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“That was reckless.”
You knew the lecture was coming long before Joel took his first full breath.
“Let it go, Miller.”
Arguing is a lost cause, but you could argue the rest of the world is just as gone. Petty fights, impulsive mistakes, the works — they come with the territory of navigating a world barely standing on two feet.
Joel has yet to turn from the door keeping you and everything else walking this desecrated earth apart. His shoulders rise and fall from the run.
(From the close call.)
Of all people, it has to be him. No matter the mission. No matter the risk. The zone chooses to send the man who doesn’t want to keep going but can’t quite quit. The person who requested the most dangerous work in the community in the hopes he may finally have an excuse to never come back.
His busted wrist watch gleams in the sliver of sunlight peering from boarded-up windows, palms pressed firmly to the surface of the wooden door. You wipe the sweat from your brow, relishing in the silence (no clicks, no cries, no chaos) before he finally cranes his chin towards his shoulder.
And he’s furious.
Usually he buries his emotions deep, that much you’ve come to learn in what fleeting time you’ve spent by his side in the Quarantine Zone. Stoic, stone-like, as if he only ever sees what's in front of him and cannot afford whatever may linger in his peripheral.
A man on a mission to nowhere.
Now? The fury in his furrowed glare is palpable.
The rage burns.
“That—” He reiterates with emphasis. “—was reckless.”
“Miller—”
“Shut the hell up, kid, and listen for two goddamn seconds,” Joel interrupts without empathy. Most times you push, fight back, but his eyes suggest your typical antics are unwise.
You oblige, crossing your arms over your chest with an expectant brow.
He continues once a beat passes. “You can’t afford that kind of risky shit out here, you hear me? This ain’t the quarantine zone.”
“I know it’s not the quarantine zone.”
“I don’t think you do,” he corrects, sliding his palms from the door once satisfied with the absence of noise in the vicinity. Joel Miller, always fighting — and for nothing.
“So next time I should just let you get stuck in one of them traps and… what? Run for the hills?”
His teeth grit in a hiss. “Exactly.”
You scoff with a roll of your eyes, rounding towards a scrapped table in the middle of the room. “Run for the hills, he says, like it’s that easy.”
“It is that easy,” he argues with conviction, stepping around the other side of the table.
“Reckon you wouldn’t have run too far if it’d been me, right?” The creak in the floor ceases, and you raise your chin to look him dead in the eye. His jaw is tight, scowl imminent. You keep your expression neutral, unreadable, as your chin tilts. “Right?”
“Ain’t about that.”
“Oh, spare me, Miller.” Cutting around the corner, then another, you find yourself standing a mere few steps from the taller man. “Everyone else runs with your savior complex shit, but not me.”
Joel shakes his head with a glance to the dusty chandelier, thumb hitting the side of his nose before inhaling sharply. “You’re too—”
“I’m too what, Joel?” You interrupt, daring the few steps forward to stand toe-to-toe. “Young?”
By the way his flinches, you’ve hit the mark.
“Thought so.”
A decade, probably a little more, but you are younger than him. He has salt and pepper all over his beard, his unkempt hair, while you have a few stray grays from the stress of the world’s climate. His crow’s feet crinkle, stubble jumping from a tight clenched jaw. Beyond some scratches from the relentless trees, your skin remains smooth. A blank canvas for the years to come.
This isn’t the first time the subject’s been breached. First it was in protest of you coming with him to scavenge for supplies. Then it was in the middle of the night when you huddled beside him for warmth while it was your turn to sleep.
Now you were too young to try and save someone else’s life — a life, it seems, Joel has deemed unworthy of continuing.
Joel remains rigid once he blinks back to you. There is a fracture of softness when his eyes travel around your face, noting the congealed blood on your forehead; the dirt on your nose and cheek.
No one is here to listen. No one will know what was said on the road.
(What was done here.)
“You got a whole life ahead of you.” It’s a murmur you nearly miss. The drawl of his accent catches on his protest.
“I don’t,” you reply just as softly, shrugging a singular shoulder. “No one’s got their whole life ahead of ‘em anymore. Thinking about a future is reckless. You living, breathing, here and now? That’s what I have ahead of me.”
“Kid—”
Taking a risk, you raise a finger to press to his lips. Joel freezes in an accidental kiss to its tip. “They can’t hear you beyond the walls, Miller. The zone’s miles away. If you’re mad at me, then don’t waste my time.”
Something shifts in his expression. Something darker, tangible, and you swallow thickly as his hand reaches to curl gentle fingers around your wrist.
“Where?” he asks.
“Here,” you answer.
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“On a table?”
“Easiest place to bend me over, ain’t it?”
Joel contemplates the sentiment, dropping his attention to the table behind you.
“Ain’t bending you over just yet.”
With a purposeful push, you stumble and slip. Your back abruptly hits the protesting table beneath you, causing you to see stars in your eyes. Rather than finding a silhouette above you, you feel a tug against your hips — again, and again, until your bare ass hits the cool surface of the table.
In just a few short movements, Joel Miller has successfully tugged your jeans to lay idle at your ankles, and by the time you gain composure to crane your neck for a view, his frame has fallen to a kneel on the floor.
The way he isn’t looking at you — rather only looking at what’s ahead — causes you to lose your cockiness that got you mixed up with a man like him in the first place.
“Gonna regret this,” he mumbles into a kiss at the edge of your inner thigh, strong fingers dragging along tender flesh until both thumbs spread you open.
Your breath hitches, unable to reply. Exposed like this, at his mercy — it’s better than any high the old world used to give.
