The Three

by Meghan O'Brien

  Never mind.”

  One side of Elin’s mouth twitched. “ ‘Fess up. You saw what?”

  Anna glanced out at the water, making sure that Kael was far enough away, and leaned close to murmur into Elin’s ear, “The first night, I couldn’t sleep and, well, I don’t understand how…”

  “You saw us making love?” Elin’s eyes danced with amusement.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to watch, but—”

  “You’re confused because you saw me riding him.”

  Anna’s face burned. “Well, yeah.”

  Elin tipped her head back and released a musical peal of laughter. “I’m sorry, you’re just so—” When Anna looked down, humiliated, Elin grabbed her hand. “You’re wonderful, really.” She leaned over to give Anna a soft kiss on the lips. “To answer your question, Kael and I spent some time in Michigan last year. We picked something up in a shop in Ann Arbor. A toy and a harness for strapping it on.” Tilting her head, she stroked her thumb over the side of Anna’s hand. “Do you know what I mean?”

  Anna wasn’t entirely sure she understood how such a thing would work, but she imagined that these objects helped Kael simulate the anatomy of a biological male. She wondered what kind of store would have carried something like that. “Um, yeah. I get it.”

  “You don’t have a problem with this, do you? That we’re both women?”

  “You know I don’t.” A sudden, strong feeling of safety overwhelmed her. “I never thought I would meet another woman who…felt the same way I did.”

  “A woman who loves other women?”

  “Yes,” Anna whispered. Speaking her own secret for the first time since one teenaged afternoon with Garrett, she felt her whole body relax and she broke into an unthinking grin at the joy of it. “Or who hopes to.”

  Elin gave her a sly smile, then stepped back and stripped off her T-shirt. “We should probably think about getting in the water. I’m sure Kael would appreciate not being the only one who’s naked and swimming.”

  Anna managed a nod as Elin reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. She didn’t even try to tear her eyes from Elin’s bare breasts when her pink nipples darkened and contracted under her heated stare.

  Finally dragging her gaze to Elin’s face, she said, “It was hard for Kael to take off his…her clothes in front of me, wasn’t it?”

  Elin nodded, cheeks rosy after Anna’s intense appraisal. “Yeah, it was. He’s shy about his body.”

  The words bolstered Anna’s courage, so she pulled off her own T-shirt and cast it to the ground. “Um, does Kael prefer to be called ‘he’?” She kept her hands moving, trying not to concentrate on the fact that she was baring her body.

  “Kael…can go either way. If it’s just the three of us, it’s okay to acknowledge that Kael is a woman. He doesn’t mind. But in general, I use male pronouns. He likes it, and it’s less confusing that way. It’s also safer if we’re in a situation where there’s any chance we could be overheard.”

  Fascinated, Anna shed her jeans. “You said that Kael has presented himself as a man since he escaped.

  Where did he escape from?”

  Elin stepped out of her panties and stood nude before her. “That’s not really my story to tell.” Her eyes flicked out across the water to where Kael floated on her back, some distance from shore. “All I can say is that he spent most of his life in a very bad place. He wasn’t as lucky as you and I were after the sickness.

  There are some very evil things out there. Before I met Kael, I had no idea.”

  Anna shook her head, a million questions flooding her mind. “So that’s why he pretends to be a man? He escaped from someone and doesn’t want to be found?”

  “That’s part of it. Mostly, though, it’s just who Kael is. He’s not really a woman, and he’s not really man.

  He’s just…Kael.”

  Naked now, Anna gestured to the water. “Let’s get in, all right?”

  “I know it’s confusing,” Elin said as they walked into the lake. “And I know I’m not telling you very much, but I think some of this needs to come from Kael himself.”

