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1
DILLON
I wondered what it meant that I was starting to mark the time by my supply runs and whether it was depressing or not. My mom would’ve told me that I needed to get out and actually talk to people, but unfortunately, she wasn’t around to give me any lectures.
Since I had a horrible habit of leaving my fill-ups for the last minute, the fuel for the cabin’s generator was starting to run dangerously low, but it wasn’t something that could be helped. I just couldn’t get past the aversion that I’d built up to being around people. As soon as I grabbed my keys from the coffee table, my dog and best pal, Bucky, lifted his head from the pillow on the couch and bounded for me.
“You gonna come with me, bud?” I asked, leaning down and rubbing his ears. Bucky barely acknowledged me as he headed for the door, jumping up on his back feet and opening the door handle with his front paws. I shook my head as I followed him up to my truck and opened the front door for him, allowing him to jump up into the seat and make himself comfortable. I got up into the truck after him, smiling as he set his head on the ledge of the window, nosing at it in a clear signal for me to lower it.
“Thank God for you, Buck,” I said, turning the engine over. He gave a little huff as I lowered the window for him, as if he understood me. He was about a thousand times easier to have around than people.
There were the occasional people that I could still stomach, surprisingly. Just… people, as a general rule, made me pretty uneasy, to say the least.
I pulled up to the gas station in town and pulled out the canisters that I always filled up and took back to the cabin in the mountains, leaving Bucky in the truck with the windows down. I walked inside and put my card down in front of Hank, the gas station owner, who picked it up with a quick smile and ran it for the same amount of gas that he did every month.
“You goin’ over to the market today?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, signing the little screen on the credit card reader. “I’m completely out of bacon.”
“How can a man live without it?” he asked, grinning at me fully this time. I grinned in return. “Just be careful, okay? I think there are supposed to be a few storms in the next couple days, and I always think of you alone up there on that mountain.”
“Do you come up with this, or does Nadine put you up to it?” I asked with a chuckle. Hank’s wife, Nadine, had brought me more than a few casseroles when I’d first moved to the cabin and hadn’t stopped inviting me to dinner, no matter how often I turned her down. Eventually, it had only taken Hank’s assurance that I would probably never take her up on the invitation to get her to stop asking.
“Oh, she told me to tell you that the invitation is still open whenever you want it, especially during a storm,” he said. “But I do think about it too. You know how many rockslides happen up there, and you’ve only got that one generator.”
I turned, saluting him as I walked away. “Yeah, but at the end of the day, it’s just nature. I can deal with it.”
It was true. Compared to some of the shit that I’d seen coming from the dregs of humanity, whatever nature could do to me was nothing. At least nature had understandable motives.
I got into the truck and headed over to the market, where I was pretty put out to see all of the cars outside. I was tempted to go back home and come back another day, but I was running dangerously low on food. Plus, people always need their groceries I suppose. I’d been living on the last of my pantry for a few weeks, but I was getting a little sick of it.
But even more importantly, I’d noticed when I’d gone to fill Bucky’s dish that day that his food bag was too low for comfort. I’d sacrifice myself before I let him go hungry.
I opened the door of my truck cab, and Bucky didn’t hesitate to jump out after me. The store manager had given me a little trouble when I’d first moved here, but everyone had gotten used to both of us relatively quickly.
I grabbed a large cart and started loading up on my usual staples: bread, bacon, eggs, tomatoes… anything that would keep for the next couple of weeks before I needed to come down again.
As I turned down the aisle with pet supplies to grab a bag of Bucky’s food, I noticed that he wasn’t with me. This wasn’t like him. Usually when we went out, he stuck to me like the brambles that got caught in his coat when we went out on the trails.
“Bucky?” I called, going back around the corner of the aisle to look for him. Thankfully, it didn’t take too long for me to spot him where he’d jumped up onto a girl in one of the staff vests of the market. I was about to jump forward and intervene, but as it turned out, I didn’t have a lot to worry about in this case.
The girl turned around and immediately got down on her knees so that she was face-to-face with Bucky. “Hey, boy. Whatcha doing here, hmm?”
I stepped forward to pull him away from her, and she stood up to look at me. I noticed that she was older than I’d initially thought, but that wasn’t the only thing I noticed.
It was impossible to tell exactly how long her thick, dark red hair was since it was tied into a knot on top of her head, but I could see that she had enough of it to get lost in. It contrasted beautifully against her creamy, smooth complexion.
But it wasn’t until I met her eyes that I really felt like my stomach had been socked so hard that I might never be able to breathe deeply again. They were such a deep, intense blue that I felt like I was falling into the perfect water of an ocean. She was fire and ice personified.
I immediately pulled back from her, almost wishing that I hadn’t seen those eyes. They had jolted me so hard that I didn’t know whether I’d ever come back from it.
“Can I help you find something, sir?” she said, blinking those wide blue eyes up at me.
“Just my dog,” I said, gesturing at Bucky.
“Oh, he’s yours.” She leaned down and rubbed his head. “I was wondering where this gorgeous guy had come from.”
I wasn’t sure what came over me. I normally tried to keep conversations as short as possible, and I definitely didn’t draw out dialogue with women any more than I had to. But something moved me to say, “Yeah. It’s strange—he doesn’t normally go up to people.” I put my hand out, and he came to me silently. “I guess he sensed something about you.”