Thoughts cease at the sudden hot tongue dragging along your slit, causing your breath to vocalize into a sharp gasp. Joel pries your thighs open, wasting not a second more to attack your clit with everything he has.
It’s the one thing you like about him: he puts himself fully into everything, whether good or bad. When he closes his lips around it with the intent to lap in a circle, he does so in a punishing manner.
(To be too much and not enough.)
Because that’s the type of relationship — if you can call it that — the two of you have come to know. Too much, a secret hiding in plain sight, but not enough. Exasperated at the idea of being in the same room, yet trusting no one else to lay you out like this after escaping near death.
He’s been places, done things, seen things, and the scars time has left on his body is part of the allure. And in a world where nothing is sacred, untouched, there is you.
It works.
It’s fucked up, but it works.
If it wasn’t for the way his hands force your hips to still against the surface of the table, then you would have soared at the way he changes up the sensations, sucking to catch you off guard.
“Joel—!”
And it stops.
Like that, he unlatches to look up at you with dead eyes.
“Shoutin’s just gonna get us both in trouble,” he replies huskily, lips glistening. “You wanna cum or not?”
When he talks like that — dirty and direct — you feel arousal alight every fiber in your body. All you can do is nod quickly.
“Won’t be easy,” he hums, lazily dragging his thumb in a circle where his lips once lay. Your hips jolt from the electricity. “Gonna make you beg for it.”
“Thought you said we didn’t have the time,” you weakly reply, painfully aware of how wet you’ve become.
“I never said anything like that,” Joel corrects. “All I said was you shouldn’t have come back for me when it was dangerous. If you want this, then you’re gonna have to take whatever I give. Got that?”
“Miller.”
“Oh, we’re back to Miller?” Amused. Although Joel isn’t a comedic man, he’s amused by the switch in protest to his rules.
For that, he leaves your clit to drag down, down, and tests the glide of his index finger into your core. You give easily to it, moaning softly to the ceiling. Your hands claw for purchase at the edge of the table above you for stability.
He adds his middle finger, stretching you to his will before bending his fingers. You shudder, widening your knees to accommodate the way he fucks you earnestly with both.
Somehow, you manage to stay quiet, even as the pressure builds in your lower belly.
He leans again once satisfied by the reduction in volume, rolling his tongue along your clit as his fingers pick up the pace. You squeeze against his fingers, knuckles white along the wooden frame, and you buck into his hand.
The feeling disappears.
Just as you feel the orgasm rising, Joel backs off.
“What the fuck?” you whisper, chasing his fingers as he lets go.
He’s almost breathless as his free hand squeezes your knee with a reminder: “Take whatever I give, darlin’.”
The drawl of the pet name could make you cum without contact.
He resumes eating you out and filling you with his fingers, twisting and sucking and lapping, only to stop just at the precipice once, twice, three times — to the point where you feel absolutely delirious. Mumbling his name, pleading under your breath, fingers cramping against the table for the plea of release; Joel thrives off of the control, and you accept whatever it takes to get you away from this world to wherever you’ve landed with him.
If it continues to a fourth disruption, you may start to cry.
“Joel, m’begging you,” you pant under him as he hums against your clit, holding your hips back down as they desperately buck. “If I don’t cum around you—”
There.
That’s where you find the upper hand.
Joel stops a fourth time, but it isn’t a pointed punishment this time. He stands at full height, lifting you by the torso to roll you to your belly. You languidly follow his lead, dripping and shaking from overstimulation. There’s the sound of a zipper behind you, causing you to thunk your forehead to the table with relief.
“You wanna cum around me?” he murmurs against your shoulder to your neck, peppering kisses you cannot see.
(Always behind and never forward.)
“I really do,” you respond, deciding on honesty. He groans above you, and you gasp at the gentle nudge of the tip of him to your entrance. “Fucking finally.”
“Yeah? You been wanting this?”
“All day, Miller.”
“Joel,” he corrects, pushing a sliver of the tip inside of you. He stills your hips to keep you from backing into him. “Say it.”
“Joel.”
“That’s my girl.”
His hips snap, bursting stars behind your eyes. Your mouth drops open, wide with a soundless scream, as he pulls out and groans as he pushes inside to the hilt.
Every movement is rough, merciless, and you relish in the sounds he makes above you — both out of your minds, trying to find something to hold onto into this world.
He won’t hold you, not really, just as you refuse to fully give into him.
A push and pull.
(The only thing the two of you have ever been.)
Within seconds you cum around him, violently shuddering in the contractions dragging him closer. He continues to fuck you into the table, grabbing a fistful of hair between his worn fingers. You whine when your head lifts at the tug, throat exposed, and shiver at the inability to do anything in the moment.
You wouldn’t want to go anywhere.
You wouldn’t want to stop.
So you take what he gives you no matter how painful, how exhilarating, how overstimulated you’ve become, because all you can think about in the moment is him.
Something crests in the back of your mind, slowly but surely, until a warm buzz fills your body like molten lava. Joel reaches between you to capture your clit once more between two fingers, rolling and rubbing in precise circles.
That molten lava fills your lungs, shooting straight down to your core, and you shout despite yourself into a second climax.
You feel Joel slip quickly from you before streams of hot cum hit your bare ass. He groans a semblance of your name, something he’s never done before, until it’s cut short by slamming a hand down beside you on the table.
He hovers, catching his breath, while you focus on the aftermath of being fucked out of your mind.
“Didn’t — regret it,” you tell him between pants, and he gives a cut-off huff for a response.
It’s easier not to answer. It’s easier just to let this moment be the moment, then keep moving.
Anything more is reckless.