Homestead Harem 2, page 17
“Six feet,” Blossom said, blushing a little. “And a half.”
We all laughed at the half addition, and before long the group had separated into a few volleying conversations, laughter and stories seeping into one another and circling back around. Alexis challenged Blossom to an arm wrestle and lost tremendously while we whooped and cheered, and before long Charlotte had fallen asleep nestled into my side, purring lightly against my skin.
As I leaned back and took in the scene, I realized it was funny—after the muddy battle of the night before, I had expected the morning to be a walk of shame, lamenting my precious lost bullet and apologizing to everyone I’d failed. But Charlotte and Sophia were right—I’d been working myself to the bone lately keeping this house standing, keeping these girls safe, keeping our farm protected. Maybe, just maybe, I deserved a plate of pancakes—and six girls gathered around me to enjoy them with. Maybe I didn’t have to beat myself up.
The morning was a good reminder of all that I was fighting for—and, on the flip side, everything I had to lose. But, warm and washed with a belly full of pancakes and maple syrup, I had to admit: things were looking (at least a little bit) up.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
The sun was rising over the Eastern ridge of the valley, and, from my spot atop the roof of the barn, I could see for miles and miles.
It had been three days since the attack on our fields. Three days of nursing our wounds and trying to return to some semblance of our normal lives—tend to the fields and the animals and the house like nothing was wrong. But there was nothing normal about any of this.
“All alone out here?”
I turned around to see Ellen peaking over the edge of the barn, perched on the ladder. The light of the sunrise painted the edges of her rabbit ears in gold.
“Yeah. Just thinking,” I replied, holding out my hand to steady her as she climbed across the roof to sit down next to me.
“You’ve been doing a lot of that the last few days,” she replied. “Which is funny, because I’m usually the silent, brooding one.”
I chuckled a little.
“You’re right, I think I’ve been stepping on your toes.”
“It’s okay, I forgive you,” she replied, nudging me lightly with her shoulder. “What’chya thinking about?”
The sigh that poured out of me could have powered a windmill.
“That much, huh?” Ellen joked.
“’Fraid so.” I peered out at the ocean of fluorescent green trees that surrounded our land. “I just…I feel like we’ve been two steps behind Maven this entire time. Reacting to her every move instead of making our own. Sometimes I think I should have set out on Hickory with my shotgun the second Sophia showed up crying on the lawn, hunted Maven down myself and taken her out then and there. Avoided all this mess.”
Ellen stayed silent for a while, staring out at the horizon.
“We both know that’s not you,” she finally declared.
I exhaled.
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
My shoulder was stinging again, so I pulled the bandage back and readjusted it—even though I knew Alexis would chide me for it later. It killed me that—on top of it all—my fighting arm was weakened.
“Do you remember when you first met me?” Ellen asked, turning to let me see her wide blue eyes. “I was terrified of you.”
“I remember,” I said, smirking a little at the thought. “You ran like someone’d stuck you with a hot poker.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Ellen countered. “You were a strange man out in the forest, asking me to come back and talk to you. In these parts, in this world…I would have been a fool to believe you.”
“’Spose you’re right about that too.”
“I like hearing you say that,” she said, kissing me lightly on the cheek.
I rolled my eyes, sidling closer up to her and wrapping my arm around her shoulder. There was something soft and comforting about Ellen’s body that couldn’t be replicated—like lying down on a plate of warm dinner rolls.
“It wasn’t until you all built me that hut in the forest that I could finally believe you were serious. That you were actually different from every other man I’d learned to fear. That your words weren’t just empty promises—they were as real as the dirt beneath my feet. I couldn’t believe it was possible for someone like you to even still exist.”
“I remember,” I said. “You were speechless.”
Ellen shrugged.
“You’re remarkable, Jonas,” she said, offhandedly, like you might say you have jam on your face, Jonas. “A man in the new world who still believes in doing what’s right. That’s why you didn’t leave the farm the second Sophia showed up to go kill Maven. Because, deep down, I know you still believe there’s a world where you could get her to change.”
My head dropped limply between my legs as I took in her words.
“That’s the problem, darlin,” I admitted. “I’ve been sitting up here since before dawn trying to figure out a world where I let go of that ridiculous notion. I’ve given Maven more chances than I’ve got fingers on my hands. Why can’t I just accept she’s rotten past expiration and take her and her girls out?”
“Because then you wouldn’t be you,” Ellen replied simply, resting her head on me. “Imagine if you’d gone all psycho killer on them back then. You could have killed Blossom.”
The thought jolted me back to reality.
“Damn. You’re right.”
“And if there’s girls like Blossom and Sophia in that community, there’s probably more who are only there because they’ve got nowhere else to go. I mean, even Charlotte fought for Duncan before you came along. Us mutant girls have got a very limited number of choices out here. Either go totally rogue and hide yourself in a fox den way out in the woods like Alexis, or find someone powerful enough to protect you.”
I sighed.
“I just wish there was some way to show those girls with Maven that they could switch to our side,” I lamented. “Some way they could actually trust me. Because words don’t seem to be cuttin’ it.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jonas. They’d be fools to trust you,” Ellen repeated, shrugging as she did.
