Summary and tags
Suggested listening: 'Mad World' by Gary Jules & Michael Andrews
Word Count: 4,088
February 14, 2024
The world has ended. With every step, each one heavier than the last, you drag your feet and wonder why you’re even bothering to try and find Jackson, Wyoming. You barely made it out of the resort town of Silver Lake by the skin of your teeth, and now you’re trudging through the snow-covered woods alone searching for this town that could be your last hope.
You have only heard nuggets of information about what you can find behind the tall walls of Jackson. Someone you traded intel with in the shadows of Silver Lake said that there is an even larger community there. The word they used was “thriving”. There are people somehow thriving in this world.
According to them, they have luxuries like fresh produce and enough sturdy heated homes for everyone. This was all supposedly made possible thanks to their own people who have been gathering resources from surrounding deadlands and abandoned towns and using them to rebuild and strengthen their walls. Apparently, they even have a fucking hospital and a school.
Even if it turns out not to be true, anywhere is better than the shithole you narrowly escaped from over a month ago. Silver Lake is nothing but a blur of misery and cruelty that has left you hollow. A piece of you remained there and died with it, and somehow what’s left of you moves forward.
All hell broke loose on your final day there. An unknown teenage girl that was being held captive murdered the so-called “saviour” and community leader, David, a weasel of a man that was closer to a deranged cult leader than a man of God. The things you witnessed and learned about him… the things he put you and your family through… it’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.
You didn’t catch a glimpse of the girl before she slipped away, but you discovered David’s body inside the burning wreck of Todd’s Steakhouse, which served as Silver Lake’s community hall. His face was hacked so many times that it was hardly a face anymore. It was just mangled meat, forever burned into your mind.
A teenage girl? He deserved worse, but that image cuts colder than the punishing elements out here.
After leaving his corpse to the flames and ensuring no one else was trapped in the blazing building, you staggered outside to chaos unravelling before you. His men had turned their guns on the mutinous members of the community who saw their opportunity to rebel against the now leaderless group that had oppressed them for so long.
Weeks of simmering tension had built as more of you began to question David — yourself included. Once the full extent of the horrors he was orchestrating behind the scenes became clear, you didn’t just want him dead. You wanted him to suffer. He was lucky the kid got to him first. You would have made his death much, much slower.
At those initial gunshots, you fled, abandoning the community as bullets sprayed, painting the snow crimson red. The sounds of their screams and the snarling of infected that were attracted to the commotion faded into the distance as you ran. None of them were considered friends, but that doesn’t alleviate the guilt that is now residing and festering in your chest.
But you can’t afford to dwell. Out here, the cold is merciless and gnaws through to your bones. Hours fade into a forest of endless lodgepole pines that tower over your aching body. Somehow, you have survived in the wilderness, taking shelter wherever you can and using your trusty bow and arrow to hunt for food and clear the infected.
Nobody would’ve described you as the outdoorsy, survival type before Outbreak Day, but you have learned a lot over the last twenty years— enough to keep you alive at least. Everything just seems bleak now that you’re alone. No family, no hope.
A quick glance at the fading sky through the treetops tells you sunset is close. With stiff, gloved fingers, you wrestle a map you stole from your jeans pocket and carefully unfold it. If you’re on the right track, the trees should start to thin soon and Jackson will finally be in sight. The promise of safety is within reach.
You can almost hear the swarming streets, families greeting each other as they walk by, laughter… God, it has been so long since you’ve heard someone other than David laugh.
If you could just hear your mother’s laugh… just one more time… maybe it would give you the stamina to make it out of the woods before nightfall. You stagger towards a nearby tree and lean against the trunk for a moment, your breath sawing in and out as you clutch your chest to hold the pieces of you together.
You squeeze your eyes shut and try to just imagine it. A garden party, hearing that shameless, chesty cackle of hers that she only used when gossiping with your aunt over tea and cigarettes. The memory guts you, hot tears stream down your frozen cheeks. The ache of remembering feels like a trap. Enticing, but dangerous.
You drag a sleeve across your eyes and nose, sniff hard and straighten yourself. Move. For her. For your father. For your sister.
And so you move, placing a foot on what appears to be a slab of exposed rock to swiftly float over, but you slip on the unsteady surface. Pain lances up your leg as you stumble, barely keeping yourself upright. Great, that’s gotta be a broken ankle.
“Fuck!”
With a frustrated hiss, you give the oddly shaped rock sticking out from the snow a firm stomp with your good foot. Thankfully, nobody’s around to see you lose your balance and almost fall a second time just from doing that. There is no time for delay. You need to keep moving.
Before pushing ahead, you glance back because you could have sworn that rock just moved. You freeze, eyes narrowing and heart tightening. Maybe it’s the isolation and delirium, living out in the wild and replaying every traumatic nightmare of the last twenty years in your head over and over. Maybe you have finally lost it.
But then, the rock begins to gargle, gasp, and growl, sending an icy chill down your spine. The ground comes alive and moves, and you realise that the rock you just stomped on was, in fact, the head of a hibernating, but now very pissed-off clicker. It comes back to life right before your widened eyes, writhing and shaking the snow off its body as it jerks to its feet.
Before you can react and start running, it lets out a bone-chilling shriek that pierces through the trees and lunges right at you. Your hand reaches for the sheath strapped to your waist to pull out your knife, but you are not fast enough. It knocks you back, causing you to trip over a snow-dusted log, breaking your bow in the process. The impact knocks the air from your lungs, and before you can even draw a breath, the clicker is on you. It screeches, jaws snapping just inches from your face.
With all the force you have, you try to shove it off of you before it can sink its teeth into your skin, but it’s too overpowering, and you are too weak even with the adrenaline and fear running through your veins. You let out a cry for help, knowing no one is going to hear you because there is no one else out here. If anything, you will probably just alert more infected that might be lurking under the snow or around the trees.
This can’t be how it ends. You were so close.
Despite everything, you forced yourself to carry on all this time - choosing to breathe, to fight, to survive, even when there was no reason left to. There were months, years even, of your life post-outbreak wishing for death, and now that it presents itself to you so generously, you’re still choosing to try and fight it. Why? Why not just let it happen and join your loved ones? Let it happen… Let yourself slip into the dark and just… let it happen.
The sudden crack of a gunshot echoes through the woods, and the snarling stops. You blink against the ringing in your ears and see the clicker’s jaw frozen mid-snarl. With a heave, you roll its limp, cold body off you. Gasping, you look up and see a pair of kind and living eyes staring down at you, a hand outstretched.
“Hey. You’re okay. It’s dead.”
You take the stranger’s hand and let him drag you to your feet with a grunt. For a moment, you’re not sure whether to thank him or scold him for denying you death. You say nothing, keeping quiet and wary with instincts on edge. Before the outbreak, you wouldn’t second-guess a simple act of kindness and humanity like this. In this world, though, nothing is ever simple.
“Are you bit?” he asks with eyes already scanning.
“No,” you reply, a little too quickly. Answering ‘yes’ to that question can get you killed on the spot.
The stranger squints, now a little wary of you. You can see his dark brown eyes flit around, checking your limbs and neck for any signs of blood or suspiciously covered sites on your body.
“I swear,” you add. “I’m fine. Just a broken ankle, I think. Well, my bow too.”
Slowly, you raise your hands as a silent invitation: check me if you must.
He approaches cautiously, running his hands along your arms, checking under your sleeves, peeking beneath your scarf and jacket. Once he’s satisfied that there are no bites, you tug your clothes back into place.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“What’s yours?” you answer back, a little too snappy again.
“Tommy.”
Your gaze drifts to the dead clicker sprawled on the icy trail below, curled in a grotesque, foetal pose. Its hands clenched to its chest and jaw frozen wide in an eternal scream. It resembles a spider, balled up in death, only human-shaped with fungal plates sprouting from its skull and a mouth full of jagged teeth that jut out in chaotic angles.
Turning back to the man who just saved you, you study him warily. His name means nothing to you. Why is he out here? Why would he risk himself for a stranger?
“I ain’t gonna hurt you. Are you lost or somethin’?” he asks.
You catch the unguarded warmth in his eyes and you somehow trust that he won’t harm you. He stands firmly in place, showing you patience in the blistering cold. Slowly, he holsters his gun and sweeps the snow gathering on his moustache with his forearm.
“Why did you save me?” you reply, still cautious.
He shifts his weight from one hip to the other, placing gloved hands there before looking at the clicker and then back at you with a puzzled frown.
“You looked like you needed savin’. I was patrollin’ the area, heard some commotion, so I came to see what was goin’ on. I saw you go down with that thing on top of you and… I’m not the kind to let people die for no good reason.”
“Patrolling?” you ask, quirking your eyebrow.
“Yeah. I’m from Jackson. It’s not far from here. If you need a place to go, we’ve got space.”
He notices the way your eyes widen slightly and your shoulders sink with quiet relief, knowing that he just offered you a lifeline. He gives you one more look up and down before clearing his throat and gesturing further down the trail.
“I got a horse just up ahead. Can you walk?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” you murmur, testing your ankle on those first few steps. “I’m Joey.”
You follow his lead, limping closely behind. Every step fills you with a tentative warmth, a hopeful sense that this stretch of endless isolation might finally be over.
Though only average in height, Tommy’s build suggests toughness, even without the thick khaki jacket adding bulk to his frame. Snowflakes falling from overhead settle on his black curls, dust his thick moustache, and cling to his eyelashes. He looks well-nourished, alert, and focused. The complete opposite to you.
“This here is Old Beardy,” Tommy announces as you approach a graceful steed tethered to a tree waiting patiently. Its deep chestnut coat gleams over the crisp white snow blanketing the ground beneath it. The scars decorating its flank would have you assume the creature has seen its fair share of struggle, but it stands as strong and as confident as Tommy does next to it.
“He ain’t mine, just borrowed him for the day. I assume you know how to ride.”
