FIVE YEARS LATER

"I still feel like I'm doing this wrong," I say quietly, keeping my hand still as I lift the arrow to my line of sight.

Cain stands right behind me, his large hand trailing down my arm to keep me calm. He adjusts the position of the bow slightly, our fingers touch momentarily and that's suddenly all I can focus on. The heat flashes in my stomach, twisting with temptation and lust. I shake my head and I concentrate on the clueless deer in the short distance that is nibbling on grass.

"Steady," he whispers. "You've got this."

I suck in a breath, letting it out slowly as I keep the deer in my sights. Cain's hands fall to my waist and I release the arrow. Cain laughs out as the arrow hits a tree and the deer runs for its life through the woods. I turn and scowl at him.

"Maybe next time," he says.

"I definitely feel like I could hunt something if you weren't here to distract me," I groan.

He smiles down at me. "I don't know what you mean."

My scowl quickly turns into a flushed grin as he touches my face. His green eyes twitch with seduction and I push my lips to his, setting the bow aside as I wrap my hand around his shoulder, pinching him closer to me. I distance myself, looking up at the setting sun with a sigh.

"It's getting dark, we should head back," I say. "We'll have to go into the community tomorrow with our tails between our legs."

Cain's eyebrows furrow and he twists his head.

"It's an expression," I laugh, taking his hand and dragging him along.

"I wish you would write these expressions in a book so I can study them."

"I do, it's called my journal and you will find multiple phrases in there such as 'Cain is boring me to death and my survival instincts are kicking in.'

"Hm. That one I understand."

I grin up at him as he wraps his arm around me. Our cabin isn't far, we never travel too far because of leaving Emery for too long. Cain takes the bow from me and takes it into the small outhouse to lock it up, we always keep our weapons separate from the cabin but we have emergency rifles in our bedroom now.

Two years ago, a small group of scavengers broke in while we were asleep. At first we were alarmed and Cain was focused on beating them to death but I made him wait instead. We sat on the staircase and we listened to them raid our refrigerators and cupboards desperately. It was rare that scavengers ever came to this part of the valley and even more rare that they had a small child among them. The moment I heard the child's voice, we both knew that we had to help them rather than threaten them. So we revealed ourselves and told them that they could take whatever they wanted so long as they stayed the night and talked to us. They agreed and the next morning we took them down to the community. They've lived there ever since.

Despite the scavengers being harmless, we're still on high alert for break-ins which might not be. Cain is very tactical and inventive. He installed wires over the doors that when pulled open send a signal into our bedroom upstairs that set off a string of bell chimes. He even finished it while I was sleeping to deliberately test if it would wake me up. I almost killed him myself for that.

Apart from the incident two years ago, we have lived in peace for five whole years. Well, not complete peace. Our adopted daughter always found a way to keep us on our toes.

Emery sits at the kitchen table as I enter through the side door. I take my jacket off and drop it on the back of a chair as I look over her homework that she's been completing for the last few hours.

"Hey, you're almost done."

She smiles and rubs her head. "I just can't figure this last part out. No catch, huh?"

"I was close. I swear I was. But Cain scared the deer off."

She laughs, her blue eyes twinkling. "Right."

"It's true," I say, narrowing my eyes as I back away towards the cupboards. "Who needs deer anyway when we've got. . ." I scan my eyes over the contents, pulling out a tin and reading the label, my mouth twitching with disgust. "Spam."

"That's the only thing left?"

"I think so, we'll get some meat from the community tomorrow after we take you to school."

She darts her eyes down, laughing quietly to herself.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing," she says. "You just always do this. You say you're going hunting but you don't return with anything and then you beg Christian for food."

I smirk at her, placing a hand to my hip. "I do not beg."

She grins. "What do I know? I can't even solve a stupid history question. How am I supposed to know when the American civil war started?"

Cain walks inside at that exact moment. "Eighteen-sixty-one."

"Cain," I snarl.

"What?"

"Thanks," Emery says, writing it down excitedly. "That saved me an extra hour of looking through this book."

"Remember when we said that we weren't going to help her because she'll never learn?"

"You said that, I never gave verbal agreement. She'll get the answer either way, why does it matter how she gets there?"

"Hm."

He walks towards me and takes the tin out of my hand, throwing it back into the cupboard. "Hell no to that. Go and put your feet up and I'll make us something."

"We don't have anything else."

"We have pasta and some herbs. I'll throw together something delicious. Just go and relax, okay? You do everything around here."

I squeeze my fingers around his shoulders as he kisses me. I eye him suspiciously as I back up to the door. "You just want to help her finish her homework."

"I'll call you when it's ready."

"Fine, I'm going to have a bath. Don't make a mess."

I head upstairs and I fill the bathtub, undressing while I wait for it to fill. Having Emery in our lives has forced Cain and I to become premature parents. I was already used to being a surrogate mother to Jackson but it was an entirely new experience to share it with someone.

We found Emery five years ago when we took a team out to canvas the surrounding nanneries at the edge of the valley. There were only two close to us, according to Cain, and to get to any others we would have had to walk for an entire month. It was impossible so we settled on saving the children that we could and we accepted that it was enough.