We stared out at the horizon for a while, daylight finally creeping across the valley and illuminating our farm, the thrushes and blackbirds chirping good morning.
“Wait,” I said, realization hitting me like the dawn. “What are we thinking?”
“What do you mean?” Ellen asked, staring at me curiously.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Uh…”
I was already standing up to climb down the ladder, taking the rungs down the side of the barn as fast and loose as when I was a child while Ellen climbed down after me.
“Where are you going?” Ellen demanded. I stayed at the bottom to make sure she got down safely before I took her hand and started jogging us towards the house.
“Get inside!” I called to Sophia, Jordan, and Blossom, who were practicing evasive maneuvers on the lawn. “Farm meeting!”
“Can I come?” Benny called, popping his head out from the chicken coops with eyes as wide as full moons.
“Of course!” I called back. “Round up everyone you can and meet me in the house in one minute!”
Benny sprung into action, and the chickens squawked and fluttered as he clearly threw food in their faces and ran out in a flurry. Meanwhile, myself, Ellen, and everyone else outside filed into the house, which smelled of fresh coffee and late August heat. I climbed the stairs two at a time to the bedroom, where Charlotte slept peacefully, Alexis conked out in a chair by her side.
“What?!” Alexis shouted in a daze as she woke up to half the house bursting into the room. Her orange hair was disheveled and sideways, and she grabbed a long wax candle from the coffee table to hold weakly out as a weapon. “Are we under attack?”
“No, but good to know you’d be ready to defend Charlotte with that deadly candle,” Ellen deadpanned, to which Alexis just sank back down in her chair and tossed the candle back on the coffee table.
“Whatever, I’m just the doctor,” she muttered, wiping the sleep from her eyes. “What the hell’s happening?”
“No idea,” Ellen shrugged. “I think Jonas has a screw loose.”
“Are you alright, darling?” Charlotte asked, having risen from sleep with more grace than Alexis. She blinked around the room, taking in the scene.
“I’m fine, everything’s fine,” I assured, moving to stand next to the bed so I could face everyone. “I just had an idea, and I thought you all should hear it.”
“Is it about not having house meetings before seven a.m.?” Alexis asked. “Because I’m all for that.”
“No,” I replied, shooting the fox-girl a look. “It’s about Ellen. Well—not really, but it’s about showing Maven’s girls that we aren’t just all talk. We don’t manipulate people into living here and we don’t prevent them from leaving. It’s about actually, really, fully convincing them to switch to our side, and avoiding the deaths of probably a dozen mutant girls who just want a safe place to live their damn lives.”
Sophia had subconsciously stepped forward during this speech, her hazel eyes glistening with hope.
“How?” she asked. As if we were the only two people in the room.
“We build them a home,” I declared.
All around me, my people stared at me in confusion.
“Listen,” I continued, my voice crescendoing with excitement. “We all agree we need more space around here—and that’s not even factoring in potentially ten to twenty new house members. Now, we’ve got a warehouse full of building supplies and a lot of folks eager to get to work on a whole slew of ideas, as we learned the other day. I know I said we should wait to start building until we’ve dealt with Maven, until the baby is born and the harvest is over, but to hell with all that. We gotta start building now, because the only way to show Maven’s girls we’re serious is to show Maven’s girls we’re serious. We ain’t all talk on this farm. Maven’s got us under constant surveillance—so if they need to see we’re willing to build them a home here, then let’s build the damn thing.”
“But…” Blossom started, her face strangely blank, as if she couldn’t understand the language I was speaking. “That will take weeks…and so much effort…not to mention the fact that it might not even work…why would you do all that just for half a chance they might defect?”
I looked around, shrugging my shoulders.
“It’s not all up to me. Do y’all think a few weeks of hard work is worth it for half a chance we might save a dozen lives?”
Every person in the room nodded, Benny adding a “hell yeah it is!”
I looked back to Blossom.
“Seems like it’s worth it to us.”
The wolf-girl only blinked, her violet eyes filling with sudden moisture as she processed the fact that people could still be kind in this world.
“With everyone on the farm working together, we could put a structure up in ten days,” Leaf, the goat-boy with an affinity for engineering, chimed in from the back of the crowd.
“See?” I declared. “Now I ain’t always right, but I know this. I’m sick of playing Maven and Lara’s game. If we’re gonna fight back, let’s do it our way.”
“What about Maven, though?” Blossom asked. “Will you try to speak to her again?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to end this madness,” I said, placing my hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. The cat-girl placed her hand over mine, and I could feel the pride radiating from her—filling me with an energy I hadn’t felt in months. “If you think your mother is still capable of change, I trust you. If she’s willing to talk, so am I.”
“Well I for one am ready to get to work,” Sophia said, trying her best to tamp down her giddy smile.
“I’ll go start breakfast!” Jordan declared, dancing out of the room and down to the kitchens.
“I’ll prep the horses to start towing supplies,” Polly the chipmunk-girl said.
“I gotta get my notebook!” Leaf declared suddenly, pushing out of the room excitedly.
