I feel like complete and total shit.

My head is pounding.  No matter how much water I drink, I can’t get rid of the headache or nausea.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before, and I can only assume I’m suffering from a hangover.

No wonder I don’t usually drink.

I place the half-empty bottle of Jameson on the top shelf of the cabinet and close the door.  As far as I’m concerned, it can stay there until the snow melts.

Seri is still asleep with Solo curled up on her pillow.  I have no idea what her reaction will be when she wakes up and remembers everything I told her last night.  I’m having a hard time believing I was so drunk that I revealed damn near everything.  I gave her details the forensic guys didn’t even have when I was prosecuted.  They only suspected premeditation, but I came right out and told her it was.

“Fucking idiot,” I mutter under my breath.

I don’t know this woman at all.  Sure, she’s told me a little bit about herself, but I don’t really know her.  I have no idea what she will do with the information I provided.  She could very well go straight to the police when she gets out of here, and I could go back to prison on a parole violation.

This is why I stay away from people.  This is why I choose to live here in the middle of nowhere.  This is the only place I have ever felt safe, and I just totally fucked that up.  I would have been better off staying with Margot.  If she were going to turn me in, she would have done so before now.  Then again, she didn’t know the whole story.  She also pointed out that I had served my time, and she probably didn’t give two shits about parole.

But Seri isn’t from around here.  She grew up in the States, and she knows what a parole violation is.  Her sister was murdered, and no one paid for the crime.  She could very well decide to take that out on me, and I wouldn’t blame her too much if she did.

I can only blame myself for opening my big, idiotic mouth.

I glance at the sleeping woman in my bed as I remember the previous morning.  Seri had completely denied everything that happened the night before, and it’s possible she would do that again.  Is there such a thing as evening amnesia?  Fuck if I know.  I didn’t even complete my freshman year of high school before going to prison and was too pissed off and stubborn to take any of the college classes that were offered to me.  I barely passed the GED they forced me to take in juvie, and it didn’t include any questions on psychology.

I probably should have listened to my parole officer about the programs they had available for education and training.  I should have gotten a better education, but the one time I went to a class, all the other people there were in their late teens.  They looked at me like I was stupid and probably realized I was a criminal.

“Bishop Harp has been a model prisoner since his incarceration at the age of fourteen.  He’s been granted residence at the Homer Halfway House and admittance into their job placement services.  Mr. Harp plans on furthering his education through these programs.  Given the details of his crime and no other criminal acts prior, we do not believe he is a danger to society, and his parole should be granted immediately.”

I don’t want to go back to prison, but in many ways, I wish I had just been given a life sentence.  Life inside had been structured and simple.  I always knew what to do and when to do it, and I wasn’t punished as long as I obeyed the rules.  The people around me were like me—violent and dangerous sociopaths—and didn’t belong in the outside world where we could come into contact with regular people.

I glance at Seri again, wondering just how “regular” she is.  I don’t get a vibe from her that tells me she’s been in prison though.  I can usually recognize another ex-con.  Sometimes it’s the way they walk, often the way they eat—quickly and without bothering to taste the food.  Those who have been inside are always watching other people around them and never sit with their backs to the door.

That’s how I recognized Kirk long before we officially met.  He was in the lodge in Whatì having dinner, sitting in the far corner with his back to the wall and shoveling food into his face.  All the while, he watched everyone around him.

Seri’s voice pulls me abruptly from my thoughts.

“Good morning.”  Seri sits up in bed and stretches.

Solo jumps up on the bed and greets her by meowing, crawling up her chest, and rubbing his face up against hers.  Seri giggles as he rolls over onto his back so she can stroke his stomach.

“Has he been fed already?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I tell her.  “He’s just greedy.  You want coffee?”

“Sure,” she says with a smile.  “Thank you.”

I get the coffee together and hand her a cup.  I watch her carefully, waiting for her to remember our conversation and have some kind of freak-out or meltdown, but she just drinks the coffee and plays with the cat while I cook.

Maybe she did forget.

“What’s the plan for today?” Seri asks.

“Plan?”  I look at her briefly as I spoon breakfast onto plates.

“Yes.  What are we going to do today?”  She looks at me in earnest.

“I mostly hibernate in the winter,” I tell her.  “Do what needs to be done like eating and keeping the fire going, but I mostly huddle up and sleep.”

“All day?”

“Not all of it, but a lot of it.  If you weren’t here, I’d be spending all my time in bed.”

