew she wanted to fuck him after they'd shared a few words. He was refreshingly honest, even kind of blunt. They hung out as friends at first, and spoke a lot through text, because he was too stupid to have noticed that she liked him for a while.

Rama laughed. Celest smiled.

They both looked at the TV. Celest had definitely pressed a button on the remote, but nothing was happening. She looked down at it: "Wrong button." She pressed another.

"How do you want to do this?" he said.

She looked at him like . . . he couldn't tell what. His best guess: her mind went blank.

She hadn't thought about where they'd cuddle, only that they would. She looked around, weighing options. They were both standing; that certainly wouldn't do. "I was gonna say the couch because I wanted to sit up, but it's too far from the TV and I thought it was taller. If we put it close it'd kinda be in the way of the bed."

"Are you concerned about our room's feng shui?" he said.

She couldn't tell he was joking until the last two words; he'd played it completely straight. Well done. They'd had this brief conversation before, but she felt like concisely rehashing it after she laughed: she said, "Feng shui's bullshit, you know that." She looked to the—their—bed. "How about we just use the bed and lay together, and use pillows to prop our heads up?"

"Sounds good to me," Rama said. "As long as I can put an arm around you."

"I'll be mad if you don't," Celest said, looking at him fake-scoldingly. He smiled. She smiled back. Her look was dirtier. "I was hoping you'd put more than an arm around me."

"Like what, a rope?" he said—definite joke, and he almost played that one straight too, except he smiled at the end. She wasn't sure if he did that to, in the moment, nonverbally tell her he was kidding, or if maybe it was just a behavior of his now. She liked it, anyway.

"No," she said. "Uh. Bad double entendre."

XVII

The TV was on the hotel's main guide screen, running demos.

"I think that was innuendo," he said, smiling.

"Whatever," she dismissed, smiling.

Neither of them had expected as much as the dumb hotel channel. Neither of them had ever worked at a hotel or motel or the like, and they didn't know how such a system would work. They assumed it required internet somehow. Everything had, before. The whole place could be wired with fiber optic cable, though Wifi would probably have been cheaper (if slower and less consistent), and they'd both left behind their smartphones months ago so they couldn't easily check for networks nearby.

Rama moved all five of the bed's pillows so they could lay on their backs and prop their heads up to see the screen, which Celest discovered wouldn't tilt down; it could come outside of its shallow wall cubby and pan to either side, but no tilt.

"How's this?" he said of the pillows. "Is it gonna be weird to have our legs hanging off the bed?"

Because the room's layout had the bed perpendicular to the TV and its wall mount, which were on a side wall rather than atop a dresser as they'd both become accustomed to in recent months (facing the foot of the bed was apparently the standard layout) and which seemed like an odd choice to Rama. Maybe the place's designers had crammed the bathroom into this single-bed room's floor plan, or crammed this entire suite into a more standard floor plan. Maybe a two-bed room would be laid out more naturally. So he and Celest would have to lie sideways on the bed to look at the TV head-on. The room had no balcony, so fortunately—in case they weren't alert—that positioning would have one or both of them face the direction of the only door in or out.

"That should be good," Celest said. "Either that or we turn the whole bed."

"I can't tell what your expression means," Rama said. "Do you want me to turn the bed?"

She looked from TV to bed, considering. "Nah," she said. "Let's try it like this, and see if it's comfy."

"Works for me," he said. He looked around; he dragged the bed a few feet down so he could lay near the edge and lean to see the door, but so he also wasn't more than about a quarter exposed to the door in case hostile humans used magic to know he and Celest were in here and then shot fully-automatic weapons through the door. Which was all unlikely. He hoped.

He forgot to tell Celest why he moved the bed; she was staring at him.

"So I can see the door if I need to," he explained.

"Okay," she said.

"I hope this is excessive, but, I think we should arrange our weapons—the main ones, at least—so we know where they all are, and so we can get to any of them easily, in case . . . zombies or people happen to come through the door."

"Do you think that's likely?" she said.

"No," he said. "All the stairwell doors are locked from the inside, and—fuck we never checked the elevator! If that works we hafta do something about it."

"Fuck," Celest said. "You're right." She shut the TV off.

Rama put deodorant on, and eventually finished dressing.

XVIII

They were going to only get their weapons, but it occurred to Rama that somehow something may go terribly wrong, so they just packed up all their things and brought them with them. Except for a few items of clothing they'd be leaving behind anyway. Their general experience so far was that whenever you weren't ready for anything and everything to go horribly awry very quickly, that was always when they would—when a horde of Z or a tank or a dog-type or maybe a horde of all of those things would pop up right fucking behind you, or in front of your car while you're driving. They didn't use cars anymore, but they used to. Rama also put socks and boots on.

"Do you want the gun?" Rama asked Celest.

"No, you take it," she said, "you're better with it." Then largely to herself she said, "I can't fight zombies in a skirt with my coochie out." He giggled. "I gotta get pants on." She started changing. He really wanted to watch, but looked away.

"Okay. And I'll take the compliment, but you're just as good with the gun as I am," he said as she changed.

She said, "I can't hit anything under pressure. You can."

"We haven't tested that," he said. "I might've just got lucky. We don't know."

"Repeatedly."

"In different conditions."

She shook her head. "No. Please take it."

"I will," he said, putting their thick, stiff gun belt on, still not watching her change clothes or gazing at her booty or thighs or whatever else. "I'm . . . not arguing. And I respect and understand how you feel. So you know, though, I consider what you're saying an untested hypothesis. At least not a rigorously tested one."

"I think I'm afraid I'll shoot you by accident," she said. "Or myself."

"Respect—no, just, know—how dangerous the weapon is, yes, but you shouldn't fear it," he said. "You might have to use it sometime to save your life. Plus it's so fucking loud we shouldn't use it anyway, if we can avoid it."

Celest started grinning as he spoke. "That's true," she said. It was funny now how fucking loud the thing was, but when they'd been forced to fire it inside without hearing protection it had been anything but funny. She was sort of nostalgic for some of those times; she didn't like to share Rama per se, but she'd liked having other friends around, too, for both of them. He was even more fun around other people.

"Not unless we have to. If we ever find another gun, though, ideally with a suppressor or so it could take one, or maybe a bow or crossbow, we both have to practice with them," Rama said. "Firing them, especially, with moving targets if we can rig some. I'm not great either, is my point. And, we both need our own ranged weapons, my love."

She smiled. "I agree with that. I love you."

She noticed his back was turned to her—because she'd been changing. What a gentleman. He already knew what she looked like naked (her own choice); a silly gentleman. "Turn around," she told him.

"Are you decent?" he said. The words and tone were a joke, but he actually meant what the question got at; he didn't turn or look before she answered.

"No, but I have clothes on," she said.

He turned around, smiling. She had clean pants on.

"Those pants look great on you," he said.

"Yeah?" She turned partway so he could see her back. She didn't take her eyes off him.

The pants were jeans. "Your ass looks amazing."

"Thank you," she said. "That's cuz these are my new smaller size."

"A fine choice."

They embraced.

She kissed him. Softly, not quite chastely.

He kissed her back, softly and even less chastely. He grabbed her ass with both hands. He needed to. Once in a while he had to remind himself why he'd even bother trying to survive in such a crapsack world. Celestina was why.

They both held that second kiss and kept going.

Then near-simultaneously broke off, letting go of the way they'd embraced as part of kissing maybe without entirely noticing it.

"Nope," Rama said,

at almost the same time Celest said, "Sorry."

"No, that was my doing," he said. "I should've stopped at the one kiss."

"I'm glad you didn't," she said. "Both were good; yours was better."

"Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome, sexy," she said.

"Am I a good kisser?" he said.

She seemed shocked he'd even ask. "Yes. Fuck, yes."

"Good."

"I'm serious. I wouldn't be your girlfriend if you weren't good at kissing me."

He smiled.

"Not kidding," she said.

"I believe you," he said. "I'm just glad I'm good. And that you're being honest with me. And yourself. I like all of that."

"I mean, I was kidding about how I said it, but not what I said," Celest said. "We'd just be friends. Maybe fuck buddies, but I couldn't let you kiss me."

He thought aloud: "I dunno if I'd wanna fuck somebody if I couldn't kiss them."

"Good," she said. "Seriously, kissing's a turn-on for me. But bad kissing is a huge turn-off. Or like if you had bad breath and slobbered on me. A person like that—maybe they could help me come, eventually, but it would be physical-only. Like purely mechanical."

"You're going into such detail I'm starting to feel like I'm doing it wrong somehow."

"No," she said.

"But licking your whole face is okay?"

"Yeah, that's fine," she said; by then they were both laughing. "You're a great kisser, Rama! Don't change anything. Ten out of ten." She smooched him sweetly. "You're physical and emotional. For me. Which is really exciting. It's not gonna be hard for you to get me to come. It would be, for them. Whereas you—I'm gonna bust several nuts, easy."

"Okay," he accepted, giggling. He hoped it was all true but it didn't feel that way. He'd happily prove it all either way through diligent, meticulous, rigid research.

She took one of his hands in one of hers. She said, "We just. . . . God I want you." Her voice got deeper, throaty, and serious at the last.

He had to look away from her, close his eyes and take a deep breath. Boner again. He thought about how her ass had felt in his hands—fleshy, gloriously formed, but now muscled, too. He could feel his cock trying to claw through his pants. "Baseball . . . cold showers." Another deep breath.

Celest laughed. He saw her look down at his dick's rising influence on his pants between breaths. She said, "I'm pleased to have such an effect on you." She looked very happy.

He liked that, but, he said, "It shouldn't be so easy for you," not looking at her.

"You affect me just as much, honey," she said. It sounded like a threat. "I, uh, pretty often get . . . excited, just from you looking at me."

He looked at her blankly, saying, "I don't—"

She cut him off, smiling anxiously and saying, "Yep. Just like that." Just from the eye contact, he realized she meant. Also they were physically quite close, though only their hands were touching.

He looked away. "That's too . . . porn-ey," he said. "I can't believe that." He looked back at her. It felt weird not to even look at her. "Though I want to."

She sighed. Maybe he really did have effects on her. "You do, baby. Do you wanna see? I can show you."

"No. Yes. No," he said. They laughed. "Fuck, we gotta check the elevator. Just . . . get that done."

"Yeah," she said. "Hey, hang on a second. I'm . . . " She trailed off.

"What?" he asked, softly.

"Do you think I'll be able to . . . get you off?" she said, suddenly bashful.

"Yeah," he said. "Hopefully not too fast."

She smiled, happily, at the message of "yes you'll be able to make me come," and then giggled at the rest. She really wasn't anxious at all about him coming prematurely.

He believed her—ideally he wouldn't pop quickly, but if he did, that didn't mean the night was over and they were done. He could go again. It would still be embarrassing somehow. He imagined it made him less of a man, somehow. He needed to let go of that.

"Good," she said. "When you said 'baseball, cold showers,' that was a reference to something, wasn't it?"

"I think so," he said. "Don't remember what. I was trying to think of it." They grinned. "I'm trying not to think about sex."

"Oh, so you're trying not to think about smashin' my puss?" she said, and she very nearly managed not to start laughing before she finished. He laughed along with her.

"Among other things," he said. She liked that. "If you want me to."

"I do," she said, then: "Fuck! Yeah, we gotta get this done real quick. But . . . tell me, though, what kinda sex were you trying not to think about?"

"You—" He began, then grinned and stopped himself. "You just shut your dirty sexy mouth about that." They both laughed. He poked at her lips, with this goofy-ass deliberate lack of precision. Not as if his hands were shaking or anxious, but as if he could barely control his own body. It was hilarious to her. She tried to capture his fingers in her mouth after an instant of that. He evaded her because he didn't want to moan at whatever she'd do upon capture. Because he probably would moan at whatever she did. Because she's sexy mouth lips hot wet, and to him his probable moaning seemed embarrassing. She actually tried to catch his fingers with her mouth, though, and he'd decided to commit to the "I have no muscle control" bit, so while he wanted to keep up the whole gag for a whole minute he had to just quit or she would've captured his digits inside of a few more seconds.

They laughed some more after he gave up the chase. She went to kiss his cheek and stopped herself. She muttered, seemingly to herself, as she pulled back and away, "I'd better not." Then she said, "I thought you were gonna say my 'whore mouth.'"

They smiled. "I almost did," he said.

"Anchorman!" she ejaculated.

"I got it," he said, grinning just like her. "I was gonna say that, then . . . I thought you might take it the wrong way."

She said, "I don't think I would if you said it. Wanna try?"

"Okay. But obviously it has a negative connotation, I don't think I've ever heard someone say it as a positive. Which would be how I meant it. Positively. Anyway. What should I say?"

"Just 'whore,'" she said.

He leaned in and said, "Whore mouth," in a surprisingly dirty way.

She stumbled, hummed in thrill, and steadied herself on his shoulder, looking at the floor. "Honey," she said, breathing consciously. Deep breaths. "You can't surprise me like that." She looked back to him. "With the . . . sexy." Until the last sentence, she hadn't even embellished. Though that last was definitely a bit.

"I'm sorry," he said. So yeah he could influence her, but he didn't have sexual power over her. He told himself not to get full of himself, not to overestimate his prowess or whatever.

Something about the way he apologized was really funny to her. Like he kind of didn't mean it. She laughed.

"So, what were you saying?" Celest said. "That I had to shut my dirty whore mouth?"

"Yes," Rama said as if it were a threat. "Quite."

She laughed. Somehow the very verbally sparse language made it extra-funny to her. "What're you gonna do if I don't?"

"I have some ideas."

Celest laughed, biting her lip, looking between his eyes and lips. "Shit, here I go again. I'm sorry, Rama, I'm not trying to act . . . stupid and randy."

"Austin Powers!" Rama ejaculated.

"What?" she said.

"That's what I was—Never mind," he said. "And there we go again, you should've said. Went. It's my fault too. And you're not stupid, you're awesome. And you're smart; your INT is ten." They both enjoyed his nod-and-wink-knowing repetition of her joke—his callback—which she was pretty sure was a reference to something. Apart from the direct text of it, which was that 10 was the average Intelligence score of humans in the D editions they'd played. They laughed.

She said, "But my Charisma's fourteen."

They both smiled.

"Eighteen," he said. "Sixteen without the tits."

She laughed, really feeling bolstered by the compliment, goofy as it was. She said, "Oh, bless your heart. I mean, cock. I mean heart!" They laughed.

Celest kissed Rama—this time with heavy "we should not fuck right now" love and not "hey let's just take all our clothes off, see what happens" lust.

Rama kissed her back the same way.

XIX

They brought all their things with them and re-cleared the hotel's ground level.

There was a brief moment of tension—a normal zombie that had wandered into the lobby area saw them and roared. Which drew to them three more Z who'd already been in the building's ground floor somehow (they'd cleared it before), and fortunately only one Z from outside.

