Congratulations on Convincing Her to Come Into Your Fallout Shelter!

As the bombs drop the girl next door will cower beneath the awning outside your building, gazing at you across the street. You’ll have the door to your fallout shelter open, your hand braced on the wheel to seal it in the event that a teenager or a person of color comes along and tries to kill you to secure their safe haven.

“Come on,” you’ll call at her. “It won’t be that bad.”

She’ll frown as she looks at you. Mentally she’ll be recording every oddity you ever visited upon her, every late night game of “gayser tag” that she had to walk by in the hallway, the loud sessions of masturbation every other night, groans cutting through the paper thin walls between your apartments.

She’ll think of the time you spent carving out a fallout shelter in the basement beneath the building next door under the condition that, if it ever came down to it, you’d let the super stay there with you. She spent weeks watching the two of you hollow out a passage leading to god only knows where in the company of that heavyset Ukrainian man, laughing with him, sharing bottled water with him, asking him about his family. He’ll be laying a few feet away from you now, his skull crushed with a brick.

She’ll frown and bite her lip, eying you up and down, looking at the fires in the sky, threatening to collapse upon you at any moment.

“Will we have to do sex stuff?” she’ll ask. You’ll almost hear the bile in her throat.

You’ll shrug and look at your shoes for a moment before nodding. She’ll bring her hand up to her mouth and look at the skies again. You’ll be losing her; you’ll be able to tell.

“But we can do it with the lights out,” you’ll shout over the cacophony as the next round of bombs fall. “And you won’t have to do any kind of oral on me.”

“Can I receive oral?” she’ll shout back. You’ll nod.

“I don’t see why not. Unless there’s something weird down there.” She’ll hold her thumb and forefinger apart and wince a little, and you’ll shrug.

“Come inside and we can discuss it,” you’ll cry, glancing at the sky, preparing for it to fall at any second.

She’ll run across the street, clutching the grocery bag filled with all of her worldly possessions to her chest (a laptop computer and charger, a bottle of water, some beans and rice and a tattered paperback, erotica judging by the cover). When she darts through the door into the concrete interior of the passage you’ve carved, etching under the city to one of the fallout shelters of old.

As you spin the wheel of the door shut, sealing the two of you underground, she’ll put her arm on your shoulder, look into your eyes and ask you.

“No weird stuff for the first year, right?”

You’ll nod. “Unless anilingus counts as weird,” you’ll reply.

She’ll smile and the two of you will walk towards the old fashioned fallout shelter, hand in hand, each of you silently hoping that the other’s genitals aren’t too, too weird.

Congratulations on Convincing Her to Come Into Your Fallout Shelter!