It was good, not being alone. The dynamics were a little weird at first, with Angel being older and younger, more stable and more vulnerable, but we fit somehow. As partners, I mean, not physically. I’d be lying if I said that I never desired her as the woman she was rapidly growing into, but I never made a pass, and she never teased. We often slept together for warmth or comfort, touching-but-not-that-way as she’d put it, but while it occasionally came up, she never reacted to its presence.
Partners. Friends. Explorers in a world that didn’t seem to have anyone for me to save, or anything to save them from. A world that she didn’t know any more about than I did.
On the plus side, she was awesome at catching rabbits, which significantly reduced the amount of bugs in my diet. I was the better cook, which surprised us both, once we had a variety of things to cook. She was smarter and better educated, filled with ideas for how to improve our lives and extend the reach of our exploration together.
Always together. By unspoken agreement, we never went off on our own, never went out of earshot.
When I wrote Angel’s bit of snark, it felt like a breakpoint, so I made it one. Then I looked at the folder organization in Scrivener and whimsically added titles to the prologue and chapter one. Respectively, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One”, and “The Universal Crazy/Hot Matrix”.
Steven Brust once commented that the worst part about coming up with clever chapter quotes in his first novel was that everyone expected him to do it again. And again. I didn’t come up with a title when I started chapter two, because I still didn’t know where things were going, and committing to something in advance could send me down a rat-hole.
Then when it was done, I had trouble because the vaguely-remembered song lyric that kept popping into my head (“angels never fall in love”) was misleading. The title of the movie it comes from actually works a lot better: Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.
Fun fact: one of the young angels was Susan St. James, better known to me as Wife. (why, yes, I do have the DVD box set of this old TV show)
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