They thought they were in the clear, then heard banging on one of the sally port fire exit side-doors. They ran to it, and got lucky—they were able to both reach the door and unlock and open it before the zombie could break it. The door was made, almost entirely, of glass, all of which was still intact. Celest had the keys, so Rama handled the stench—another "doesn't feel quite right" general type name; especially not for just the normal, most common type, even given how foul they usually smelled.

He let it lunge at him, and dodged back and threw it into the wall—of the narrow hallway leading to its door—behind him and away from Celest, who was already re-closing the door. Rama had used its momentum against it more than thrown it. He'd done it well enough that the zombie wrecked itself before it could check itself—it slammed into the wall and fell in a heap to the floor, completely losing balance.

It wasn't dead yet, though.

Rama acted quickly, without thinking, and stomped on its head and stunned it before it could turn to resume attacking him. One stomp didn't quite do it so he worked on his footing and balance and stomped again, much harder, and at the weaker side of its skull rather than the tough crown. That was plenty; his booted foot went through the nearer side of its skill and he didn't even feel resistance until his boot's sole reached the far side of its skull. No; that was the floor he felt resisting him, not its skull. He only needed to destroy brains, though, not bones, so he slipped his foot out of the slop he'd reduced the thing's skull and brains to and re-assessed before stomping again.

He wouldn't need to stomp further; it'd ceased all motion and sound, and stayed that way for three-one-thousand seconds.

"Nice!" Celest congratulated.

"Thanks," Rama said. She'd meant what she said, but it seemed wrong somehow. They shouldn't enjoy zombie-killing.

"You've gotten a lot better at zombie-fighting," she said. "Do you remember early on?"

"Breaking weapons, dude?" Rama said in a goofy voice not his own.

They'd been alone together for long enough that that was funny to them—enjoying their dead friends' company, even after those people had ceased to be. Celest and Rama both laughed. There was some pain in the humor. Which helped it hurt less.

"Is that a Chad-Andrew I hear, dude?" Celest said, still laughing with him.

"Yup," he said.

"Ahh. I miss his dudebro levity sometimes."

"Me too."

Andrew had died of sepsis, from infected zombie bites and burns.

Rama used clean portions of the newly-dispatched zombie's tattered clothing to get most of its blood and grey matter off his boot.

XX

They agreed not to clear the hotel's every single room, though they wanted to absolutely clear the place eventually, but they did check any open rooms; plus employee and common areas on the ground level, mostly, and the bar and the restaurant/lounge, and outside behind the hotel because it was enclosed by a surprisingly nice, solid, still-completely-standing privacy fence. There was one zombie out there. Celest snuck up on it.

They learned the place had an indoor pool—glimpsed through largely intact interior windows—but it had a Z in it so they wouldn't be enjoying those facilities, ever, because the water was certainly contaminated. The Z seemed to have climbed in through one of the interior windows—which was mostly broken, remnants below it on the inside. The door was locked so Celest used the housekeeping skeleton key-card; they used a chair as a doorstop in it in case they needed to escape that way quickly. They'd kill the zombie in the pool just to be safe—it was wandering, idling, incredibly slowly in the shallow end . . . but it still might wander out into the lobby by tomorrow sometime. It was late afternoon outside. The Z was in the shallow end, not close to any edges. If they let it see them, or it just happened to turn quickly, it may roar, which could draw in zombies from outside; that noise could go through walls, and the pool room had a ton of large external windows, too. It wasn't a private pool at all. So they stepped back from the pool to strategize.

"We don't have a quiet ranged weapon," Celest said.

"And we don't wanna throw our good mêlée weapons into the pool," Rama said. "How good do you feel about using your throwing knives?"

"Not really. Not good, I mean. But I do like trying," she said, grinning.

He smiled. "Wanna try?"

Celest kept a sheath of several throwing knives in her backpack that she'd bought on Amazon before the apocalypse. Some no-name brand neither of them had ever heard of that seemed randomly generated in Chinese then Google Translated into English then back to Chinese and finally to Esperanto, 12 knives for $18. Six black, six silver. She got their case out and remembered they were actually not knives, but shuriken, specifically kunai, though they couldn't be a true, realistic ninja weapon—they were stainless steel, highly stylized, modern anime kunai, hardly a traditional Japanese peasant's gardening tool repurposed for real ultimate power. Five of her kunai were missing. She remembered using two—throwing practice on a real zombie—but not how she'd lost the others. Perhaps she'd dropped them while Naruto-running.

"Yes I do." Celest set her bag down and dug out the kunai from a side-pouch.

"What do we do if those don't work?" Rama said. Planning ahead, not doubting her. Sometimes things went wrong even if you were flawless.

"I'm definitely gonna hit 'em," she said.

"I don't doubt that," he said, smiling. "I mean like, the blades are a couple inches long, but what if they don't penetrate far enough into the brain to kill?"

She just stared at him, grinning like an idiot. Excited to be a ninja.

"What?" he said.

"'Penetrate,'" she said, fake-chuckling. Then they both actual-giggled. When that died out she shrugged and said, "I dunno. One of us could just . . . jump in." She almost laughed, around 80% joking.

Rama chortled. "It—that seems risky," he said. She winked. "I'm not against it, I just want to avoid that if we can."

"We could wait," she said. "It's heading toward the edge of the pool."

"I'm not that patient," he said. "Besides, I wanna get my dick wet."

"The pool's right there," she said, pointing toward it.

"That's what I had in mind," he said. "It's just not safe shared with the undead."

"Really?" she said.

"No," he said, looking at her lips. "There's a perfectly good mouth much closer to me than the pool." He couldn't resist touching her, grazing her lips with two fingers. Her lips were wonderful.

She smiled. She liked that for about a half-second, until she didn't. "You don't really want—"

"No, not right now!" he said. "I like touching you, but I was kidding about the rest. Did I play it too straight?"

"I guess," she said. "I'm sorry, I ruined your joke." She didn't actually feel bad, but she pouted, cutely pretending as if she did.

"It's fine," he said. "I probably shouldn't make jokes about male imagined-entitlement with somebody I wanna fuck. Or in general."

Celest grinned dimly. Clearly in spite of her own experiences, mostly pre-zompoc. He wished he could've done more, before. Then Celest looked at their pistol, on Rama's right hip. "Can that fire underwater?"

"I dunno," he said. "Not for certain. Maybe once?"

She shrugged.

"It's—" he non-started. "The water should absorb most of the noise. If it even shoots. That's risky, too, though—it's in the shallow end, I'd have to get its head underwater. Which I could, it's just . . . risky."

"Could you get in quietly, and shoot up at it?" she said, gesturing like she meant he should get himself and the gun underwater, kneel, and fire with the pistol aimed upward.

He grimaced. "Yeah, but I—have no confidence that'd work."

"Why not?"

"Guns are meant to go off in open air, right? Earth surface atmosphere. Ten millimeter's supposed to be pretty powerful, excessively so, but I don't know its, like, ballistics. Trajectory. The water might slow it down so much it won't kill. Or maybe it doesn't but it redirects the bullets and I miss. Or maybe the thing won't even go off underwater."

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

"They must have pool-cleaning stuff, right?" she said.

"Probably," he said.

"Maybe they have one of those nets with a really long pole. If that's metal it might work as a weapon."

" . . . Let's go check. If we can without the zed seeing us," he suggested.

They checked. The pool room was an echo chamber, so they moved slowly to be sure the Z wouldn't hear them. The Z was heading toward the pool's shallow end's edge, which was to the right of the one door in or out (except for the solid metal exterior fire exit, or the one? broken window), so they could walk right in without the Z seeing them. So they did that, slowly enough for their footstep noises not to carry. They were both too anxious, until they entered the pool room for this, to go in far enough to look around and see if any of the room's other windows were broken. One other was, but it was a small hole and up high. Maybe a bird had crashed through it.

There was a utility room. No one inside of it, fortunately. Its two fluorescent tubes worked like new. The room looked like it'd been untouched since before the apocalypse, like their bedroom upstairs. Except dusty, and sort of sticky from the room's humidity. And it smelled like chlorine even more strongly than the pool room proper did. The room wasn't in good order, but there was no random detritus or shit stains or soiled clothes or blood or corpses. There were three long poles, two bearing nets, on hooks on the far wall.

"Why would they need these inside?" Celest said. They both whispered. "There won't be any leaves."

"This place has a full bar," Rama said. "Drunk people do stupid shit. Maybe somebody leaves something in the water, and somebody else asks an employee to get it out instead'a doing it their self. Employee wants to get it out without changing into a swimsuit."

"That's pretty convoluted."

"I don't know why they'd have three. Probably some kinda minor tax scam," he said. He looked straight at her. "You've clearly never worked in retail."

Celest began to laugh, and covered her mouth quickly with both hands even more quickly than Rama did—they both did the same thing, except she felt the laugh coming. She looked at his hands over hers and raised an eyebrow. Neither of them were sure if enough noise got out for the zombie to hear her laughter. Zombies seemed to find laughter more offensive than general noises living humans made, like speaking or running. It was far enough away that they should be fine, but the pool room's walls could've bounced her cut-off laugh around enough for it to have reached the Z's disgusting ears clearly.

Rama peeked out at the zombie first. It was still facing away from them, and still ambling toward the pool's opposite edge. No changes to its behavior. He looked back to Celest and gave her a thumbs-up.

One netted pole was some kind of hard plastic, but the other two poles in general were metal. Very light metal, though, probably aluminum or some weird synthetic composite / polymer or whatever. One metal pole was fixed-length and had a net; the other could telescope and had no net.

"I'm thinking this one." Celest said of the fixed-length one. The collapsible one looked pretty cheap, like it wouldn't take much of an impact, say during zombie-fighting. The fixed-length pole was around eight feet long. Maybe enough to reach the Z from one or two sides of the pool. It had no net on it. They inspected the pole's edges.

"This isn't sharp," Rama said of one end.

"My end isn't either," Celest said.

"Ah, fuckin' hell. Wanna just try your knives?" Rama said.

"Kunai," Celest corrected.

"What'd I say?" he said.

"Knives," she said.

"Oh."

"Yeah, let's try it."

"I'll bring the pole in case it doesn't go well," he said. "Worst-case scenario: I guess one of us could just drop all our stuff and dive at it with a knife. We'd kinda have to hit, though."

"Is this . . . too much work?" Celest said.

"We've already wasted a lot of makeout time on it," Rama said. She smiled, being reminded that he wanted to do that with her too. "Let's see how the kunai goes. Go. If it's about to roar I'll dive on it, or something."

Celestina's first throw was a hit, but the kunai hit too low, in the zombie's neck. And the ring in the kunai's pommel hit the Z, instead of the blade end. Shit! I shoulda tied a rope to it, she thought as the kunai bounced off the Z—as she watched her silver blade sink to the pool's bottom.

The Z didn't seem to notice it'd been struck.

Celest's second throw immediately killed the pool Z. The blade-end of a black kunai plunged into the zombie's right temple so deeply that, as it fell, all Rama could see of his lady's kunai was its pommel ring, its opposite end. They both heard the kunai hit. The zombie halted movement.

"Huh," Rama said.

"That was easy," Celest said.

The zombie slumped quietly down into the water.

Rama said: "Great throw."

Celest said: "Thank you, baby."

"Wanna go enjoy the jacuzzi?" Rama said.

She giggled, like "ain't no chance it's clean."

The jacuzzi looked clean: no zombies or their parts or blood in it. They considered it.

"We're definitely using that," Celest said.

"Okay," Rama said.

"Do you think it's really clean? It looks clean."

"Probably not," Rama said. "We can't trust that, or risk infection. We can't be sure of it without dumping a ton of bleach in and running it for a while."

"Well, how about this," Celest said: "Let's do that, but just to be safe: we can make out in it, but not fuck."

"Okay," Rama said. "Well. What is 'fuck?'"

Celest laughed. She had to hesitate to resist making the stupid-obvious "when two people love each other . . . " joke. That would've been pretty hackneyed. He might be disappointed with her; they were both cleverer than that. They had at least a few original things to say. She'd rather talk about fucking in some detail than pretend he was clueless or whatever, so she said: "Penetration of my pussy, with anything. Or underwater orgasms."

"Okay," Rama said.

"Something that would let water get inside of us," Celest said. "Probably-contaminated water."

XXI

For now there weren't any other Z on the ground level, short of them checking every guest room to be sure. They agreed that if they stayed here tomorrow they'd start clearing the whole place. They'd probably sleep here, in their suite, but that wasn't guaranteed—things could always go wrong in here somehow. They wanted to loot the entire place. It seemed unlikely, but there could be something good in here. Even if there wasn't, it could be a relatively safe place to sleep. Better than a single-story ranch-style house all on ground level.

They locked all the exterior doors, including a few sets of still-working automatic double-doors; the main entrance had two layers of them. It seemed like it should be much harder than it was, locking those.

The whole ground floor was a problem, really—tons of glass. Transparent glass, too. Almost anywhere was a new-entrance-waiting-to-happen. They barricaded the main entry doors—the outer layer—somewhat with tables and chairs from the restaurant and bar area. There were a lot of windows in the common areas.

They tested the elevator with caution. They took out a short Anvil prybar they kept for use as a tool and figured out how to force the elevator shaft's doors open, as well as the elevator carriage's inner doors. There was a maintenance access hatch in the carriage's ceiling, out onto the top of the cabin, which would've taken some work to reach, annoyingly. Ultimately they decided hell with it, and Rama just gave Celest the gun in case he got stuck, and Rama tried riding the elevator like normal to their (second) floor.

It just worked. Which surprised both of them. It worked well—Rama was out on 2F before Celest got there, running from the right hall trying to beat him.

"I forgot what riding elevators felt like," Rama told her when they regrouped.

Celest grinned.

So they emergency-stopped it on 2F, and then to keep all the elevator doors stuck open and block the elevator from going up or down, they got a couch from the nearest room—which they'd first had to re-clear—and put it so it blocked both doorways. The room was trashed like someone had lived in there for a few weeks or even months and never really cleaned up nor cared if it stank. They'd found another similar state of decay in a room by theirs earlier. No Z or living people, though there was a corpse, shot in the head once. They didn't find a gun in the room. The body was decomposed enough that Celest and Rama weren't sure if they'd died human and stayed that way or died and reanimated and then got shot.

XXII

They re-cleared 2F. Not every room, only hallways and open rooms, of which there was one. All the furniture in room 231 was gone. It was a much more basic room than Celest and Rama's. Their room—maybe "suite" or "studio" was more accurate—had a cramped but full kitchen (maybe it would be called a kitchenette?), a closet, a refrigerator and a dishwasher, but 231 was just two beds and a bathroom, a small desk, and a spot for maybe a small couch. (Every room had an HDTV.) Still comfortable, just fewer amenities, less spacious. They re-cleared the rooms around theirs, and then cleared two more rooms in each direction: to the left and right of their room on the same side of the hall, and the room directly across the hall plus the rooms to its left and right. They did that out of consideration for noise they'd make later: Celest said to Rama, "Because I plan on making you say my name."

