Ruby slid out of her sleeping bag and untied the tent flap. In the clearing of soft duff and lush ferns, the air was fresh and wet with pine scent, the sky streaked with clouds scudding over the mountain peaks.
“Why would she run away?”
“Too heathen, I guess,” Quinn smirked.
“Heathen?” Ruby gulped a laugh. “When was the last time you worshipped false idols?”
“Yesterday!” He raised his hands in surrender.
“Cursed?”
His hands rose higher. “A minute ago!”
“Fornicated?”
A deep blush crossed his face.
“Tell me,” she said, twirling her fingers around his hair. “You tell me. I tell you.”
“Never,” he confessed.
“No, really?”
“Really truly.”
“I thought girls jumped you, game boy!”
“Not the right ones.”
“You in the closet?”
“Not that either,” he shrugged. “Shy, I guess.”
Ruby’s fantasy of life in California included hordes of sexy young women fighting over Quinn.
“The longer you wait, the shyer you get,” she said.
“Pathologically shy,” he sighed.
“Everything works?”
“Apparently,” he said. “And you?”
“I live in a wasteland. On weekends, dumb low-rider kids get wasted on wine and hippie brats get stoned on pot. Who wants to have sex with a dude who’s out of it?”
“I know you’ve done something,” Quinn said. He could read it in her body.
“There’s my friend August but he doesn’t count. Sometimes I let him hump me. He’s like a charity case.”
Ruby ached to have love-making sex. Her new life required it.
“It’s probably okay to do it once,” she said. “Don’t they call that ‘kissing cousins’?”
Quinn shook as he slipped his arm around Ruby’s waist and bent her backwards. They fell on the ground in one graceful motion and Ruby folded underneath him, her heart pounding. She loved the feeling of his weight, the feeling of his creamy skin, the bristles on his chin and cheeks. She and Quinn had always loved each other. He was her childhood groom and she was his bride.
“The last two people on earth,” she purred, her lips against his ear.
They lay kissing, lost in the smell and taste of each other. Eager, hungry, wet kisses in a tangle of legs and hips.
“Reckon it’s time to stop that!” a voice croaked.
“What the hell!” Quinn leapt to his feet. Ruby rolled over the ground to the nearest tree.
“You seen her?” A small, hairy man with a shotgun stepped out of the woods.
“Last night,” Quinn said.
“With the boy?”
“We haven’t seen them this morning,” Ruby said.
“You lying,” the man said.
“No, sir.”
“What she tell you?” His deep-set eyes were too tiny to read. “You hear me asking?”
There was a wrong and right answer. Quinn needed Ruby’s help.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Now you lying!” he shouted.
Ruby and Quinn jumped.
“Lucas was sick,” Ruby said. “She wanted to find a doctor.”
“Still sick?”
“He looked sick to me,” Quinn said.
“No, sir, but he was running a high fever. He couldn’t take solids. He couldn’t even drink water.”
Jenkins regarded the two youngsters. Hard to tell girl from boy. Likely pervert siblings and offspring of sin.
“What she say about me?”
“Excuse me, sir, you are?”
The menacing man with overworked arms and bearded like a troll swung his gun at Ruby. “Her lawful God-fearing husband!”
“No need to point that way, sir,” Quinn stammered.
“What she say about me?”
“I don’t believe she mentioned you,” Quinn said.
“Did she tell you where she came from?”
“Ruby, did Hazel tell us where she came from?”
“She said there was a camp but no doctor.”
Quinn cringed.
“She done trade the devil for a witch.” Jenkins waved the gun. “She done told you. Now you know.”
“We don’t know anything, I swear,” Quinn said.
“Don’t tolerate swearing,” Jenkins said.