“Oh.”

She looks upset, and I realize what I said probably didn’t come out right.

“I don’t mean that you being here is a problem,” I say quickly.

Seri nods, but I don’t think she believes me.  I also don’t know what else to say to convince her.  Without words, I go back to shoveling food like the ex-con I am.

“I can’t believe I went on and on about my sister,” Seri says as she collects our dishes.  “I didn’t mean to burden you with all of that.”

“It’s not a burden.”  I wrinkle my brow and shake my head at her.  I definitely made her feel bad about being here, but my lack of social graces keeps me from saying the right words.

“It was a lot to dump on you.”  She pours hot water into the sink and begins to wash.

“Compared to what I told you?”  There—it’s out now, and I just need to see if she is going to acknowledge the conversation or pretend it didn’t happen.

“Well, no.  Yeah…maybe.”  She looks over her shoulder and gives me a half smile.  “That was a lot to take in, too.”

“You haven’t gone running for the hills.”  I lean against the side of the chair, and Solo jumps into my lap.  “Not yet, anyway.  I suppose you needed breakfast first.”

“Running doesn’t seem like the safest option.”  She looks out the window.  The storm is over, and the sun is starting to shine in the eastern sky, but it isn’t likely to make a lot of difference.

“You feel safer with a killer?”

“Well,” Seri says softly and then pauses for a moment as she rinses our coffee cups.  She slowly and deliberately washes each plate, staring intently at her work.  When she speaks again, she sounds half-asleep.  “Outside, I have nowhere to go, and I know I can’t survive in this weather.  In here, I won’t die of exposure.  I think if you intended to kill me, you would have done so already.  Knowing that you killed your abusive, sick father doesn’t have me fearing for my own life.”

“Maybe I didn’t tell you everything.”  I grit my teeth.  Why do I keep saying all the wrong things?

“Have you killed anyone else?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean I’ve told you everything.”

“I assume you have not.”  She places the last dish on the drying rack and turns toward me slowly.  She’s expressionless as she speaks in that slow, toneless voice.  “I know there is more than what you have said, just as there is more about my sister than you know.  Maybe in time, we will understand each other.”

I blink a couple of times as she turns back to the sink to let the water out.  She walks past me to the bathroom and closes the door.

Solo immediately follows her, stands on his hind legs with his front paws against the door, and howls.

“Silly boy,” Seri says as she comes out, all smiles again.  “You have to let me have a little privacy!”

Solo howls again until she picks him up.

“I don’t actually need your help in there!” she says with a laugh.  She rubs her face against the kitten’s and then looks over to me.  “I’m really glad you have a working toilet here.  A few months ago, I couldn’t have imagined going a whole day without my phone, but I’m getting used to not having electricity.  I don’t know what I would do if there wasn’t working plumbing!”

“The septic system and the well are the only things I added to this place,” I tell her.  “Took a lot of work to get it done, but yeah, it’s worth it.  Going outside to a pit toilet would not be comfortable and sometimes impossible. There’s only one other option, and cleaning chamber pots is definitely not my thing.”

“Ha!  I bet not!”  Seri sits on the floor carefully with the kitten still in her arms.  As soon as she’s settled, he wriggles and jumps away from her.  He makes a mad dash for the kitchen, jumps straight up into the air, and comes down with an arched back and a hiss.

“What the hell?” I yell at him, trying to contain my laughter.

Solo runs back toward me sideways, still in his arched pose, then runs under the bed.

“He’s crazy!”  Seri shakes as she tries to hold in her giggles.

“I’m just glad he has the energy,” I say.  “When I first found him, I wasn’t so sure he’d live.”

“You took good care of him.”

I feel heat in my cheeks as I look away from her and busy myself adding wood to the fire.  I didn’t do anything special for the cat; I just brought him inside.

“Did you have pets when you were a kid?”

“Two guinea pigs.”  Seri smiles.  “Do they count?”

“I guess.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guinea pig.  Do they run around the house like cats and dogs?”

“No.  Ours lived in a cage.  It was a pretty nice cage though.  They’re kind of like rabbits without the big ears.  They hop around and like to eat hay.”

“Do you eat them?”

“Eat them?  Good lord, no!”

“I eat rabbits,” I say with a shrug.  “If I run out of meat in the winter, they’re about the only thing you can track.”

“Ew.”

“You won’t be going ‘ew’ if you’re hungry enough.”