Rama liked that. He hoped he'd want to go along with whatever she had in mind. He felt anxious that she'd be super-into something he'd never even tried before. He hoped he could give / bring her to at least one super-awesome orgasm, that she'd let him and feel comfortable enough to reach climax with him and allow herself to, and that she'd want to. She'd been rather loud one time when they'd done some dry-humping while making out. He'd been grinding against her pussy, with both of them fully-clothed. He wondered if she now remembered how loud she'd been back then during orgasm for . . . maybe 15 seconds? Thirty? Not all constantly, but intermittently as waves of pleasure (muscle spasms) hit her. It had probably been two months since then, in a library. She'd pretty much fallen asleep after she came, leaving him to go fight a few zombies her nut summoned, which was incredibly awkward to do with a raging boner, and also absolutely worth it.

XXIII

Rama set down his backpack, then took off their gunbelt and was setting it down as Celestina said: "Rama, I'm really fuckin' hungry."

He turned to say something, but by the time he saw her again he'd forgotten whatever he was going to say and noticed that he felt awfully hungry too. The sun was on its way down, for sure, and they hadn't had lunch. It'd been . . . what, late morning?, when they decided to check out these two near-neighboring hotels; they hadn't eaten since before then.

"Shitfire, me too," Rama said. "Wanna go check the kitchen for food?"

"Good idea."

Gunbelt and backpack went back on.

They couldn't even tell where the kitchen was, so they checked several "associates only" doors on the ground floor. They found a big industrial washroom first, then the kitchen. Kind of small. Not labeled "kitchen."

The kitchen wasn't as nice as they'd expected, but it was still well-equipped and devoid of people living or dead, which was better than either populated or completely trashed, or both like most places were now. It looked like nobody'd thought to loot this place yet. Or had, but hadn't taken the time to find a housekeeping access key or the unmarked kitchen. All the kitchen had was breakfast stuff, and Celest and Rama were both so hungry they didn't want to cook anything. The place had days of food in the form of continental breakfast fixins, though; maybe even weeks, for just the two of them. They settled on cereal in sealed, 2.1-ounce plastic cups; Celest chose Frosted Flakes. Rama wanted Cinnamon Toast Crunch and therefore chose Multigrain Cheerios.

There was sort of a convenience store-refrigerated vending area in the main lobby, but that was all so picked-through there was nothing left. Still powered, though.

They checked through large milk cartons in the kitchen for a while—the process was gross—trying to find one that hadn't definitely gone bad. Eventually they found one toward the back of an industrial fridge, unopened, whose expiration date would only have been around a month ago and cracked it open—it was the best candidate. Rama was starting to consider substituting with water or something from the place's bar (maybe a jägerbomb? scotch? whiskey? vodka?) when Celest wafted this one and didn't get a disgusted look on her face.

XXIV

They hadn't planned ahead well, so they couldn't take the elevator back up, so right before Celest began to pour milk into her tiny, now open plastic cereal bowl Rama stopped her gently and said, "Don't; stairs."

"What?" Celest said, complying.

Rama said, "We hafta take stairs. I'll just carry the milk."

Celest stared at him blankly, then said, "Good idea."

After that she took a couple of muffins for both of them, a chocolate éclair for herself, and a tiny mango juice bottle and a pineapple strudel for Rama. He would've guessed that and why those last two were for him even if she'd been nonchalant about it (that may have been more exciting?), but when she chose them she gave him this loaded look, and then tried to act normal. He knew what they were because he'd noticed both before she chose them. It seemed to him like probably not a large enough amount of either fruit to make a difference, but eh, didn't hurt to try. Both fruits tasted good to him. And she clearly wanted / expected him to consume both. He couldn't actually see what she'd taken, so for all she knew, he didn't know what the look was; he was busy carrying spoons, napkins, their cereal bowls and the milk carton.

"What'd you just get?" he said, off her look. He was curious how she'd respond. Mostly he hoped to hear her say the word "cum."

"Nothing," she jokingly-obviously-lied, grinning. The place's real fruit was all frozen solid. She began the journey back to their room.

He caught up and acted like he didn't know what she'd taken—he saw her éclair ("Good choice," he'd commented) and orange juice before he looked away. Then she'd asked if he wanted any dessert snacks, he'd said sure, she'd said what?, and he'd been asking "What do they have?" when she'd clearly gotten inspired by something and furtively took two more small things. Now that he could see the snacks and drinks she was carrying he couldn't read the labels of the stuff he didn't recognize—she sped up her walk as he caught up (which was lovely on its own; she giggled, and he got to watch her ass-in-jeans wiggle)—and also couldn't tell what she'd taken for him. If he hadn't already known what she took for him, all he'd know now was that one was juice but not OJ, and the other was a snack.

"What'd you get me?" he said, jokingly nudging her and trying to look. She had the stuff in both her hands. They speed-walked (her trying not to let him see what she got, him pretending to chase) down a hallway of rooms to one of the lush, somehow clean, spacious stairwells at the far ends of the hotel's two wings. They'd blocked those less rigorously than the main entry, and left one unlocked for this purpose. Celest had the actual keys, and Rama had the skeleton key-card. If anything attacked they could just run, or drop their late lunch/early dinner and run more easily.

"It's a surprise," she teased, smiling at him, trying not to let him see the things for him she was carrying.

"I don't like food surprises," he said.

"You'll like this," she said. "Trust me."

"I only trust you as far as I can throw you, which is maybe ten feet. Laterally." She was laughing quietly by then. "I dunno how to translate imperial distance into trust, though; it's . . . kind of immaterial."

She giggled. "I think you could throw me farther than that. But . . . how about I just stay within ten feet of you?" she said.

"Please do," he said.

She smiled and stood as close to him as she could, without letting him see his food surprise. Naughty minx. As if he wouldn't notice what it was when he opened the packaging and consumed it. Unless she wanted to feed it to him. Not a kink of his, but maybe it was one of hers. Could be fun.

They got to the stairwell, and had to go single file. Wide staircase, narrow doorways. Celest opened the door inward awkwardly: she used her single spare finger, then rolled her whole body around the door. She held it open for Rama with her ass. He liked that, though at his angle he really couldn't see that part of her.

"Thank you," he said, meaning allowing him to see her stuck-out ass, not the door.

"Uh-huh," she said. She knew what he meant.

"I should've brought a spare bag for this stuff," he said. "I really wanna put an arm around you."

"Well damn, I'd love that," she said. "You're right. I didn't think of it either. I like when you touch me."

"Good," he said. "I like when you touch me, too. I should really ask you about that more often. I pretty much always wanna be touching you."

She liked that. "Well then we have no excuse," she said. "I pretty much always want you to be touching me. So . . . "

"That sounds a lot like consent," he said.

"It is," she said, smiling. She noticed they were standing by a door for them to lock it and she had the keys. In a pants pocket. She thrust all their food things at him—"Take this."

He did, though he wouldn't be able to run with it all. He had to awkwardly close his arms to keep their breakfast from falling out. He must've looked uncomfortable.

"Sorry," she said, with her free hands getting the big keyring out, making sure the interior stairwell door closed properly, and then locking in the deadbolt. "I gotta do this again upstairs," she added, meaning, "please keep carrying our entire meal."

He nodded. "It's fine."

They walked up the stairs. As he climbed, he again pretended that he was trying figure out what Celest had gotten him. He'd seen the kitchen's few juice options, he knew, but even now his instincts told him his lovely girlfriend would distinctly not want to taste or play with his cum, there was just no way she'd be at all into that . . . but that was hardly proof of anything, and even if it were true that wouldn't preclude her from having read about such. He clearly recognized the word "mango" on a wrapper. The first "make your cum taste better" fruit he always thought of. He hadn't even thought about base or alkaline vs. acidic, etc. detailed chemical sexual health stuff since before the apocalypse, back when he was wondering when he and Celestina would have sex, as opposed to if, and wondering if she was even still attracted to him like that. So . . . huh. He couldn't deny that she was certainly not ruling out cum-play. Well, no, they hadn't explicitly talked about it. But she hadn't ruled it out yet, which was exciting to him for several reasons, mainly because it seemed her thinking was beyond whether they'd have sex and now into inspired, relatively specific things they might do, like the taste of his semen. It was hardly a promise, but it also seemed to suggest fellatio—

Rama bumped into Celest, by accident, but he stopped himself quickly enough not to smash or drop any of their breakfast. They both had good instincts now. She'd halted. And he'd been too busy thinking about sex and getting a partial chubby to notice.

"What?" he whispered. She'd paused on the inside of the door, before stepping back into their floor's hallway. He went into alert! mode. Got ready to drop breakfast (which should be fine so long as he didn't trample any of it, and tried to keep the opened milk container in hand), and draw their gun or one of his mêlée weapons—a knife or a metal baseball bat, probably—or run.

She pushed the door—unlocked—open, saying, "Oh, nothing. You were just so quiet I wanted to make sure you were still there." She grinned.

He did too. "I was just thinking really hard."

"Yeah?" What about?" she said. She was curious, but her tone implied that either he must've been thinking about sex, or that she wanted him to have been thinking about sex.

She went through the door and held it open for him.

"Nothing," he said, lying badly for comedic effect. He stepped through the doorway. "Thank you."

"You can't think hard about nothing!" she joke-scolded. And locked the door behind them.

They resumed walking to their room.

"Don't tell me what I can't do!" he said, also joking.

"Fine," she said, sticking with the bit. Then she broke character: "Want me to take that back?" She gestured at breakfast.

"Nah, I'm good," he said. "And, okay, I'll admit it: I was tryin' to figure out why boobs are so good."

"That's a deep mystery," she said, in a melodramatic voice with much gravitas.

They laughed.

They reached their room. "Oh shit I have the key card," he blurted out.

"Which pocket?"

He had to think—he mostly went by feel, not words. "Right cheek." Words took too long when you got stuck fighting for your life.

She giggled. "Is it okay if I get it?" she asked, sincerely. She sounded surprisingly hesitant.

"Please do," he said, feeling embarrassed at his lack of forethought. He turned so she wouldn't have to. "It'll be quicker than an alternative, and I'm really hungry."

She leaned down, which wasn't necessary, and couldn't resist groping both cheeks of his ass. He tried not to flex. Or fart. Or let himself enjoy it too much. Overall, he was so self-conscious he scarcely felt her touch.

"God you have a cute butt," she said, examining it.

"Thanks," he said. His stomach growled. "I remind you, right cheek."

"I didn't forget," she said, fondling the wrong cheek. She hummed . . . something, enjoying herself. Then she unbuttoned the correct pocket and got the card. She left a parting shot: she lightly bit at his left ass cheek before she stood back up. Part of him flinched at that. He wasn't sure what part. He almost dropped a muffin.

He hadn't received much buttplay, though he appreciated her attention, especially that she was comfortable involving her mouth even in goofy teasing pre-foreplay. If she wanted to do more stuff like that, he'd try it. He wasn't sure if he'd be comfortable with letting her put anything inside of his ass, though, her fingers or otherwise. He'd done his best to wash the area while showering, but he really hadn't expected her to get even that close to his asshole with her mouth, and they hadn't seen any bidets or bidet-like features in any of the place's toilets.

Celest stood back up smiling.

He thought best to acknowledge her action: he said, "I liked that. Especially getting attention from you. And affection." He felt like he'd—however inadvertently—downplayed his enjoyment too much during the act. He hadn't allowed himself to enjoy it at all. He hoped she could feel him liking it emotionally, if not allowing himself to physically, despite self-consciousness.

"Good," she said. Smiling. She swiped their door unlocked. "You know it doesn't make you gay, right?"

They re-entered their suite.

"If my butt's touched by a woman?" he said, setting the whole heap down along the kitchen's counter. He put the milk in their fridge, which was still working, as soon as he could do it without dropping anything else.

"Right. One-hundred per cent not-gay."

He didn't care, but felt like he had to try to add to the joke as if he was concerned whether any thing he did with a woman could somehow make him gay: "Even if I like it?" He spoke quietly.

She giggled. "Even if you like it," she exaggeratedly assured, nodding too much.

"Good," he said.

"Still not gay," she said. Then she tried her Hulk Hogan voice, which was pretty good: "Hell yeah, brother, butt stuff."

He chuckled. She smiled. "I don't care if it is gay, it's stuff I'll do with you," he said. "Or . . . There might be something I don't wanna try, but generally, if you want to try something with me, I'm probably down to try it."

She grinned, loving him. "Good. Cool."

They sorted their meals out. He noticed her putting the mango and pineapple items deliberately in his grouping. He said nothing.

As they did Rama said, "After we eat, know what we should do?"

"Reverse cowgirl?" Celest said.

"Yes, but—Damn." He smiled. She laughed, excited. "Yes, but I meant about something else."

Celest knew he hadn't meant sex. "What else is there?"

They giggled. "I completely forgot there are two more stories in this piece," he said, pointing upward. "We should clear those out before we really settle down and watch TV. The halls, at least."

Celest was disappointed—she'd forgotten too.

"You're right," she said. "Four floors. We gotta eat first, though."

"Right," he agreed.

XXV

They sat on the edge of the bed to eat, needlessly close to one another. Rama's entire left leg ran along Celest's right leg, in close contact. To some extent that was habit / custom / standard practice for them, though—they'd been like that for . . . weeks? Months?

Rama devoured his cum-taste-improvement morsels (they couldn't be enough to make an appreciable difference—but whatever, anything to help his lady get more comfortable) without comment. He saw her watching, though.

Rama dragged a nightstand in front of them to use as a coffee table. Neither of them drank coffee regularly anymore—too rare, too much work. Caffeinated drinks, or the extreme energy drinks, were far more common. Early on after the apocalypse coffee was probably far more common, but people had used most of it up now. At least, in their experience. The room had a "breakfast in bed" lap tray, but it wouldn't work well for both of them at once; too short.

As Rama dragged the nightstand close, Celest turned the TV on and looked for something to watch.

"Will you pour my milk for me, please?" she asked him.

He almost grabbed his crotch and said "I got'cher milk right here!" And he knew what she meant, but got another joke-impulse and went for it: "You're not lactating, are you?" In retrospect both jokes seemed pretty un-funny.

She must've known she wasn't, but for whatever reason she put her hands on her boobs anyway, somewhat defensively, in the second it took her to fully process what he'd said. Or maybe it didn't take her any time to process, and she was joking the whole time. She laughed, surprised. "No, honey, I'm not," she answered casually.

