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(Nighttime, and a knock. That’s how it started.)
The gravel crunches underfoot as [Name] hitches her bag higher up her shoulders, the morning spring breeze a little more forceful this high up. Right as she crests the edge, the world expands and explodes with a burst of green: trees, farther than her eyes could ever possibly see. Somewhere out there is Jackson, miles away, but she can’t see a single glimpse from this far away. That’s how she likes it.
The wind stirs the loose hairs from her braid, slapping her forehead and cheeks, eyelashes fluttering and eyes narrowing against the touch. She spends a handful of seconds catching her breath from the trek up the hillside, her horse tied up a few minutes back down there. She’ll be safe alone; the clickers don’t think to wander up here nor this far. They stick to the abandoned mountain towns sprinkled throughout Wyoming, fortunately. If they even have thoughts, apparently they don’t think it worthwhile to search the forests too extensively.
Naturally, she finds herself stopping right at the edge of the cliffside, the wind rocking her body minutely as she grips the strap of her bag with one hand, eyes shutting against the beautiful, serene morning up so high. A chance to catch her breath, gather her thoughts. When she first came to this part of the country, she found this place and made it hers, coming up here and looking across the millions of trees for some measure—no matter how small—of quietude. Everywhere she stays, she needs somewhere close but far enough away to hide and sit, appreciating watching nature reclaim its domain.
As the years passed, the spot became something more.
A breath releases, heavy, from her lungs. It’s the only sound out here that isn’t the whisper of branches or the calling of faraway birds. Ever since she was little, before the world went to shit, she loved being outside. Her mother taught her how to take care of their small garden, the fresh smell of those flowers in their front yard still fresh in her nose, the touch of their silky petals between her pudgy fingers. She would climb trees, sap sticking to her clothes and hair, watch the squirrels running through the grass, chase butterflies slipping through the breezes. Nature has always been kinder to her than humans ever have. The weight of the billions of lives lost over these decades is heavy, but she feels free to admit to herself that she is a little grateful that the earth can take back what has always been hers.
If things had gone right, perhaps she would’ve become a biologist. Maybe something to do with animals. Anything to keep her secluded with the outer world, away from anyone. Even now, the population significantly reduced, she still has a hard time finding peace.
(Soft, graying hair slipping like silk between her fingers. Hot breath on her mouth.)
Through it all, she’s never not on alert and she catches the sound quickly: footsteps approaching. She knows who it is, but that’s precisely why, for a millisecond, her heart jumps at the bars of its cage.
She turns right as Joel is pushing a branch back to walk through it, his heavy eyes already on her. She holds a hand up against the sun. “Surprised to see you here,” she says, voice surprisingly steady.
“Mm.” Of course that’s his only acknowledgement of the night before. “It’s Sunday,” he says. “Tradition.”
A break away from everyone else, they meet up here every Sunday. To hunt, forage, hike, argue about Ellie—for some reason, they always need the time alone.
But after last night, [Name] had wondered if this was ruined for them. Or even that Joel would avoid her, period. Clearly neither. The relief is physical: her stomach untwists and her shoulders loosen.
She’ll never let him know how anxious she’d been, though. It’s not her style.
“What’s on the agenda?”
“Up to you,” says Joel. He’s standing a good distance away, keeping them separated. But he came. He has his hands on his hip as he looks out over the trees, his hair stirring.
She looks away. She looks, again, at the trees. “Let’s walk around,” she decides. “Maybe something will find us.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, a flash of teeth. “It always does.”
They leave the horses and descend the mountain on foot, pebbles loosening and tumbling down ahead of them as they take their time with the steep trail. It’s safe, but running certainly isn’t an option. She takes small, measured steps, jolting with each one as she keeps her stability, or else shimmying her feet at particularly slippery parts.
“Where you thinkin’?”
[Name] shrugs, eyes trained on the ground. “Not sure. I know there’s a small town nearby. Sometimes patrols pick through there, but I’m not looking for a supply run. I just wanna…explore.”
“Maybe I should’ve sent Ellie instead of coming by myself,” he says, but there’s a slight smile in his voice.