“My sister wouldn’t have been able to stand it.  She was a vegetarian when we were growing up.  Well, not really—she still ate fish—but she would tell people she was vegetarian.”

“I couldn’t live like that,” I tell her.  I think about prison meals and the serious lack of palatable vegetables.  “Even if I didn’t live here, I couldn’t be a vegetarian.”

“I would tend to agree,” she says, “but I’m not sure I could eat a bunny.  I was pretty hungry the week or so before I met you, but I don’t think I was that desperate.”

“Just desperate enough to steal donuts,” I mutter, then immediately regret saying it.

“I wasn’t stealing them,” she says with a shake of her head.  “I don’t know how they got in my pocket.”

Considering Seri’s obviously faulty memory, I figure it’s best to change the subject.

“So what made your sister think eating fish was still vegetarian?”

“Heck if I know.”  Seri lets out a huff.  “It never made much sense to me, and she never did explain it well.  Maybe it was just teenage rebellion.  It did get under Mom’s skin when she had to make special meals just for one person.”

“Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem.”

“Dad would get all riled up about it and have a tantrum.”  Seri snickers before she impersonates a male voice.  “‘Don’t you think your mother does enough around here?’”

She laughs again, but her words bring goosebumps out on my arms.  I rub at them briskly for a moment to get them to go away.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.  “I didn’t mean to make light of it.”

“I know,” I say.  “It’s all right.”

“My dad was a good guy.  He yelled a bit, but that’s it.”

“Good.”  I don’t know what else to say.  I’m exerting every effort I can to keep memories from flooding my head.

“I think my sister enjoyed arguing with him, but it always made me a little nervous.  I wanted everyone to get along, and when she acted up, there was turmoil.  I think she just liked the attention.”

“Probably.”  I take a deep breath and debate having a cigarette to calm me down a bit.  I’ve already smoked half a pack though, and they have to last me all winter.

“We were so different, you know?  We were sisters, and we got along great, but we were polar opposites in a lot of ways.  Iris was always in trouble, and I was a straight A student.  She had a lot of boyfriends, and I never went out at all.  She played on the school soccer team, and I stayed home on the weekends, reading.  She barely made it into a state college, and I was on track for a full scholarship.  But we could talk about anything when we were together.”

“Sounds like you are pretty smart,” I say.  “Straight A’s?  I was lucky if I came home with C’s.  I can’t do math at all.”

“But you like reading.”  Seri points at the books stacked up nearby.

“Yeah, I always liked reading, especially mysteries, but those were never the books my teachers chose for an assignment.  I like stories about other people and even some non-fiction now, but at school when it came time to do a book report, I never knew what to write.”

“That’s a whole different skill—taking what you’ve read and analyzing it.  I wasn’t very good at that, either.  I’d like the book, but trying to interpret it wasn’t my strong point.  Always loved math though.”

“Yeah, not for me.”  I watch Solo as he sticks his head out from under the bed and eyes us.  As soon as he sees me looking at him, he ducks away again.

“I always liked mysteries, too,” Seri says.  “Clue was my favorite game as a kid.”

“Yeah, I remember that one.  The kid next door had it, and we played it a few times.”

“Iris liked it, too,” Seri says with a sad smile.

“So, you didn’t date, but she did?”

“Yes.”  Seri laughs.  “Iris would sneak boys into her room all the time.  I think she lost her virginity when she was fifteen or something like that.  I didn’t have a serious boyfriend until I was twenty.”

“Oh yeah?  Who was he?”

“Just a guy from one of my classes,” she says with a shrug.  “His name was Will, and we dated for about eight months.  He was my first, and at that point, I think I was the only one I knew who was still a virgin.”

She blushes and looks away from me.

“Too much information, huh?”  She giggles and puts her hands over her face.  “I guess I was a late bloomer.”

“I was way behind you,” I tell her.  “I had my first date with Margot about a month after I moved to the area.”

“She was your first?”  Seri bites her lip.  “I mean, your first first?”

“You mean the first woman I slept with?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Yes,” I say.  “I didn’t have much of a chance at a relationship before her.  I spent most of my adult life locked up.  Once I got out, I wandered around a bit and eventually found my way to Yellowknife.  I was twenty-six when I met her.”

“When did you break up?”

“About three years ago—something like that anyway.”

“How many women have you dated since then?”

“None.”

“Are you twenty-nine now,” Seri asks, “or thirty?”

