Sweet Romance14 min read
My Pocket Cabin and the Storm of Teeth
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I woke up on a bed that wasn't mine, sunlight like a hot coin pressed into my face. The room breathed wealth: a crystal chandelier, European curtains, a garden beyond the window that looked staged. I blinked and the world slid into place like a movie reel. I wasn't in my dorm. I wasn't in my life anymore.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
I touched my face. My fingers met soft skin and hair that fell in neat waves. I found a phone on the bedside table, unlocked it with a face I didn't recognize, and then the memory hit me — not mine, but a copy. I had fallen into a book. Great.
"This is ridiculous," I said to the quiet room.
The girl the book had belonged to had the same name as me, had been called pretty and spoiled, and in the story she'd ended up hated, then eaten alive by the walking dead. I sat up so quickly the dizziness returned. The thumb ring on my finger — ornate and ancient — pricked my skin when I moved. A small drop of blood smudged the metal, and the metal drank the red as if it were thirsty.
"Okay," I said to the empty room. "If that's a sign, sign or no sign, I'm not going to be the girl who dies."
I tested the ring in a huddle of silence that felt like prayer. I thought the word home, and a wooden hall unfolded around me, a tiny cabin smelling of old pine and dust. I thought the word back and I popped into the mansion kitchen again. The ring was a pocket cabin, a space I could breathe into. It wasn't the miracle the book's heroine had, but it was mine, and it could hold supplies.
"Jaylin," I told the ring, because naming things gave them power. "You're coming with me."
Weeks became a blur of lists, orders, and practice. I rented a storage unit under the pretense of opening a store. I filled it with rice, oil, canned goods — everything I could imagine eating when the world went bad. I ordered clothes for four seasons, boots in multiple sizes, baby formula, solar panels, generators. I set up accounts and deliveries under names that didn't exist, and I taught myself to move like someone who knew which door to run to if the world collapsed.
One scorching morning I walked into a training center and asked, out of breath, "Can I learn blade work here?"
The desk girl looked at me like I was absurdly pretty and some kind of myth. "We teach knives," she said. "You sure?"
"Yes," I said. "Start today."
"All right, bright one."
When I asked about stores with livestock and farms, they directed me to a model village where old men sold vegetables and stories. I convinced one of them I was a buyer from a new supermarket chain, and he smiled like a prize.
"Money isn't the problem," I said, pinching a little of the paper I carried like it could be real. "Just bring me what you have."
I never realized how much I could do when no one expected me to be anything.
Then the day I had been dreading came close. I stared at a newsfeed reporting a creeping fog, a hush of panic, and a warning to stay inside. I called a friend — Davina Payne — the only person in my life who had been real in both versions. Her voice was grainy on the phone.
"Jaylin, you haven't called in weeks," she said, like a scolding sister.
"I'm sorry, Davina. I was... busy."
"Come down. Come stay with me for a day. Spoil yourself. Let's sleep in the same room like we used to."
"Okay," I promised. "I'll come."
At the airport Davina wrapped me in a hug like I had been gone forever. Her brother — Jasper Craig — watched us with a careful smile. Then another man came into the doorway like the room inhaled and everything else exhaled: tall, carved, eyes like winter glass.
"That's Arden Zimmermann," Jasper said in a low voice. "He's our unit leader. Arden, this is Jaylin — my sister's friend."
Arden's gaze visited me and rested, and I felt it like a temperature change in the air. He didn't have the softness of a man who loved banter. He had a presence like an order. I tried to be invisible. I failed.
That night, fog rolled in like a spill. People slept and didn't wake up. When we did wake, Davina had a fever that thudded against her skull. "Is this... awakening?" she whispered.
I dosed her with medicine and then, because it seemed the right thing, I went to check on Arden. He was in pain, fever-flushed, but when I helped him sit up his hand found my waist and he didn't let go.
"Don't move," he murmured into my hair.
I wrestled with the embarrassment of sitting on the lap of the story's hero and the strangeness of his warm hands at my back. He held me like he could stop the world. Then the world stopped itself: fog, screams, and the rise of teeth.
"Get down, Jaylin," Arden said, voice low with steel. "Stay behind me."
"You mean stay out of your way," I said, but I obeyed.
He taught me two things with enormous kindness. First, how to hold a blade so it became an extension of the arm. Second, what it felt like to be protected by someone whose whole body ran with care for you.
We formed a team and we became a strange family: Arden, Jasper, Frederick Ito, Gavan Koch, Levi Gray — men who moved like machines with the look of someone who'd already lost too much. They took me as a thing to shield, and because I wanted to earn the shield, I trained harder.
"Promise me you won't play the damsel," Arden told me in his dry voice one night.
"I promise," I said, and lied a little because I wanted his warmth more than I wanted to be brave.