He sounds so much looser and laid back than she ever would’ve expected after last night. She turns to catch a look, to see if he really is smiling. Yes, he is—but she is suddenly slipping and more pebbles scatter and fall and her arms start to pinwheel and there’s a jolt as she thinks oh fuck off I’m about to eat shit when a firm arm slips around her waist and another over her stomach. They screech to a halt.
A hand is laying on the spot between his neck and shoulder. Her hand. “Jesus,” she mutters, the adrenaline spiking and then teetering off as she regains her balance. She looks up.
(His hand on her face, his thumb brushing over her cheekbone. This arm tight around her middle.)
“Sorry—”
“Gotta pay attention, woman,” he says, his voice low.
It stirs something within her. And they’re still tangled up. She’s the first to step away—carefully—and his grip loosens and falls off like it hadn’t been tight mere seconds ago. She lifts her bag higher on her back and turns away, continuing on like nothing had happened.
“Alright, so we’re explorin’,” says Joel.
Minutes pass in silence, especially now with her concentrating on her footing. She doesn’t need that happening again. Yet a part of her wants to stage another elaborate fall, just to get his arms back around her like that.
What’s strangest of all is that last night, after she’d gotten back to her cabin and leaned against the door, pulling at her hair wondering if she had just had the most elaborate, realistic dream ever, when she thought of the next morning, she’d been petrified. Joel isn’t an open book. In fact, his book is padlocked shut and he swallowed the key years ago. There’s no way he wouldn’t panic and be mean and ignore her for the rest of their lives after that.
Yet this morning, he’s being…flirty. And she’s the one keeping distance.
They reach level ground sometime later, talking no more. Wordlessly she leads the way to where she knows that town is. She’s been there a couple times, but she’s never really looked around.
“No horses?”
“You’re asking a lot of questions today.”
“Well, I have a lot,” he says.
So do I. “It’s about twenty minutes from here.”
“Wonder if we’ll run into anybody.”
“Probably not,” she says. “Clickers and people don’t come up this far. They don’t know to look for it.”
Joel scratches his beard, the sound pleasing to the ear. “How have I never been here?”
“Guess Tommy doesn’t trust you with it,” she says, a teasing smile pulling at her lips.
“Big surprise,” he huffs.
As they walk along, the images return and her face flames: standing in front of Joel, his eyes searching her face. She never thought Joel was capable of such a feeling, much less towards her: the unabashed attention.
There are flutters in the pit of her stomach. She never gets like this, never. In fact, if she thinks back, the last time she felt this way was as a teenager. Well, it has been years. Makes sense to be a bit flustered over the slightest incident when all you’ve known for all your life is death and blood and hurt.
She didn’t know he had it in him.
“Ellie finally got her tattoo finished,” he says.
“Oh?”
“That Cat girl…”
“Mm.” Her and Joel hold the same opinion on Ellie’s new girlfriend, one of the few things they agree on.
“Looks…good, though,” he says, attempting to bypass the tension but reluctant to compliment the girl’s tattooing skills. “Covers her scar.”
“That’s the important part.”
“Yeah,” he says. He seems lost in thought. “I thought her and Dina had a thing.”
[Name]’s brows knit. “Dina’s dating Jesse.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve also thought Ellie and Jesse are datin’ too.”
She snorts. “Missed the mark there.”
“No kiddin’.” And then Joel blurts out in such a rush she knows he’s been wanting to ask for some time, “Does Ellie talk to you ‘bout this stuff?”
“What, dating?” At his nod, she says, “Not really. She keeps to herself.” A pause before she adds, “Wonder where she gets that from.”
Joel smirks. “Sure, sure.”
“Is it bothering you? Her dating?”
“She’s growin’ up fast,” he agrees. “Hard to keep up.”
“That’s teenagers.”
“I…” Joel swallows. “I ain’t ever had one. I wouldn’t know.”
Her mouth presses down. Joel doesn’t bring Sarah up often, but she has the decency to pretend it’s not a big deal whenever he does. “You’ve been one,” she says, wanting to sidestep the potential topic change. “I’m sure you were a terror.”
“Course I was,” he says. “Joyrides, drinkin’…I crashed my old man’s truck one time. Had me workin’ nonstop for him until I could pay it off. And don’t go tellin’ Ellie any o’ that.”