"Oh, okay," he said, feigning disappointment. She giggled. He still regretted making that joke. Shoulda gone with the Breaking Bad reference, he thought. He retrieved their milk from the fridge and poured some of it into their cereal—she stayed on the bed, and he was by the fridge, though she was watching him. He was conservative with the milk—it folded open, didn't have a cap to reseal it between uses—and even then she made a goofy, tiny hiss noise like he'd used too much.

"So, there are two shows DVR'd," she told him. "You'll never guess what they are."

"NYPD Blue?"

"No."

"Dr. Pimple-Popper?"

"No. Good idea, though."

Everything but their cereal bowls was already on their makeshift coffee table. Rama put a spoon in each tiny cereal bowl. "Night Court?"

"Nope."

"Uh . . . The Office?"

"No," Celest said. "You give up. It's Adventure Time and Star Trek: The Next Generation."

He brought both their bowls to the bed.

"Thank you, baby," she said, taking hers in both hands. She held the TV's remote between ring and pinky finger.

"You're welcome," he said.

"I'm thinking Star Trek first. Are you okay with that?"

"Sure," he said.

She took a big bite of cereal with a nice-looking metal spoon—their room came stocked with silverware. Or, stainless steel-ware, really. It was all clean. Which was astonishing to Rama. Celest checked what episode(s) of TNG was on the TV: it turned out to be a two-parter, but they only had about 20 minutes out of approximately 60 of the first part. And all of the second part. Which struck Rama as odd. The recordings were from BBC America, of course, as the system's metadata told them. The actual episodes' content were really only about 40 minutes long, Celest told Rama.

"They probably started one near the end, then had to go sightseeing, so they set the rest to record," Celest said.

"Okay," Rama said, eating cereal. "That . . . completely explains it."

"Yeah, I'm smart," she said, looking at him. Then she joked further, "How could you not be super-interested in this?"

He shrugged, grinning. She noticed he was interested, though perhaps not so much as her. "I never really tried Star Trek; I'm not invested."

"Well I am," she said.

"I know," he said. He recalled seeing a lot of Star Trek DVDs in her bedroom back home, when they'd had homes—TV series and movies. Presumably videogames too. And, y'know, parents and friends who weren't dead.

"Are you sure you don't mind watching TNG with me?"

"I'm happy to!" he said. "I've always wanted to. I thought you knew that. I'm sorry if my joking made me not seem interested. I'm . . . excited to watch Star Trek with you, babe. I thought I'd never get to."

She was very happy to hear that. "Okay. So this is from later in the series, the seventh season—"

"I don't wanna know!" he said. "I don't know anything. I think I should just try it out-of-context. Because like, no matter how much exposition you give me, I still won't really have context. Not like you do."

She pondered that. "Huh." She seemed satisfied. "I wanted to be mad at you, but that's a cool way to consume media—just jump right in. Uh . . . just know that it's kinda stuffy and cheesy; low-budget. I'll provide live commentary for some things, okay?"

"Sure," he said. "I'd like that."

"And not all the time, but feel free to ask me anything," Celest said. "I guess all you need to know is . . . humans have solved all their problems in the future. And Picard, the bald guy, is the Enterprise's captain."

"Okay," he said. "I want to ask a question, but it would be inconsistent of me to ask for stuff now."

She evaluated that. "No, it's okay." She smiled, enjoying his sincere engagement. "As long as you're genuinely taking interest."

"I am," he said. "Or . . . I am, but I can't tell if I'm just lying about it to myself?"

"No," she said.

"I mean, I'm sure you'll be able to tell. So call me out if I'm being fake."

"Okay."

"So—the Enterprise is the Star Trek ship, right?"

"Yeah," she said. "It's kind of . . . there are different versions of it throughout. The ship in the original series in the sixties had the same name."

"Okay," he said. "I should stop asking things, I'm sorry, I'm just anxious. I don't wanna do it wrong, for you."

She smiled. "It's not wrong unless you don't like it." He laughed; she tried to keep an otherwise straight, haughty face, but it cracked then. It was fun.

Celest set her cereal down, and kissed Rama. He very carefully held his cereal in one hand so he could use his other arm to hold her; they embraced each other at the same instant. He hadn't even thought that was why she was setting hers down, he just decided "I need to hold my lady" and moved his and balanced well. He kissed her back and looked into her eyes, for a second or two. He needed to only do that for a moment. He stroked her hair.

"I love you," she told him. Surprisingly vulnerable.

"I love you too."

They started the episode.

XXVI

Commercials first. Because of course.

"Dammit," Rama said.

"I have a plan," Celest said.

"Yeah?" he said, watching for the commercials to stop.

"Yeah," she said. "If we ever go back to my house, we'll get my TNG DVDs, of the whole series, and we can watch them all. And DS9."

The "watch them all" sounded a lot like a threat. Or maybe a tolerance test. If it was with Celest he wanted to do it, though; he'd enjoy it. As long as he got to hold her. He smiled with anticipation.

"Is that another show?"

"Yeah, Deep Space 9," she said. "It's a space station."

"Is 'The Next Gen' a ship's name?" he said.

"No," she said.

"Why's that the title?"

"I dunno," Celest said. "Weird development history. To differentiate it, I guess? Apparently in the eighties and nineties it was mostly angel shows."

Rama laughed.

The commercials ended.

Rama enjoyed Celest's company and got into the show. As best he could tell, this particular two-parter was . . . fine. It was about Klingons, who seemed too brutal to know interstellar travel, or science, or vehicles in general.

Occasionally, his lady explained things.

For Celest, she'd wished it was a better or more noteworthy two-parter or just a single episode, like maybe "The Best of Both Worlds" (season 3 finale/season 4 premiere) or "Q Who" or "The Inner Light" or "The Measure of a Man" or "Who Watches the Watchers?"—she wanted her loving, open-minded boyfriend to see how good TNG could be early on so he'd eventually want to endure all seven seasons of it with her, in order. And he might not want to do that if the first episode he saw was "Code of Honor," or really anything from season one. But they had "Redemption." Celest always liked learning Klingon culture stuff, but usually found Klingon politics episodes dull.

XXVII

During one of the commercial breaks while Celest fast-forwarded (they didn't think to the first time; the second time they decided to try it for nostalgia, but several months hadn't been enough time for either of them to stop hating commercials), Rama said, "I recognize that guy Gowron from memes."

Celest giggled, chewing a spoonful of cereal. "I probably sent you a few of those." Somehow that she spoke at all with food in her mouth was funny. She looked away from him so he wouldn't see in.

"I believe you did," Rama said, smiling with her.

She kissed him on the cheek. "Thanks for watching TNG with me."

"You're welcome," he said. He wanted to lean into her and kiss her back but he suspected he'd spill his cereal and milk. "I'm happy to watch something with you. We really should've tried this sometime in that one study lounge area, underground—under A-building, I think—"

"Oh yeah! I remember that place!" Celest said. "At the college. That's a good idea." She paused, thinking. "I never even thought to do that. I guess I just always assumed dudebro kids would be wasting all the space in there playing Call of . . . Battlefield or whatever."

"That's not a real title," Rama fake-muttered as if he gave a shit. Though he did know better.

"What?" She played along, obviously joking, and pretending she minded being corrected. She'd played some games, but she never got into first-person shooters. She played mostly Star Trek games and real-time strategy. She'd never considered herself or Rama to be gamers. They'd played some Halo 1 Anniversary together, and a couple other games, and enjoyed it, but usually thought of better things to do, like making out, or watching TV (together for the first time) or movies, and making out while watching TV or movies, and making out.

"You're conflating Call of Duty and Battlefield," Rama said. "I think?" She laughed. "Which is fair, by the way, they all deserve it—they're the same shit: two gigantic undead staid rote corporate money-printing franchises."

She shrugged at him with a look of question in her eyes, like, "what's the difference."

"A YouTuber I like called them the Call of Duty mines." She laughed. "Something like that. I dunno," he said. "It was just gonna bug me if I didn't explain that, for . . . no reason."

"Shut up and eat your breakfast."

They laughed.

He did. He regretted waiting two seconds, trying to resist making some kind of joke about eating her pussy instead.

"You're cute when you talk about games," she said.

"Thanks." He chortled. "I remember people playing a lot of Street Fighter and Smash Bros there too."

Celest smiled and kissed him, with closed lips and prudent caution because she was between bites of cereal but hadn't finished chewing the last one. She really wanted to say some double entendre about "You better smash my bros," or "I'll smash your bros," but everything she came up with seemed too stupid so she just let the undeveloped idea go. She dimly recalled: "Didn't we watch something Star Trek at my parents' house? Once?"

"We did," he said. "I think it was one of the movies."

She frowned, nodding. "We waited too long to tell our parents," she said. "We could've gotten a couple seasons into TNG before all this shit happened." She frowned at that, but also because, as he knew, she hated all the Star Trek movies except the first two. He'd only watched the recent rebootquel one with her, and he hadn't cared for it.

"Yeah."

"I shouldn't have tried to get you hooked with the movies," she said.

"I'll take your word for it," he said. "Do you remember what we watched after that?"

"No," Celest said. "Didn't we just . . . make out?"

They smiled. Rama's cereal and milk level was low enough—and he wasn't chewing—that he risked leaning to kiss her on her cheek. Really her jawline, low. She smiled at him afterward.

"We did eventually," he said. "But we started watching an episode of Doctor Who first."

"Oh. Nice," she said, happy he remembered. Now that he said it, she did too. "Do you remember what episode?"

"No," he said. "I know . . . something underground."

"Which Doctor was it?"

Rama shrugged. "Not Tennant."

Celest snapped her fingers. "Was it my idea? To watch Doctor Who?"

"Yeah," he said. He'd always generally liked sci-fi but he'd instinctively avoided franchises of any kind or genre after he saw the original The Matrix trilogy. "We were a few minutes—I think—in before you could clearly no longer resist my animal magnetism."

Celest giggled. Which was ridiculously adorable. Even her nose was cute. "I got your animal magnetism right here!" she said, grabbing his dick a little too forcefully. He still liked the attention. And it was actually funny. And thirsty. They laughed. She didn't let it go right away. Then she relaxed her hold, hesitated, and removed her hand. "Sorry," she said. "I think I committed to that bit too much."

"It's all right," Rama said, kissing her high on the cheek this time. "I don't mind the contact. Just . . . don't start somethin' you can't finish."

Celest bit her lip, grinning deviously at him. "Shut up and watch Star Trek," she said, and giggled, jokingly dismissive.

He chuckled. She watched him. She looked really happy. Even her eyes were smiling. He hadn't seen that much in the last few months. He was delighted to see it now.

"Can we rewind?" he said. "I missed some things."

"Oh shit," she said. She'd forgotten about actually watching the show. Too excited to be sharing it with him, and then she'd touched dick and forgotten most things.

She rewound until the previous commercial break. She pressed play, accidentally, about five seconds before the last commercial ended.

Rama ate his entire pineapple pastry and drank all of his mango juice. He liked both flavors anyway, but he made extra-sure to devour them for his lady. He didn't think about it too much and tried not to notice her watching him drink the juice. It was a small bottle, it didn't last long. Celest ate her whole meal too. She often didn't finish meals; part of him usually suspected she was trying to do some womanly modest thing her mother probably taught her, but sometimes she really seemed to have a bird-sized appetite. Neither thing made any sense to him. He merely tried not to over-eat so he wouldn't get sluggish.

They finished eating before they reached part two of "Redemption," so they decided to take a break to clear out at least the common areas of the rest of the hotel above them.

XXVIII

It didn't even go wrong. But it nearly did.

As they walked up the hotel's opposite-far side nice stairwell, one normal zombie above saw them before they saw it . . . but zombies didn't think, so instead of waiting to ambush them or coming around and down at them, it just charged straight toward them—directly over the banister in front of it. Celest and Rama learned of its presence then. Both of them saw it land on its head. It was an insta-paralysis, though—not the insta-own-goal it looked like; it wasn't dead, it just couldn't move anything below its neck. Before it figured out how to ambulate without limbs—Well, no, "ambulate" means walk, Celest thought . . . Before it figured out locomotion without usable limbs, Celest walked down to it—below them, where it landed—and stomped its head in. Her boots made that easy.

"'And thus, the weapon not being damaged by use, its bluntness remains perfect,'" Rama complimented.

Celest took a deep breath, calming herself, then noticed what Rama said; she looked satisfied and confused at once. She also giggled. "Is that from a movie?" she said.

"I think it's from The Art of War," Rama said. "It was written about blades, but we both wisely use blunt weapons, so I adapted it. Giles translation, of course."

"Naturally," she said, smiling at him. She found nothing about The Art of War compelling and had never got all the way through any translation of it, but she did like when he quoted things. Poetry might be more romantic, but quoting a text about war was downright Klingon of him, and she liked Star Trek more than any poetry. She wondered if that's why he quoted the Sun Tzu. No, it was more fun to be uncertain.

There was only one zombie anywhere else on 3F, and it was supine. They did that sometimes. Celest looked from it to Rama like "Take 'em," so he did; he ran up to it—at some speed, in case it magically sensed that he was near even while he was out of its view and completely silent in his advance (Z sometimes had extrasensory perception)—so he'd still get to it before it could rise and attack him, and he axe-kicked it, which collapsed its face but not its entire skull cavity. It gurgled blood and began trying to sloppily rise, caught totally by surprise. One straightforward stomp finished the job.

Rama looked around in case any other zombies had spawned nearby since he got there, but none had; the only change in the environment was his lover giving him a big, goofy thumbs-up.

XXIX

4F almost went bad very quickly, but commensurate very fast thinking saw them through it safely. The hotel's stairwells were only on the extreme far sides, opposite ends of the hotel; only the two elevators were right in the middle, and they weren't using those, so Celest and Rama had to choose to ascend by the left or right. They chose right, and looked and listened carefully once they stepped out into 4F, but it was empty all the way down to the far wall (near which the other stairwell would be)—4F, or at least its central corridor, was devoid of undeath, as far as they could tell. Lights on, clean. No blood trails or refuse anywhere. Nothing animate. Arbitrarily, they checked the rooms on their right side first this time. And they didn't hear or see a special zombie—a screamer—stumble out from a room with its door ripped off, far down on the left side (from Celest and Rama's perspective). They hadn't seen any doors missing because of their forced perspective—the missing door was at so high an angle, so far away from their stairwell, they couldn't see it at all—and because they'd coincidentally chosen to approach from the opposite end of the hotel. Rama, fortunately, heard its gaspy raspy breathing before either of them saw it, and because—like Celest—he'd already experienced situations that'd gone horribly wrong due to just one scream from just one screamer, he recognized the sound of wind this type made when sucking in air to make an extremely loud, unholy screech, and, so recognizing it, he felt fear—for Celestina, not even himself—and ran toward it at full speed without thinking. He even dropped his backpack on the way to move more quickly, which seemed smart in the moment and sort of dumb after because it made a little noise of its own falling (though nothing compared to a screamer's scream). The screamer was far from both of them, almost all the way on the opposite end of the corridor. But Rama had recognized it when he first heard it breathe, before it spotted them, so he was already sprinting and backpack-less when it bowed over and started sucking in huge amounts of air to scream. He had maybe three seconds to stop it.