Days bent into missions. We cleared abandoned small towns, and I learned to split wood, to drive, to move without thinking. Davina, it turned out, had water powers when she burned with fever, and she could make a stream when we needed one. "You're a water girl," I teased, and she squealed.
Arden's abilities were strange and rare. Lightning wrapped him like a cloak. He also had something else — a mental edge most people didn't have. He could tune a silence across us so the infected didn't notice. Once, when he asked, "Do you want to come?" I said yes and felt the world narrow to him.
"Then don't let me regret it," he said.
We were both playing with things bigger than ourselves: a ring that held a little cabin, a new family, a base slowly growing into something solid. We pulled crates of canned meat out of a hidden underground storeroom, and I watched Arden's eyes soften when I moved like I belonged.
"Jaylin," he whispered one night while I fell asleep in his arms, "you can't leave me."
"I wouldn't anyway," I answered, and believed I meant it.
Then came the first mutation.
A team we didn't take in the first place — five people who had been saved — trailed us and stayed on the edge of camp. One of them, a woman with a hard mouth and eyes like coal, was obvious in a way women used to be before everything collapsed: she wanted Arden. She wanted attention. She wanted to climb.
"Arden's never going to look your way," I told Davina and watched the woman watch us.
She made a mistake when she tried to touch Arden’s shoulder during a mission. Arden didn't like being touched by other people when he wasn't in a mood for it; he's blunt like that. "Get back," he had said, and shoved her. She twisted it into the kind of slur that wants a fight. Men laughed. Arden's team ended up with a bruise to their pride but not their bonds.
"Don't touch what's mine," Arden said later to me, fingers braided in my hair like an older man with a child's stubborn crown.
"I know," I said, and let the warm of his fingers steady me.
The woman — I learned later her name was Hunter Coulter — flamed with jealousy. She bullied Davina, sneered when I entered a room, and at one point she tried to pick a fight on the street. Arden stepped in and all she got was a shove. But she didn't stop. She whispered poison, she spread a rumor that made other people look twice. She grew into a problem.
One night in a market street, Hunter followed Davina and me back to the lot where we had parked. She pushed Davina hard and laughed when Davina stumbled. My temper never used to be quick, but it lit like paper. I stepped between them.
"Stop it," I said.
She spat, "Look at you, always the pretty thing with a ring. What are you hiding, huh? A stash? A lover? We're all risking our lives, and you—"
"Get out," I said.
She didn't go. She pushed Davina again. I shoved her back, and then she hit me in the face — a low, soft slap. Crowds gathered quickly in this new world where people hunger for drama. Someone shouted. Everyone stared.
Hunter grinned with a slim and hungry joy. "See? She's got it good. I'd slap that smug face every day if I could."
"Don't," Arden said.
He had not moved before, and then he moved and the world bowed to him. He stepped between Hunter and me with an ease so cold it cut. "She should be careful," Arden said. His voice was a blade.
Hunter laughed at him, then at us. "What are you going to do about it?" she taunted.
That was a choice that night. Arden didn't answer with his fists; he answered with the law. He arrested words in the air like a conductor ending a symphony — he handed her over to the base's temporary council and there were more and more eyes. In a world gone wild, there are moments when the remnants of civil order still ring like bells. We made one of those moments.
They brought Hunter into the central square at the base; the whole encampment had assembled. Lanterns burned, faces carved with sleep and suspicion, and someone had even propped up a wooden platform like an old theater stage. I went because I couldn't stand not knowing what would happen. Davina clung at my sleeve.
Hunter stepped up on the platform with the swagger of someone who'd lived on other people's fear. "Who gave you the right?" she snarled at the crowd. "You think you own him? He saved you. Who are you to pull me into your little show?"
"You're the one who hurt our people," Arden's voice didn't tremble. He stood with Denis Hart — my grandfather in the book's world translated into Arden’s grandfather here by name and rank — and Jasper by his side. "You threatened safety. You spread lies. You assaulted two members of this community."
Hunter's smile faltered, just a fraction, as the crowd's eyes sharpened. "I... I was defending myself. She walked in like she owned everything."
A man in the crowd had phones — more of them now than you'd think. Someone else tapped a video and then another. The hunger for spectacle in people's pockets is a force of its own. My face went white. This was not how I wanted to handle things, but the base needed a line drawn.
"Let her speak," someone shouted.
"No," Arden said quietly. "Let her hear how it sounds."
They brought Hunter a microphone. She made the mistake of thinking the platform was still private. The cameras were not kind.
