Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

Chapter 371: Sleeping at Carmen’s

After washing up, I headed over to Carmen’s house for dinner.

Ever since I’d started staying here, I’d ended up eating there most nights with Carmen and Shannon. Shannon had been the one to insist on it in the first place. I’d pushed back at first, mostly because I already felt like I was taking up too much space in people’s lives without meaning to, but in the end I gave in.

Honestly, Carmen made that decision way too easy.

She could cook. Really cook. In this world, that wasn’t some small domestic skill anymore. It was rare. Valuable. Almost unreal some days. Half the time, when I thought maybe I should stop imposing and eat somewhere else, all it took was remembering the last meal she’d made and my resolve folded on the spot.

I still felt a little guilty about it.

Thankfully, Carmen didn’t seem to mind.

At the beginning, I think she’d been uneasy around me, which made sense. I was a stranger. A useful stranger, maybe, and one who had helped Shannon, but still a stranger in her house. That kind of thing didn’t vanish overnight. But I must’ve done enough not to set off alarms, because after a while her caution softened. Now she invited me in almost automatically whenever Shannon did.

The front door had barely closed behind me when Shannon’s voice hit me first.

"Welcome home, Ryan!"

I looked over at her and smiled a little before I could stop myself.

She was too good. That was the simplest way to put it. Too bright, too open, too easy to like. It wasn’t hard to understand why everybody around here treated her like she belonged to all of them at once, like she was everybody’s little sister, everybody’s kid, everybody’s reason to not turn into something uglier.

"You look even more exhausted than yesterday, Ryan," Carmen said when she saw me come in.

She was by the table, finishing setting things out, and even with her hands busy she still noticed everything.

"Well, training with Marlon went longer than usual," I said. "Then I ended up taking a nap on the beach, so... yeah. Sorry about this."

Carmen shook her head right away. "No, no, that’s fine. You should rest when you can." Then she gave me a more searching look. "I hope Marlon is going easy on you?"

"Yeah, well..." I trailed off.

That was enough for Shannon to jump in at once.

"I knew it!" she said, throwing her hands up. "That old uncle is taking his frustrations out on you, right?"

I blinked at her. "What frustrations?"

I’d honestly thought it was simpler than that. Marlon was strict by nature, and if he had any personal issue with me, I figured it was because I kept ending up around Summer too much for his liking.

Shannon crossed her arms. "About my mom, obviously! I’m not letting him get his way with her, so he’s annoyed!"

"Shannon!" Carmen snapped back at once. "Stop saying nonsense."

Shannon didn’t even look that embarrassed.

She’d been dead set for a while now on making sure Marlon didn’t get too close to Carmen, and the whole thing was honestly kind of funny if you stood far enough away from it. At least until you looked at Carmen’s face when his name came up and noticed she didn’t exactly dislike the idea of him. Maybe Shannon was picking up on that too and didn’t know what to do with it.

And really, it wasn’t impossible.

Carmen had divorced her husband long before he died, so it wasn’t like she was clinging to a marriage that still existed. She’d already turned that page. For all I knew, she and Marlon might’ve even known each other from before the outbreak. Places like this had a way of turning old ties into present complications.

"Hmph." Shannon stayed with her arms crossed, unimpressed.

I laughed lightly and reached over to pat her hair. "Don’t worry. No one’s stealing your mom."

Shannon looked up at me, narrowed her eyes for half a second like she was deciding whether to accept that, then immediately grabbed my arm and tugged.

"Come on, let’s eat."

I let myself get pulled one step before I remembered.

"Wait. I need to change first." I looked down at myself and grimaced. "I’ll have to head back."

My clean clothes were still at the place I’d been sleeping in, that little empty shop I’d ended up claiming because it had a roof and a lock and nobody else wanted it.

Shannon stopped dead and turned around like I’d just said something personally offensive.

"What? You’re seriously going all the way back just to change?" she asked. "Why don’t you wear my brother’s clothes? He was older than you, sure, but you’re around the same height."

The second she said it, I felt my whole body tense.

That was dangerous ground.

Wearing the clothes of her dead brother, Carmen’s dead son, didn’t sound like the kind of idea you accepted casually. Those weren’t just spare clothes stuffed in a drawer. Those had to be memories, even if nobody talked about it directly. I wasn’t sure how Carmen would feel seeing me in them, and I didn’t want to blunder into something painful because I’d been too stupid to think ahead.

So I looked over at Carmen.