“Yeah,” you reply, your voice straining as you hoist yourself onto the battered and worn saddle on its back with your good foot.
“Alright. I’ll walk alongside you. We should make it back to Jackson before sunset.”
Riding back with him feels like a miracle. This stranger not only saved your life, but offered you safety in the fortified town he calls home. The saddle rocks beneath you and the cold air bites, reminding you that you’re still alive. It all feels surreal, too good to trust. Maybe you hit the ground harder than you thought. Maybe the clicker finished you off, and this is just some strange afterlife.
“Where are you from anyway? That accent is… Irish, right?” Tommy asks to break the prolonged silence.
"Yeah. Moved here to the States before… everything.”
He nods, taking that much in. “And where were you living before I found you out here wanderin’ the woods all by yourself?”
“I’ve been around,” you begin, wincing slightly with your worsening ankle. “Once everything went to shit, I ended up in Pittsburgh QZ. Got out of there after the war broke out and moved from town to town for the last decade just trying to stay alive, but…”
Tommy turns, watching you, waiting to hear how that sentence ends with the kind of patience that makes it easy to keep talking.
“But?”
“But the inevitable always happens. Communities collapse. People die. You run. You find the next place and the same thing happens again until eventually it’s your turn to die.”
Tommy drops his gaze to the ground beneath him, keeping a steady hold of Old Beardy as you move further down the trail. You wonder if he is picturing Jackson meeting the same fate one day, or just processing what you’ve confessed and how it reveals more than you had intended it to.
After a moment, he clears his throat and brushes his forearm across his nose.
“Jackson ain’t like that,” he says assuredly. “We’re strong. I ain’t just talkin’ about our walls either. Our people are tough as nails. You’ll see for yourself.”
Silence falls over you for a brief moment, broken only by Old Beardy’s steady trot and the dry snap of frost under his hooves. The chill creeps beneath your collar, but there is a bliss in finally being off your feet and taking the pressure off of your lower back.
“So, do you just do patrols around here every day?” you ask.
“Me? No,” Tommy replies, shaking his head at the ground. “I don’t usually do patrols. I guess you could call me one of the community leaders. Me and my wife. I just like a change of scenery from time to time.”
“Huh…”
He shoots you a baffled look, his eyebrows pulling together with curiosity. “What?”
“Just seems… strange. You’re the leader of a town with a reputation for safety and you’re just out here without backup. You find a stranger, put me on your horse and just offer to take me back. No hesitation. No concern.”
He lets out a snort, a brief cloud of steam puffing from his nose. “Well, you’re not gonna hurt me, are ya?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Then why would I be concerned?”
You mull his oddly confident response over in your head once or twice until a glimpse ahead makes you let out a soft gasp. Through the break in the pines, you see the unmistakable walls of Jackson standing tall and imposing.
“I came looking for Jackson. That’s why I was out here.”
Tommy follows your gaze and smiles, pride evident in his voice. “Well, you found it.”
Realisation sets in that it’s not just a myth. You’re about to see it for yourself. You made it.
He accompanies you across the plains towards the town. As you get closer to the entrance gates, you finally take in the sheer scale of the reinforced wooden fortress. Built from scavenged logs and steel sheets, you understand what Tommy meant when he said Jackson is strong.
You notice signs of wear and tear from the elements, but they have all been masterfully patched to make the walls even sturdier— a true showcase of the skilled and resilient survivors inside. High above, you spot the armed guards watching closely as you both approach from their lookout towers.
“Open up!” Tommy bellows.
Both guards exchange a quick and unsure glance before one gives a sharp whistle to those stationed at ground level.
Slowly, the gates start to creak open. You watch with amazement as the town opens up and reveals itself to you. On the other side, you see lantern-lit streets with clustered storefronts, dogs weaving between running children and groups of onlookers peering back to see who is arriving.
“Somebody go get Maria!” Tommy shouts to the small but growing crowd.
“On it!” one man replies before jogging off down the street and out of sight.
All eyes are on you as hushed speculation moves around the townspeople trying to figure out who the battered, sick-looking stranger on Old Beardy is. You try to make out what is being said in the chorus of whispers to see if it matches the array of facial expressions staring back at you.
“Another stray?”
“Tommy just don’t know when to stop, does he?”
“Let’s give him a chance.”
“Wait ‘til you-know-who hears about this.”
You carefully dismount Old Beardy, landing unsteadily on your good foot and look around with growing anxiety as more people flock to the gates. News of a new arrival spreads fast, and it suddenly dawns on you how utterly alone you are. No allies. No story prepared. Just a wounded outsider standing before a town that has every reason to distrust you.
While the minutes tick by, Tommy steps aside to have a quiet word with the guards, and for a moment, you’re exposed — pinned beneath dozens of curious, suspicious stares. Then, the crowd begins to shift and part neatly down the centre, creating a narrow path for someone nearing with purpose.
The woman who approaches moves with an obvious authority. Her shoulders squared, spine straight and a presence that parts the crowd before she’s fully visible. Her eyes flick over you in a quick, practiced assessment before they soften at the sight of Tommy.
Relief sweeps across her face as she makes a beeline for him. He holds her close as they share a loving kiss, his arm trapping her low, practical braid against her fleece-lined jacket.
“Who’s this?” she asks once she pulls back, her gaze returning to you with cool precision.
“This here’s Joey,” Tommy answers. “Found him fightin’ off a clicker out in the woods just as I was finishin’ up my round. I took care of it. He’s lookin’ for someplace to stay.”
You watch them, unsure how to act. She then straightens further, almost imperceptibly, and her jaw tightens with tension.
“Has he been checked?”
“Yeah,” Tommy replies quietly, like he knew that question was coming. “I gave him a look over. It’s okay, Maria. He’s good.”
She doesn’t blink as she contemplates her next words with a calculating and cautious stare. Every second that passes twists the coil of unease in your gut a little tighter.
“Alright, if you say so. Bring him into holding. We’ll carry out the full NAP evaluation in the morning.”
Two guards step in without warning, each clamping down on an arm before you can even process what is happening. Pain shoots up your shoulder as they wrench you away from Tommy, Maria and the gathered townsfolk. Panic hits fast and is humiliatingly visible on your face. You twist back to face Tommy, breath stuttering and trying to make sense of the sudden hostility.
“It’s okay,” he calls after you, a hand raised in a futile attempt at reassurance. “Go with ‘em. I’ll come see you in the mornin’.”
You want to believe him, but are too frail and weak from hunger and exhaustion to resist anyway.
They march you deeper into town as the sound of the gates closing and murmurs fade into the distance behind you. The sun has begun setting on the horizon, draping Jackson in a peaceful darkness.
As you’re hauled along, dragging your injured ankle behind you, you notice what appears to be a bakery with faded pastel paint, a library with a cracked window, a bar still humming with voices, and even a hairdresser.
Although each building displays clear signs of rundown and time passed, this is the closest thing you’ve seen to a pre-outbreak world. It feels impossibly alive and like you’ve stepped through a doorway to the past.
They then steer you down a side street to the western edge of town. The buildings here look more unoccupied and unused. At the very end of the street, a single-story slab of weather-stained concrete stands on its own. Blank and uninviting, it’s like a cross between a prison, an animal shelter and an old garden shed.
One of the guards digs around his jacket for a ring of keys once you’ve reached the heavy wooden doors that look like they were designed to keep things in rather than out.
Your eyes roam over the barred, narrow windows and mismatched boards covering what must be deep cracks in the walls. Frozen vines climb up the exterior of the small building, solidifying your assumption that this place has been neglected for quite some time.
The lock eventually snaps open and the guards usher you into a dim, echoey reception area. The air smells of mildew, copper, and rot, and you can hear the steel roof overhead creaking ominously.
“Alright,” the taller guard says, nudging the door shut behind you. “You’re gonna be sleeping in here tonight. Hand over your things and empty your pockets.”
The other guard disappears down a long corridor, flicks some switches, and a second later, old fluorescent lights buzz to life weakly. As the room brightens, you see the rows of cramped holding pens lining the concrete walls. Once meant for animals, now for you.
“You’re taking my things?” you ask nervously, your hand slowly reaching to hold on to the straps of your backpack.
“It’s just temporary. Standard procedure. I’m sure Tommy will fill you in on it tomorrow.”
Reluctantly, you begin to empty your pockets, surrender your weapons, and slide your backpack off your shoulders. The guards quickly inspect your belongings before directing you to a pen near the end of the left corridor.
“Here. In here. The draught isn’t as bad in this one,” one of them says, guiding you into the pen that looks least likely to collapse.
A latch clicks and suddenly you’re standing in a literal dog kennel. In the corner lies a thin, damp mattress beneath an old duvet that looks like it has survived just as much as you have. And yet, as miserable as it seems, it still beats sleeping on the floor of an abandoned, rat-infested house with infected lurking around outside.
“Look what I found in the storage room. Forgot we had that in there,” the shorter guard says as he carries what appears to be a portable heater inside and places it next to your makeshift bed.
You barely notice, your mind numbly registering the small comfort while the cold seeps through your clothes. The guards click the lock into place, flick off the lights, remind you that Tommy will be by in the morning and then leave.
Darkness settles around you, broken only by the soft, red glow of the heater that hums incessantly. Above, the roof whistles and groans in a haunting, steady rhythm, jeopardising any chance you have at sleeping soundly on your first night in Jackson.
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'When I Die' by Lush
Word Count: 9k
Previously: Once Jeremiah convinced Joel to be more open about his feelings for Joey and Michelle encouraged Joey to apologise for calling him a coward, Joey made his way to Joel’s. They opened up and shared a kiss, which Tommy happened to see through the window.
Summary: Tommy confronts Joel about what he saw and he has a proposition that could spell the end for them before it has a chance to truly begin.
May 27, 2024
Tommy stands on Joel’s porch with his fist raised in the cold, but he hesitates. He’s thinking it over, talking himself through if it’s right to interrupt.