"You're lying," Hunter declared. "She seduced him. She takes more than she earned. She—"
Then the crowd reacted not with applause but with the dry, clear hunger of pity shaped into fury. A woman in the crowd who had been beaten by rumors herself shouted, "You hurt us. You picked on the weak. We don't take that." Phones lifted like a prayer in stone. A dozen members, not all Arden's but people who had been bruised in other places, gathered to speak. It's astonishing how quickly a group's moral membrane can stitch itself together when one person keeps tearing it.
"You're protected by their strength," one man said, voice raw. "We trusted you farther than that."
Hunter's smile started to crack. Her face, which had been hard and practiced, became small.
"You're not listening to me," she snapped, clinging to bravado. "I was afraid—"
"Lies," another voice said.
"I didn't do anything," she insisted. "You can't—"
The stages of the punishment unfolded like a cruel little ritual. First, arrogance: she looked at us with the look of someone about to win an audience. Then confusion as the crowd's sympathies shifted and a man who had been the joke in so many of the broken places spoke with authority and named the earlier slaps, the whispers, the times Hunter had driven others to tears. People began to speak, and the stories knitted together until her fabric of power was just a heap of threads.
Someone in the crowd who'd kept a ledger against her — the woman whose stall Hunter had sabotaged last winter when supplies were low — came forward and produced evidence: jars of stolen goods, a list of debts she had manipulated, the names of people Hunter had blackmailed. The crowd hummed. Hunter's face flushed with fear and rage.
"You're lying," she cried. "You're all lying!"
"No," said Arden, and his voice carried like a verdict, "she's admitting a pattern. She can't be loose in our community."
"Now watch," the man whose bread she'd stolen said, calm as a judge. "We executed every warning we had, and you ignored it. Then you turned on the weak. Tonight, you turned on Davina. We will not have this."
There was a shuffle. A woman took Hunter's coat and rolled it into a neat bundle. Another man came with a bucket of water and poured it over Hunter's hands. Someone began to read a ledger of wrongs. The crowd's mood shifted from gossip to ritualized justice. A platform, a microphone, an audience — a public punishment.
"Do you accept responsibility?" Arden asked simply.
Hunter dug at the stage with her nails. "I didn't mean—"
"You want to speak? Then speak the truth." Arden's voice had no softness now. It had a weathered, final quality.
Hunter tried to stand firm. She couldn't. Her shoulders crumpled. "I... I wanted a place. I thought if I got close, I'd be safe. I would not let the world decide for me."
"Who have you hurt?" someone from the back called out.
She hesitated, eyes slitted with shame and calculation. Then it happened: the arc of denial that people cling to when the base around them demands an accounting. "I didn't hurt... I didn't mean to—"
The audience erupted into a single sound that wasn't cruel so much as exhausted: "Then tell us how to mend it."
There was a moment of stunned silence, like a held breath. Hunter fell from anger into the other, more dangerous space of terrors: exposure. She started to weep, a raw sound that stripped away the old arrogance. The first step of the descent looked like this: shock at being caught, then the split-second searching for a liar to blame, then the pale realization that there were no more lies to build.
"Please," Hunter whispered. "Please."
"Beg," the woman she had wronged said hoarsely. "Beg them."
Hunter's face kicked through the motions. She dropped to her knees. The crowd went still. Someone raised a phone and then lowered it because this was close and ugly and holy in its own way.
"Please," she said, voice shaking. "Please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
It would have been almost enough if apology were currency here. It wasn't. Public endurance required consequence. The base elders — people who had borne more than their share of calamity — convened a quick council. An hour later they read out a sentence that was equal parts restitution and shame: Hunter would be bound to community labor for a month, her supplies taken to those she'd deprived, and she would stand on the platform each morning to make a public apology, recorded and shared across the outposts as a warning that abuse of the vulnerable would not be tolerated. She would also have to care for Davina for three weeks with no compensation.
Hunter's face went through the stages: brief, hard disbelief ("You can't!") — then shock at the loss ("No, you can't take my things!") — then denial in tremulous pleading ("I didn't mean to hurt anyone, I was protecting myself") — then the crack — the begging: "Please, don't. Please, I'm sorry, forgive me."
The crowd watched, and they shifted between outrage and something like approval. Granny-soldiers clapped, some men recorded it with their phones and others looked away, and a child from the medical tent covered his face and giggled because this was the most story-like thing he'd seen in weeks. Someone who'd been beaten by Hunter earlier nodded once, slow and satisfied. A few people who had once been Hunter's friends stood stiff as wax against the wind.
There were shouts, songs even, because humans do that when they want to stitch meaning into ugliness. Some people applauded when Hunter finally fell to her knees and truly sobbed. Others recorded the entire exchange and uploaded it to the base net, some out of curiosity and some out of hunger for cautionary tales. A woman filmed the moment Arden turned and walked away with a look that was private and fierce.
Hunter's begging turned into a whisper. "Please, please," she kept saying, as if repetition could summon forgiveness out of the cold air.
