Chapter 48: End of the Road
They went south for three days, though they didn’t go particularly fast to avoid wearing out the horse. Given that now they were sleeping on the hard bed of the wagon between a row of crates and the wall, Simon considered this a real improvement. In his mind, nothing was wrong with being pressed against a woman as lovely as Freya every night, but he knew it wasn’t permanent. They couldn’t just stay in the wagon forever. It was no way to live.
The first two villages they stopped in seemed too small for strangers like them to fit in. Still, they were a fine place to settle for the night. Now they claimed to be peddlers to befit their wagon instead of adventurers, though Simon had no idea what he should charge for the random pots and cutlery the previous owner had been selling, and as Mr. and Mrs. Jackoby, sellers of odds and ends, they seemed to be treated much better than Simon the adventurer and his companion Freya.
Simon spent a whole afternoon just searching the back of the thing, and it seemed like the previous owner had just stolen whatever wasn’t nailed down and taken it on the road with him. There were copper kettles, cast iron cookware, knives of various quality, strings of garlic, a box of potatoes, and a half-full bag of flour. These were hardly the trade goods he’d have expected of a merchant in a fantasy world. There wasn’t a scrap of dragon hide or a vial of fairy dust to be had.
Still, they received a warm enough welcome thanks to his silver, and Simon and Freya put the inn’s beds to good use most nights. He still couldn’t understand her, though. Sometimes she seemed like she was falling for him, and other times he half expected to wake up and find her gone. This mystery was finally resolved when she said, “You know, I always thought that when someone proposed to me, it would be more romantic, but I don’t think there’s a single romantic bone in your body Simon Jackoby!” during one of their tiffs.
“Married?” Simon asked dumbly, not connecting the dots.
“What? You’re keen enough to sleep with me and to introduce me as your wife, and now you’re going to what… say that it was all some big act just for show?” He could hear the fury in her voice getting ready to erupt if he made a misstep here. However, he wasn’t quite sure what to do, so he tried to channel his inner rom-com again, even as his mind grappled with the fact that this might not be the random fling he thought it was.
“I would be delighted for everyone to know you’re my wife,” he said finally as he pulled her down to sit on the bed beside him, “But I don’t want you to be with me because you know - you have to. Danger and zombies aren’t very romantic, but—”
Freya eventually shut him up by kissing him before he could ruin the moment. “You stupid, stupid man,” she said softly, “how could I not love the man that saved my life!”
Simon really didn’t know what to say after that. He’d only ever dated two women longer than six months, and both of those had ended poorly a decade ago. He was pretty sure that he’d proposed to Freya just now, or she’d proposed to him. He honestly wasn’t sure which, so in the end, he just held her while he tried to sort out his feelings about what had happened and how he felt about it.