  Anna gasped as the cool water hit her inner thighs. “I’m not sure that Kael would want to talk to me about stuff like that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Anna’s eyes strayed to Kael, who was slowly paddling toward them. “Kael and I aren’t as comfortable with one another as I am with you. Or like Kael is with you. I just don’t know that he—”

  “Anna,” Elin whispered, keeping her voice low at Kael’s approach, “now that there are no more secrets between you, maybe you can get closer. Kael knows that you’ve felt uncomfortable with him, and that…well, that’s affected him, too.”

  Anna thought back to seeing Kael trembling and in tears with Elin after her flashback of the other day. It was yet another piece of the puzzle of Kael that she still struggled to put together. “I know.”

  “You should try to talk to him. He’s an amazing person, really. And you two have more in common than maybe either of you realize.”

  Anna couldn’t help a soft giggle at that. “One pretty major thing, for sure.” She looked down at her own breasts bobbing in the water. Kael is a woman. I never saw that one coming,

  “Pretty is right,” Elin drawled.

  Anna glanced up to find hazel eyes assessing her breasts. “Stop,” she whispered, blushing hard at the blatant flirtation.

  With a wide grin, Elin asked, “Do you really want me to stop?”

  Anna considered for a moment. “No.”

  “I can’t ignore a beautiful woman,” Elin said as the shaven-haired Kael swam up beside her, “can I, sweetheart?”

  “Not in my experience, no.” Kael leaned in to give her a slow kiss.

  Anna felt her center throb. Something about knowing Kael’s true sex made the sight of them kissing charged and erotic in a way that left her breathless. Kael’s delicate masculinity had always intrigued her, but now it fascinated her beyond words. Kael’s gender took on an ambiguity that left her dizzy with arousal.

  “Lucky me.” Elin drew back and flicked a glance at Anna. “I’m surrounded by beauty.”

  Anna blushed. Lucky us. Remembering what Elin had said about Kael’s shyness, she said, “Thank you for trusting me, Kael.”

  Despite her best effort to resist, her eyes dropped down to take in Kael’s small breasts once again. That’s when she saw something she had been too flustered to notice before. Scars. Kael’s chest and shoulders were littered with faded scars.

  Anna had a feeling there was a lot more to understand.

  Three days after the revelation, Kael sought Anna out for a private talk, the first time they’d spent alone since their morning of sparring.

  “Listen, I wanted to tell you again how sorry I am about that morning,” Kael said. “I never meant to scare you so bad.”

  “I told you to forget about it. I was just being stupid.”

  “You weren’t being stupid, at all. I was the stupid one. I pushed you way too far.”

  “You want to know that I can defend myself. I understand that, Kael, I really do.”

  Kael rubbed her palm over her shaven scalp. “I was being an asshole. You’d just hit me in the chest, and I thought you could feel my breasts and so I pushed. I was trying to break down a little of your defiance. In the ugliest way possible.”

  “You couldn’t know how I would react.”

  “I’ve been hurt like that before,” Kael murmured. “There are things, if someone did them to me, I would react the same way. Triggers. I should have realized that you might react like that.”

  Anna looked over to Kael in surprise. Someone hurt her like that? She tried to reconcile Kael’s deadly strength with that kind of ugly violation. Though she couldn’t imagine it, she felt an instinctive agreement with Kael’s words. “Yeah. A trigger. That’s exactly it.”

  Kael nodded. “When I looked down and saw that fear in your eyes, I couldn’t believe
I’d caused it. It really shook me. Knowing I had done that to you.” Her eyes shone with emotion. “I never, ever wanted to make you feel like that. It nearly killed me to know I did.”

  “Is that why you decided to tell me you’re a woman?”

  “I was always going to tell you, sooner or later. You’re here with us to stay, after all. After what happened, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted you to know that I understand.”

  They fell silent and enjoyed the quiet evening for a few moments, smiling at one another when the sweet humming of an unfamiliar melody floated over to them. Elin was cooking dinner at their campsite, within shouting distance. When she got really involved with her food preparation, music was usually a part of it.

  “Do you have nightmares?” Anna asked after a while.

  “I used to have them all the time. Before I met Elin. Now, just sometimes.”