Chuckling, she holds her hands up in surrender. “You have my word,” she says. And because she can’t help it, she adds, “I’m sure you were a menace to all the girls.”
“Hardly,” he grumbles. “I mean, I had a couple of girlfriends, nothing serious, but…”
“The smart ones knew to keep their distance from Joel Miller?”
He shoots her a glare that makes her laugh a little more. She reaches out and shoves his shoulder. He lets himself be shoved, barely stumbling a step or two to the side. “You’re not far off,” he concedes.
Then I’m the biggest fucking idiot.
———
It was a Saturday night, which meant drinking, singing, dancing, and a whole lot of celebrating—for making it through yet another week alive or just winding down from work, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t need much of a reason.
The band was playing in the recreation hall, feet tapping and couples spinning, mouths open with laughter. The smell of alcohol was heavy in the air. She just had a glass of whiskey, only half of it, before she set it down on some table and wandered outside, a single thought in her mind.
When she got out there, the sky was vast, overwhelmingly so. Stars twinkling, bright as beacons. Ever since she was little, she couldn’t wrap her head around the thought of how small this world was, let alone her. It wasn’t scary, as most would think, but it did suffocate her. To think that beyond her, the clickers, the earth, nothing truly mattered. Just a pale blue dot in the cosmos.
Her feet carried her on instinct to Rancher Street as her head, still tipped back, took in the sky. No more smog, no more pollution. Clear, glittering space.
When she knocked on Joel’s door, she didn’t know why she wanted to be there, she just did. She didn’t even know if he was there or not.
But the door opened. “Hey there,” he said. “Little late.”
Embarrassment gripped her. What was she doing, coming to his house in the middle of the night? “Sorry, didn’t mean to—”
“No, no,” Joel said. “I’m not—” His mouth hardened. An inward frustration. “You ain’t botherin’ me. Come in.”
[Name] did. She loved the coziness of Joel’s house despite its immense size. Or perhaps she just liked that it was his. His smell, his homebase, his world. A safety net.
“Wanna drink?” he asked. “I assume you just came from—”
“Yeah, I had a little earlier,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Not as much fun drinkin’ as you get older, ain’t it?”
She smiled. “Hits harder in the morning.”
Joel smiled, too. He nodded, eyes falling to the floor. “It’s great, huh?”
“Better than dead, I guess.”
“Well, what about coffee?”
So they ended up in his kitchen, leaning on opposite sides of his island. She had her elbows and forearms laid on the cool marble, hands clasped around a warm mug. Joel had a hand planted on the island, the other on his hip as he sipped his black coffee. He made an appreciative sound deep in his throat. “Damn good,” he said.
She looked up at him through her lashes. What was she doing? This was dangerous. They had alone time often, but right then the energy charging through her, like electricity, felt hazardous. Something had changed. She had changed. She wasn’t sure when or why she suddenly decided to cross that line, but there she was.
“Are you ever lonely?”
Joel set his mug down. “No. Used to be, though.”
“When?”
He gestured loosely towards the windows. “Out there a long, long time ago. I’m not much of a people person—”
“No kidding.”
“—but you still have your moments,” he finished, trying to fight a smile. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, his scruff shifting. “I liked the quiet. It’s nice bein’ out there, just hummin’ a tune. Course, then I met Ellie and haven’t known silence since.”
[Name] laid her chin in her hand. “But…?”
“But…” Joel leaned on the island, mirroring her stance. “Sometimes you wanna go back to the way things were: campfires, bar-hoppin’, vacations. Jackson is real. It’s got the normal thing, so I ain’t have that anymore, but I still think I’d lose my mind if I got to experience somethin’ as mundane as grocery shoppin’ again.”
She smiled. “Still. You sound almost…happy.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, looking into his mug. “Maybe I am.” Joel raised his head and their eyes held. There was something in their stare that made her feel even braver. So sure that it wasn’t just her. “I got you, Ellie, Tommy…It’s good enough for me.”
“Me too,” she said softly, practically a whisper. And then she reached out and touched his hand, the long fingers around his mug.
She half-expected Joel’s face to darken or for him to flinch away. The Joel she knew was only ever hard and sharp as a chainsaw, and he’d tear you apart like one too.
