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“Do you think that's why It chose us?” Travis begins to ask with a pasty mouth. “Because we are the only ones who don't... want to fuck like rabbits?”
Lottie frowns, confused for a moment before she understands what he's asking, and then hurries to correct him like he's a silly child.
“No, Travis, no.” She reprimands him gently. “The Wilderness is not governed by Judeo-Christian morality. Sex can be beautiful and divine if it is part of us.”
Travis remembers his first time with Nat, how Lottie appeared in his mind surrounded in a golden, ethereal glow, cradling him as the Virgin Mary would have cradled Jesus on the cross.
But then he also remembers the kisses —Lottie's and the girls'— after Jackie, voracious with those eager claw-like hands and hungry eyes, stripping him of his shirt, leaving him exposed and helpless like a lamb at the slaughter that had little to do with the knife's edge.
He thinks the word ‘divine’ is appropriate. If there was one thing they had made sure he remembered as a child in catechism classes, it was that God was to be as revered as he was feared.
“The fact that isn't part of us...” Lottie continues carefully. “It doesn't make us any more worthy or special in its eyes.”
“What does it do, then?”
He's still high, so he lazily reaches up and traces with hesitant fingers the scar on Lottie's forehead, as if it will hold all the answers he seeks. Lottie looks back at him, and for the first time in a long time she doesn't look like a prophet, just a little girl lost in a forest that devours her.
“I don't know.”
He had never liked Jackie, she was just another snooty, stuck-up rich girl who he would never have given a second glance at under any other circumstances. Yes, sure, she was pretty, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that she was a nice girl who was saving herself for her high school sweetheart, as his mother would have opined, that she was another frigid, repressed slut, as his father would have scornfully retorted, and more importantly, in how neither of them were doing this out of desire, but to fill a void they weren't brave enough to name.
“Were you... Are your parents religious or something?” One day he asks, leaning back on the dry leaves, with the bittersweet taste of berries and mushrooms still on his tongue. “Before...” He gestures vaguely to the treetops towering above them, enclosing them in a cage.
Lottie seems puzzled by the question, as if there is no direct relationship between the cult beliefs she has created and her religious background. Maybe there isn't, maybe what Travis should be asking about is her clinical background, but he has no shame in admitting to himself that he's projecting.
It's so easy to cling to something when you're scared.
“No, I wasn't raised in a religious family.” She answers, gently shaking her head. Her long hair covers her face like a chocolate waterfall and Travis' mouth waters. He forces himself to take another swig from the berry jar. “My mother believed in something, I guess. She had her own form of spirituality... However my father has been very skeptical since-” Lottie interrupts herself, shrugging her shoulders, making herself small as if suddenly shouted at. “My father is skeptical.” She trails off after a silence.
“My parents raised us as Catholics.” He shares. The plural hurts more in that sentence than in any other. The iron in Javi's heart returns to his mouth.
“Laura Lee baptized me.” Lottie says in response after a long, self-absorbed moment, her voice strangled as if she's choking. “She was Baptist, I think.”
They stand in silence as the wind rustles the leaves and branches around them. The Wilderness scoffs, victoriously.
If I were a girl I would have been the perfect Catholic daddy's little girl, Travis thinks bitterly as they pack up, being a guy I'm just a sissy for not having slept with a slut yet.
He feels nauseous at the thought of getting on that plane and spending a week in a hotel surrounded by dykes. Fucking a lesbo — or pretending to have done so— was almost more repulsive and pathetic than the rumor that Bobby Farleigh had spread around the boys' locker room with his stupid nickname.
But he was determined not to leave Javi alone with his father. His younger brother hadn't yet seen how gross he could be around young girls when mom wasn't around. His younger brother still thought they had a good father.
“Sex is strange.” A sweet voice says out of nowhere.
Travis turns from where he sits, startled to realize he's no longer alone.
Lottie looms against the light, a shadow engulfing him. Travis has to blink bleary-eyed, the sun tracing the figure searing his vision. Between blinks he'd swear the shadow wore antlers but then Lottie slips past him and the illusion disappears.
“I don't feel desire for it.” She declares, looking down at her feet, dirty with earth and dried blood. She has gone barefoot into the forest. “I don't think any of us really feel it that night...” She slowly shuts down, raising her head, her eyes unfocused on the scar peeking through the collar of his two layers of clothing. Winter is coming. “It was hungry.”
She speaks as if in a trance, as if she can still see the knife slicing open the flesh, the small rivulet of blood pooling on his collarbone.
“We were hungry.” Travis feels a shudder, his muscles tensing as if at any moment he must run again like a frightened, badly wounded prey, but Lottie looks away from his jugular and meets his, her eyes warm (sane) again. “Sorry.”
He doesn't know what to say to that. He doesn't know what that is.
No one but Nat has tried to talk to him about Doomcoming. No one has verbalized how the knife was not the only assault at Doomcoming except Lottie.
Travis knows exactly what it would be called if it had been done by a guy to a girl. But it wasn't. Is it even the same thing?
The apology makes it worse, somehow. Implicitly titling the act as Travis is unwilling to name it, asks forgiveness for something that cannot be forgiven.
“Do you feel no desire for sex?” He asks instead, not without interest, avoiding Lottie's calm resignation the way he avoids Nat's anguished pity. If he can't get up and leave this time, he'll retreat under the locks that have grown long enough to hide his sunken eyes. “Aren't you...?”
Like Taissa and Van hangs from his lips, but he cringes with a grimace at the thought of uttering it.
“Homosexual?” She completes for him, which he appreciates. It's almost ironic how that word makes him more uncomfortable than a slur. “No. I don't think so, at least.” Travis looks up slightly to look at her through the curtain of his shelter, curious. “I feel that... although not romantic, the feelings I may have for a woman will always be deeper, however.” She murmurs abstractedly, as if trying to understand herself.
“I'm in love with Natalie.” He confesses to her as he confessed to Jackie. “But I don't feel the desire to have sex with her. What does that make me?”
It's absurd how Travis still expects the in a fucking faggot he knows would have come out of his father's mouth, but Lottie just curves her lips kindly.
“That makes you you.” She says simply, as if it makes sense. Maybe that's the only thing that does here. “We should go back to the cabin. It's getting dark.” She coo him like a loving mother, standing up, waiting for him as she hug herself, shielding from the cold.
Travis fixes his gaze on the darkening navy blue horizon. It's been two days.
“Javi...”
“He's safe.” Lottie interrupts him with gentle but firm assurance. “Shauna protected him. The Wilderness will, too.”
The Wilderness will protect him. Travis finds himself believing it when they return to the cabin.