  “Elin said you’ve been living as a man since you escaped…from somewhere bad. Is that…where it happened?”

  Kael sucked in a deep breath and gazed up at the starry night. “Not the first time. But many times, yes.”

  Anna wanted to keep asking questions, but she was afraid to push. It wasn’t like she enjoyed talking about her own life, and she didn’t expect that Kael did either. Still, Kael had brought it up, and Anna had never spoken before to anyone who could really understand.

  “You don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  Kael shook her head. “No, it’s okay. How long ago did it happen to you?”

  “A little over a year. They were with the men who attacked my tribe. I killed one of their buddies, when I was defending my people.”

  Kael gave her a respectful nod. After a long hesitation, she said, “I was ten years old the first time.

  Everyone was dead. My mother lasted longer than my father. He died almost right away. Mom hung on for a while, but she passed away and then I was alone. Nobody else in my family survived.”

  “I can’t imagine what might have happened to me if I’d been left alone that young.” Uncle Roberto may not have been the nicest guy in the world, but he was someone who cared whether I lived or died.

  “I don’t remember a lot about when mom died,” Kael said. “I think I lived in our house for a while, ate whatever food we still had. To be honest, I think I’ve repressed a lot of that time. A neighbor found me. Mr.

  Jacobs. He took me with him. He decided to leave the city, to find other people. I was just a kid, so I—I let him take me.”

  “And he hurt you?” Anna guessed in a whisper.

  “He told me that as long as he was taking care of me, I had to…do stuff for him. He was a sick fucking bastard.”

  “Ten years old,” Anna whispered. At ten, her biggest concern had been keeping up with Garrett when they ran foot races around camp. “Did you even understand what was happening?”

  Kael’s lip twitched, and she picked at a slight rip in the knee of her jeans. “No, of course not. All I knew was that I didn’t like my new daddy very much.”

  Anna shuddered at the venomous inflection of the murmured word. She could feel hatred pouring out of Kael for a brief, startling instant, then the stoic mask slipped back into place. “Kael, I’m sorry.” Her own experience seemed almost insignificant now, and she felt a familiar self-recrimination at letting it shake her so badly. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything to say about it. It’s just…how I grew up.”

  “So you escaped from him? Mr. Jacobs?”

  “No.” Kael snorted. “Mr. Jacobs,” she repeated, almost under her breath. “Funny how I’ve never used his first name.” She shook her head. “No, I didn’t escape from him. He had me until I was twelve, and then, when we were passing through Philadelphia, he found the Procreation Movement.”

  “The Procreation Movement?”

  “You haven’t heard of it?”

  “No. I mean, the people in my tribe used to talk about procreation all the time. It was why my uncle and everyone else threw a fit when I told them I wanted to train as a fighter. I was supposed to find a mate and have babies.”

  Kael let out a strangled half-sob, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Imagine the people of your tribe, except there’s a whole community of them, and their single-minded purpose is procreation at all costs—repopulating the planet. And they’re so focused on that one goal that they will go to any length to promote it. That’s the Procreation Movement. It started near Philadelphia, and every year it gained members and got stronger.”

  “How many people?” Anna was astounded by this piece of news; she had never heard of any kind of organized community like that.

  “When I escaped? Honestly, there’s no way for me to know. One hundred? Two? There were always more trickling in. Mr. Jacobs sold me—well, he allowed the good religious folks of the Procreation Movement to convince him that abusing a child was morally wrong. Especially one he had adopted. They gave him a place in the community, food, supplies…in exchange for me.”

  Anna breathed a sigh of relief. “At the very least, it’s good that they don’t believe in raping children.”

  Kael turned to her with a hard smile. “No, sex was for procreation. They waited until I started menstruating when I was thirteen. Then I was a woman.”

  Anna gasped in shock. “How could they claim to be religious and do something like that? How could they claim to be human?”