Inside, your fingers are still in Joel’s hair as he kisses you with a sustained, hungry focus that makes it seem like he’s making up for lost time. His hand has found the strip of skin above your waist and the warmth of his touch makes your knees turn to jelly. You lean into him without meaning to and his arm cinches tighter around you, pulling you in closer than you thought possible.
You can feel the thrum of his heartbeat through the layers of cotton where your chests meet. It’s like his own body is failing to hide what his mouth still struggles to say, how badly he wants this.
And when it ends, it ends slowly. Your foreheads are pressed together and you just breathe each other in. His arms keep you in place, letting you feel what it has done to him. Somehow, that’s the most intimate part of it all, knowing that he is as undone as you are.
The knock at the front door pulls you both out of that moment in a way that’s almost cruel.
You stare at the door and then each other. His jaw is already working and your heart is now hammering inside your sternum for a completely different reason than it was a second ago. Nobody knocks at this hour, not without a good reason at least.
Joel’s arm falls away and his body immediately rearranges itself, going rigid with panic in a way you’ve learned to recognise. Every loose, open thing about him is sealed back up in an instant and he creates a wedge of space between you. You’re both aware of the irony of it. The confession that neither of you wanted distance is still fresh in the air.
Joel drags a hand down his face and then through his hair. You smooth the front of your flannel down where his hand had pushed it up and try to will the heat and colour out of your cheeks. It all feels wrong, but it has to be done.
You watch him clear his throat, straighten up and cross the room to answer. For a fleeting second, you wonder if you were supposed to find somewhere to hide. But it’s too late. The door swings open.
“Tommy.” It’s not exactly a greeting. It’s more just a fact.
Tommy? The most inconvenient person in all of Jackson for it to be. Your stomach drops through you to the floor. It doesn’t matter why he’s here so late, he’s going to want to know why you’re here so late.
“Joel.” Tommy’s voice is flat in a way that you’ve never heard it. “Sorry. I know it’s late. Saw the lights on. Hope I’m not disturbin’ anythin’.”
The pause before Joel speaks up is maybe two seconds too long.
“Uhh— No,” he says, his voice coming out in a way that Tommy now has every reason to wonder what’s going on. He hesitates for a moment before realising his brother is still outside and he’s blocking the doorway. “Come on in.”
The first thing Tommy’s eyes do when he steps into the hallway is land directly on you in the middle of the living room, like he already knew you were there somehow.
“Joey.” The surprise in his voice sounds like it was placed there on purpose, and it’s not convincing at all. “Didn’t expect to find you out so late. ‘Specially not here. Thought you’d be in bed by now seein’ as you two have patrol in the mornin’.”
“Uh, yeah.” A couple of seconds pass of you just trying to find something to say. You jam your hands into your back pockets to seem casual. “I just dropped by to… thank Joel for helping with some leaky pipes at Jeremiah’s. They’ve been giving us a lot of trouble, but he… fixed them for us.”
Tommy receives that information with a slow and single nod. Then he looks across the room to his brother, who is standing far enough away from you that it draws attention. Joel just holds Tommy’s pointed gaze without adding anything more to it.
“Hm.” He shifts his weight, settling onto his other hip now. “Seems like Joel’s been helpin’ you out quite a bit lately.” He let’s that make its way around the room. “Good to hear."
You ears start to prickle. He knows. And you don’t know how.
“Yeah, well, I was actually just about to leave,” you say, already starting to move towards the door. “Like you said, we’ve got an early start tomorrow.”
“Hold up.” Tommy’s arm extends to make you stop mid-step. Not aggressive in any way, but enough to make your pulse spike. Joel’s shoulders go taut. “I’m actually glad you’re here. I need to have a word with you two.”
You look over at Joel. His jaw is locked solid now.
“I stopped by Jeremiah’s lookin’ for you,” Tommy continues, folding his arms now with a lopsided smile. “He said you were in Michelle’s. So I went to Michelle’s and she said you were probably here. Sounds like you’ve been gettin’ around today.”
“You know me,” you say nervously. “Always got somewhere to be. Off on my little adventures.”
“Apparently.” He lets that sink into the floorboards below then shifts gears. “Well, I’ve got a little adventure lined up for the two o’ you. I’m takin’ you both off patrols this week. I need you to ride out to Dubois instead for a supply run.”
“Dubois?” you repeat. “Where’s that?”
“About 60 miles east,” Tommy says. “Should take you around a day to get there and a day to get back, so you’ll need to camp out overnight somewhere.”
“And you’re droppin’ this on us last minute?” Joel asks, a twinge of restrained frustration in his voice.
“We got a list of essentials we need. It only got handed to me earlier today,” Tommy says, producing a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and holding it out. “We’ve cleared out most of the other towns nearby. This one’s our next best bet.”
Joel almost snatches it out of his hand and holds it back from his face to read, eyes squinted without his glasses and moving down the list. Medical supplies, stationary, tools, hardware… the miscellaneous things that hold the infrastructure of a settlement together and that the people can’t survive without.
Joel looks up at his brother then with an expression that communicates his thoughts without needing words. It’s a huge ask.
“Don’t worry,” Tommy says, pre-empting whatever Joel is about to say. “I’m givin’ you both the rest of the week and next week off patrols when you get back. Consider it a thank you from all of us. You’ll have earned it.”
“That’s not the point,” Joel says. “It could be dangerous. We don’t know what’s out that way.”
Tommy looks at you both. “Only one way to find out. And besides, you’ve got each other, and let me tell you somethin’, there’s nobody else on that roster I’d trust with a job like this. You two make one hell of a team.”
His gaze moves between the two of you at an agonisingly slow pace, like he’s watching for any change in your body language.
It’s hard to know whether that’s a compliment or a death sentence. Maybe Tommy himself isn’t sure if he’s being pragmatic or just banking on faith. Either way, the prospect of two days on the road with Joel, sleeping God knows where, after everything that has happened, feels complicated and overwhelming. The danger of what’s out there is almost the simplest part.
“So.” Tommy turns to you. “Whaddaya think? You up for it?”
You find Joel’s eyes across the room. There’s a whole conversation happening in that one look and none of it is about the task itself. A supply run is a supply run. You might make it back, you might not. It’s the journey there that is undetermined and how it could change things when things haven’t even been established. For now, all you know is that you can’t say no to Tommy. Not after everything.
You sigh eventually. “Yeah. I’m in.”
Tommy nods, but his expression is a new one for you. It’s not the broad, triumphant grin he usually wheels out when he’s managed to talk you into doing something for him. It’s smaller and more considered, like he knows what you were thinking about to reach that decision.
“Alright,” he sniffs, giving your shoulder a firm pat. “Get yourself home and rest up. Big day tomorrow.”
With a small inhale, you move towards the door, eager to escape the weight of the air. You feel Joel’s gaze on the back of your head as you leave. At the threshold, you glance back at him, just briefly, enough to let him know you’ll see him tomorrow and good luck with the next however many minutes he’s got stuck with his brother.
The door clicks shut and neither of them moves or speaks for a moment. The house returns to complete silence around them as if no one was home.
Tommy turns to face his brother then, who’s now staring at something between the floor and emptiness, like he’d rather look anywhere else but in front of him.
“So…” Tommy’s hands find his hips again as he measures the man he thought he know inside out across from him. “Joey. Huh.”
Joel’s eyes come up slowly, trying to not appear accused. “What about him?”
It isn’t really an accusation at all. They both know that. Joel feels the smallness of the space pressing in acutely, he’s once again being cornered in his own hallway like the night you confronted him about the kiss.
“I saw you, Joel,” Tommy reveals quietly. No performance or cushioning in it. “The two o’ you. Through the window.”
The blood drains from Joel’s face so quickly that it’s very visible and his expression changes to one that Tommy hasn’t seen since they were young boys. Pure and undisguised fright.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” His voice shakes at the end.
“Joel—”
“I don’t know what you think you saw—”
“Hey,” Tommy interjects. No volume or force to it, just enough to silence him. “Stop. You don’t have to do all that. Not with me.”
Joel goes mute. His eyes are glassy now at the corners, glistening with something he is clearly fighting to contain. Tommy can see all of it laid out across his face. The fear, the old reflexes, the shame of being seen as someone he spent decades refusing to acknowledge for the sake of those around him.
“It’s okay,” Tommy says with a quiet patience. “You’re still my big brother. Doesn’t change a damn thing.”
Joel’s lip has a slight tremor to it. He can’t speak nor can he move. He’s completely paralysed from hearing something he never thought he needed to hear, and Tommy starts to realise that. He’s watched this man survive things that would’ve broken the toughest people, and yet here, in his own home, he looks completely defeated by something Tommy didn’t even know about.
“How long has this been goin’ on for?” Tommy asks.
Joel’s eyes drop to the floor. “This month. It started… this month.”
Tommy continues to study him and the way he holds himself with that diminished posture. It can only mean this is something he’s been grappling with for quite some time.
“Does Ellie know?”
Joel’s eyes snap up. “No.” The word comes out faster than anything he’s said tonight. “And she can’t know. No one can know. Not yet. I haven’t even— We haven’t even—” He stops and composes himself. “It’s new. That’s all.”
Tommy nods slowly, turning his thoughts over. In the quiet that follows, Joel stands in it and doesn’t find any comfort.
“Promise me, Tommy,” Joel says, barely above a whisper. “Promise you won’t tell anybody.”
Tommy holds his stare for a long, drawn out moment. “You have my word. Secret’s safe with me. Like I said before. To the grave.”
Even with his word, Joel doesn’t look completely satisfied. His shoulders don’t drop. His expression doesn’t soften to calmness. He just stares back like he’s looking for cracks in it somewhere.
“I just want you to be happy,” Tommy says, plainly and without any unnecessary decoration. “After everythin’. I think you deserve that much at least.”
Tommy begins to move to the door then, placing his hand on the frame. He stops and turns back again.
