“Our vows,” Bette answered, kissing Tina softly. 

They shared a long look, smiling at the happy memories of the emotional wedding they’d celebrated.  They turned to lean back again against the bed’s headboard.

“Are you afraid?,” Tina asked, after a few minutes, thinking about what they’d just heard about their neighbors, and not about Jason’s mom. 

Bette kissed her.  “Yes.” 

Tina looked at her in surprise.  Did she hear right? 

“The world could be prove to be too much, T,” Bette said. 

“What do you mean?,” Tina asked, curious about what could make Bette afraid. Was she missing something?  Could Bette be thinking about something else?  Jason’s mom?  Bette was otherwise fearless.  She’d never heard Bette say she was afraid about anything.  She took her heart condition as a matter of fact, more often than not, and sometimes joked with Tina about it. 

Now, however, she was clearly worried about something.   After a few minutes of further silence, Bette answered “Death, T.  It can happen to anyone, anytime.”

Now Tina was really curious. What was worrying her? 

Bette re-grasped Tina’s hand first before resuming.  “Mortality, Tina.  I wonder about it sometimes.  When I’m with you, I feel immortal, like we can live forever.  But….,”  she paused. 

“I know that we’re not.” 

Bette couldn’t hide from it now. The encounters during the missions in the caves had resurrected latent fears.  The idea had been unnerving to her: Death.  Clearly, the most jarring event for her on this was the one wherein she’d witnessed a horrific car accident one evening while driving in a mountain pass outside Malibu, right around the holidays, too: the whole incident touched off a sense of foreboding in her.  On the one hand, she found her father’s passing to be one more along the natural order of things. The accident she’d seen, and later assisted in the aftermath with, was not natural, though.  It had taken the life of a young man, and altered that of the young woman with him. 

Even as she’d felt an obligation at that time to sit with the body of the young man who was driving, to wait for others to claim it from her, she’d felt she’d crossed an invisible line that night – moving from an innocent,  fearless state a priori, to one fully aware of a sense of mortality, a posteriori.