The humans from the nanneries joined our already populated group and we became one very large community. Most of the nannies were attached to the children and didn't want to let them go but Emery was unclaimed as she was a fairly new transfer.

The first moment that I saw her, this six-year-old little thing with long raven hair, sparkling blue eyes and a pale shade of olive skin, I was instantly drawn to her. She reminded me so much of myself.

She was born to a breeding centre and Cain said that both of her parents were sold immediately after her birth. He was the one that approved her transfer into the valley and little did he know then that merely a few weeks later he would become her surrogate father. He fell in love with her just as quickly as myself and he was insanely protective over her at first. He's gotten better now but it used to drive me insane.

She adjusted to us straight away and though we gave her the choice of living with everyone else in the community village, we were overjoyed when she decided to stay with us in the cabin.

Living in the community has never appealed to us, Cain and I like living in the woods, we like having our privacy. Jackson chose to live with Natalie and Christian in the village, I agreed to that as long as he promised to do whatever Christian said. I saw him every day and I watched him slowly grow taller and older and now he's a nineteen-year-old with a life of his own.

As for the rest of the humans, they formed their own communities too. Big ones just like ours. We cross paths with them sometimes when we go on supply runs but they've always left us alone.

That can change at any moment. There are a lot of humans out there that know what Cain looks like, especially since in his last few days before becoming human he decided to go on a travelling spree to avoid being at the palace. They don't know that he's still alive yet but all it takes is the wrong kind of scavenger turning up here and recognizing him.

Cain isn't worried. He's annoyingly fearless. He still has all of his victims' memories, all of their knowledge and talents. Some of those talents were stolen from soldiers and agents. He knows how to build and assemble weapons, even bombs, and he's made it his mission lately to try and find more parts out there. I truly believe that even as a human he could kill us all within a day if he wanted.

I tie my hair up tightly as I lower myself into the bathtub. The solar panels on the roof generate our electricity and hot water. The community has them too. Though it's annoying sometimes when the sunlight becomes blocked by the trees and we suffer a power shortage for half the day. Cain tried to resolve that by cutting down the trees that surround the cabin but it still somehow gets blocked. Our water is constant from the nearby dam, we have to filter it and chill it for a while before drinking it but so far it's been safe to bathe in.

We are used to our new, little world now. We're incredibly happy and blessed. Cain drives me crazy but what else is new?

"Two minutes!" he screams.

I sigh, looking at the water with a frown. I quickly scrub my arms and then I drain it. I tie a towel around my waist and I walk into our bedroom across the hallway. The cabin has three bedrooms, it was pure luck that we discovered it so close to the village. Cain uses the third room as his office where he spends hours writing down all the knowledge in his mind onto paper. It's been five years and he still isn't finished. Some of the papers have names to them, with ages and information about the victim he killed. I think it's his way of honouring them, he feels guilt easily now that he's a human, that was a hard thing for me to snap him out of. But this is his way of dealing with it.

We can't ever change who he was, or what he was. I just take comfort in the fact that he built beautiful worlds for them where their souls felt loved and safe. I remind him of that all the time, especially when he goes into one of his guilt frenzies.

I change into my pyjamas and I tie a bathrobe around me before joining them at the dining room table. I yawn into the back of my hand, walking in on Cain telling Emery another one of his planet stories. We couldn't hide what Cain was from her, since the beginning the others have been questioning him and resenting him and she heard most of it. She knows everything. She always found it fascinating and he would tell her memories about his previous lifeforms as bedtime stories that she fell asleep to.

She's eleven now and smarter. She no longer wants to hear about how 'pretty' a planet was, she asks him questions about the real stuff.

"How big were they?" Emery asks as she chews down pasta.

"To put it to scale with something on Earth, imagine standing next to the big tree outside, the one at the back of the outhouse. You'd need to crank your neck up to see the top of it, right? That's what the other species had to do to look at us. The superior lifeforms on that planet were giants."

"So are we like. . . the smallest lifeforms you've ever possessed?"

"Yes," Cain laughs. "Definitely the smallest. Until I came here, I thought the water specimens from the previous planet were small. But next to a human, they probably would have just grazed the ceiling."

Emery and I both look up at the ceiling at the same time. And he thought they were small?

"It was hard to find the scale without other species standing next to us," he says. "Once they did, we realized just how giant we were. I usually measured how tall every species was by how far away I was from the ground. The ground was level on every planet except for five where the levels changed. By that data, I could find comparison between which species were the smallest and largest between the planets."

Emery starts rubbing her head and Cain laughs.

"Now that's something they don't teach you in school." He meets my eyes over his fork and we smile at each other.

"You thought anymore about teaching?" I say. "You'd be good at it."

"They need the manpower for supply runs."

"You could do it in between."

"I could."

I click my tongue, that's the end of that conversation. He'd be a great teacher, not just to the children but to all of the humans in the community. He's already taught me so much about the universe, things I really didn't ask to know, and it's a shame to have it go to waste. It's his choice though. I respect that. He doesn't like talking about his past lives, he only allows me and Emery to hear his stories. Maybe because he knows that we are the only ones that won't judge him.