  “I was serving the greater good,” Kael said in an emotionless voice. “That’s what they used to tell me. God wanted us to repopulate the earth, and so I had to stay at the Eve Institute and let them try to impregnate me. I was a girl without anyone in the world. What other reason did I have to exist?”

  “That makes me sick,” Anna spat. “How can they even think—”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Kael said with a painful smile. “It was my duty. And they thought it was their duty to see that I fulfilled mine. I used to wonder why I was here. From a very young age, I knew I was different from other girls. I didn’t like men, and I don’t think it’s just because I didn’t have a very good experience with them. I can remember having crushes on the girls when I went to school. So yeah, there were times when I wondered…maybe I really was useless. If I wasn’t at the Eve Institute, what could I contribute to the world? Maybe that really was the only thing I was good for.”

  Anna looked up the sky and a few tears escaped despite her best effort to suppress them. “I can’t understand how people who claimed to care about God and the greater good could treat you like that.”

  “Oh, they were really very civilized about it.” Kael’s voice was harsh, sarcastic. “At least they thought they were. It wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t intended to be violent. They wouldn’t come to our rooms unless we were fertile. When we were, they would send someone nightly. If a girl got pregnant, she was moved to a special ward and left alone.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “By the end, I was ‘out of control.’ That’s what they labeled it. I was resisting. While alone in my cell, I had been practicing fighting, and I realized that I was getting strong enough to maybe really hurt someone. One night I gave the guy they sent to me a black eye. By this point the guards had concluded I was trouble anyway, and one of them decided to sneak into my room the next day and teach me a lesson.” Her eyes glinted in the darkness. “I killed him. I disarmed him and stabbed him in the neck as he laid on top of me. I was twenty-two years old.”

  “Wow. I bet that felt…amazing.”

  “It did. I still have nightmares about it. I killed five people to escape. It took me two weeks to make my way out of the city. I was so scared to travel during the day. And all those buildings, I was incredibly paranoid.”

  Anna managed a slow nod, feeling numb after all she had been told. Her head started to pound when she thought of all that Kael had suffered. “This is an evil world.”

  Kael str
etched her long legs out and leaned back with her palms against the ground. “Sometimes. I used to think that was all there was to it, but now I know better.”

  “What do you know?” Please explain to me what’s so great about a world where things like this can happen.

  “I know beauty,” Kael said, and smiled. “I know pleasure. Before Elin, I never did. Now that I do, I know the world isn’t evil.”

  “Just some people in it?”

  “Yeah.” Kael gave her a friendly nudge with her shoulder. “I used to want to kill just about everyone I met. I was so full of anger. And fear. I still feel the fear sometimes, but I’m healing. You will, too.”

  “What happened to me is nothing compared to what happened to you. You’re so strong.”

  The night breeze picked up, whipping a long piece of brunette hair in front of Anna’s eyes. Kael reached over and tucked it behind her ear. “It’s not a matter of degrees. Hurt is hurt. I’m no stronger than you are.

  I’ve just had more time to heal, that’s all. Don’t give up, okay? I know it’s hard, but it can get better. It just takes work.”

  “And love?”

  “Love helps,” Kael said.

  “You’re very lucky to have found Elin,” Anna said. I can’t say that I’m not at least a little jealous. I’d give anything to feel that kind of pleasure just one time.

  “She’s helped me a lot. I never knew that my body could be a source of joy before I met her. And I never knew that I could feel the things she makes me feel.”

  “Hey, Kael?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It can really…feel good?” Anna blushed even as the question left her mouth.

  Kael chuckled and eased a careful arm around Anna’s waist. The affectionate touch took her by surprise, but she leaned into Kael’s strength on instinct. “It can feel very good. If it’s someone you trust—someone you love—it can be just about the best thing in the world.”

  Anna gazed at Kael through different eyes. The stoicism, the attitude, the distance, every aspect of the dark woman’s personality took on an entirely new spin. Anna was left with a deep sense of admiration, as well as a burgeoning attraction that she didn’t yet understand.