She was still near the table, adjusting a plate into place, but she’d clearly heard everything. When she saw my expression, she just smiled.

"Shannon’s right," she said. "You shouldn’t go all the way back there just for clothes. Try them on. They should fit you well enough."

I hesitated. "You’re sure...?"

Carmen gave a small chuckle and turned toward me properly. "Of course I’m sure. I’m not that rigid about memories." Her smile softened a little after that. "Better they still serve some purpose."

"Right," I said quietly, then nodded. "Okay, thanks."

"Come on," Shannon said at once, tugging my sleeve again. "My brother’s room is upstairs."

She dragged me toward the staircase before I could linger on the awkwardness too long, and I followed her up.

The room she brought me to was clean. Not just tidy in the lazy way people pretended a room was tidy, but properly kept. The bed was made. The shelves were dust-free. The few things left out looked placed rather than abandoned. If nobody had told me, I never would’ve guessed the boy who used to live there was dead.

Carmen had to be the one keeping it that way.

That thought hit harder than I expected.

A mother keeping a dead son’s room in order. Making the bed. Wiping the shelves. Leaving the space ready as if someone might still walk back into it.

I could understand very much that loss. Unfortunately the only memory I had of my mother was a picture I took from the apartment of both of us but as long as I could still see my mom’s smiling face besides me, it was fine for me.

Shannon didn’t treat the room like a shrine, though. She just crossed over to a wardrobe, opened it, and started looking through it with easy familiarity.

"This should work," she said, pulling out a shirt first, then a pair of pants. She held them up against me with a critical look. "Yeah. More or less."

"More or less sounds reassuring," I muttered.

"It means they won’t fall off you," she said. "That’s good enough."

I took the clothes from her and glanced around once more, then back at her. "You sure this is okay?"

She paused, and for once the answer came without teasing.

"Yeah," she said. "It’s okay."

So I nodded and changed, a little more carefully than I probably needed to.

The clothes fit well enough. A little different from what I usually wore, maybe a bit broader in the shoulders, but close enough not to feel strange. When I stepped back out, Shannon looked me over with her hands on her hips like she was judging a finished project.

"See? I told you."

I looked down at myself. "Not bad."

"Of course not," she said. "I have excellent judgment."

Then the smell of Carmen’s cooking drifted stronger from downstairs, warm and rich enough to cut through the quiet of the room, and whatever awkwardness I still had left gave up on the spot. I followed Shannon back down toward dinner before the food got cold.

Then the three of us sat at the table, and Carmen started serving the food.

It still amazed me how she managed to cook that well without electricity. She used an old stove fed with wood, nothing fancy, nothing modern, and somehow everything that came out of it still smelled rich enough to make your stomach tighten before you even took the first bite. In a world like this, that kind of skill felt close to priceless.

I took a bite and let out a quiet breath. "As always, this is really good, Carmen. Thank you."

She smiled at that.

"I’m glad you like it," she said. "You shouldn’t be shy about coming here whenever you want to eat."

I looked down at my plate for a second. "I don’t want to bother you too much."

"You aren’t bothering anyone," Carmen said at once.

Shannon nodded hard beside me, already ready to push the idea further. "Exactly. We both want you here. Honestly, you should just sleep here too, Ryan."

I nearly choked.

"W—What?"

She said it so casually, like she was suggesting I take another piece of bread.

"I mean it," she went on. "I saw where you’ve been sleeping. On the floor, in that empty shop. It’s cold, it’s depressing, and you don’t even have a proper bed. You could just stay here. We’ve got enough rooms."

"N...No, that would be too much," I said, and I hated that I stuttered a little.

But Shannon always did that to me. She threw things out so directly that by the time I caught up, she was already halfway through deciding for everybody.

"Mom, come on, say something," she said, turning toward Carmen like she needed backup to finish cornering me.

Carmen looked at me for a moment, then set down what she was holding and smiled.

"I don’t mind," she said. "If you’re really sleeping somewhere that bad, you can use one of the rooms here, Ryan."

For a second I just stared at her.

I think she noticed, because her smile turned a little more amused.

"Don’t look at me like that," she said. "I’ve learned enough about you by now to know you’re a good person. You saved my daughter’s life. I’ve heard plenty from other people too, about how helpful you’ve been. And besides..." Her voice softened a little there. "If my son were still alive, I’m sure he would’ve brought you in too."

"Yeah," Shannon said with a grin. "You definitely would’ve been best friends with my brother."