He wouldn't be able to kill it, outright, fast enough, so he dive-tackled it into the floor. Not onto, but into; he hoped that force alone might kill it and tried to make it land on its head. He'd fought screamers in mêlée range enough to know that if you knocked them over they wouldn't or couldn't scream until they got back up to their feet. For whatever reason. Metaphysical fairness, he assumed. Rama really should've just fucking shot the thing, but his instincts hadn't weighed his options, and if they had, first: he wouldn't have stopped it from screaming, and second: he would've wished he'd run at it anyway because this way at least had a chance of being quiet. (And third, the panic-fear would've fucked up his aim.) It was relatively safe to get close to a screamer, anyway, the pale-with-death armless things had no teeth; the only real weapon they had was conjuring other zombies to hurt you. The challenge was getting within touching distance before they screamed, because if you failed that their screeches could really cause pain. Rama assumed if you were close enough and unprepared they could do permanent damage to somebody's hearing, but he didn't know of anybody going deaf from it. It was just distracting and uncomfortable. Rama assumed that by now hundreds if not more people had permanent hearing damage caused entirely by these douchebags, though. But they couldn't scream—well, maybe just wouldn't scream—while horizontal, so if you were going to bother to close the distance on a screamer it was best practice to just knock the cunt down.

Rama's tackle seemed to hurt the screamer, it grunted, but he hadn't angled the tackle to cave its skull in or break its neck on impact; it rolled into itself, taken off balance. Rama and the screamer both worked to recover from the tumble; Rama was much faster and better-coordinated. He rushed, and instead of stomping on it he grabbed the fucking thing's head (which was cold and gross, though not nearly as sticky as it looked like it'd be; and of course the thing's whole body stank of death and putrefaction), as it tried to rise, and smashed it into the floor repeatedly as hard as he could, using his entire body against it. He didn't think this would be effective, but he felt part of its skull crack from the first slam, so he tried it a second time. He was pretty sure he heard it protest or try to beg for mercy without words, and then its skull cracked open—bits of skull flew out in a few places on its face—and brains and blood poured out the back.

XXX

"Wow," Celest said, half the building away. "I didn't know you could move that fast," she whispered. It barely carried to him.

"I didn't think that would work," he said, catching his breath and standing back up.

"So I guess you chose fight rather than flight," she said, jogging to catch up with him by the screamer. He was still in such a fight mode he didn't even notice her tits bouncing.

"I suppose I did," he said. "Did I get any blood on me?" He looked over what he could see of himself, but turned for his lady to check too.

"No," she said, looking. "But I'll thank you to wash your hands before you touch my snatch."

He laughed out loud before he could suppress it. She giggled, surprised she'd got him so good. He'd forgotten that euphemism for vulva.

"That's fair," he said as if he wouldn't have her hygiene in mind. "Let's try a room up here—if it's not trashed I'll wash right now, before I touch anything else. Including my backpack." He gestured toward it, at least fifty feet away from him. He also conscientiously kept his hands away from touching any part of himself or her.

She grinned. "Good idea."

As they strode toward it, silently, Rama stared at Celest's ass. It was glorious. He found himself speaking, fluently, without really choosing to: "I'm surprised that thing didn't go off earlier from the way your cheeks clap." Her ass looked great, though her cheeks didn't actually clap. She could make them, though.

She giggled, trying to stay quiet, enjoying it—a silly compliment—but she felt a little self-conscious about her rear, too. "I don't have that much booty in the pants, Rama!" she scolded.

"Well. Okay," he said. "But the amount—volume—of booty you do have is great."

Celest said solemnly, "No it's not."

Instantly sincere, borderline somber, Rama said without exaggeration: "It is to me."

She smiled, kissed him, and gave him a big hug. During that she said quietly, "I'm glad I'm enough for you." He hugged her back, she noticed, but she didn't feel his hands on her. For an instant she felt incredulous at that, but that happened to be when they disengaged from one another, so she looked at his hands like "wtf, put your hands on me, lover," then she saw gore on both his hands and remembered what he'd just done and appreciated his conscientiousness. It was the same kind of courtesy she consciously hoped for during sex, but might not always want, like if he pulled out instead of coming inside of her without a condom on. Most of the time she felt smarter than him. Sometimes, like now, she felt the opposite was true.

She got the door for him; they tried a room immediately by them. It was just short of pristine, except that one of its beds hadn't been made. It had half the amount of towels in its bathroom theirs did; Rama thought somebody had taken the other half, and Celest thought maybe a hotel employee had lived in their suite after the apocalypse, or maybe they'd had a VIP there.

Rama washed his hands, for at least 30 seconds, twice. Celest sang "Carry on My Wayward Son" from memory so they could both have a pleasant timer. He was surprised at her memory. Not that he knew the song's lyrics, but she didn't seem to miss any beats or improvise, so everything she sang seemed right. She'd never tried to be a singer but had a lovely singing voice; he couldn't tell if she was objectively a great singer or not, but she sounded great to him, and she was completely unself-conscious about it, which was very cool. After he dried off a second time he smelled his hands—no death. Not beyond the background-radiation levels of the funk, anyway. He couldn't smell anything on his flesh but skin (now dry), soap and hair. He was so used to strenuous physical activity—fighting multiple zombies every day—that he hadn't broken a sweat killing the screamer, except maybe after killing it, and that was only out of the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush. He still wanted to shower again. He'd gone halfway up to his elbows the second time he washed his hands—unusual for him. He held his hands up to Celest, without saying anything, for inspection. She smelled carefully, and looked even more satisfied than he felt; she nodded.

"When we get back to our room, let's both wash our hands again anyway," she said.

"Great idea," he said. "Should I shower again?"

She leaned closer to him than he'd dared hope and audibly smelled him. Even got close to his armpits. "You're good," she judged.

"Okay," he confirmed. "I will if you want me to, though."

They returned to their suite with prudent caution, which given context was slightly less than normal though hardly carefree. No undead should have gotten inside or wandered out of any rooms with closed doors, but the fuckers tended to show up, regularly, out of nowhere even in places they shouldn't be able to reach, inexplicably. They encountered none between 4F and their room, and re-cleared the first floor's common areas anyway—none in there either.

XXXI

Back home—for now—they unpacked, and spread most of their weapons about the room for easy access, largely out in the open. You had to carry a few spares in case something broke, or got stuck in someone or -thing.

Without saying why, Celestina pushed the bed back where it had been—so they could keep the gun on a nightstand but not have that same nightstand act as a coffee table and stay in a walkway. She didn't explain that she was thinking: What if a Z starts banging on the door while we're fuckin'? Or a hostile human? We'll have to respond pretty quick if we want to live, which we will. And if part of the bed was visible from the door she'd feel exposed, even if nobody intruded—exposed to gunfire / violence / injury, not only to Rama. She wanted to be exposed to him. And she hoped he either wanted to be exposed to her, or would be comfortable with as much, anyway. He'd seemed largely okay with it before—while showering they'd both already been exposed completely to one another, and that had gone far better than she'd imagined. And she hadn't been planning anything like that, it just happened—an opportunity presented itself, and she took it, without too much consideration, happily. Actually, she hadn't imagined it at all, it'd been spontaneous and impulsive, but anyway, she had imagined scenarios vaguely resembling that one and she'd always rendered herself less exposed in them and even then she'd feared him not liking what he saw, or thinking she looked fat, or that he thought her pussy looked flappy, or . . . whatever else bad. And she loved him; she'd already known she'd like whatever she saw of him. Not only was she confident he'd liked her entire body—he hadn't made fun of her belly or her ass, or her thighs or pussy or anything—but it aroused him, got his dick actually-clearly-visibly hard. She turned him on at least close to as much as he turned her on. She was pleasantly astonished at the cycle of arousal she found with him—she excited him, and seeing him excited had the same effect on her, which got her even hotter, and so on. Not that she hadn't experienced something like that with him before, or her own past sexual partners, it was all just vastly more powerful—to a humbling extent—and thrilling and satisfying with Rama. Plus they were effectively adults now, completely on their own; they could take their time. They didn't have to contort themselves in a car, or try to finish before one of their parents or siblings got home, or feel like they had to perform or whatever because they had several friends nearby either doing something similar or watching or listening. They also didn't have to try to be silent at night because one of their grannies was visiting and was a very light sleeper. Or whatever. Rama noticed her moving the bed, but said nothing. Somehow that's what she'd been hoping for.

"Let's put our trash in some other room," Rama suggested as they finished distributing and placing their weapons.

"That's a really good idea," Celest said. "God dammit I don't wanna repack everything again just to do that."

"How about this: We'll just put the bin in a room down the hall."

"But we'll still have to repack everything," she said, "in case we get cut off and can't come back here."

"God dammit," he said.

XXXII

It was arduous, though they'd packed all their things so many times already today that it went faster than ever this time. They didn't even forget anything.

They were on the left of the elevator, which was in the center of the hotel's floorplan, so they went further left. As far left as they'd gone to a closed door. They chose one on the opposite side of the hall from their room because why not, then cleared it. It looked like its last occupants had been messy and checked out shortly after everyone had stopped doing their jobs here. Not too bad but it kind of smelled like ass (not in a good way) and coffee and cigarettes, all of which was gross, though hardly as gross as corpses in most states of decomposition (all of which they'd seen and smelled now), as they'd found in other rooms. Nothing useful was out in the open, so they dropped off their breakfast trash bin and fucked right off.

XXXIII

All was still nice in their room. It was getting late in the day; the sun was getting low. The room had an air conditioner, refrigerated, and it was still working. Celest reset it from an LED cold blue 72 ("degrees Fahrenheit," presumably) to 69 and giggled and looked to Rama, expecting him to have either watched her doing it or noticed, but no, he was setting his backpack down and strategically positioning a few weapons about the room in case whatever. He'd notice later.

"Here's my plan," Celest said.

"Okay," Rama said.

"I'm gonna talk about sex. And it's fine if you get a boner. Really. I think we're both ready to do it, but I keep . . . I guess I'm just trying not to think about it because throughout today every time I've thought about it I've gotten really distracted. So in a second I'm just gonna talk frankly about sex. Is that . . . okay?"

"Yeah, you're good," Rama said.

She took a breath. "So we have two episodes of Adventure Time and one of Star Trek left on DVR, and that may be all we have. I'm thinking: Let's brush our teeth, then conclude the TNG episode or the two-parter and cuddle, then I'm gonna fuck your brains out."

"Okay," he said. "All of that sounds good to me."

"Even me fucking your brains out?" she said. She went on, "I meant that literally, I'm gonna kill you with my pussy. You're too good for this world."

He laughed. She giggled. He said, "Oh," pretending to think about it. "How about this: What if you start by fucking me until I pass out from exhaustion? I mean from the pussy, not tiredness." She laughed. "Or until I have no more fluids left in my body."

She bit her lip, then said, "I'll consider it."

"Shit we haven't been drinking enough water," he said, breaking out their big metal water cans. They both drank some.

"I really expected you to say that you were gonna fuck me to death instead."

"I thought about it," he fake-admitted. "Tell ya the truth, I did like the sound of it. Fuckin' a lady until she dies? From being fucked good? Sounds pretty intense. Maybe worth it."

"Sure," she said.

"But that's only one day," he said. "I know myself. If I were on my own—I dunno what's normal, so forgive me if this is either more or less normal, or whatever you might like:"

"Okay."

"My sex drive is such that if I were on my own, or just didn't care what people thought of me, I'd prob'ly wanna jerk off a couple times a day."

Celest's eyebrows went up at that, presumably in surprise. She had sort of thick eyebrows. She used to over-pluck them, before the apocalypse. It seemed fashionable for women where they lived but it always looked stupid to Rama—pencil-thin eyebrows. Naturally, hers fit her face right. They seemed luscious somehow. Healthy. Whereas they plucked thin made her face seem sort of stressed and stretched, like a too-tight ponytail. Rama was far too afraid right now—despite what she'd said, he wasn't ready to consider let's-do-everything-together sexual intercourse with her today or ever a sure thing—to ask if that surprise meant she had a higher or lower sex drive than he did, if she was impressed or disappointed or intimidated or encouraged or what. He just hoped he could be enough for her, to really genuinely satisfy / sate / satiate her sexually, in whatever ways she wanted. Again despite what she said he couldn't get himself to believe that his meager dick-size offering would be sufficient, so why would any other aspect of him—physical or mental—be? He didn't care how much higher or lower her sex drive was than his—whatever her level was like, it was plenty, he loved her, he just hoped she'd be patient with him as he adjusted, like if she wanted to fuck every day or only every other day or even every few days or a few times a week. Adjustments he was happy to make. And she didn't have to be regular, of course. He always felt like he somehow had a low sex drive so he assumed hers was higher. He'd probably need to exercise for the sake of it more, drink more water, eat more. He hoped she'd be honest and up front with him if he'd never be enough, or never good enough, or whatever else.

"So think of that sex-death in perspective," he went on without pausing. Though there was some insecurity in his mind. "I'd have—presumably—an incredible orgasm like once. Maybe a few times. But all in one day. What am I gonna do tomorrow? Or a year from now? One of two things'll happen. Worst-case scenario, death by sex becomes a fetish and I can't come without it. That's not sustainable. I'll run out of living women. And zombies can't consent, so they're right out. Best-case scenario I'll never come as hard again. Ever. That wouldn't be fun for anybody. Least of all me. So while yes, in the short term, killing you with my dick sounds great, it's actually self-defeating."

Celest had giggled and laughed throughout in short spurts; when she knew he was done talking she stopped trying to hold it in. She nearly shouted laughter, and grabbed a pillow and laughed convulsively into it for a few seconds. He tried not to ogle her body while she bent over their bed doing that, and he failed. At least he didn't have an erection. Again. Yet. He succeeded in not letting himself feel impressed with his own (comedic) performance.

Celest came away from the suppressive pillow speaking: "I've thought it over, and your argument has swayed me. I shall not fuck you until your head explodes."

"Which head?" he couldn't help joking. He acted as if he really wasn't sure. Which he knew she'd see through.

She said, "That one," pointing to the one with permanent bone mostly around it as if he were stupid. She'd decided to trust that he either had something ready to say to that or would make something up on the spot.

He improvised: "Oh, good. Cuz I was gonna say," he grabbed at his crotch, "we want this head to explode."