“I’ll be thirty in the spring.”

“The same as my sister would be.”  She presses her lips together.  “You don’t seem that old.”

“Late bloomer.”  I give her a half smile.

“So, Margot—she’s the only woman you’ve ever…ever been with?”

“Well, aside from you, yeah.”

“Bishop!”  Seri laughs and swipes my shoulder playfully.  “We kissed once!  It’s not like we’ve had sex!”

“We haven’t?”  I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Just because we sleep together does not mean we’ve had sex!”

As Seri laughs off the very idea, I stare at her in disbelief.

All this time, I honestly believed she was just denying having sex for the same reason she denied stealing the donuts—because she was embarrassed by her behavior and didn’t want me to think she was normally like that.  I figured it was easier for her to just pretend it didn’t happen, but as I watch her reaction, I see that’s not it at all.

She has no idea.

My insides feel like they’re plunging into my stomach as the implication of this hits me right in the gut, and I comprehend that she isn’t denying our tryst because she wants to forget about it or because she regrets it.  She isn’t lying or pretending it didn’t happen.  She honestly doesn’t remember that she jumped me.

Solo comes out from under the bed and crawls into Seri’s lap, meowing for attention.  He doesn’t seem to think there is anything wrong with her.  Aren’t animals supposed to sense such things?

She obviously remembers and admits to the kiss but nothing about what happened before then.  She doesn’t remember how she spoke to me—the cursing and outrageous dirty-talk that I’d never even heard out of a woman’s mouth before—and she doesn’t remember shoving me down on the bed and grabbing my dick.  She doesn’t know that she rode me violently and yelled at me to come inside of her.

Fuck…what if she isn’t on the Pill as I had assumed when she made that shameless demand?

What do I do now?  Do I tell her that we have, genuinely, had intercourse and that she was the one who initiated it?  Do I tell her that I actually quite liked it and wouldn’t mind if it happened again?  Should I ask her if she is, in fact, on birth control?

If she were, I would have seen her taking it.

A brand new panic builds inside me.  Margot was older and couldn’t have children, and we were monogamous.  I have never used a condom, certainly don’t have any here, and didn’t give it a second thought.  What if I got Seri pregnant?  If she is, and she starts having symptoms, would she think it was divine intervention?  Maybe she’s on some birth control unfamiliar to me.  I think there are patches or shots or other such things, but I don’t know for sure.

How can she not know that we had sex?  Did her overuse of F-bombs block her memory?

She hasn’t used a curse word stronger than “hell” since that night.

I recall the first night she was here and how she woke up speaking in a monotone and referring to herself as “Netti.”  I thought she had been in shock, but what if that wasn’t the case?  She said she didn’t put the donuts in her pocket when she clearly had, but what if she really didn’t remember doing it?

In the back of my head, I remember a cellmate telling me about a guy who pleaded not guilty to a homicide by reason of insanity.  He said that even though he was there at the crime scene, he wasn’t the one who did the deed, but an alternate personality living inside of him—someone he could not control.

The plea didn’t work, and the guy had been sentenced to death anyway.

This is insane.

My head is starting to pound.  This is, without a doubt, the most ridiculous thought I have ever had.  Everyone has mood swings, and two people can’t be inside the same body.  Even my father had his good days when he would take me outside to play catch or go sledding.  We even went fishing once though that day hadn’t ended well.

“Doesn’t it hurt the fish to have a hook in its mouth?” I asked.

“You want to know what it’s like to be a fish?  Do you?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’d like to know what worms taste like, then?  Want some of these?”

“No!  I don’t want them!  Dad, stop!”

But he didn’t stop.

As bizarre thoughts and irrational scenarios run through my head, Solo rushes out from under the bed and pounces on some fluff in front of Seri.  She reaches out and rubs his belly before grabbing a stick by the fireplace and entertaining the kitten while I watch and contemplate.

Seri is bright and cheery for the most part.  She’s had a rough time of it, but she’s persevered.  She plays with Solo and cooks for me.  She doesn’t swear, but what about Netti?  She speaks in a monotone voice, matter-of-fact phrases, but I don’t recall her cursing constantly.  Netti is observant and logical—practically emotionless—but she doesn’t curse.  Does she steal?  Is stealing donuts a logical act for someone who is without money and hungry?

And if neither of them curse, who did I sleep with?  Was it someone else entirely?

What the fuck is going on here?