Back in the main room, the paper that had been taped to the inside of their door since the beginning caught his eye again. There was one rule he and Max had made, long before she’d lost her shadow and they had made the rest of them. Rule Zero, they had started calling it after they’d written the list. He pulled it down and crumpled it into a withered ball. There was no way Max could not have seen it when she left. What did that mean? How much had she forgotten?
They’d made Rule Zero when they became the only ones left at the hotel. For months there had been no electricity, no running water, then no radio. Then finally there were no other guests. They couldn’t avoid the conversation about it any longer.
“It’s not fair,” Max had said. “If it was me that went missing, you’d come after me.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Ory replied. It didn’t even sound believable to him.
“Yes, you would,” Max argued. “Besides, it’s different. You go out all day, and I stay here most of the time. If I disappeared, it would be because I lost my shadow and forgot to stay, so of course you shouldn’t follow then!”
“Don’t—” He grimaced. It felt like tempting fate to ever mention the possibility it could happen to either of them.
“I only meant, if you were the one who didn’t come home, it would probably be because you were injured somewhere and needed my help.”
“I’ll make sure to get killed, then, so there’s nothing to come help.”
“Ory,” Max said, her voice horribly small.
The silence settled between them, heavy. “Sorry,” he finally murmured.
They looked down at dinner—one plastic bag of potato chips. What he’d found the last time he’d gone out.
“I just can’t,” Max said. “It would be one thing if one of us forgot. But if you go missing while you’re out looking for food, I’m going to go to where you said you went and try to find you.”
“That’s not the deal,” Ory said.
“That’s as good as you’re going to get,” she shot back. “I’ll give you that if one of us forgets, the other doesn’t go after. I can’t do any more than that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ory finally said. He used paper from the abandoned guest book—wrote the rule in silence and hung it up. You never go after the other person if they forget. They didn’t speak for the rest of the evening.
It was the best they could do, but it wasn’t enough. Over the next few weeks, Ory stopped telling Max where he went to scavenge for scraps each day, or if she refused to let him out the door without an answer, lied so blatantly she knew it was so. Eventually she stopped asking, because she knew what he was doing.
Later that night, after they’d made Rule Zero, Ory used a tiny bit of the precious soap they had left. The shelter had contained boxes and boxes of surplus inventory, back when it was Elk Cliffs Resort, and in the early days they’d squandered it. Bathing whenever they liked, washing their hair at least once a day. It made things still feel normal. They realized too late that what had looked like an endless supply in the housekeeping closets actually wasn’t. They now had two hundred toothbrushes left, but no more toothpaste. Nine hundred towels, but barely any body wash. Now they were trying to stretch what was left, bathing only every few days, and only washing the essential areas. He dipped his finger into the plastic container and tried to scrape every millimeter of excess back in. Only what was needed. He reached down, away from his face and hair, and worked the slippery cleansing film over his testicles. He pulled back the foreskin, trying to spread the soap upward, working painstakingly to scrub away the vague, inescapable musk.
Max was already in bed when he toweled off after his bucket bath and slipped into the darkness of the bedroom. He crawled in next to her, naked, self-conscious. Her breathing echoed softly in the darkness. When soap was infinite before, bathing never used to mean anything. It didn’t reveal things one didn’t want announced so clearly. But now, with so little left, and bathwater from rain that they were collecting in buckets on the roof, it somehow became shameful. There was no subtlety in a world without soap. No room to pretend what one desperately needed and what one could skip tonight, no big deal, only if you feel like it, too.
Ory touched her back, under the tickling puff of her hair, and his fingers brushed against a T-shirt. Max rolled over, pulling him into a lazy hug, and he felt her realize he was nude and still damp mid-embrace—her arms paused for an instant, legs half-entwined with his own, her body recalibrating with dawning understanding. Ory withered, but he dug around clumsily for the bottom hem of her shirt anyway, trailed his hands upward inside of it until he felt the silken, heavy curve of her breasts.
She drew him closer and took hold of his slackening stiffness with one hand. Her fingers wrapped around firmly, and she pressed her other hand over his own on her breast through the fabric.
He tried to forget. The soap. Being the only ones left. Rule Zero. Everything. Her hands moved, warm, pulling him toward her.
He couldn’t.