“Wait for me!” Benny called after his friend.
Charlotte only stared up at me as the rest of the room filed out, one hand over her swollen belly, her eyes beaming with pride. The baby would be coming any day now—and we’d moved all the necessary equipment into the bedroom, making the space feel even more cramped than usual. Suddenly, the idea that we weren’t already building a new house seemed ridiculous.
“You’re pretty spectacular, you know that?” Charlotte said to me.
I shook my head, my heart swelling.
“He doesn’t, but he should,” Ellen added, sitting down on the bed and looking up at me the same way Charlotte was.
“Alright, alright, girls, I gotta go get to work,” I declared, but Ellen and Charlotte were pulling me back before I could make it two feet away.
“Not yet you aren’t,” Ellen declared.
I looked to my left, where Alexis was staring at me like a juicy steak she wanted to devour. By the door, Sophia had lingered, her teeth biting suggestively down on her bottom lip.
I paused, realizing the direction this was going in.
“Well,” I declared, “I suppose a delay couldn’t hurt my morning too much…”
“Atta boy,” Ellen replied, and before I knew it was being pulled eagerly into the bed.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Over the next few days, the farm was a flurry of activity.
The first thing I did was find my father’s old maps of the area and draw out the exact route we needed to take to transport the supplies. We rigged every cart we had, expanding them and attaching them to the horses for long hauls. When the first group returned from the site with four horse carts worth of piping and concrete blocks, the whole farm whooped and cheered from the front porch, running to help them pull everything the last fifty feet.
Suddenly, I understood how the Egyptians built the pyramids, how the ancient English built Stonehenge. It wasn’t aliens—it was a group of people galvanized by ambition and hope, who had no other choice but to achieve the impossible. It was determination and grit and not having any other option but to succeed. It was how my grandfather built our home with nothing but a few hundred dollars saved over five summers as a farmhand and a group of buddies who’d die for him.
And it was how we were going to save our farm.
Digging the foundation of the house was backbreaking work, but there was something nice about zoning out while I shoveled, the sun beating down on my back, my muscles straining, a slick sheen of sweat coating every inch of me. I could forget about how Charlotte was due any day now, forget about the bullet I’d wasted, and stop replaying my fight with Lara over and over in my head—how I didn’t kill her when I had the chance.
Instead, I practiced my speech to Maven. How I would appeal to her humanity, convince her to change with a rousing speech more badass and inspirational than the ones from Braveheart and Gladiator combined. And, I was ashamed to admit, I imagined how good it would feel to take her out should she refuse to listen to my words.
I was doing just that when Blossom dropped down into the trench of the foundation, looking taller than ever next to her shovel. Even in the rocky dirt, her feet were bare.
“Come to join the digging crew?” I asked, mopping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.
The wolf-girl nodded, her face unreadable.
“Well, dig in,” I joked.
Blossom didn’t crack a smile.
“Dig in,” I repeated. “Get it? Because we’re…you know what, nevermind.”
She seemed to realize what I was saying halfway through, faking a halfhearted laugh and going back to her work.
“Alright, I’dda preferred nothing over that pity laugh, damn,” I joked, shaking my head. “Everything alright with you, darlin’?”
“Yeah,” Blossom started, straining to lodge her shovel deeper into the dirt. “I just…I want to do everything I can to help out.”
“You are,” I assured her. “I mean, ain’t nothing else you can do but grab a shovel and dig, right?”
She didn’t respond, instead staring down in the dirt, lost in thought.
I went back to my work, but a creeping fear invaded my inner monologue. Blossom had seemed depressed all day. Was she regretting leaving her family?
“You know, we can set you up somewhere more roomy to sleep,” I blurted out, suddenly desperate not to lose the mysterious wolf-girl on our team. Maven’s own daughter believing our cause was my best asset in getting the crazy enemy leader to believe me. “You know, if bunking with Sophia in that closet is too cramped for you.”
“No,” Blossom said, a little too quickly to ease my mind. “Definitely not. Don’t go through any more trouble for me, please.”
Because you’re planning on leaving us soon? I wanted to ask. But I kept my mouth shut, returning to my work. If she was considering leaving, I didn’t want to push her further away by hounding her with questions.
We kept digging for a while, the sun beating down on us as we tackled a whole corner together. Eventually, Blossom stuck her shovel down in the dirt, looking directly at me.
“Jonas?” she said, a little nervously.
“Yeah?” I started. But we were interrupted by Ellen running at us.
“Everything alright?” I asked.
“Charlotte’s hurting,” Ellen replied. “She needs you.”
I was up and out of the hole of the foundation in a heartbeat, ten running steps towards the house before I even remembered Blossom had been about to speak.
A few hours later, I woke up in a panic, glancing around at my surroundings.
I exhaled relief, wiping my eyes. It was dusk, and we were safe. I’d fallen asleep on the bed next to Charlotte, holding her in my arms until the pain in her abdomen subsided. Luckily, it seemed it had—she was passed out next to me, snoring ever-so-gently, her ebony hair spread out on the pillow.