But Joel didn’t move. He didn’t get mad or retreat back into his shell or even hesitate. He let her glide her fingertips over his hand, the steady warmth of him. It was his trust in her that made her do what she did next.
Abandoning the hot mug, she stood straight, Joel’s eyes following her as she did. And then they followed as she slowly walked around the island and over to his side. He straightened up too, staring so openly at her that she felt inside out, stripped bare.
A hand landed on his cheek. Her hand. His scruff was wiry and cut into her palm. “This isn’t good,” she said, a final resort. A last ditch effort to stop before things went where they couldn’t return from.
She was throwing him a lifeline. Take it, Joel.
His own hand, comfortingly warm and firm and him, came up to her face and his thumb brushed along her cheekbone. So gentle and not what she would expect of him. She leaned into his touch, lashes fluttering.
“Good thing I ain’t ever been a good man, then,” he said. And that was when she kissed him.
And Joel kissed her back. His mouth was warm, his tongue heavy, and his scarred, calloused hands had slid around to cradle either side of her spine as he tucked her in closer, their bodies pressed together, her chest empty of breath, mind spinning. Her fingers played through his hair, so soft, while she moaned in his mouth, a detail that embarrasses her everytime she remembers. But Joel had seemed to like it, a hand traveling up her back and planting between her shoulder blades, pressing her closer, closer, closer.
Then she was frantic, pulling his hair and opening her mouth and breathing heavier into his. Joel turned and pressed her against the island, the marble digging into her lower back as he thread his hands through her hair. “Joel,” she gasped. She thread her fingers around his wrist and led his hand to her clothed breast. “Fucking touch me.”
Joel’s fingers tightened into the soft flesh and she pressed harder against him. His lips threaded down to her chin and over to her neck, leaving open-mouthed, wet kisses as he hiked her up onto the marble, sitting on the edge of it. Her legs circled his hips. She could feel him through his jeans. “Christ, woman,” he breathed against her throat, his teeth sharp against the thin skin.
“Should we stop? This is a bad idea,” she said, thinking of Ellie, who would suffer the most if this went south. And of herself, who had nobody else than them and it was scary to think she could lose it all in a second.
“Do you want to?” asked Joel, and he pulled away to look at her. She was breathing heavily, chest rising and falling, and looking into his soft eyes, she knew her answer immediately.
The door opened. His front door. A voice called out. “Hey, Joel?” It was Tommy.
Joel and [Name] separated in record time, hearts pounding hard. Joel tapped his finger against his lip—shh—and raced out to the hallway to intercept Tommy before he could see her. Joel wanted to hide her.
The two were talking outside the kitchen, just out of view, and she wasn’t even following the conversation, so startled and frazzled that she couldn’t really think. Perhaps it was fate. Maybe they really weren’t meant to do this.
So she jumped down from the island and walked out of the kitchen, her face hot. “Hi, Tommy,” she said. The two men spun around, Joel’s face dropping before hardening once again. As she walked past, she patted Joel’s arm. “Thanks for the coffee. Have a good night, guys.”
“You, too,” said Tommy, so used to seeing Joel and [Name] together that he didn’t even question her presence so late at night. Joel, though, had said nothing. And she knew that it didn’t matter if they had wanted to stop or not—they’d already inextricably changed things.
———
“Wow.”
The town is barren, obviously, save for a small herd of deer wandering down the main street cutting through the small community. A hardware store, a cafe, a bar, a pharmacy—all of the essentials all in one place. She knows from past visits that there are side streets leading to even tinier neighborhoods. The population couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred at its peak.
Crouching in a cover of bushes, their eyes follow the family of deer as they pick through the tall grass that has grown in the street. Two babies and two parents.
Joel goes to grab his bow, but she grabs his arm and shakes her head. They watch for what must be a while.
“So pretty,” she whispers, shifting off of her leg that has fallen asleep. “I miss animals.”
“They’re still out there,” says Joel.
“I know,” she says. “More than there was back then. But still. I want them to take it all back from us.”
“I don’t know. Look at Jackson. There must be more like us all over the world. It’ll only be a matter of time.”