“Out of everybody in this town,” he says with a small huff that sounds almost like a laugh. “I never would’ve thought it’d be Joey.”
Another pause. “You two take care of each other out there.”
Then he’s gone. The door closes with a gentle click, leaving Joel alone in the hallway with a silence that didn’t feel as heavy as the one that filled his home only an hour ago.
—
May 28, 2024
You’re both bundled up and on the road before the sun has fully risen the next morning. The heavy fog lingers low across the plains, clinging to the grass while the sky decides what colour it wants to be today.
Joel offered a quiet “mornin’” at the stables and not much else. It was blatantly obvious that the night was unkind to him. It came out through his voice and you’d recognised the sound of it immediately because you’d had the very same type of night.
The horses carry the extra supplies and ammunition dutifully but without any enthusiasm for it. It’s like they’re just as miffed about the early start and long journey ahead. Dusty’s stride has a sluggish quality to it, and you have no intention of pushing her too far today.
You wait until Jackson has shrunk far enough behind you before bringing up the one thing you’ve wanted to ask him all morning.
“How did it go last night? With Tommy.”
Joel keeps his eyes forward. “He knows. He saw us before he knocked. Through the window.”
The chill you feel from that has nothing to do with the temperature outside. You breathe out through your nose and stare out at the dense greyness. The cat wasn’t exactly out of the bag because it was never even in it in the first place. “What did he say?”
“Said it’s okay,” Joel says, his voice careful like he’s still not sure if he wants to believe it. “Said he just wants me to be happy.”
Objectively, that’s the ideal version of events. A part of you feels the warmth of it, but the other part of you reads Joel’s voice, the particular quietness in it, and realises that relief is noticeably absent.
“I made him promise not to tell anyone,” Joel adds. “Not until I’m ready.”
You look across at him. Dusty moves steadily beneath you, her breath coming out in small white puffs. “And? Do you think he’ll keep it?”
He meets your eyes briefly. “I don’t know. I know how it looks and I know I said I’m tryin’, but—”
“Joel.” You shake your head. “It’s okay. I get it. I mean, we haven’t even figured out what this is yet or what we’re doing. No one should know until we do.”
His eyes stay on you. His expression sits between gratitude and guilt. He’s living with the discomfort of knowing he’s being let off the hook when he shouldn’t be.
“Well,” he says, his voice still rough around the edges. “What do you think this is?”
Dusty flicks her ears, as if she wants to hear your answer as much as Joel does. Old Beardy snorts.
“No idea,” you reply honestly with a soft exhale. “But I don’t want it to stop.”
—
“We should set up somewhere around here,” Joel says, eyes moving through the branches overhead and noticing the light starting to fade. “It’s gettin’ dark.”
You’ve covered more ground than either of you expected. Less than half a day more and you’ll have reached Dubois — that is, assuming the road stays clear and the weather holds.
The trail bends off the main road into a clearing in the trees wide enough to work with. It’ll provide some cover and plenty of escape routes if needed. It’s perfect for what’s available.
Once the horses are fed and settled, the building ache in your lower back flares into something you can’t ignore any more. The camp comes together relatively easy. You have enough experience that the fire is going and the sleeping bags are out before the last of the light disappears entirely.
Joel drags a log closer to the fire and then lowers himself onto it. “I’ll take first watch.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he says softly, his back also starting to go stiff. “Get some rest. You’re a lot more tired than I am.”
You’re not entirely convinced that’s true seeing as he looks just as wrecked as you feel, but your eyelids are already heavy and making the decision for you.
You shake out your sleeping bag and before climbing in, you cross to him on your hands and knees and press a thankful kiss to his mouth, hoping that he’ll allow it. He comes into it without hesitation, his hand curling around the back of your neck and holding you there. His nose is cold where it brushes yours but everything else about him is warm, generous and careful.
When you finally pull back, you look at him closely, how his eyes track your lips and how you both carry this uncertainty about what the rest of the trip will bring. “I really hope we make it back,” you say softly.
“Course we will,” he replies, almost a whisper. “We got me.”
The tightness in your chest loosens a touch and you can’t help but smile and roll your eyes. “I always loved a man with confidence. Cockiness, on the other hand…”
A grin and low chuckle comes from him then, and you bank it just like the first time you witnessed it. These rare flashes of something other than hardness on him are like shooting stars, and you wish for another every single time.
He pulls you back in for one more, this time almost like he’s thanking you, before releasing you.
You burrow into your sleeping bad and lie there watching the fire through half-closed eyes. It isn’t exactly comfortable. The ground is uneven and the cold seeps through from below as well as above regardless of the layers. But you’ve slept in worse conditions for most of that month between Silver Lake and Jackson. Now you have Joel. Now you have purpose and a reason to get back. This should be manageable.
Despite the fire, the layers and whatever else, the temperature plummets further within half an hour. Your breath drifts up in pale, misty clouds and the shivering won’t stop no matter how tight you zip yourself up. It becomes so bad that it’s impossible for him to not notice.
“Hey.” Joel’s voice cuts the quiet. “C’mere.” He slides down off the log and settles his back against it, creating a space beside him.
You lift your head from your makeshift pillow and look at him before accepting the invite, manoeuvring yourself over and tucking in against his side with your head now against his chest. His arm comes around you and he starts to deliver long, steady strokes up and down yours until the shivering gradually starts to ease.
At last, you finally start to feel yourself drift. The fire crackles softly and his breath ghosts lightly against the crown of your head. His chest moves with a soothing rhythm beneath your ear, and out through the dark spaces between the trees, he keeps watch, giving you permission to rest.
—
Consciousness comes back gradually, and then all at once. You don’t know why, but you’re awake. The sky above the tree branches has shifted from ink black to a bruised blue. It’s not dawn yet, but it’s on it’s way.
Then you realise you’re back on the ground and not laid up against Joel.
You sit yourself up way too fast and your neck and shoulders punish you for it. The fire is still going, your belongings are all still scattered around, but Joel is no where to be seen.
The trees stare back at you like they’re hiding something. It suddenly feels darker and more exposed than it did. Your pulse starts to pick up a little under your skin.
“Joel?”
At first, nothing to answer you as you scan the dark shapes around you.
But then behind you, you hear the snap of a twig and the rustling of footsteps. You spin around as fast as your body will allow.
He comes through the tree line looking completely unaware and unbothered, stepping over a low branch like you haven’t just spent several unpleasant seconds fearing the worst.
“Jesus Christ… there you are,” you say, letting the air out of your chest slowly. “Where the fuck did you go?”
“Was just checkin’ on the horses,” he says simply, nodding back in their direction. “Everythin’s okay.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” you groan, tipping your head to the side and trying to work out the knot forming in your neck. “It’s nearly morning.”
He resettles on the log and picks up the stick he’d been using to tend to the fire. “You needed the rest. Didn’t wanna disturb you.”
“That’s not how this is supposed to work,” you say impatiently, watching him prod at the embers. “You need sleep as much as I do. Lie down and get a few hours at least. We’ll just leave a bit later than planned.”
“I’m alright. We should get movin’ soon’—”
“Joel…” you say firmly, not a suggestion and not open for debate. “I need to be able to rely on you as much as you need to be able to rely on me. Sleep. Now.”
He stares at you, the fire popping and casting shadows on his face that highlight the tired lines. It’s not a long standoff. He’s too exhausted to make it one, and somewhere under his stubbornness, he knows you’re right. He pushes himself back off the log with an aged grunt and mutters something under his breath.
You shuffle and kick off your sleeping back and hand it over to him. “Here. Get in mine. It’s still warm.”
He takes it from you and folds himself onto the ground, pulling your sleeping bag around him. He moves in close against your side naturally and without thinking. Within minutes, the tension goes out of him completely and the soft snores come soon after.
You sit with your back against the log and tend to the fire, watching the dark for any movement. Your shoulder becomes heavy and warm where his head rests against it, and you don’t mind at all.
—
A couple of hours have passed and you’re still fighting off the stiff aches as you sit on the frozen ground with your back to the log and his warmth at your side. Joel had been restless for a while, shifting and turning in his sleep until he eventually became still with his head now resting on your lap.
The woods have started to come to life around you as morning begins to break. Birds first and then the general murmur of insects and other creatures moving about in the undergrowth. It’s the only form of company and entertainment there is out here, so you welcome it.
As you take a swig of water from your flask, you start to feel the need to piss. Very, very carefully, you hold Joel’s head as you shift out from under him and place your backpack there for him to carry on sleeping. He doesn’t stir, so you get to your feet and stretch both arms overhead, your jaw cracking from a deep yawn.
You pick your way through the leafy litter below, stepping over branches and putting enough distance between you and the camp to find the most adequate tree. When you find one, you unzip and let the chilled air fill your lungs as you relieve yourself.
You’re zipping back up when the sound of movement somewhere out in the trees makes you freeze in place.
A shape, indistinct and dark, moves slowly behind a tree. Enough size and movement that it is definitely something or someone, but not enough light to reveal who or what. Your hand is already on your gun before you decide what to do next.
“Joel.” You call his name. Not loud, but just enough to carry back to where he sleeps. There’s no sound of movement or acknowledgement behind you. You look back. He’s on his left side, facing away. Out for the count still.
“Joel!” you whisper, sharper this time. But still nothing.
Another rustle from the trees. You turn back and start to move inward, stepping over twigs methodically with your eyes cutting left to right at gun level, scanning for anything. The silence around you starts to feel less like nothing and more like something waiting.
Slowly, you move around the tree where the sound was coming from.
A deer stands there, chomping on whatever it could find on the forest bed. It looks at you with large, untroubled eyes and the expression of a creature that was just minding its own business and searching for a suitable breakfast.
Your foot snaps a branch below unintentionally and the deer bolts in the other direction. It’s gone in four graceful bounds, it’s white tail disappearing into the dark like it was never there in the first place.
