His eyes moved to rest on the gun as hers did, and for a moment they shared a mutual sort of awareness. Sarah wasn’t wrong; she had stopped being a kid long before he met her, but her giant blue eyes and sweet face made it easy to forget that. Or maybe it was just a convenient way for him to justify keeping such close tabs on her, the only family he’d known in…too long. The fear that gripped him by the throat whenever she disappeared on him, even for brief snatches of time, was almost suffocating. Too many times he’d envisioned finding her remains out there in the woods, nothing more than bloody scraps and blonde hair coiled on the ground. Other times he imagined worse – finding her infected, already mutating from the cordyceps and clicking those awful sounds.
Screwing his eyes shut a moment, he sighed again and sat down in the rickety chair across the table. “Yeah. You can,” he agreed. “I just…do me a favour and tell me next time you need space, okay? I’ll understand.”
He attempted a thin smile. “I might even be less of a dick about it.”
“You’re always a dick,” she came back, trying hard not to smile. She failed, of course. As much as Sawyer’s over-protectiveness got on her nerves, she loved him. She used to tell him that he was like the big brother she never wanted, but got anyway. It wasn’t too far from the truth.
Sarah scrubbed at her face and sighed, sitting back on the table. “One’a these days, we need to go on a long vacation. The Bahamas or somethin’...”