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personally – Emmett, you know I respect you! I don’t always agree with you. I imagine you believed in what you were doing in those wars –”
“Please stop talking,” he cut in.
I got to practice waiting for at least another 15 seconds. I tried to stay with him this time by stroking his lower belly. He arrested my hand in a vice grip.
“That’s what I thought you thought,” he eventually said. “Two things. I believed in what I was doing, in those wars. No regrets, no apologies. I won’t argue with you about it. I will suggest that you never get to know what would have happened on the road not taken. We can agree to disagree on that.
“The second thing bothers me more. I wonder if you have me confused with Zack. Dee, I loved Zack like a brother. But I am not Zack. Zack was a reluctant, apologetic warrior. Not me. Zack was a Yankee liberal arts ROTC officer. I went to West Point. So here I slipped into his life, his house, into a relationship with his girl and her foster kid, even his damned livestock. So I gotta wonder – are we both dating Zack?”
“Ow,” I said, eyes suddenly tearing up. He released my hand and hugged me tighter. “Ow, Emmett! I’m sorry if I said anything that made you feel that –”
He shut me up with a fierce kiss. We didn’t talk anymore until we’d made love and lay spent, with me draped half over him.
I considered waiting for Emmett to talk first. Nah. I poked him. “I’m not Zack, either.”
He snickered.
“I don’t believe you ever slept with Zack, Major MacLaren.”
“Slept? We roomed together for a year in Estonia. Truth. Vacationed together in his ancestral Finland. That was epic.” He chuckled at a stray memory.
I’d heard snatches of that adventure in Finland before, from both of them.
“I don’t believe you ever had sex with Zack, Major MacLaren,” I clarified.
“Not without a woman in the room, certainly.”
“I don’t believe you.” He just shrugged. “Can I respond to what you said yet?”
He hesitated, and sighed, but said, “Shoot.”
“I think part of what makes a relationship is shared experience,” I said, groping for words. “Especially deep emotional experience. Shared drunken debauchery in Helsinki. Lost comrades. Working together on shared goals. Grieving and celebrating and getting the work done. We’re both still doing work that we started with Zack. He’ll always be a part of that. But we all believed in it. Dee and Emmett still do.”
“Yeah,” Emmett murmured.
“I think you were right to call me on it, Emmett. I’ll watch out for confusing you with Zack. But I’m pretty sure I’m dating Emmett now. And that damned rooster crowing is mine now. And I’m very grateful that I have a man who can wring its neck for me. I have an idea. Could we stop referring to this as Zack’s house, or my livestock? You live here. You deal with the dratted birds and the goats and the cow. So they’re Emmett’s. Not Zack’s, not Dee’s.”
“And if we break up?”
“How about we worry about that after we’ve slept, taken care of the livestock, saved New York, turned the garden beds for winter, eaten, and dodged today’s weather?”
“Sounds like a plan. Maybe the kid will take care of the livestock for once without me today.” One of Emmett’s hobby goals was to teach animal husbandry to others in West Totoket. The local teenagers proved pretty unreliable on the dawn shift, though.
“Miracles happen,” I quipped. “Emmett... Are we OK now?” I wasn’t sure we were. But he’d fallen fast asleep.

Chapter 3
Interesting fact: The most important currency that year was the tax credit, established by the community coordinators, or Cocos. A tax credit was minted when an agricultural producer deposited food as taxes or surplus. Any tax credit balance could be traded for food at a trading post. A ‘full tax credit’ meant enough credits to feed an adult for a year. Few civilians managed to earn that in trade for non-agricultural