You stay where you are for a minute, leaning forward with your hands on your knees, letting the fear drain out of you through the soles of your boots.
—
May 29, 2024
Joel wakes up like old machinery coming to life and it’s kind of fascinating to watch. It’s slow and in stages. He makes noises that sound like they should belong to a grizzly bear and not a man. The sun has climbed well above the tree line and is now in proper late morning territory. He squints up at it, pressing his knuckles into his eyes to rub the sleepiness out of them.
“Morning,” you say gently while leaning over to pluck a small twig out from his hair.
“Mornin’,” he says back. His voice is thick with sleep and has the texture of gravel. “How was it? Everythin’ alright?”
“Yeah,” you sigh, your gaze drifting back out to the trees. “Thought I heard something or someone moving around over there while I was peeing. Turned out it was just a deer.”
He lets out a long and thorough yawn before scrubbing a hand across his jaw.
“I tried to call you when I heard it but you didn’t hear,” you mention. “You must be a heavy sleeper.”
“I’m not,” he says. “Just deaf in my right ear. Must’ve been sleepin’ on my bad side.”
You give a small noise of acknowledgement. “Born that way, or…?”
“No,” he shakes his head, looking at you now. “Gunshots.”
Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t need any further elaboration. You nod your head slowly and start to piece it all together. The way he keeps you on his left, the way he angles himself on patrols, always leads with his left side… A small, involuntary smile forms on your mouth before you can stop it. Every new part of him he lets you see just makes you want to see more.
He’s up and moving around the camp, repacking everything with a systematic efficiency like he's done this a million times. At one point, he walks over to you with his hand in his backpack and then pulls out an apple and hands it to you.
“Brought some coffee too. Want some?” he asks.
You look at him, your ears immediately perked up like a trained puppy. “You have coffee?” You knew you could smell it on him and it in his kitchen.
“Yeah,” he says with a little self-satisfied smirk. “Not much, but I figured we might need it. You like coffee?”
That alone gives you a boner.
“Coffee is one of my favourite things in the world,” you say. “I can’t remember the last time I had it and I can’t believe you’ve had some this entire time and still managed to be such a grouchy dick.”
He takes out his portable cafetière with a smirk and starts to prepare it like it’s some sort of ritual with a viewing audience. He knows he’s got you now. It’s just another thing to win you over with.
You down the rest of your water like it’s useless and then hand him your flask. When he gives it back, you hold it in your hands, lift it to your nose and just inhale the bitter, smoky aroma steaming out of it. You go very quiet. You’re trying to fight off the urge to rush into it.
He watches you from the fire, quietly amused at how you savour and cherish it. He can’t help but smile like a fool.
The first sip is an event. Something in the core of your being just softens. Your senses sharpen and ease all at once. It tastes like life in New York before all of this. It tastes like Sunday mornings in Ireland waking up hungover with your friends. It tastes like Leo’s apartment when you’d sit with Bobo and stare out at the city.
You stand up, walk straight over to him and grab the back of his head to pull him into a kiss. It catches him slightly off-guard and is firm enough that he has to find his footing. He’s not awake enough yet for it.
“You have never,” you say, planting more kisses between each word, “been sexier than in this exact moment.”
He stares at you for a long moment, but then the confusion dissolves into a boyish, helpless smile. His cheeks turn a few shades warmer, mostly because he can’t remember the last time he was on the receiving end of a compliment like that.
—
By late afternoon, Dubois materialises through the windbreak of trees exactly the way you had hoped: deserted and frozen in time. It doesn’t make it any less unsettling however. Silence in the woods is natural. This is anything but.
Main Street is a strip of faded storefronts that tell the story of what happened here. A boutique with the windows smashed in. A diner where the chairs are still pulled out from the tables and dishes abandoned, like everyone simultaneously stood up mid-meal and ran. Rusted cars scattered everywhere and facing in random directions.
Two decades of weather and opportunists have had their way with the place. Mother Nature has reclaimed the street in the most unapologetic way, leaving nothing but dust laid thick on every surface. You just hope there’s enough left behind to have made this trek worth it.
Thankfully, there was. The two of you made it through most of the list without wasting much time. With everything close by, it doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d dreaded to collect what you can. Antibiotics, bandages, stationery, nails and hardware, lighter fluid, salt, batteries, toiletries, sewing supplies… Not everything Tommy asked for, but there’s no way in hell he’ll be anything less than thrilled with this.
The sky has started to transform by the end of it. Shadows pull long across the streets and orange seeps into the blue overhead. Even the temperature has peaked and now starting its swift descent. It’s time to get the horses and find somewhere to set up camp again before you’re doing it in the dark.
You’re almost at the edge of town where Dusty and Old Beardy wait when something stops you.
A single-story concrete block building, painted maroon but now peeled from itself in long, dry strips. Above the tinted window, you read the sign, The Pleasure Chest, in what was had clearly once been pink neon, but now is just dark, dead glass tubing. Below the sign, in smaller print, it reads Adult Novelties + Lingerie — Must be 18+ to enter. A sun-bleached poster spitefully clings to the door, so faded that the image is barely recognisable, but the word “SALE” is still visible in red and white letters.
A chuckle bubbles up before you can stop it.
“Hey, Joel.” You tilt your head towards it. “Look.”
He follows your eyeline and you watch the change in his expression. That focused surveillance morphs in real time into something that can only be described as confusion and deep mortification.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
You’re already veering towards the entrance. “Come on.”
“We don’t have time for this, Joey,” he says, already irritated. “We gotta leave and find somewhere to camp before nightfall.”
“Just a few minutes,” you reply with an unhideable smirk that you can’t control. “It’s a bit of fun after a long day. What’s the worst that could happen?”
He exhales through his nose and his face flattens into a look that communicates several things at once, and none of them enthusiasm. With a heavy resignation knowing he has already lost, he follows after you.
Your boots crunch over broken glass and gravel as you approach the heavy metal door which has miraculously been left wedged open. The hinges announce your arrival with a loud, arthritic groan. A small bell above the door offers the most pathetic little jingle you’ve ever heard.
Once you’re inside, you just stop and wait, listening out for any movement or disturbance. All you find is the smell of stale dust, old latex and a trace of vanilla from an out of date air freshener that has somehow lingered and survived. No spores, so no need for a mask.
Joel comes in behind you. You don’t need to look at him to know what his face looks like right now. His discomfort is a third presence in the room. It radiates off of him without meaning to. There’s no doubt that he would find a room full of infected less daunting and confronting than this.
The tinted windows soften the remaining daylight to a dim, amber-tinged murk. Shelves run the lengths of both walls, still stocked with a surprising density. Places like this clearly were not the top of anyone’s priority list when looting began. Glass cabinets hold their contents undisturbed and there’s a large pegboard behind the checkout counter displaying a curation of items positioned for quick, discreet transaction.
“Jesus Christ,” Joel murmurs. He’s stationed himself by the entrance with a precise posture that communicates that has already seen enough.
You’re moving deeper into the store with escalating amusement at the variety of different products.
The lingerie rack is a carnival of colour that has somehow held onto its vibrancy. Just past it, the shelves of vibrators range from simple and straightforward to theatrical and downright hilarious.
What grabs your attention most is the wall of DVDs. You skim the titles and start reading them out for Joel’s consideration as he starts to walk further in to the store to join you.
“Wet and Wild Wyoming… Rocky Mountain Riders…”
His expression goes through several interesting stages of disgust and incredulousness.
“Everything’s Bigger in Texas…” You hold it up to him and pop your eyebrow suggestively, watching him trying to conceal the blush forming on his cheeks and scratching the back of his head like he wants the ground to swallow him up.
“I take it you weren’t into this sort of stuff back in the day?” you say.
“Definitely not,” he replies, now staring at a mannequin in the corner wearing a leather ensemble and a ball gag. “I was always more of a magazine kinda guy.”
Something about that is incredibly hot for some reason. It’s old school.
Then you see another DVD title you can’t help but read out. “Get a Load of This Guy!”
That’s the one that breaks the two of you. He bursts out in a hearty chuckle where his eyes disappear and his hands are on his knees. It’s chesty and unrestrained. A laugh you’ve never heard from him before. You’re both swiping tears out of your eyes and holding on to each other trying to catch your breath after a minute. You haven’t laughed this hard in over twenty years.
It takes a while, but eventually you’ve regained composure and have fought off the last of the giddiness. You slot the DVDs back into their places in alphabetical order, as if it even matters.
You start to move again and push through a curtain at the back into another room. Joel follows along. Partially out of instinct and partially because he doesn’t want to be left alone with the mannequin standing in the corner.
As you step into the next room, you’re immediately greeted by something that makes your jaw drop to the floor.
A wall of dildos in every imaginable size and colour. At the base, freestanding with a presence an inanimate object shouldn’t have, is a comically large purple one. It has the dimensions of a traffic cone. Waist height. Probably taller. And a girth that makes you question how it would even be humanly possible.
You walk right over and pick it up with both arms, holding it like it’s a rescued animal. It’s way heavier than it has any right or need to be.
“The fucking size of this bad boy!” you say, mostly to yourself. “I think I’d have better chances of surviving against a bloater.”
Joel’s eyes go wide at the sight of it. He turns away, his hands planted on his hips and mutters something to himself like he needs a moment to process it. When he turns back, he’s shaking his head and chuckling. He has decided you’re completely beyond him and he can’t believe he’s stuck with you.
He approaches and nudges his shoulder into yours. “I thought you would’ve liked ‘em kinda big.”
You snort as you ease the beast of a thing back onto the floor. “Definitely not.”
“Well, you sure seemed fine with mine.”
You turn and give him the theatrical eye roll that that comment deserves. “What was it I said about cockiness?”
