CHAPTER 144: BRING ME A CONDOM

Mary’s voice went even sharper and more strained as she advanced a step. "Sister... get away from him. He’s horny. He might rape us!" Her words were filled with panic, and her stare kept flipping from both of them to the bulge in my leaf skirt, which was pretty obvious.

Veronica reddened even more, but she stood her ground. She picked her lip and said with a low but firm voice, "Mary, we are not sure of it. He could just be showing normal behavior to mate with females. They might not even be aware of it as a wrong thing." She sounded a little bit of wonder, trying to make friends with something wildly unfamiliar.

Mary gasped, her voice shook as she tried to get the correct words and make sense of them. "But... but... " she stopped abruptly, her fingers pressing into her palms, her knuckles turning white. Her eyes showed the emotion of fear, but alongside it was something different, a raw and unrevealed one. That was curiosity. That was the most reluctant and nearly a forbidden form of curiosity standing on the verge and pulled one side back to lean in and see what lies down.

It was at that point in time when the realization came to me: They are as unaware as I was first.

They haven’t the slightest notion how "Stone Age" folks lived here. Nor did I when I first arrived here.

But their take on it was somewhat logical in a perverted way. For them, a man from the primitive period would be ruled by his nature only - seeing a female, getting a hard on, and doing it without thinking or feeling. Like animals. Like the rawest side of nature.

And somehow, I agreed with them as well. It made sense if you took away everything else - culture, ethics, layers of civilization that had been there for millennia.

The real Stone Age - survival and reproduction would be the only rules. Desire wouldn’t be complicated by shame or rules or the burden of societal expectations. It would just be.

But this world - this reality - was nothing like that.

In this Stone Age Era, it was enmeshed in the layers of meaning, morality, love, longing, and the heaviness of what was "right".

Men were trained to see virginity as something sacred, to detach lust from instinct, to feel shame where there should be none. It was all so artificial, so far away from the raw, unfiltered survival rhythm.

And still, we found ourselves here.

A woman from the future, a system that cannot be explained, and me - a man confused between time and space - all of us thrown into a version of the Stone Age that seems more like a break in reality than history.

It was neither the past. Nor the future. It was a crash, an area where time’s rules have been twisted, where the worlds that should never have met are now intertwined.

A time machine by 2050? Not likely. A "system" that bends the laws of physics? Hardly conceivable. Yet, here I am, lying next to Veronica, with my hard cock.

Veronica moved a little and said with a voice that was abrupt and business-like, though her cheeks were red, "Mary, bring me a condom."

Mary was so shocked that her eyes grew larger than usual, "What?! Sister, have you lost your mind?!"

Veronica’s red became even more intense, but she didn’t drop the point, "Mary, you are the one with the dirtiest mind. Don’t you know that I am a biologist?" She looked at me, and the next words that came out of her mouth were of seriousness and almost like an academic nature, "I want to find out if there is something unusual in his sperm - if his body produces more protective antibodies than ours."

Mary put her arms over her chest and said with a voice that was very close and tight, "But we can just do his blood test! You don’t need to - " She stopped, as if the words were too scandalous for her to utter.

Veronica refused to agree. "Blood test won’t give me the answers I am after. I want to know if his sperm is more viable than people from our timeline. You remember the reports—after the glaciers melted, the air got polluted, and the virus that didn’t just kill people,"

"It made them infertile. Even with the government’s population incentives—offering care for parents and children—people still weren’t able to get pregnant. That’s the reason why they started the Exodus Project and sent all those people here. But what if the virus came with them? Then there’s no reproduction even here in this timeline?"

Mary looked as if she had just seen a ghost. "So it means... that fertility issues might still be a problem for the people in the fortress? Even if we have put our timeline behind us?"

Veronica confirmed with a nod. "Yes, it is possible. And if that is the case, the only way we can figure it out is by understanding why. It could very well be that his body has the answer."

Mary was staring at Veronica, then at me, and her fingers were nervously scratching one another. "But ....?" Her voice was extremely low, and her throat seemed to be clogged. "I... I am not doing it with him. You decide."

Veronica didn’t look away. Her tone was calm, almost detached, although there was still a slight pink color on her cheeks. "Mary, it is the only way. The only way for science. For the coming generations." She was silent for a moment and then, after a quick glance at me, she said to her sister, "I know it is hard, but be brave."

Though Veronica’s assertion was quite straightforward and assertive, there was something else apart from that being conveyed - something that was not stated but could be heard like the crackling of a radio between the lines. "It won’t be necessary to sleep with him... He might just be done with a handjob," was the unspoken part of the sentence.

The treehouse seemed to get smaller with the shrinking of the space between us and the suffocating feeling of air that the presence of an awkward silence brought. Mary’s chest heaved, her eyes were round from a mixture of amazement and something else, something darker, something that was almost like curiosity. She didn’t argue; she didn’t utter any refusals. She only stood there and was twisting together her fingers, her thoughts racing at a high speed.

However, I am not sure that they thought positively because in my head, it was a complete mess as well.

Supposing they find my circumcised cock? Would they then understand the truth—that I am not some barbarian from the past but rather someone from their time or close to it? Would that be the end of everything?

After a while, Mary spoke, her voice weak and trembling with emotion: "But, sister... I am still not convinced that it is a good idea. What if he thinks that we want to mate with him and then... he might try to rape us!"

Veronica was not sure herself and was biting her lower lip. "Well,... perhaps, you are right. We can’t take any risk," she said. Looking at me, she was full of contradictions, "I don’t really feel like it... But he doesn’t seem that bad, you know?"

Mary’s voice becomes more and more cutting, her terror transforming into revulsion. "He is evil! He is terrible! Who knows if he’s even washed his body in years? And then what if he carried some disease or virus? For all we know, he might have AIDS!"