17

01:21

Adam was waiting with anticipation inside the shed. He had fed the mice they were keeping in wooden cages and watched them eat. He observed as they were playing with each other and how their numbers were gradually increasing. He had already built another cage to store the young ones with the mothers. Gemma asked him to do this and he very carefully tried to fulfill her wish.

Finally, she came. She smelled differently and looked more beautiful than ever with her long hair smooth and clean, with her body scented with perfumes. She changed her clothes for the ones she would wear in K. but still, there was an aura around her that he couldn't sense when they were spending their first summer days together. They made love as before, wild and loud. They touched each other with the same force as they had done before but there was something different. He felt it and he was sure she felt it as well. Being so long kept away from each other, missing each other for such a long time, they felt their feeling were less intense. That made Gemma uneasy. And Adam was terrified. They didn't talk about it. They talked only about mice and how they should be fed and how many they should expect to have by the end of the year.

Gemma left Adam with a feeling of emptiness and deprivation. When he came back to his communal place he was glad that he had people to surround himself with, that he had mates to talk to, friends that would take away his thoughts about her. She was different. He was afraid that she would be different but, optimistically, he thought that it might not be so. He hoped that it would be just the same with them, as during their past days when they were still kids. But she had spent a long time in this sheltered environment and they didn't have anything in common.

That night he went to the girls' room. He chose one of the ones lying bored on the mattress, took her hand, led her to an empty room and made love to her. It wasn't a beautiful girl. She wasn't even pretty. But Adam couldn't keep the memories of Gemma alive while, in reality, they weren't as vivid as his expectations. He needed someone to forget about her. Every night after her departure he would choose another one and did exactly the same. He couldn't understand why one moment someone was the center of your world and the next one you did not even care.
There was one promise he wanted to keep. He tried to make the colony of mice big enough to make Gemma use it for her own reasons. He felt that he owed her something for the days they spent hand in hand and body to body. He stopped visiting that shed altogether and stopped thinking about their mutual days. He was K., she was N. And that was the biggest difference two people could be separated by. A different clay mixed together temporarily in the right circumstances. Once the circumstances were over, he hated those N. people even more.