The smirk on his face only widens as he pulls you into him, both hands framing your face now as he kisses you with a thoroughness that makes you forget where you are. Your hands find the lapels of his jacket and then work their way up to his collar and then shoulders. He flicks your face to the side with his nose and starts on your jaw, all the way down your neck, and suddenly your brain vacates entirely. All you know that exists is the press of his lips, the graze of his facial hair and his arms keeping you upright.
When he draws back to look at you, you’re not fully assembled anymore. Your eyes have gone soft and heavy and your neck has gone splotchy and red from the rush of it. He studies you closely in a way that almost makes you feel exposed and self-conscious, like he’s mesmerising every detail because he wants to.
“I’m gonna make this work,” he says then, his voice barely audible. “I mean that.”
You hold his gaze without saying anything, just licking your lips and breathing out through your nose. You know what it took for him to say those words out loud. It feels like more than words because there’s a commitment behind them. He’s choosing to promise rather than retreat again.
You reach up and kiss him again. Once, then twice. Tender and with no urgency. It’s just your way of saying I hope so without having to actually say it.
You drift past him eventually, leaving him where he’s stood to give the shop one last sweep before something else snags your attention — rows of bottles of lube. Every kind and flavour you can think of, and even ones you’d never heard of before.
Joel’s attention stays stuck on the library of dildos for another minute. When he turns back to look for you, you’ve already shrugged your backpack off your shoulders and are cramming lube into whatever space you have left.
He watches with complete puzzlement.
“How much of that stuff do you think we’re gonna be usin’?” Joel asks, his brows pinched.
You glance back at him over your shoulder and offer a loose shrug. “Better to have plenty. Saves us having to come back anytime soon. This town gives me the creeps.”
He lets out a breath that turns into a crooked smile and drags a hand along the back of his neck. The kind of future planning that it hints at isn’t lost on him, even if you don’t say it outright.
“Alright,” he mutters. “I think we’ve seen enough. We really need to get movin’.”
You’re already making your way back to the front of the store with your backpack hauled over your shoulder. It’s heavier now and thudding lightly against your spine with every step.
Joel gets there ahead of you, yanking the door open and stepping clear to let you pass.
“Always the gentleman,” you murmur as you walk by, catching the softness in his features before it fades.
The doorframe barely clears your shoulder when a gunshot cracks through the air, slamming into the plaster beside your head, spitting chunks and stinging your cheek. Joel’s hand is on you just as fast, dragging you down low and hauling you to the rusted shell of a car parked out front.
Another bullet tears through the shop window. Glass bursts inward, scattering across the floor in a glittering spray.
“Stay down,” Joel shouts, already reaching for his rifle. “They’re on the roof. Down the street.”
You press yourself against the car, ears ringing and pulse hammering so loud that it drowns out everything else around you. When you look over, Joel’s already positioning and waiting. Then, he rises and fires.
The shot lands clean. A head snaps back somewhere out of your sight.
The silence that follows is anything but calm. Your breath is dragging out in rough pulls and your eyes squeeze shut as it all hits you. You were an inch from death.
“Wait here, don’t move,” Joel says. “I’m gonna make sure it’s clear.”
He’s already moving off when you push yourself up after him, still trying to centre your senses. “Joel, wait—”
An arm hooks tight around your throat from behind before you get another word out. The grip pulls you back, crushing your windpipe. The metal of a gun jams into your temple.
Joel spins back around, rifle already up and eyes blown wide.
“Drop it or I’ll blow his fucking head off!” an unknown man snarls against your ear.
Joel doesn’t move or blink. He just stares.
“Joel—” you manage, your voice strangled on its way out.
“Shut the fuck up!” The gun presses harder and so does the chokehold. Your breath starts to give out.
Joel’s gaze holds yours. There’s a calculation happening there, but then he looks past you and over the attacker’s shoulder. Something takes his attention.
“Okay,” Joel says. “I’m droppin’ it.”
He lowers his rifle to the ground and raises his hands slowly.
There’s a scrape of movement on metal behind you. The man twitches and turns at the sound.
A stalker, perched on top of the car, preparing to pounce.
It lunges at him before he has a chance to react, knocking him off of you. You’re on the ground and crawling away as it angrily pummels him with its arms, clawing at his face with that high, inhuman screech.
Instinctively, you snatch his gun from where he dropped it and bolt, legs moving before your head has even processed what happened. You just sprint for Joel.
Joel has already picked his rifle back up and takes a few steps forward and delivers one shot. The stalker’s head bursts and it’s body collapses in a heap beside the attcker.
The man barely gets a knee under himself before Joel’s boot brutally slams into his stomach, hard enough to fold him in half and send him crashing back down to the concrete. The air leaves him in a broken gasp and the dull crack could be a broken rib.
You approach, gun trained cautiously on him. He’s in all black with a hood and face-cover now torn away from where the stalker got at him. Long, mousey blonde hair clings damply to his head and his large nose juts out from his face which has now been raked with deep, angry scratches.
“You motherfuckers killed my friend!” he spits through brown teeth, clutching his sternum.
“Quiet,” Joel orders. “Who are you?”
“I’m not telling you shit!”
Joel doesn’t flinch a bit. “Tell me or you’ll be joinin’ him.”
Then you notice something dark and red spreading through the sleeve at his arm and is now pooling in the gravel below. “Joel…”
He sees it too and gives you a short nod to go and take a look.
You crouch next to him, keeping the gun steady as you grab his sleeve and shove it up. The fabric is stuck there for a second, wet with blood.
There it is. A fresh, already swelling bite high on his forearm and seeping. But it’s what you notice just below the bite mark that is more concerning. Branded and burned into his skin, a single letter. D.
You glance back at Joel. He looks back at you.
“What’s it mean?” Joel asks.
“Dicksuckers! Like the two of you!” The man lets out a ragged laugh and then hurls spit in Joel’s direction.
Joel loses his patience. “Hold him down.”
You look at Joel and then back at the man, but then follow the order. Once you’ve pressed him into the ground, Joel steps over and drives his boot straight into the bite wound, pinning the arm in place with his weight. The man howls in pain, his body trying to thrash around.
“Talk.”
He still refuses.
Joel shifts then and brings his heel down on the man’s hand several times, snapping and crunching his fingers as he goes.
The bloodcurdling screams rip out of him and cut straight into you. You’ve seen worse and have done some pretty awful things yourself to survive, but something about it gets to you.
“Okay! Okay! Fuck! I’ll talk!” he chokes.
Joel stops, but he keeps his boot on the man’s now mangled hand.
“It’s… It’s the mark of The Disciples.”
“Who are they? What do they want?” Joel presses.
The man’s breath stutters over itself. “I… I can’t say. He’ll kill us. All of us.”
Joel leans in, his voice dark and threatening. “There ain’t a damn thing he can do worse than what I’ll do to you. Who’s he?”
The man shakes his head with his lips clamped tight like he can hold it in if he just seals them hard enough. Joel adds pressure and grinds his boot back on his arm and then onto his broken fingers.
Another scream rips out of him
“David!” he shouts. “It’s David!”
You meet Joel’s eyes, exchanging words through the stare alone. Surely he doesn’t mean…
“David who?” you ask now.
The man looks up at you then, his mouth curving into something that is supposed to resemble a smile. “Oh… you know exactly who I’m talking about. I heard you know him very well. Our leader. Our saviour. Our shepherd. And we are his sheep.”
“What are you talking about? David’s dead!” you reply, your voices raised now.
He starts to laugh even more maniacally now, shaking his head in a frantic, disturbing way. “No… no, he’s not dead. He can’t die. He’s still with us… He’s here to save us. He—” He pulls in a breath and grins through gritted teeth. “He has never been more alive.”
It doesn’t make any sense. It’s simply not possible. You saw how Ellie left him in Todd’s Steakhouse before it burned to the ground. His face was minced into something unrecognisable, but it was him. There’s no version of events where he walked away that day and lived to tell the tale.
Joel doesn’t want to entertain it. “Where is he? Where can we find him?”
Before he can answer, a sound silences the three of you and sends a chilling tingle down your spine.
Unmistakable, angry clicks.
You look up and see shapes moving in your direction from the far end of the street in distorted, sickening motions. There’s at least ten of them. More than you and Joel could handle alone. They’ve been drawn out and unearthed by the commotion, emerging from whatever holes and shadowy hiding places they’ve been laying dormant in, and now they want blood.
“Come on, let’s go,” Joel says, grabbing your arm with a renewed urgency.
You pull back. “Wait, we can’t just leave him! He might be able to tell us m—”
“Joey, we gotta move. Now!”
Joel’s grip tightens around your arm and he starts to drag you away with him.
The man desperately tries to scramble and get himself standing, but Joel turns back quick enough to fire one more shot. The bullet blows through the man’s knee, tearing it apart and dropping him to the ground again.
The sound he makes causes you to flinch. He clutches at what’s left of his leg as the clicking gets closer and hungrier.
Joel pulls you along and you follow because there’s no other choice.
You don’t turn back to watch them fall onto him and start feasting. Not only because you can’t bring yourself to do it, but because you hear every grizzly detail as his guzzling screams fade into the distance behind you.
—
It’s well into the night by the time you find an old farmhouse sitting alone on the roadside long forgotten. You both check it room by room before settling in one of the bedrooms upstairs. The place is cold with dampness creeping through the foundation. Every inch of it has been softened by years of rot, but it’s four walls with a roof, so it’ll do for tonight.
The two of you move quietly through the dark together, dragging a cabinet and positioning it across the bedroom door and wedging it in place. It’s enough to allow you to let your guards down while you sleep. The mattress gets hauled off the bedframe and dumped onto the floor and you roll out your sleeping bags side by side and climb in.
You lie facing away from him and he notices the distance instantly. He felt a change in you since the ambush. He lies there for a while, watching the back of your head, like he’s trying to read what’s going on in there. Eventually, he gives in and breaks the silence.
“You okay?” he asks quietly in the dark.
“Yeah,” you whisper back. “I’m just… tired.”
He thinks about what to say next before speaking. “We did what we had to do.”