I'm surprised his brain hasn't exploded yet with how much information he has stored in it. It causes him to get migraines sometimes but he tries to hide them.

Cain washes up after dinner and I kiss Emery goodnight before she heads up the staircase. I wait for him in the living room, watching the stars through the window until I hear the kitchen lights turn off.

I turn the living room light off and we walk up to our bedroom together. Cain doesn't completely remember everything about being a human and sometimes it is hilarious to watch him try and understand something that he wants, or what his body is telling him that he wants. Most nights I have to remind him to brush his teeth or even go to the toilet because he'll sit there in discomfort with a hand against his stomach. He used to mix it up with hunger or he'd narrow his eyes at water dripping from a tap and twist his head at it, the sensation of having to pee eluding him for several minutes.

The memories of some of his 'firsts' keep me awake at night laughing. The first time he got drunk was quite something. Christian threw a party in the village after they raided a bar on one of their supply runs. The children were tucked into their beds and the adults came out to play. I warned Cain not to drink so much but he said 'I'm a man, I can handle it.' He did not handle it. After throwing up and stripping down to his underwear, he climbed a tree and decided to stay there for the night. Four of us attempted to get him down but we eventually gave up and left him.

But that's not the best. No, the best 'first' was the day he felt pain. He had some little aches now and again when he first became human but nothing too drastic. A week after we moved into the cabin, he decided to play around with a nail gun. He forgot that he could now feel pain and wasn't careful with the positioning of his hand.

I was standing in the kitchen when I heard him screaming my name over and over. I thought we were under attack. I told Emery to run upstairs and hide and I even went looking for him with a knife in my hand.

There he was. Rocking on the floor outside the outhouse with a nail wedged into the back of his hand. His eyes were stinging with tears and he was begging me to 'end it.' I pulled the nail out, poured alcohol on his wound which he squealed at and then I roared with laughter.

He has so much knowledge of how to assemble guns and how to build things from scratch but when it comes to his own body, he really is an alien.

Though, there is one thing he still remains good at. Great at.

We almost trip over our own feet as we make our way over to the bed kissing each other. He stubs his toe against the bed post and hisses out, hopping for a few seconds. I laugh and put my finger to his lips, pulling him down to the bed.

"Shush," I say.

"Why does that always happen?"

"Why don't you remember where the bed post is?"

"Shut up."

His large arms flex as he positions himself over me. He pulls the straps of my bathrobe open and kisses my throat as his fingers slip into my shorts. I moan against his ear, my hands pulling at his shirt until it's over his head and on the floor. I crush my lips into his chest, trailing my tongue over his collarbone.

My shorts are dragged from my legs moments later, along with my shirt and his body still leans over me as his fingers press against my womanhood.

"We have to make this quick, we need to be up early," I say.

"Okay." He turns and opens a drawer, he pulls it too strongly and the whole thing pulls out, the clips breaking from the wood.

I slap my hand to my forehead. I sit there for several minutes as Cain tries to get the drawer to fit back inside the stand. He plays around with it and studies it from all angles.

"What the hell is wrong with this thing?" he mutters.

"Just leave it on the floor and get the condom," I hiss.

Condoms. Another wonderful thing that I had to introduce Cain to. We never had to use them before, being different species and all, but now we are very cautious. He knew they existed but he had never actually seen one. The day I passed it to him and told him how to use it, he almost had a panic attack. Using one was even more hilarious. He had this look on his face the entire time, like he was trying to do complicated math in his head. He got used to it eventually, he didn't have a choice, though he hated me for a while.

I lean back with a sigh as he roots through the contents of the drawer.

"Why do you have so much pointless crap?" he says as he picks up one of my hair mask packets and throws it aside. "Why do you need so many bottles of perfume?"

"Cain," I growl. "You're looking in the wrong drawer."

"I knew that."

He drops the drawer to the floor and the bang makes my body flinch.

"Quietly," I whisper. "Leave it on the floor quietly!"

"Well it's already broken."

"You'll wake Emery up." I slap my head again. "Just get the damn condom before I push you off this bed."

"You're being really mean tonight," he says as he finally looks in the right drawer and opens the packet, placing the condom onto him. "It's turning me on."

He meets my gaze and we grin at each other as he crawls back over and plants a strong kiss against my lips. I fall into it, my tongue caressing his until we can't wait any longer and we are writhing against the mattress. Our bodies become alive once more, our souls joining together, matted by heat and sweat. I kiss his throat and I claw my hands into his back as my body trembles against him. I'm making too much noise and he covers my mouth with his hand.

"Shush," he says, smirking down at me.

He removes his hand moments later and our bodies press together like pieces of a puzzle. I bite down hard on my teeth as I try not scream but it's happening too fast to contain. Cain's lips cover mine, forcing me to surrender the scream inward. I feel him smiling against my lips, he knows what he's doing. My nails claw down his back gently and I gasp at the ceiling.

"Te quiero," he whispers, before dropping his lips to my chest.

"Te quiero," I say.

We count ourselves lucky every day that we have our little family. That we have the life we always secretly wanted with each other. We have never taken anything for granted, never resented each other and have never showed each other anything other than love.