"Oh! Right!" she said as if she didn't get that until now. "Because cum! Right, yes; there are, indeed, two heads on your sexy body, the brains one and the cock-head." She enjoyed saying that. He enjoyed seeing and hearing her say it, not to mention the (perhaps serious) compliment. "That makes much more sense now. My glorb, what a faux pas that would've been! To think you could die from hot ejaculation!"

They laughed and kept up the bit. Rama shrugged. "I really didn't see how you'd kill me from that," he said. They were both smiling. "I was about to say, 'Oh, no, it's normal for jizz to seemingly explode out of the cock-head.'"

"I suppose semantically you have me there," she said. Laughter. They supplemented it with big fake laughter. Which caused more real laughter.

"I didn't mean what I said as argument, however," he said. He hated that word. She knew he hated it. It was part of the joke. "If you do truly mean to kill me with sex . . . I can think of much worse ways to die. And I would be honored to die by your hand. Or tits."

"Or cunt," she said.

"Let's keep this civil, okay?" he joked in a loud under-the-breath tone. She laughed, surprised as his nonsense bit-character got uptight and corrective out of nowhere. "You said part of the deal was me brushing my teeth, which I'd rather prefer to do before things escalate. If you use such wonderfully filthy words in my presence, I'll forget to brush entirely, and—through no fault of my own—skip agreed-upon procedural steps. Important steps."

Break for laughter.

XXXIV

Celest steadied herself on Rama.

"That's fair," Celest said. "No dirty talk until after we brush our teeth." They both grinned.

"Agreed," Rama said. "Do we have any mouthwash left?"

"No," she said. "Well, I don't. Do you?"

"Nope," he said. "None, for like a week. Maybe more. That's why I asked you."

"Damn," she said. They didn't have any gum either. Or mints. "Well, I, for one, wouldn't worry, if I were you." Somehow he enjoyed her deliberate pauses. "I like how you taste even if you don't brush well."

"Good," he said. "I mean, no?" She laughed. "I guess," he said, grinning. "Anyway, what would you do if you were me?"

"I'd do a good job of brushing once, and then eat my pussy."

"But you'd be me," he said. "So—your pussy would be mine. You wouldn't mind eating my pussy if I had one?"

"No, because if you did I'd have a dick, and then I'd be totally way into it."

"I suppose you would."

"Yes."

"I'm gonna set my weapons about again," Rama said, to Celest's taste almost too abruptly, though clearly with a joking "Imma get some!"-type short-term urgency.

Celest laughed. "Good idea!" She moved just like he had.

XXXV

They arranged weapons, turned the TV on and brushed their teeth. Rama brushed two full times, without telling Celest, though she noticed. No less insecure or anxious, Celest focused on things other than brushing—like things and positions she'd be comfortable or not comfortable doing / trying with her lover—so she only brushed once, yet she paid rather close attention to it, whereas Rama let his mind wander so as not to fixate on sex quite so much.

They set pillows back up for TV-cuddling. As they did, Rama asked Celest, "I feel . . . not too hungry. Not full, but not still hungry."

"Good," she said.

"I bring that up because I wanted to ask you something for two reasons. Promise to let me say both before you think about either, okay? Or try to."

Wary but open-minded, she prepared herself (to an exaggeratedly pronounced physical extent), then said, "Okay, I'll listen. Tell me when you're done so I know when I can think, okay, baby?" He appreciated her playing along. He was pretty sure she knew he hadn't meant she wasn't supposed to think at all. This felt like a vague Cabin in the Woods reference somehow.

"Okay, I will," he said. "So: I want to ask you if you ate enough, because I want you healthy, but I'm also suddenly concerned that you may feel too full to make out." At this point he hurried his speech as best he could because he feared she'd hear "full" and think he was suggesting she looked fat. She didn't look fat. Probably couldn't. He probably couldn't either. He finished: "I wanna ask if you ate enough because you're as skinny right now as I've ever seen you." They were both self-conscious about their weight, he knew. He didn't think either of them thought much about it now, but a few months ago before the zombie apocalypse they both definitely had.

This huge smile spread from Celest's soft lips to her whole face to her whole body in a second, like a shockwave. Rama was glad he had such a positive effect on her. He knew—without wanting to or really caring—that he'd be getting his dick sucked tonight (as long as he didn't fuck up). That wasn't why he wanted to ask about her eating, though; he was concerned she'd feel too hungry to make out and stop to eat, or too tired and stop to take a nap.

"Thank you!" she exclaimed. He wished that wasn't a compliment, but it was. They'd both been very self-conscious about their weight before the zompoc; neither of them had found the other at all unattractive before it, though. But until today, they'd never actually seen each other naked, malnourished-skinny now or whatever they were before. Rama wondered—maybe Celest hadn't had fornication in mind earlier so much as she was confident about her new lean post-apocalyptic survival (malnourished) body and proud of it and wanted him to see it. Maybe all she'd really meant by it was to let him see. He'd noticed he felt a lot better about his own body, so he certainly tried to hide it less now than he used to, but . . . it'd never occurred to him to just show all of it to his lover. Perhaps because he was insecure about his dick size. Whatever. She said, "Have I told you that I love you lately?" She strode up to him, head-on.

"I don't think you have," he said, sure it'd been less than ten minutes since the last time. His hands found her waist as he spoke.

She kissed him heartily. One of his hands got low on her back; the other held her face.

"I love you, Rama," she said, holding her forehead against his, looking into his eyes. She was allowing herself to be very vulnerable with him. She wasn't just saying the words, she was opening her heart to him.

He caressed her face and hair and hoped he could meet her equally. He gave himself permission to. He took a deep breath to let his own big dumb heart open as he touched her, then said, "I love you, Celest."

He was sure he'd told her that and absolutely meant it before, but something about her expression then told him that perhaps he hadn't. Or maybe she hadn't completely known before.

She kissed him again.

"Is my breath okay?" Rama asked. "I may still have some gum."

She giggled. "Yes, your breath is great. Clean, organic, human. No need for gum. I don't really like mint on you anyway." She just smiled at him. She gestured at her mouth and said, "Is mine okay?"

Hers was a little worse than neutral but he couldn't say that. He pondered whether to say anything but he couldn't seem to hesitate so he immediately—he had time to think because she gestured, and he knew what she was going to ask before she spoke—said: "Yeah. Did you eat ass earlier today?"

XXXVI

She burst into laughter. He'd made it funny enough that it didn't sting at all. Good. "My breath is not that bad, Rama!" She punched his arm. Not hard, but not entirely a joke. Maybe some sting.

Celest tried to smell her own breath. By her reaction, she found her own breath much worse than he did. She looked back to Rama aghast: "My breath is gross!" She sped into the bathroom. "Fuck! I thought that was just zombies nearby! If your breath smelled like mine does now, I wouldn't even be able to lie about it! How are you so much stronger than me?"

Rama wanted to stop listening to her speaking negatively of herself, but he couldn't get himself to ignore her.

Celest dug her toothbrush back out. She must've rushed her brushing, or missed a huge spot, or . . . something. Toothbrushes were surprisingly common in the zompoc. They would've shared one if they had to, but they'd never needed to. Even toothpaste was common. There was a mini-convenience store kiosk in the lobby area, they might have some travel-size floss and mouthwash down there, she dimly recalled. It must be picked over, at the very best. She wondered if they had any bleach. Maybe in the hotel's industrial linens washroom.

"I'm not saying your breath smells great to me," Rama said. "I think maybe my sense of smell isn't as good as yours. It wasn't gross to me."

"But you'd still be thinking, 'ew, bitch do you even brush?'" She turned the sink on, rinsed her brush's bristles. She noticed as she did it that this was the first moment in weeks, or longer, when she'd taken for granted that any place would have running water. She'd become accustomed to it, again, awfully quickly.

"No I wouldn't," he said. "I—that's not how my attention works, I wouldn't be fully smelling or tasting it at every second."

"It'd still be bad!" she said, applying paste on brush. "It's such a turn-off!"

"If your breath smelled bad to me, probably yeah," he said.

"No, it's—if I smelled it and it smelled bad to me, I'd feel gross! That would take me out of it! I'd be like 'I gotta climb off your dick, my love, to brush my teeth, and . . . gargle some industrial solvent.'" She started brushing. Probably too hard.

"I hear you," he said. "Mostly I'm hearing that you'd like to get on top, at some point."

"Yes I would," she said, her voice so muffled by brushing that he took a few seconds to decrypt it.

"Oh, I can't have that," he said. His tone was, he hoped, so clearly joking that she couldn't possibly misconstrue it as even a little serious. "It's emasculating."

She stopped brushing to look directly at him. He pulled a goofy face. "Oh you're kidding," she said through toothpaste. It was slightly less difficult now to understand her. "Good."

"I'm disappointed that you thought for an instant I'd feel emasculated, by anything," he said, only slightly exaggerating. "How dare you."

"Well I'm sorry!" she said, kidding, through toothpaste and toothbrush both this time. Rama saw some go flying into the air; she didn't seem to notice that. It was pretty funny. "I'm not—I haven't—Not all guys are as cool as you! So thank you!" She clearly-feigned belligerence.

"You're welcome!" he said, in the same joking-angry tone.

"Good!"

"Good!"

About a minute later she spit white stuff into the sink—his mind went directly to a dirty place for an instant—and she rinsed it down with running sink water (Rama still wasn't used to that utility working) and said, "It really didn't bother you much? My stanky breath?"

"No," he said. "I could've ignored it. Once in a while I might've noticed it and thought 'could be better,' but that's hardly . . . a turn-off. Maybe for an instant. At worst. I wouldn't have really minded. I almost didn't say anything."

"You could still kiss me like that?"

"Yeah."

She looked into his eyes for a moment. "I'm glad you said something," she said. "Why wouldn't you? I wanna be good for you!"

"You are good for me!" he said. "The only imperfection about you right now is your breath. And that's pretty minor."

Brushing, Celest grumbled, "That's not my only imperfection." Which was sort of good, because it meant she was really listening.

"No, you're flawless, and I won't hear otherwise," he said. "Except the breath. The point stands."

She smiled at him with the toothbrush in her mouth. She looked ridiculous and everyday-mundane and completely beautiful. He couldn't help smiling. Celest said, "Thanks." It was difficult to understand. For an instant, his mind turned that garbled speech into "I bet that's what she'd sound like with one of my nuts in her mouth," but he was able to shake that off pretty quick.

"You're welcome!" Rama said. "Sorry, I couldn't tell what you said for a second." He didn't want to mention what he'd imagined for the other second.

She spit again and said, "Honey, if my breath's bad again when we're kissing sometime, you have to tell me, as soon as you notice."

"All right," he said, with a gesture of defeat and surrender. "As you wish."

"Good," she said. "Cuz I wouldn't let you get away with it." She put more toothpaste on her brush to brush some more. He wanted to intervene, but even pre-zompoc she'd brushed more than once around him when they'd been making out or just spending time together and she'd been vehement about finishing another complete brush. This second brush, now, was much more calm than her previous.

"I really wouldn't want you to," he said. "I guess I hope my oral hygiene is . . . solid."

"It is," she said just before fake-giggling. "Hehe. 'Oral.'"

Right then, he noticed she was trying too hard. Self-conscious. Maybe only in that instant. She actually felt disgusting because her breath didn't smell good. He would've felt similarly if his smelled as bad to him as hers seemed to smell to her, he just didn't think anyone else would. It was weird to see from the outside—usually only he felt as icky and unattractive as she did right now. Or had a minute ago, he hoped. It wasn't that big a deal to him, her breath. He appreciated that she was trying to be funny, though by trying to be funny she instantly became un-funny to him.

Rama stayed quiet for a few seconds and then said, "Celest."

"Rama?" she said.

"Your breath smells bad."

"You can't smell my breath from there." He was at least eight feet away.

He jokingly claimed, "Yes I can."

Chortling, she said, "No you can't."

"Maybe not right now." He got about as melodramatic as he could and went on, "But I . . . remember. From before."

She laughed and accidentally spit some toothpaste, then recovered and said, "It wasn't that bad." She resumed brushing.

Still painfully melodramatic, he said, "It'll haunt me always."

Celest laughed so hard she inadvertently spat saliva and toothpaste onto the mirror in front of her. Rama was astonished—he hadn't seen a real spit-take since before the zompoc. Instead of feeling anything about his own funniness or having made her laugh, all he thought about was how happy he was to see her happy, enjoying herself with him. She quickly took her toothbrush out of her mouth to avoid choking on it; she was laughing and simultaneously trying to stay quiet.

Rama felt bad, so he stepped close and put an arm around her. "My love, did I break your mind?" He pretended to be worried. He didn't need an excuse to touch her, but . . . still kind of felt like he did. She was clearly fine, she just had the giggles.

A few seconds of laughing later—at what he said and herself—she said, "I'm okay." Then she got melodramatic like he'd been, like she'd been a police detective in a film noir city for 40 years and smoked several packs of cigarettes daily the entire time. "I'll make it." She was still catching her breath.

Mostly joking, Rama said, "Are you sure?"

Celest smiled and took a deep breath. "Yeah." She didn't try to get out of his embrace at all. She leaned forward as little as possible (to stay in the embrace) and put more toothpaste on her brush. She backtracked by a few teeth and resumed brushing.

He backed off a step so she didn't have to worry about accidentally elbowing him in the face. She made a disappointed noise at the loss of him and contact with him, but didn't otherwise move. Rama was impressed: He so seldom consciously brushed individual teeth of his—he let his mind wander—that her accuracy surprised him. He didn't remember what tooth she'd been on when she spat-took, but she seemed to. He would've had no idea where he left off; he would've had to completely restart. Fuck they needed floss. And maybe tongue scrapers.

"We need to get floss," he said.

She said something through toothbrush and toothpaste foam. He had to process and interpret. She'd said: "Good idea."

XXXVII

Rama took his boots off. What felt like ages ago now, he'd been a low-key military/guns otaku, and they were a remnant of that. Original SWAT, coyote tan. He didn't remember their model name anymore. He liked them because they were good and light, and quiet, which was why he initially liked the brand. In this moment, he mostly liked them because they had side-zippers and he could get them off quickly. He didn't like tying and retying laces on footwear before the apocalypse, but you really needed to tie them well now; you didn't want your shoes to fall off while you ran from the undead. Fast ones especially. Rama had seen a person trip from that and get trampled by a tank before he could get up. Nice guy, but stupid. He felt insecure so he smelled his socked feet—fine; no foot smell, clean, not sweaty. Good socks. He took the socks off and put them with his boots by the TV's wall, not in the walkway.

His instincts told him Celest would want to watch part two of the Star Trek episode so he went to that in the DVR submenu but didn't play it.