“I know,” you say. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
His mouth goes a little dry when he takes a quiet but deep inhale. The events of the day have rattled you more than he expected them to.
“I just wanted to keep you safe.”
His words should comfort you, and to an extent they do, but you’ve now seen what that looks like when it plays out, and it’s as unsettling as it is comforting. Maybe you just never believed that someone would ever want to do something like that for you.
Carnage and brutality have become the norm in 2024, but Jackson has made you remember that they didn’t used to be. Not to this extent, at least. Places like Jackson keep the old world alive and not just in people’s memories. It gives them real tangible purpose and a chance to reclaim what we all lost.
Maybe you’ll just have to learn to accept it, because you know you would do the same for him if given the opportunity.
“I know. I just can’t stop thinking about what he said,” you say into the dark. “About David.”
“David’s gone,” Joel answers softly, his breath flicking against your skin. “You saw what Ellie did to him. That guy was just a nut.”
The mattress sighs underneath you as you turn onto your back, your eyes tracing shapes on the ceiling now. “But how can we know for sure?”
“Because we do.” His voice is quiet but final, enough to stop before the spiral takes a hold of you. “I’m not gonna let anyone hurt you or Ellie. Get some rest.”
You exhale the thought and let the tension fall away, or try to at least. You turn onto your side again and curl up more, facing the wall on the other side of the room.
He reaches for you across the mattress, snaking his arm around your waist and pulling you back into him. His breath warms the back of your neck and his lips press gentle, absent-minded kisses behind your ear.
The room remains as cold and as damp as it was when you found it, but it doesn’t reach you the same way now that you’re in his arms.
AN: I really loved writing this one and it was one of the chapters that took the longest to finish. This one sets up how the next act will play out from chapter 30 onward, so I hope you're as excited as I am! 🤩
I hope you're ready for buckets of Joely cuteness... 🫠
Also I love Tommy so much and if you ever doubted that he would react any way other than how he did, we need to talk because... that man loves his brother AND he loves his future brother-in-law 🙂↕️
Chapter artwork by @yommmmss on Twitter/@yomsieslomsies on IG
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'Ain't No Grave' by Johnny Cash
Word Count: 9k
Previously: Joel and Joey spent the afternoon together, culminating in a cozy nap on the couch. When Ellie returned home from school, she immediately sensed a suspicious shift in their behaviour. She invited Joey back the next day for a guitar lesson, using a lull in their practice to directly probe the nature of his relationship with Joel. Joey deflected, though it was obvious she already knew the truth. Joel confronted Joey about it, and Joey urged him to be honest with her. To his surprise, Joel agreed. That evening over dinner, with Joey by his side, Joel finally confessed. Ellie took the news well, leaving Joel suspended between a strange, lingering confusion and profound relief.
Summary: Just as a sense of peace finally starts to settle over Jackson, shattering news fractures the community, placing Joey in a perilous, life-threatening position.
June 9, 2024
“We’re callin’ for an emergency meeting in the town hall tonight,” Tommy says.
A knock came in the middle of dinner preparations, disrupting what was a quiet, late afternoon. When you opened Jeremiah’s front door and saw how Tommy and Joel were standing, Joel half-turned away and Tommy with tension trapped in his jaw, you immediately knew something was wrong. People don’t look like this when they have good news.
“8pm.”
The tea towel in your hand suddenly feels stupid to be holding. “What’s happened?”
“Stevie and Gerry. They haven’t come back from patrol.”
A cold wave runs through you and your eyes find Joel’s. He’s already drawn the same conclusion you’re drawing. Another ambush. Neither of you need to say it aloud.
By the time 8pm approaches, you’ve managed to get Jeremiah into his wheelchair and made your way to the hall with him. The atmosphere in the settlement is almost unrecognisable compared to how it was the last time this kind of meeting was called for. Last time, there was a fragile quality to the gathering. The disbelief was what defined that day. But not this time. People are moving through the streets with a restless energy radiating off them. It’s pre-grief fused with something almost combustible.
Gerry you only really knew at a surface level. A handful of pleasant exchanges over the months you’ve lived here, but then the broken arm in March took him off the roster before anything between you could develop further.
Stevie was a different matter. Any shift that you weren’t paired with Joel, you were almost always paired with him, and in the accumulated hours you shared doing the route together, you’d grown quite fond of him. The more experienced of the two veterans, he was always dependable and kind, especially in your early days of patrolling when you were still learning the ropes and making stupid mistakes rookies make. You’d always thought he was just built for survival, and that even in this world with it’s ruthless cruelty, he’d always be a stubbornly permanent fixture in all of this.
Once you’re inside the building, you find Joel waiting just past the doors. He takes Jeremiah from you and wheels him off to join the other council members assembling on the platform. The council cluster together doing a rather terrible job at looking composed. They huddle together in a collective bracing of what’s coming.
Joel moves the way he always does, contained and looking at nothing too long. You’ve spent enough time studying him though to catch what he’s not giving away to others. He’s just as worried as Tommy, he’s just far better at hiding it.
Tommy and Maria stand near the centre of the platform, paler than you’ve ever seen them. Maria’s pregnancy has advanced visibly in recent weeks and she seems much more exposed now. Tommy stands by her looking like he’s made of old concrete, just grey and bloodless. It’s all round unsettling seeing them this way, particularly when it’s so public.
Michelle and Arron were easy enough to spot across the room tucked against the far wall. Arron’s arm rests across Michelle’s shoulder as she chews distractedly at the skin on her thumb, not really reading the room as much as she’s absorbing it. The hall is just an assault of dozens of conversations happening simultaneously, running along the same anxious frequencies.
“I don’t know why,” Michelle says. “But I just had a feeling something was going to happen. Things were too good for too long.”
“Well, let’s be honest, after what happened in Dubois,” Arron says, tipping his head in your direction, “we should’ve anticipated something was gonna happen. This feels like payback.”
Word had spread not long after the council were informed about what happened on the supply run. The information became distorted, picked apart and reassembled as it moved through the community though. Enough people had drawn their own conclusions to produce a narrative that you were at the centre of this in one way or another. It reignited people’s suspicions that you were either some sort of mole or someone was hunting you down for some reason.
You’d managed to stop it from getting to you for the most part, but every so often you’d catch someone staring at you for a second too long and it all would come flooding back. The hearings, the voting… It was even starting to make you question if Joel suspected something still even though he was there when you were ambushed. Memories of his accusations have been replaying in your head, chipping away at your comfort.
“So, what? You’re saying this is Joel and Joey’s fault?” Michelle replies sharply.
“No, no—, I didn’t mean it like that.” Arron has the decency to look pained by how poorly that landed. “It’s just— think about it. Two of theirs died. It makes sense they’d retaliate. That’s all.”
“They killed Kai and Archie first,” Michelle reminds him.
“Because they think someone here killed David,” you add vacantly.
“Still doesn’t make it your fault, Joey,” she says. “These are sick people. What happened to David needed to happen. Nothing after that did.”
But guilt doesn’t care for logic and it has a way of persisting through any sort of reasoning. It already reintroduced itself to you like an old friend when Tommy broke the news on Jeremiah’s doorstep. More bloodshed. More innocent people dead. And all of it circles back, by some account, to you.
You’re feeling a little claustrophobic and considering slipping outside to regather yourself when Tommy steps forward. Conversations cut throughout the room without needing to be asked for.
“Alright everyone,” he says. His voice already has a slight shake to it. It’s abundantly clear there was no rehearsal for this because there’s no way to rehearse for something like this. “I wanna thank you for comin’ out tonight. I know it was short notice… but this is important.”
Arms fold and chins lift across the room. Everyone collectively postured like they’re squaring for impact.
“I’m just gonna get right into it. As some of you may already know, Stevie and Gerry headed out on patrol this mornin’ and… uhh… they haven’t come back yet.”
He struggles to find anywhere to place his eyes. Across the room, Joel’s find yours. There’s no particular expression in his face, but you’ve become fluent in reading what’s hidden beneath each one, and what’s underneath right now is confirmation of everything you’ve already assumed.
“Obviously, given what happened before, I can understand if you’re worried. Scared… Even angry.” Tommy’s hands land on his sides. “Just know that we’re all feeling the same right now. And we need to remain strong.”
Then the dam breaks the way it does in these gatherings. The crowd splits into an overlapping wall of voices, fury and fear running together until they’re indistinguishable and unrelenting. The sound raises the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck.
Joel takes a step forward then, positioning himself closer to his younger brother, instinctively anticipating that this could go south very quickly.
“EVERYONE QUIET!” Joel bellows. The volume is almost physical. The bass of it hits you in your sternum like a pressure wave. The loudest voices drop first and the rest follow until there’s only a few stray murmurs left.
Tommy glances sideways at Joel briefly before bracing himself and stepping forward again.
“I know what y’all are thinkin’, but I don’t think I need to remind anyone here that Stevie and Gerry are two of the most experienced men that we’ve got. If anyone knows how to get out of a bad situation, it’s them.”
“For crying out loud, Tommy! They’re dead and you fucking know it!” The voice comes from somewhere at the back and a tidal wave of protests heads straight for Tommy again. This time, his voice cracks across the room before the noise can fully build.
“HEY!”
It doesn’t exactly have the bite of Joel’s, but it works. The hall pulls back into a simmering, almost dangerous quiet. Things could still go either way.
“We don’t know anythin’ right now. What I do know is if this is the same crowd that took Kai and Archie from us, I won’t rest until every last one of them is taken out. And that’s a promise.”
The silence that follows is total, but not peaceful. The fury hasn’t gone anywhere, but it feels like people’s faith in Jackson’s leadership is starting to dwindle.
“We follow protocol. They have ’til sunrise to make it back on their own.” Tommy looks out across all the faces, meeting them with what he has.
“If they don’t, we send out a search party at first light.”