The thought nauseates her. She was young when it all happened, and absolutely destroyed. No more normal. But at this point, she’s spent more than half her life like this. She can barely remember what it was like before anymore.
“Is it bad,” she says after a minute, “that I don’t want it to? I like things this way.”
Joel shifts his weight off of his bent knee. “I get it.”
“My answer is no.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Last night.” Finally, the tension loosens within her. She isn’t the type to just move on so easily. “I didn’t want to stop.”
The deer are gone, back into the forest. [Name] gets back on her feet and steps out of the brush and to the street. A lot of the pavement is gone or cracked and broken apart, greenery breaking through. Windows of the buildings are smashed and shattered, the few still intact crusted over with dirt, barely visible.
If the deer and her footsteps still weren’t enough…
She grabs a rock from the ground and throws it farther down, just enough to make a cracking sound as it hits the road. She stands silent, not moving a muscle as she listens to the silence while Joel approaches. No clickers.
“See, I told you,” she says. “Nothing comes up this far.”
“‘Cept deer.”
“Except deer,” she agrees.
“And us.”
She nods. Her voice is gentle. “And us.”
“They got a bookstore,” he says, and points.
Her brows rise. “Oh, hell yeah.”
They step through the window, crunching glass on the carpet under their boots. Joel clicks on a flashlight and sweeps it around the room, finding only dust motes and bookshelves. A majority have been cleared out, either stolen for reading or fire kindling, but she picks through the titles nonetheless. Her and Joel are always on the lookout for new books. There are only so many ways to cure boredom.
“The Count of Monte Cristo. Your kinda story.”
“Never read it,” says Joel.
She pulls it down from the shelf and pushes it into his chest. “Well, trust me.”
Joel flicks through the waterlogged, but still miraculously intact, pages. “‘s big.”
“You have the time,” she says.
“Fine, I get to pick one for you, then.”
Joel—and his flashlight—disappear around a corner, wandering deeper into the stacks. She calls out, “If you bring back some Western, I’ll leave you for dead out here.” She hears Joel snort.
She runs her hand along the spines as she walks farther down the aisle. She can see even without his flashlight, albeit the darkness is a little straining on the eyes. Early morning sun pours in through the front windows, but it can’t reach this far back.
Glass crunches.
Before [Name] can think, she’s crouching. Joel is at the other end of the store. It could’ve been a rat or some other harmless animal, but something just stepped through the window they came in from.
And whatever it is will easily see Joel’s flashlight bouncing on the ceiling.
She doesn’t speak, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Yes, it’s likely a rat, but she’d rather be safe than sorry. It got her this far, didn’t it?
Several aisles over, she peeks around and sees Joel, unbothered, flipping through a book, Monte Cristo tucked under his arm. Standing up but still staying low, she approaches Joel, hitting his bicep to get his attention. She stands on her toes and presses her mouth to his ear. “I heard the glass. Like a footstep.”
Joel closes the book. Slowly, he turns, trying to see through the stacks. She checks behind him, seeing only darkness.
“Go to—”
A footstep, heavy, unmistakable. She whips around and sees, right where she just came from, a shadow of a man, barely discernible. “Who is you?” the man asks, his voice twangy and old.
Joel has his gun out in less than a second. He holds it over [Name]’s shoulder. “You first,” he says to the man.
“Saws you two come in here,” the man says. “Thought I’d say hello.” There’s something slippery and snakelike in his tone that sends a shiver down her spine. This isn’t a good person.
Joel cocks the hammer back. “Leave.”
The shadow holds his hands up. “I ain’t tryna bother ya. Just wanna say hi.”
“You said hi,” says Joel. “Now go.”
“Yer wife is real pretty.”
“Take him out,” she says.
She steps out of the way right as Joel fires, hearing a ringing that staggers and startles her. Through the haze, the man moves with a reptilian, insane speed and dodges the bullet. He lunges and grasps [Name] by the arm and pulls her in close, standing behind her. There’s a blade against her throat.
“Real, real pretty,” he says, his stinking breath in her face. She squirms, but he’s freakishly strong and she’s still dazed from the spinning in her head.
Joel still has his gun raised, a hardness in his eyes. “Let her go.”
