Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,13

overreacting. Some were convinced it was practically the zombie apocalypse. There was so much contradictory information out there, I had no idea what to believe. Hell, even Chief couldn’t decide if it was a deadly biological weapon unleashed by China to usher in the New World Order or if it was a media-spun hoax to disrupt the election. The waters were definitely muddy when even the biggest conspiracy theorist I knew couldn’t settle on which tinfoil hat to wear for the occasion.

It was weird to start seeing its effects trickle into my life, even out here in this remote part of Maine. No one I knew had contracted the virus or died from it so far, and the whole thing seemed distant and surreal. Like watching coverage of wildfires on TV while the sky was perfectly clear and free of smoke outside my window.

Except now some haze was visible on the horizon. Tristan’s hours were getting cut because of COVID-19 measures. Guys on hookup apps were balking at meeting. My command was making noise about trying—and failing—to get us things like masks and gloves.

How bad was this? And how bad was it going to get?

I had visions of it turning into a catastrophe, but that was probably over the top. It figured that during a possible global pandemic, I was living thirty miles from where Stephen King wrote The Stand, which had given me pandemic nightmares when I was a kid. Clearly that was why my imagination had been running wild. That was all it was.

Tinder pinged again. It was a message from a guy I’d been chatting with last night.

Feel like driving to Bucksport?

He followed it with eggplant and sploosh emojis.

My first instinct was to message back that hell yes, I’d drive to Bucksport. It wasn’t much farther than Bangor, and God, yes, I needed to get laid.

But…should I? Even if the virus hadn’t been documented in Maine yet, there was always the chance it was just undetected. Hadn’t there been a few reports about inaccurate tests, places that needed to be testing but weren’t, and crap like that? So were we already knee deep in a pandemic and just didn’t know it yet?

I didn’t know. But I did know that I was desperate for some contact with someone whose presence didn’t make my teeth grind. Was it a risk? Yeah, it was. The question was, how big of a risk?

If I were back home in Seattle where the virus had seriously taken hold in the last several days, then there was no way in hell I’d even consider a hookup. If I lived in New York, I’d be holed up and refusing to go anywhere with anyone.

Maine, though? Even Portland hadn’t reported any cases yet. No, the state wasn’t testing much, but there also weren’t people flooding into ERs and ICUs.

My gut told me it was still safe here. How long that would last was anyone’s guess, but I was going to grab the opportunity while I still could.

So I messaged the guy back to tell him I was down.

And thank God I didn’t have to go home tonight.

Chapter 4

Tristan

I didn’t smell coffee when I woke up, and Tilly, our fluffy orange tabby, was being a pain in the ass, so Casey must not have come home last night. Not unusual; if he matched with someone on an app (which he did all the time, the lucky bastard) and he didn’t have to work the next day, he’d stay with whichever guy he was with on a given night. Especially since we kind of lived in the middle of nowhere.

I felt like a dick for it, but I was relieved whenever I woke up to an empty house. Though we didn’t butt heads anymore the way we had when we’d worked together, there was more of a cold war going on, and that was worse in its own way. At work, we’d just snarl at each other until it escalated into one of us snapping, we’d have a shouting match, and then it would be over until the next time we started getting under each other’s skin. He’d outranked me, I’d never been great at giving a shit about rank, and we both had very different opinions about basically everything. Not really a recipe for harmony on the home front.

Living together, the rank thing was out of the way. I didn’t answer to him anymore, and we were both holding up our respective ends of our agreement. There