That one hit somewhere awkward in my chest.

Not in a bad way. Just in the kind of way that left you unsure what to do with your face.

"I... just..." I looked between the two of them and hesitated.

The truth was, I didn’t really mind sleeping in that empty shop. I’d slept in worse places. Hell, at this point I could probably sleep almost anywhere if I was tired enough. But that wasn’t really the issue.

The issue was that they meant it.

Neither of them looked forced. Neither of them looked like they were offering out of politeness and secretly hoping I’d refuse. Shannon looked excited. Carmen looked calm and certain. They really were fine with it, and refusing that kind of kindness too many times started feeling rude in its own way.

And if I was being even more honest than that, there was something else.

Every time I ate with them, every time I sat at that table and listened to Shannon ramble while Carmen moved around the kitchen, I got this ache in my chest that wasn’t entirely painful. It felt familiar. Too familiar. It reminded me of eating with Mom. Of normal evenings. Of the kind of quiet comfort you don’t notice properly until it’s gone.

Maybe that was selfish.

Maybe I was taking more from this than I should.

But I still appreciated it.

So in the end, I gave in.

"Okay," I said. "I mean... if you really don’t mind."

Shannon lit up at once. "Yeah! Finally!"

Carmen laughed under her breath. "Now eat properly before you start shouting."

Dinner after that felt lighter.

Shannon kept talking through half of it anyway, even while Carmen told her more than once not to speak with her mouth full. I listened, answered when I needed to, and ate more than I meant to because once again Carmen had made food that was way too hard to resist. By the end of it, I felt warm, full, and more tired than I wanted to admit.

After we were done eating, I stayed behind to help Carmen with the dishes.

She gave me a look the second I started stacking things. "You don’t have to."

"No, I really do," I said. "If I take any more favors from you without helping, I’m going to collapse from guilt."

That made her laugh.

She handed me another plate, and we fell into the work easily enough. I washed, she dried and put things away, and after a minute or two she glanced at me with mild surprise.

"You’re good at this."

I shrugged a little, rinsing off one of the bowls. "I used to help my mom a lot. She worked a lot, so I handled stuff at home when I could."

The second I said it, Carmen’s expression changed.

Her smile softened, and something quieter settled into her face.

"She must have been very proud of you," she said.

My hands slowed on the dish I was holding.

"I’m trying," I said after a moment, voice lower now. "Trying to be someone she’d be proud of."

That always did it.

Didn’t matter how steady I thought I sounded. The second I talked about Mom for too long, something in my face gave me away. Maybe it was my eyes. Maybe my mouth. Maybe the way my shoulders changed without me noticing. Whatever it was, Carmen saw it instantly.

Of course she did.

She was a mother. Women like her noticed the cracks faster than anybody.

"Ryan," she said quietly.

I looked up.

She stepped a little closer and placed her hand gently against my chest.

"A mother’s love doesn’t disappear," she said. "Your existence is proof of that. She’ll always be with you."

Her smile when she said it hit me harder than I expected.

There was something deeply comforting in it, something soft that made it very easy to understand why half the grown men around the Boardwalk seemed to orbit around her without even trying to hide it. Carmen had that kind of warmth that made people want to stay near her for no reason except that being near her made things hurt a little less. Putting aside, that she was honestly gorgeous.

"Yeah..." I nodded once. "Thanks."

I actually felt better after hearing that.

We finished the dishes after that, put everything away, and once the kitchen was in order, Carmen led me upstairs toward her son’s room again.

Even walking in there still made me feel a little guilty.

The room was clean, neat, and quiet in a way that carried its own weight. Nothing in it looked abandoned. It looked preserved. Cared for.

Carmen must’ve noticed the hesitation in me again, because she opened the door wider and said gently, "It’s fine. The room’s already clean, and you’ll be more comfortable here."

"I honestly wouldn’t have minded sleeping on the sofa," I said.

She rolled her eyes at me. "Enough. Stop feeling guilty about everything."

Before I could answer, she gave me a light push inside the room.

I let out a breath through my nose and looked around once more before sitting down on the bed.

The mattress gave under my weight in a way the floor of that empty shop definitely never had.

I pulled off my shoes, set them aside, and lay back properly this time.

Yeah.

There was no arguing with it.

This was a lot better than sleeping alone on the ground in that cold, empty place.

I stretched out, feeling the mattress settle under me while the last warmth of dinner still sat in my chest, and closed my eyes before my body could change its mind.