“You’s in my territory,” the man says. He can’t be younger than sixty. He’s about her size, almost malnourished, but his grip is strong. “You wasn’t expecting to miss, was ya?”
“I won’t miss the next one.”
“Just don’t nick her,” the man says, and lays his blade flat against her cheek. The metal is cool.
“Fuckin’ freak,” she spits out. She struggles against him, not wanting to spend another second so close to this disgusting old man.
“[Name].”
“You’re a piece of shit,” she says when she feels him hard against her back. She shrivels up inside. Joel wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
Steeling herself, she tightens her teeth and swings her head back, feeling herself collide with the man’s nose. He yells out at the stunning pain and she slips from his loose grip and kicks him. He collapses to the ground and she gets down with him, wrestling the blade from his hand and pressing it to his throat. “You aren’t so pretty,” she hisses, hair falling into her face.
Joel lays a hand on her shoulder. “Let me.”
She flicks hair out of her eyes and stands, throwing the blade off into the distance as Joel shoots. The man twitches and collapses against the floor, blood pooling out beneath his head, almost black in the darkness.
Her hands wave at her sides as a nauseated groan leaves her, pressing her fists into her forehead before stalking off, needing to get the fuck out of there. She’s had worse close calls, but it doesn’t matter—it’s always too much to grapple with.
Sunlight stuns her dark-adjusted eyes. She shakes her hands out again and bends at the middle, hands on her knees, while she stands in the street.
Joel is close behind her, his face hard as stone. “[Name].”
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” she says. “It just…He freaked me out. It was all so fast.”
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. Just…grossed out.”
“What did he—”
“When I was…struggling against him, he…apparently, he liked that,” she says, wanting to crawl out of her own skin. Just saying it out loud—to Joel, of all fucking people—is enough to make her queasy. “Sorry. Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”
Again, she walks away first, trusting Joel to be right behind her.
They say nothing as they fold back into the brush they’d watched the deer from and retrace their steps through the woods, feet moving fast to put as much distance as quickly as possible between them and that damn place. Maybe they should’ve stuck around, find the old man’s lair and see if there’s anything of use, but they don’t. And she doesn’t want to. They’ll leave him there to wither away.
Joel falls into step beside her. He has a book in his hand. “Here,” he says. “Almost forgot.”
She takes it from him. The Big Sleep.
“It’s, uh, a detective story,” he says. “Old-school detectives. The movie—”
“Humphrey Bogart,” she says, nodding, “and Lauren Bacall.”
“Yeah. Damn, didn’t think you’d know that.”
“Thank you,” she says, running her fingers over the damaged, yellowed cover. She stops walking, and so does Joel. “And thanks for back there.”
“‘s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
Joel slings his bag around front and slips Monte Cristo in there. He looks at her for a beat before laying his hand out. She gives him The Big Sleep to put away, too.
“C’mon,” he says after he’s zipped everything back up. “Horses are waitin’ for us.”
“Wait,” she says, and grabs his forearm.
Joel looks at her. How has she lasted this long? She tries to recount when this attraction to Joel became so painfully obvious, but she’s coming up empty. Perhaps it’s always been there and her survival instinct fought to protect her from the mere possibility. Or maybe only recently has she seen him and seen Ellie and realized that they’re family, and family means love, and love means finally opening up, the scariest thing of all.
She’s always been an adrenaline junkie. She’s always loved danger. And nothing feels more dangerous than this:
She kisses Joel. Her mouth fits to his yet again and with such ease, she wonders why they haven’t been doing this all along. She holds the side of his neck and her mouth opens for him. The other hand laces through his hair.
Joel’s hands slip back around her waist. His touch is dizzying; both because it is him, and because it has been so, so long. She wants him to rub her clean again of what she just went through, make her forget that anyone other than him has laid a hand on her.
His breath is hot on her mouth. “Last night, I wanted to kill Tommy.”
She smiles against his scruff. “Me too.”
“Let’s try it again,” he whispers. “At my house. See if we can get it right.”
[Name] brushes a piece of hair from his forehead, seeing his pupils blown and the hungry look. They can figure out if this is a bad idea afterwards; right now, she can only think of his hands and his mouth and how much she craves both. “Lead the way.”