Celest rejoined him by the bed—he was sitting—and climbed into his lap methodically, splitting her legs open and planting hers on either side of his. He'd had his legs spread some, but he put them together to accommodate her . . . whatever she was doing. He was almost sure that she only coincidentally at first thrust her tits against his face—that was just a hazard of setting herself atop him. A few simultaneously uncomfortable-yet-also-very-comfortable seconds of soft T-shirt cloth against his whole head, with warm flesh and nice soft tiddies beneath it, as she got comfortable and then she bent low and started kissing him. She tasted of toothpaste more than herself, which was a minor distraction. "Kissing" summarizes what she did poorly; it felt all-encompassing, like it was something beyond kissing. Their entire bodies were involved, to varying degrees. It was wonderful. Rama's body was trying to hold Celest's entire ass with one hand, and caressing her back with the other for a few seconds, but then he needed to feel her tits and her back would be fine on its own. None of that seemed aggressive to him—he was only trying to catch up with his lady, who'd started grinding either her pelvis or maybe her pussy itself (he was too delirious and overwhelmed to differentiate) over his crotch about a second after her lips sealed against his. Both of them began sighing and moaning rather quickly. Their tongues did sloppy battle.

Celest ripped their faces apart. He noticed she'd wrapped her arms around his neck. "Stop," she said. He saw toothpaste she'd missed on her right cheek. She didn't usually miss things like that. She was even more of a perfectionist about her appearance than he was about his, and he was very self-conscious.

He took his hands off of her, which was extremely difficult, though he managed it quickly. He was proud to have such willpower. Though she didn't seem to notice he'd complied as much as he could.

His penis was racing to erection but not there yet—which surprised him. Usually by the time he remembered it existed, with Celest in this hotel today, it was already quite hard.

One very fast breath—nearly a pant—later Celest said, "I'm sorry." She'd stopped grinding on him, but she hadn't dismounted. She was resting her forehead on his neck and shoulder; hot rapid breaths beat against his flesh. He felt her exhales expand through his T-shirt too.

"It's okay," he said, and felt like his body betrayed him again: for an instant he forgot he had a dick, but now it reminded him of itself, because it'd managed to become hard from either soft or flaccid. It couldn't have been more than a minute. Or two. Since they started kissing. A few seconds longer since she sat on him. Rama tried to recover, re-center himself, and will the erection away.

Celest sat up, holding his shoulders with her hands, keeping him at a distance. "I can't—I'm sorry, I'm not ready," she said.

"It's okay," Rama said. He certainly wanted to smash, but he didn't need to. He didn't think he'd pressured her at all toward getting naked together and penetration, or whatever else. Had he? Fuck. He might have. He'd try to monitor his own behavior and body language and tone more closely.

"I really wanna fuck you," she said.

"Good," he said before he could catch himself. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to . . . talk you into anything. At all. I want to too. But we don't have to. It doesn't have to be today."

"I want it to be today," she said.

"Okay," he said. He was good with that too. He was anxious, but ready.

"I just need a minute."

"Take your time." He hugged her.

"Okay. Sorry."

"It's fine. You have nothing to apologize for."

She looked ashamed.

He didn't understand.

"Will you please climb off me?" he said.

"Oh," she said. "Yeah." She began dismounting.

"I was going to do that for you, but it might've been . . . overpowering," he said.

Any other time she would've asked for elaboration. She wanted to know what he meant now, too, but she didn't ask. Now, she just rotated off him, to a seated position next to him, and then she let herself fall backward. She lay that way.

She took a few deep breaths, trying to empty her mind. To stop obsessing.

XXXVIII

"I don't know what's wrong with me," she said. She wanted to cry again but couldn't. Maybe she'd had too many emotional swings recently. She was usually so . . . even. Controlled.

"Nothing's wrong with you," he said. She heard it but didn't. "Do you mind if I just tell you what's on my mind right now?"

"Please do," she said. "I need to get outta my head." She stared at the ceiling. Didn't look at him, nor into his eyes. He got the feeling she was evaluating her feelings.

"I've kinda said this before," he said. "I just want you to hear my perspective. Quick recap: We came here looking for food. I thought it would be a good place to sleep tonight. We got to shower, which was great. I got to see you naked, which was far better than great. Words . . . fail."

She chuckled. "Thank you."

"No, thank you," he said. She giggled at the callback. He resumed: "I hoped to make out with you at some point. I thought that was reasonable to want. And maybe touch your boobs."

"Tits," she said without moving. Her eyes were closed but she was smiling.

"Tits, yes," he said. "And I hope when we sleep tonight you'll hold me. Or let me hold you. Whichever. And that's all."

"Okay."

"And we already made out. I acknowledge I want more, but I don't need more. Today. That's . . . I'd feel slighted if you didn't allow that. Cuddling when we sleep, I mean. But I'm not demanding it. Even though we've kinda done that much a lot. All that said, I recognize that it is possible for the two of us to have sex today. Sex is fun; I like sex. I love you. I'm pretty much always down to—sex." She giggled. Eyes closed, still facing the ceiling. "With you. And generally, I like it, but I don't need it. You seem uncomfortable."

"I'm insecure," she said. "Maybe that's all. I'm afraid I'll let you down. That I won't be as good as other girls you've been with."

"You're a woman," he said. "And you've been with other guys, too, right? We've talked about it."

"Yeah," she said. "It's not my first time." Still motionless on her back. Except for breathing.

"Is it okay if I hold your hand?"

"Please do," she said, finding his nearest hand by touch. She held his hand. He used both his hands to rotate his relative hers and wind their near hands' fingers together. "But it's our first time," she said. "I want it to be good. And special."

"We have an air-conditioned room, clean everything, and a working shower," he said. "I think that's about as special as exists, now."

"Yeah," she said.

"Please note I'm not trying to ask your body count. I'm not incurious, I just don't care."

"Zombies?" Celest said. She was kidding.

"No," he said, grinning. "Sexual partners. I only mention that because I don't want you to think I'm concerned with it."

"Okay."

"The present, and I hope our future together, is what I care about," Rama said. "And I'm going to paraphrase something you said to me earlier. But it's true of you and me, not because you said it: I really love you. Any sex we have is already gonna be good."

Long pause. He watched her breathe. He had to remind himself to breathe too. She pushed hair out of her face.

"Fuckin' . . . " she began. "While I was brushing I got this whole plan that I was gonna really jump your bones. Surprise you, suck your cock, be sexy and assertive and do stuff I've seen on PornHub. But when I got on you and started—grinding on you, I just got scared."

"Do you know why?" he said. "Or what of?"

She sat up. Looked at where their hands joined. Not into his eyes. Shook her head. "I tried to go too fast. I'm already kinda . . . wet, just from looking at you." She looked to his eyes, then away. "Even more from getting on top of you and grinding. And you responding. Fuckin' sexy guy."

WTF she's not shy, he thought. This is hard for her to say.

"But I wanted to start fucking right then—or, like that was beginning it—and I started worrying what if I'm not wet enough, I'd feel like sandpaper to you." She flopped back down onto the bed. "And I know you won't, but I'm scared you'll come and be disappointed with me and not wanna try again. Or, keep trying."

"I just need you to communicate with me," he said. "I know I can't hold out indefinitely, though I'll try if you want me to."

She smiled at him. Still looking at him, she said, "No, just do what you want." Then she looked away. To the floor. "Don't worry about it."

"Okay," he said, worried about it. "But . . . we both hafta choose what we do. Not just me, or you. So—I always seem to have a different refractory period. You know what that is, right?"

"It's basically your cock reloading, right?" she said. Dirty grin.

"Pretty much," he said. Dirty grin. "By bringing it up I just mean to tell you—if I come, if we do anything sexual, I mean, and I don't care if we don't—it might be a minute before I wanna keep going, or five seconds. I can never predict it correctly. I know myself well enough to know I won't be able to resist you. Not that I'd want to. I might have to be like, 'Hey, baby, I gotta give my stupid dick a break for a minute. Lemme finger you with my tongue,' or whatever exactly." She smiled, but her eyes were on their hands together. "We should drink water sometimes, too. If anything sexy happens."

"Sexy sex."

"Right." He paused, trying to guess her mind's conscious contents. "I feel like I'm just making everything worse right now."

"You're not," she said. She tore her eyes away from their hands, up to his eyes. "I tried to go too fast. I just need a minute." She very slowly sat up, leaned into him, and kissed his cheek. He was so unsure what she was even about to do that he kept his eyes open without really meaning to until he felt her lips seal over his skin. She held on for a second or two and smooched loudly away as she finished, and leaned back into her own space. "And your dick's not stupid. It's good."

"I'll take your word for it."

"You better," she said, smiling. Her eyes seemed to be sharing some dirty secret with him. Her eyes also looked hungry. "My word's the only one that matters."

He nodded. "Wanna finish the Star Trek?"

"Yes, please." She smiled like she'd been hoping he'd say that.

XXXIX

They rearranged the bed's many pillows to prop their heads up on two each, with the TV still on and its remote by Rama, and lay together, both fully clothed. Right before Celest's head touched down she got inspired and sat back up.

They were wearing pretty much the same amount of clothing articles, except that on his torso was only a T-shirt, whereas she had on a T-shirt and a bra. That's uneven. She decided to even the playing field without saying what she was doing.

"I'm gonna take my pants off to feel more comfy," she said, approximately half-changing her mind about the no-speaking conceit she'd just come up with. She got out of bed to remove her pants.

"Okay," Rama said, not believing her but relishing the change. He couldn't tell if he was supposed to do anything. Or look, or not look. He looked.

She unbuttoned her pants and then looked at him: she said, "You too."

"Oh," he said. He got up and removed his pants too.

Celest, shimmying her jeans past her (self-described) rhinoceros hips, felt clever until she got her jeans down to her ankles, and only then noticed she hadn't already taken her boots off. "Shit," she said at the predicament. Rama noticed.

"Can I help?" he offered.

"Y'know what? Yes, please," she said.

He got on his knees, pushed her jeans up so he could access her boots, pulled a Velcro tab and dragged down one boot's side zipper. Back before it was called a pandemic—very early on in the outbreaks—when the word "zombie" started getting thrown around jokingly, Rama insisted she choose some running shoes or military boots or something she could walk all day in. He'd buy them for her, she just had to choose. After around 45 minutes of searching she'd chosen Reebok Rapid Response boots, which were similar to the ones Rama had—modern and tactical-looking. His were sort of a beige ~ desert tan brown, so she chose black because she didn't want to have the same things as anybody else, not even her committed but not then super-serious or in love bf, especially not matching outfits—it was already borderline cringe to her that their boots happened to look similar in style.

With her man's help, Celest went from fully-clothed to only a T-shirt, boot socks, slim sexy bra and a purple thong, the last of which was probably coincidental but which Rama's ego or whatever couldn't help suspecting was a deliberate choice. Looked great. He didn't know all her underwear, or want to—he was curious, but that seemed private, so he hadn't asked or tried to observe any kind of inventory, even when it was his job to wash clothes. For all he knew and consciously remembered despite not trying to, maybe she only had the one pair of black boy shorts and this purple thong and nothing else. Or maybe those two and four G-strings and one V-string and a pair of tightey whiteys; in other words, this assalicious choice could be a true coincidence for lack of clean choice. He didn't think it was. Which could've been his ego talking. He wished he knew what outfit or clothing item(s) of his she found sexy, if any at all. He would've put those on for her after showering. He didn't really even know what sexy from him was to her, apart from apparently often him . . . himself. She'd called him sexy plenty of times, but not his clothing. All her outfits and items of clothing—that he had any memory of—were kind of sexy to him, because it was her wearing them.

Rama unzipped her other boot and helped her slip both off. The side-zippers helped. She removed her pants, then socks.

It was still uneven, though, she noticed: two articles of clothing (him) to three (her); unfair. They lay down again. He imagined them both being on their backs, butted up close to and against one another though independent. This time Celest draped herself about him; she lie directly on her side next to him, then crawled and rolled atop him, fine-tuning their positioning. She was about to press play on "Redemption" part 2 when the imbalance bugged her again. She put the remote down and said, "Rama."

"Celest." He was looking at her.

"Take your shirt off."

"Okay." He didn't question it or hesitate or think; he held her up to guide her gently, but he still effectively dumped her off him and onto the bed, as he sat up, at once. She laughed. He peeled his shirt off and lobbed it by his pants, near his boots. Her boots were close to his.

She considered options, watching him. "Dammit, no, we're still uneven," she said. "I wanted us to be wearing the same amount of clothing but now it's just worse, one"—she gestured at his boxers—"to three"—she gestured at herself.

She sat up alongside him and took her shirt off.

He tried not to stare, and succeeded, but he couldn't help looking. He looked away and took a slow, deep breath.

"So, I wanted this," she said. "Are you gonna get hard?" His dick had gone soft at some point, fortunately.

"Only if you touch me," he said. She laughed. He thought about that, looking down at his crotch. "I guess not? I felt this initial wave when you took your shirt off, but it's going away now." He let a breath out, a "wheew."

She giggled. "Good."

"Hang on, though—knowing myself, today, when we lay down, if you touch me at all I'll probably start getting hard then."

Celest grimaced. "But . . . when that happens, you don't really feel aroused, right?"

"No," he said. "We'll have to just ignore it. I don't feel aroused when that happens. Once or twice earlier I did, but we were doing more than just touching or cuddling then. Like when I was showering and we started kissing and—I can't think of a more gentle way to put this—you started stroking my . . . penis."

XL

Celest frowned. He knew what she was thinking; but she almost immediately said what she was thinking, too: "Don't say 'penis.'"

"Agreed," Rama said. "Since we're on the topic: are there any other words, or anatomical terms, you dislike that I should know about?"

"Not that I can think of," she said. "Not really. I guess . . . don't say 'vagina.' Not during sex, anyway."

"So, I should not say, 'I wanna fuck you in the vagina?'"

She chuckled. "No, you shouldn't. Not if you want it to happen." They giggled. "And although you said it plainly, that was still sexy up until 'vagina,' but then my lady-boner kinda nosedived."

They giggled.

"Is 'pussy' okay?" he said.

"Yeah, I like that one," she said. "It sounds good to me. I like the word 'cunt' too."

The C one surprised him. But he could accept it. "Do you like 'boobs?'"

Celest grinned, seeming to think it sounded about as dumb as he felt asking. "In normal conversation it's okay. Don't say it during sex, though, it's weird. Definitely don't say 'breasts,' either. Too formal. I always like 'tits.'"

"Me too, sister," he said, Hulk Hogan voice again. She smiled. He spoke normally: "Tits."

"Yep," she said. While he internalized that, trying to burn all this to permanent memory, she de-interlaced their fingers and brought that hand of his up and put it on one of her tits. "These. Tits."

He didn't even look, which she appreciated somehow. He said, "That's one tit."

She let go of his one hand on her one tit and took his other hand and put it on her other tit. "There. Tits."