"It won't be like before," Arden said quietly from the edge of the crowd, not unkind. "But if you work and you show us repair, you can live. If you hide and you hurt, you'll find yourself alone."
She clung to the promise like a child catching a rope.
After the public part was done she was led away and I watched the way her knees scraped wood and how her hands shook. The crowd dispersed with the slow, tired hum of a community that had made an example and, in making it, had found its spine. People around me filmed and whispered; some clapped; some wiped tears. Davina clung to me. "That needed to be done," she said.
"Yes," I answered. "Yes, it did."
We all wanted the world to be fair again, but fair has teeth. Hunter's fall was messy, public, and raw. She had been smug and cruel and then broken, and she begged. The crowd had responded not by crushing her to nothing — that would have been easy — but by making her accountable.
Afterward, Arden found me in the back of the crowd, careful as ever. He pulled me into the crook of his arm like a fortress. "You okay?" he asked, voice quiet.
"I'm fine," I said. "I— it hurt to see someone beg like that, but I think it scared people straight."
He kissed the top of my head and let me breathe. "You were brave," he said. "You stood for Davina."
"I didn't mean to stand up like that," I said, and he smiled a little.
"Whether you meant to or not, I'm proud."
We sat a while, just him and me, with the noise of the base like waves in the distance. I fed Arden tea from the thermos I kept in my pocket cabin, and he leaned back, eyes half-closed. "We have more to fix," he said.
"We always will," I answered.
Months — or what felt like months — passed. We scavenged, built, and trained. We found more crystal cores in the heads of the smarter infected, and Arden guessed how to use them. The ring saved us more than once. We learned how to push attention away: his mental shield worked like a hush and we used it to be invisible. I grew stronger at the blade and at using the space the ring gave me. Davina's water, Arden's lightning and mind, Jasper's sharp cheer — they became the architecture that kept us alive.
One night, Arden took my hand in the glow of the base's lamp. "Will you come to supper with my grandfather?" he asked, smiling that slightly careless smile that never quite reached his eyes.
"Yes," I said, and thought of Hunter kneeling on the platform, begging like someone who had to rebuild a life. I thought of how a community should be: fierce, and sometimes merciless, but also capable of forgiveness when it saw genuine change.
At the table, Arden's grandfather — Denis Hart — poured us wine and called me "a sensible choice" in an old man's guttural humour.
"Keep him happy," Denis said, and Arden laughed like a boy. "I like you," he added to me directly, and my heart did something dumb and intense.
People in the base came to us and asked for help with medicines and crude repairs. They came to me because I could pull things into my pocket cabin and hand them out like miracles. They came to Arden for plans. They came to Davina to fix the water system. In the quiet between missions, I kept thinking of endings and of the book I'd followed here. I refused to be the version who died, the woman who couldn't be better than the page.
"Arden," I said one dusk as we watched the sun go down like a bleeding coin, "tell me a story about the world before."
He laughed softly. "Only if you'll tell me what comes next."
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But I do know this: as long as you keep holding the space between my shoulders, I will keep carving a place for us."
He kissed me then, not like the possessive way he'd kissed in a hurry, but like someone promising a foundation. His hands were steady, and the base hummed. We had been through things that would have broken other people, but here, beneath the harshness, inside the pocket cabin of armor we had built, we were inventing a life.
We had enemies and we had public reckonings. We had small joys and enormous losses. We had a ring that held a wooden cabin where I kept canned peaches for nights when we remembered sweetness, and Arden couldn't have known that the smell of those peaches would one day become the signature of home for both of us.
Outside, the world continued to shift — plants changing, insects evolving, minds altering. Inside, we kept going. We planned another trip to a research center where the smart minds might still make a vaccine. We mapped routes, trained, and argued over silly things like who got the last can of coffee.
"You know," Arden said once, squeezing my hand, "I never planned on loving someone. Then you appear like a rogue weather system and make everything smarter."
"That's not a compliment," I said, laughing.
"It's true," he insisted. "You make the world make sense."
We fell asleep that night wrapped in the small cabin-space that the ring kept safe. I woke up at one point thinking of the day Hunter collapsed on the platform, that long, slow fall from power into pleading. In a world that had so little fairness, seeing justice done had been a strange balm. I thought maybe, in the end, people would build new rules and keep one another.
"Jaylin," Arden said in his voice that was a promise, "whatever comes, we'll face it together."
I didn't reply in that tired, worn cliché. Instead I whispered something else that belonged only to the ring and the porch of the cabin and the peaches in my pocket.
"Hold my hand, and don't let me be the book," I said.
Arden tightened his fingers. His thumb met mine, warm and alive, and I knew the ring wasn't the only thing giving me shelter.
The End
— Thank you for reading —