Free Finding Love in a Dark World: A Steamy Post-Apocalyptic Romance by Unknown

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    Jessa sighed. It was going to be another hot day. She looked up at the sky and didn’t see a cloud in sight. There hadn’t been rain in weeks and the plants needed it. She resigned herself to fetching pails to water the garden instead. After she was done in her own yard, she still had to tend to the community garden in town. It was going to be another long day. They were always long days. She couldn’t remember it any other way. If only we still had those huge irrigation booms that I remember passing in my childhood, she thought. She had been in a car then, with the wind blowing her hair back from her face as a little girl. Jessa smiled from the memory.
    After a few hours of watering, Jessa was finally finished, with that part of her day anyways. Her son was wandering around the flowers, looking for bugs. She had to smile at his antics. He was always happy, no matter what. She had feared that the death of his father would make him change for good, but after only a few years he was getting back to himself. Kids were resilient. Jessa sometimes wished that he could remember like she did, the way things were, but maybe this way was actually how it was supposed to be. Maybe it was easier for those that did not have the “before” memories to make the days now seem so much darker by comparison. Or maybe it was better to think of those memories of happier days as bright patches that lit up her life, however fleetingly, before the sun was blotted out again.
    “Shane my love, time to come help me in the greenhouse, we have a lot of planting to do this afternoon.”
    “Coming Mom.”
    The rest of the day was spent under the clear plastic of the three greenhouses in the community garden. It was Jessa’s responsibility to make sure there were always new sprouts and plants to replace the old for the next crop. The village she lived in did not have a name, but they had taken her and her son in after her previous home became uninhabitable. Something had been present in the water, and it had killed most of the community. Her husband, Kraven had gotten them across what once was Mississippi before he died. Jessa found the small village twenty or thirty miles north of his final resting place. She was not sure what state she would be in now, maybe Kentucky would be a good guess, though it really didn’t matter where those once important imaginary lines were now.
    The weather was decent there and with the rise in global temperatures, it was far enough from the equator to be habitable. Most gardens could be maintained all year round. There really were only two seasons at this point, the wet and the dry. For the moment, it was the dry season.
    “Hey Jessa, are you coming by for dinner tonight?”
    Jessa cringed a little inside, yet put on the fake smile that she had learned to add on in the morning when she brushed her hair. She could not stand Teresa and it seemed the women had annoyingly made it a point to make her a friend.
    “Yeah. We will be over in a bit after we both wash up.”
    “Okay, I have a friend coming over too. I think you guys will hit it off.”
    Jessa had to smile to herself as she turned away. No doubt this was another one of her neighbor’s ploys to get her with someone. Why was it that everyone who was married or with someone decided that everyone else must do the same? She would never understand that.
    Considering her general lack of any feeling of connection with her neighbor, she doubted that Teresa would ever choose someone that she would even actually consider being with. There were slim picking in the town. There were quite a few men, but hardly any that were in any way her type. Men actually out-numbered women three to one and as a result it was seen as ludicrous to be a single woman in the new world. Naturally she should be adding to the population and be in the process of creating more babies, or so the prevailing wisdom went. With so many people lost in the last couple of decades, there was a