"Correct," he said. "I wanted to be sure about that." She smiled. He released her tits, saying, "Because—"

She over-rode: "I didn't say you could let go."

He pretended fright and threw his hands back on her tits.

"That's better," she said.

He wasn't really feeling her tits, or gripping or grasping or groping; just holding, cupping, though now firmly. "Yes it is." He tried to allow himself to feel titty-balls. Not that he could get a full sense of them through the tough layer of bra.

A low hum of enjoyment came out of her. She said, "What were you saying?"

"I wanted to be particularly sure that you like the word 'tits,' because I've heard women say they don't like it." He was fondling her tits now.

Joking, Celest said, "Lately?"

"No."

As Rama said that, Celest deliberately overlapped him: "What other women are there, Rama!?," raising her voice. Not like she might if she were actually angry. Not that they'd ever spoken with one another about being monogamous with each other—since they became official—or not.

"None, I swear!" Rama responded in kind.

They laughed.

"No, I actually like that word," Celest said. "Especially during sex."

"Good." He tried it on for size again: "Tits." While still holding hers. Squeezing, cupping.

"I like how you say that."

XLI

Celest explained, though he'd guessed this, that part of the idea of watching TV with him was to have a relaxation activity. For both of them. Celest was always at least a little on defense, out of necessity, living in a post-zombie-apocalyptic world. Surviving, really. She hadn't let herself truly relax in months. Because zompoc. Rama was the same way but moreso, she knew just from looking at him, how he carried himself—well, but he was always tense. A coiled spring. Not more than a second or two away from violent self-defense. Except when they were asleep. Usually. Apart from that, Celest didn't much care what they watched, she just wanted to feel him with her, be held by him. She told him she'd want to kiss occasionally because she loved that feeling, but she promised until she said otherwise that she wouldn't try to be subtle or misdirect or anything, she just wanted to watch some TV and relax and kiss occasionally. He said that was all fine.

He offered to give her a—seriously—relaxational back rub. She said yes please, but only after they were halfway through the second Star Trek episode.

They lay together, cuddling, for half the episode. They saw the timeline when they fast-forwarded through commercials.

She let Rama start on her back and shoulders and sat up with him behind her. She did this knowing for a few minutes it would be very relaxing and incredibly nice, but she'd been turned on since she showered, and she knew his touch often excited her anyway, so she'd before long get more excited, and then even more excited upon that as he massaged her. She decided to let that happen—she liked it, she wanted it—and not 100% pay attention to the show. It wouldn't automatically delete, they could watch it again later.

They found the episode's halfway point and changed positions so Rama could massage Celest, as they'd agreed to do. He did as he said—shoulders, a little neck (too exciting, she asked him to move lower), back—and he wasn't a professional masseuse, but he was amazing nonetheless. Just the focused, deliberately non-sexual (to him) attention was profound. He did whatever she told him to without hesitation or argument. Just obeyed. He seemed to genuinely want her to feel good and relax—no, that's exactly what he was doing; she was sure he wasn't doing it only to score pussy points or whatever, he just cared how she felt and this would probably help her limber up and relax for later fucking—which in itself scored him even more pussy points. His metaphorical cup overflowed. We should seriously stretch first, she thought. It would be really fun to do that with him. He might like watching her, too. She'd certainly like watching him stretch.

XLII

At the next dissolve to much-louder-than-actual-TNG-programming commercials, Rama said, "Can we talk during commercials? Instead of fast-forwarding? I'll mute it." He didn't stop massaging. He was still working on her back, though at her insistence he was focusing around on her shoulders.

Too bad they didn't have any oil. For massage, or a generic personal lubricant (as in "for sex"). She wondered how much he'd like to see her tits oiled up.

"Sure," she said, loving his work. She knew she wasn't letting show quite how much she was enjoying it; she tried to downplay it some so he wouldn't get too turned-on. He didn't have an erection right now, which was cool. The one he'd popped while touching her tits and talking about tits had gone away. She liked to think about him touching that part of her body. And all the other parts too. "I'll mute it, though; you keep rubbing me." She muted the TV.

"I'll do that," he said. "So just generally—I want to talk about consent, okay?"

"Okay," she cooed. Because of the massage and because she loved where he was going with this.

"I know pretty much what I want, but I love to improvise, and I don't really care if most of the stuff I have in mind doesn't even happen," he said. "The rest is really just 'hold and touch and kiss Celest a lot, and make her come all over me.' All I really expect is to make out with you, though. Maybe I should call it makeout plus."

"I can certainly oblige that," she said. "'Makeout plus' is a very polite way to describe 'giving me a good hard fuckin'.'"

"If that's what you want, it's gonna happen," he said. "Anyway, good. That's all I really intend to do, specifically. We'll just see how it goes. I want you to tell me what you want. Whatever it actually is. So—I feel like somehow it's rude to say the 'sex' word—if we're doing that—only making out—and you feel too tired, or just wouldn't care to have five orgasms or whatever—" Celest giggled dirtily. Tingling. "—we don't have to have . . . S-word. I'm okay with just making out for like an hour and then going to sleep. With you. I wanna hold you."

"That's . . . one of the things I'm most hoping for," she said. "But after, no; you hafta get your own bed."

She was definitely kidding, and he went along with it. "Dammit. The only reason I wanna fuck you is so I can sleep with you, afterward, like we've already done a lot before."

She laughed throughout that. "No! I've changed my mind; you have to sleep with me now! You're stuck with me! I don't even care if you nut in me and then you're like 'nah I don't really like this chick anymore, Imma bounce;' I'll eventually let you leave, but I'll still force you to sleep with me, here, tonight."

They laughed together.

Rama said, "I'm okay with that." He forgot the "nut in her" part. He'd love that, but he assumed she was joking, or that she was alluding to that "he literally nutted in me and went straight back to playing Fallout: New Vegas" or whatever meme.

"Good, cuz it's happening," Celest said.

"Well, yeah."

She was quiet momentarily. Somehow he'd expected her to speak when she didn't. She tried to reach back at him. He genuinely couldn't tell what she was reaching for, specifically, if anything. Somehow he suspected it wasn't his dick.

"What do you—" he began.

"Gimme your hand," she insisted. So he did. She took it and rubbed it with her fingers and kissed it. "I appreciate that, baby." She kissed his hand again. She let his hand go. He kissed her back, maybe three inches below where her neck ended. It wasn't sexual, really, but it felt especially intimate somehow. He kissed again lower. "About not pressuring me. It's—I appreciate it a lot."

He kissed one more time even lower, then she started humming, then he halted himself, saying aloud, "Nope. That wasn't supposed to be sexual." He meant what he was doing.

"You can keep doing that," she said.

"I'd better not," he said.

She giggled.

He resumed massaging low on her back, along both sides of her spine.

"That—seriously—makes such a huge difference to me," she said. "That . . . I can't even say how much I like that you're not trying to talk me into anything. And never have. I like that. And you. I just wanted you to know that. But . . . I'm not gonna change my mind. I'm a sure thing tonight, Rama, as long as . . . you still want me."

"I do," he said. "I know this is implicit, but I feel like I should note for clarity, you're kinda giving me broad consent right now. Which I appreciate. But consent can be revoked anytime."

"I know," she said. "I feel like you've kinda implicitly given me consent too. But you can tell me to stop. I might wanna do something you don't like. Or don't wanna try."

XLIII

"The only thing I can think of that I don't want to try with you is pegging," he said.

She giggled. "You mean being pegged, right? Not pegging me."

"Yeah," he said. "We don't have a dildo or a strap-on or anything, do we? But yeah, if you wanted me to peg you I'd try it."

" . . . When we say 'pegging,' does that mean with a fake . . . dick?" she said. "I was kind of trying to joke like, well, technically, depending on how you define it, wouldn't you fucking me with the cock you already have as part of your body kind of be pegging?"

"Good question," he said. "I don't know what the official definition of pegging is. Or, would be. Whatever. For my purposes, or what I was thinking right now, was yeah, that pegging meant specifically penetration of another person with a strap-on, or something else."

"Okay," she said.

Rama modified, "Something else not naturally already part of your body."

"So . . . that's great," she said. "I'm gonna ask you to say something, and then I'm gonna kiss you, then I wanna just watch TV with you."

"Okay," he said.

"All that's okay with you?"

"'All that' meaning what you just said, right? As in, you're still gonna ask me to say something, then you'll kiss me—which, deal—then you wanna watch TV with me."

"Right. That. Yes. I'm not trying to ask for pegging or anything without being explicit. Was that minor stuff—not even sex acts—all okay with you?"

He pretended that he needed to consider whether he'd do the few things she'd just asked. "Yes."

"Good," she said. "I . . . this is gonna sound stupid. I want you to . . . just . . . say that you want me." She became surprisingly vulnerable as she told him what she wanted. She'd looked back into his eyes until then; when she started asking for that she looked away, spoke and paused awkwardly.

XLIV

Rama leaned to a side so she could look at him, took a hand off her back, held her face by the chin and tilted her head gently so she'd meet his eyes. He said, "I want you, Celest."

She hummed, smiling, looking into his eyes. "Good. I want you too, Rama."

They smiled together. He leaned forward and kissed her. Nice, but perfunctory.

Celest said, "Do you want to just lay with me?"

"I'd be happy to," he said, "but I do enjoy massaging you. I'm finding it relaxing, even for me."

She watched his eyes, thinking.

She was thinking about how wet her pussy already was from feeling his firm, strong, tender touch. She wanted to say "relaxing" wasn't quite the word for it. Instead she said, "Will you do my legs?"

"Sure," he said. He didn't need to think about it. She smiled. "How do you want me to do that?"

She looked at where he'd have to get to reach her legs now, if she didn't move. It would be awkward for them both, and he'd probably block the TV.

"Wouldn't I be in your way?" he said. "Like this?"

She nodded. "You would," she said. "And you couldn't see the show either. That defeats the purpose. How about this—"

She tossed half their pillows aside, to the head of the bed, and lay forward on the bed, belly down, ass facing up, with her face toward the TV. She propped her elbows up to look at the TV without bending her neck awkwardly. They could both watch the show that way. That way, he could also see her ass looking sexy and plump (in a good way) in her thong.

"Your ass looks great," he couldn't hold in. She hadn't even fully settled yet; he didn't hesitate to make the observation.

The way the dimming sunset caught her cheeks and the backs of her thighs and calves was rather exciting. (He didn't have an erection right now, somehow.) Bronzed her. Tha booty and thighs glimmered.

"Thank you, baby," she said, audibly smiling. She settled. "This works for me."

XLV

Celest felt very good about herself. Sexy, powerful.

"You're not gonna get tired, if you keep massaging me?" she said. Eyes on the TV, though he was pretty sure neither of them were paying attention to it.

"No, not at all," he said. "This is . . . sort of idling, for me."

Celest wasn't sure if she believed him. It seemed like mostly truth. Maybe he only wanted to please her. It was hard to tell. She decided to just go with it and let him have his way with her. If the Star Trek episode weren't over yet and he got just too excited from the lovely view of her body—she couldn't blame him—and he took his cock out of his boxers and it was hard and without saying anything he walked up to her head on the other side of their bed—him standing, and her prone on the bed, which would put his cock right by her mouth—she'd kind of like it. It would be incredibly exciting. She might not even say anything, she'd just pull him closer, via whatever of him she could reach (hips, probably), and push his cock into her mouth and let it split her lips apart around it and she'd start sucking and licking. If it was soft but he still presented it to her mouth, which seemed unlikely, then she'd get it hard first. She wouldn't even care if he didn't stop her or warn her when he got close to orgasm, and came in her mouth. She'd like that too. That would all be fine, and sort of hot, as long he was able and willing to keep going after it, because she certainly wouldn't be satisfied only by sucking him off. She wouldn't check now but she felt like she was soaking her thong—too bad, because it was a good one, but she looked so good in it—but she still wanted him to suck on her clit and kiss and lick it and maybe fuck her with his tongue a little before they got penetrative with his cock in her cunt. She was pretty sure he'd do all that, and want to and probably like it, and he'd be wonderful and very giving, but she couldn't really know that—he'd never actually had an orgasm with her before. That she knew of. Which was probably her fault more than his. What if he blew his load down her throat and just fucking went to sleep? That would be disappointing, upsetting; she wouldn't have had an orgasm yet. That . . . that would be bad. So if he did just present his cock to her, wordlessly (didn't seem likely), for sucking like that maybe she'd get started but keep asking him for orgasm-progress updates—unless he shared such information freely and she could tell he was getting close; she thought he'd probably keep her informed of his pleasure—he was a good communicator, she thought he'd at the very least warn her when he was about to pass the point of no return, which could be soon enough to back off before he came. Then she'd have him go down on her, that alone, for a few minutes. With him that would probably be plenty for her to come at least once. In their past sexual history, she'd never let him have enough intimate time with her for him to make or get her to come more than once, she'd always kind of cut him / their activities off right after one climax of hers. Which had been a mistake, she realized. Anyway if she came once like that she could let him do whatever he wanted until he came, which could be a while. But if it wasn't a while and he was done after one, she'd still be pretty satisfied. That would be enough. For tonight. Though she really wanted more. Just doing it at all once would kind of break the ice for them, intimately. She'd be much more relaxed their next time, whether that was 10 minutes later, or a nap later, or tomorrow. She could give him feedback and polite guidance, like, "Let's try edging with you some, okay sweetie?" or something. He was always chill with her feedback, though, didn't take it personally, and he probably wouldn't be upset if she just said, "That was really good"—because it certainly would be—"but it could be even better for me, cuz I can come more than once." Or maybe he'd nut and pass out, asleep, but she could just wake him up later for round two. He'd do better then; he'd be past Their First Time too.

Celest decided: She'd let him massage her legs until the next commercial break, if he really wanted to. She knew he'd never taken any massage or physical therapy classes, but he was doing a great job. He'd been awakening her entire body, and relaxing her, too, heating her up. Then she'd ask him to rub her butt—entirely selfishly, she wouldn't even care if he got nothing out of it, though it would be cool if he liked it too. She suspected he would. Then whenever the show came back on she'd pause it and tell him to just lie down with her. No making out until the end credits, if the network even ran those. But she wanted his hands to stay on her, to keep her turned-on, to keep her at a simmer; she didn't want to let that lessen. She'd just be thinking about things she wanted to do to him, or have him do to her, and have him hold one of her tits or her ass and lie on him. There were only about 10 minutes left in the episode, that should be time enough.

"I have to rewind," she said. "I was . . . kinda distracted, focusing on how good everything you're doing feels."

Then they did just what she wanted: resumed the episode, then butt rub. He was much better at it than she'd expected; enthusiastic, creative. A natural. He didn't reach under her thong or put a finger in (or up) her ass, though she'd wanted him to, or at least wanted him to tease and pretend he would and circle around the rim.

The episode ended.