—
June 10, 2024
With no sign of Stevie and Gerry by sunrise, the search party rode out into the wilderness. The sky was painted the colour of watered-down salmon at that hour and groups of Jackson’s residents gathered in groups at the gates to wait for their return.
You keep close to Joel and Tommy, not saying much but listening to the low conversations around you and the occasional creak of the watchtower above. Everyone appears to be in a state of pre-grief, suspended with the knowledge of what’s coming but still needing confirmation.
As the hours pass, morning becomes a mild afternoon and the stares start coming more frequently. Not everyone stares, most people are too absorbed in their own internal dread, but enough that it makes you feel increasingly uneasy. The more you catch, the smaller the space feels. Joel notices too, and he reacts by standing a little closer, putting his body between yours and whoever’s looking.
At last, one of the guards in the watchtower raises an arm and the crowd immediately snap themselves upright. Shoulders press together and hands grasp each other in sickening anticipation. The gates start their slow, grinding separation and everyone tips forward slightly as the gap widens.
All six men that were sent out come through on horseback, expressions empty, much to everyone’s relief. But the relief dies as soon as the blood-drenched woven sacks strapped to the back of two of the horses come into view though. The same type of sacks that brought Kai and Archie home.
From every direction, you hear half-swallowed gasps and uncontainable cries. Your hands move to your face without decision and something enormous and immovable lodges itself in your throat.
Beside you, Tommy turns away in hopeless defeat. Like everyone else, he knew deep down this was going to be the outcome, but it doesn’t make the reality any easier. His head bows and he hisses something blunt into the air. Joel says nothing, but the way his jaw tightens says enough.
The riders begin to dismount and carry out the grim, terrible business of bringing the dead back home.
Without warning and before your body could interpret it, something collides with you, handfuls of your collar bunched in fists and your back meeting the wall of the building next to you with a blunt, breathtaking force.
When your vision catches up, one of the two men who run The Tipsy Bison, Ronnie, is two inches away from your face. Old, scarred and bald, his eyes are red-rimmed and swimming with tears of fury and his teeth are bared in a way that genuinely strikes fear in you.
“This is all your fucking fault!” His voice cracks into a shriek. “That’s my friend! My friend is fucking dead because of you!”
Just as fast as he was on you, Joel rips him off and deposits him hard onto the ground a few feet back. He lands in a graceless heap in the dirt and sits there stunned for a second.
“Keep your fucking hands off him,” Joel says, his voice scarily quiet but cold.
Ronnie gets back to his feet and comes forward again, but is caught by a handful of bystanders. Whether it’s out of concern for you or because they know better than to let him challenge Joel, you can’t say. They speak to him in hushed, urgent voices, hands on his shoulders and trying to walk him back from whatever edge he was about to leap off. It takes a minute, but eventually he loses fight and the grief brings him to his knees.
Joel turns back to you.
“You okay?”
You’re still a bit winded from the impact, but his voice, low enough that only you can hear it, is exactly what you need. It pulls you back into your body and makes you feel somewhat solid and balanced again.
“Yeah,” you reply with a thin breath. “I’m fine — I think.”
He holds your gaze for a moment, not fully persuaded or satisfied, before glancing around at the crowd who are still churning with that same restless and unpredictable energy.
“You and Tommy should get inside, away from everyone,” Joel says. “Head back to Maria until everything calms down.” He practically ushers you in the other direction. “I’ll follow in a bit.”
—
For a second day in a row, a meeting was called for 8pm in the hall. What had been reported back to Tommy that afternoon made the first occasion feel, in some distorted way, pleasant in comparison. You were there when the search party’s account was delivered to him.
Stevie was found hanging from a tree, inverted and slashed open with his internal organs left to dangle freely. Gerry had been found tied to the foot of the same tree with both of his eyes removed. Inside Gerry’s mouth, another note. This time, it read “An eye for an eye.”
The man delivering the report had the image burned into the back of his eyes and was still actively reliving the discovery. That same image had now planted itself in your mind with no intention of leaving any time soon.
It explains the look the returning search party had on their faces as they came back through the gates earlier. The blankness wasn’t exhaustion or anything remotely similar to it. It was pure, unfiltered terror.
Underneath all of that, Ronnie’s voice and the venom in it loops incessantly. This is all your fucking fault. No matter what Joel or Michelle said to try and argue you out of it, they weren’t succeeding. Four people are now dead who had been alive and had a whole life ahead of them before you showed up. The thread connecting all of it started and ended with you and it was becoming impossible to not feel it.
It’s unnervingly quiet in the hall considering it is filled from wall to wall again. Probably close to two hundred people completely depleted after spending the entirety of the day mourning.
Kai and Archie’s deaths fractured the community’s confidence, but there was some level of healing taking place after the tragedy. This has just split it further, right down to the very foundation that Jackson had been built on. There’s a collective recognition spreading that things were going to be different from here on out.
The people are starting to doubt Tommy and question his leadership. It’s evident in the way people’s eyes move to one another and in the way they analyse how fragile he looks up on the platform this time. He can’t afford a single misstep anymore after today. That much is brutally apparent.
Joel positioned you close to him beside the platform before anyone arrived without really offering an explanation. You don’t actually need one. Even he no longer trusted the crowd around you. With emotions running even higher, there’s something volatile in the air and he didn’t want to take any chances.
Tommy takes the centre of the platform and clears his throat, staring out at his people and receiving nothing back.
“Uhh… I appreciate you for comin’ out again tonight, folks.”
The silence is almost aggressive.
“I wanna start off by sayin’ that this is another dark day for Jackson, and while of course we all need to be there for each other, most importantly, right now, we need to be there for the close friends and families of Stevie and Gerry, two people who should still be here with us.”
Their families aren’t in the room. They stayed home to grieve in private while it’s all still at its most raw.
Stevie had mentioned his eldest daughter to you once on patrol. She was finishing her training and nearly ready to join the ranks and start patrolling herself. How proud he sounded saying it. He couldn’t wait to be paired up with her and spend some time outside the walls.
“I know everyone is feelin’ all sorts of things right now.” Tommy‘s eyes move carefully to each cluster of faces like he’s checking their temperature. “But I need y’all to hear me when I say this. We are not losin’ any more people. Things are gonna change starting today. Our priority is findin’ whoever’s doin’ this and puttin’ an end to it. Once and for all.”
One of the remaining patrolmen near the front of the crowd stands to his full height with his arms folded.
“And how exactly are we supposed to track these fuckers down when there’s not enough people left to go out there in the first place? We don’t know who these Disciples are or where they‘re hiding. We have no idea what we’re walking into.”
“We’re already workin’ on a strategy for exactly that,” Tommy replies. “And I’m not concerned about numbers. There’s no chance they have more people than us and I can assure you they don’t have men as skilled as ours.”
“Bullshit, Tommy!” Ronnie’s voice pierces from the far side of the room. He’d been standing against the wall and you’d been actively avoiding looking in his direction. Now his arm is extended and he has a finger pointing directly at you. “As long as he’s here, we’re not safe! We’re sitting ducks and everyone knows it!”
Accusations and agreements flood the room and the crowd breaks apart once more. Tommy goes very still on the platform, his eyes losing focus as the volume builds around him and the pressure of it all seems to become suffocating.
There’s no thought behind the decision, but by the time your brain caught up to consider doubt, you’ve stepped up onto the platform and are stood by Tommy’s side.
The noise drops. Not all at once, but fast enough that the contrast makes you tense up a little. You’re not a member of the council. You have no business being up there. And a significant portion of the people now staring back at you believe, with varying degrees of certainty, that you are the catalyst for all of this.
Being up there is more intimidating and exposing than you would’ve anticipated. The room feels enormous from up here. Somewhere behind you, you can feel Joel’s eyes drilling into the back of your skull, wondering what on earth you’re doing and whether or not he should intervene.
You find a point somewhere in the middle of the crowd, swallow and speak.
“Look, I know I’m still not welcome here. Not to some of you.” You let that sit for a second. “And I understand that. What’s been built here in this town is worth protecting, and after everything that’s happened, I get the fear. But we all know by now that safety isn’t guaranteed no matter who or where you are. And I know that no matter how many times I try to convince you that I had nothing to do with these attacks, some of you are never going to believe it.”
No one interrupts. The hostility isn’t as apparent as it was a moment ago, but it still sits dormant behind many of the faces glaring back at you.
“But I’d be an idiot to ignore the fact that The Disciples want me. For what reason, I don’t really know. But I’m not going to waste any more time. Words are meaningless and at the end of the day, this isn’t about me. It’s about the four people we’ve lost and how we put an end to this.”
You glance back at the council briefly, registering each of their expressions and Joel’s clenched fists before turning back.
“So I’m going to prove it. I’m going to go out there and find them.”
A wave of exchanged looks move through the crowd as people check to see if they heard you correctly by reading each other’s reactions. The air transforms behind you. You can feel Joel wanting to take a step forward but holding himself back.
“Tomorrow, 9am at the gates,” you continue. “Anyone who wants to join can come, but I understand if you don’t. I don’t expect it. Either way, I’m going… for Jackson.”
The faces in the crowd reflect back two clear things. Some people were looking at you as if you were making a last statement, helpless in a way that they know how this ends for you. Others were watching with something that’s a fusion of respect and relief, like this is what you should do because it’s the right thing to do.
You look away, unable to hold anyone’s gaze for long. The clod of anxiety in your throat subsides marginally and you step back down off the platform. Joel remains close by, careful to not look directly at you, but struggling to hide the fact he’s trying to restrain himself.
Tommy takes the space back, flicking a quick glance in your direction. “Okay… uhh…” He strokes his chin, ruminating on what you said for a moment. “The council and I are goin’ to discuss this tonight. We’ll have more to say tomorrow mornin’ once we know where we stand.”
He rubs his hands together nervously.
“We’ll leave it at that for tonight, folks. Please get home safely and, uhh… take care of one another.”
—
“Are you out of your goddamned mind?!”
Jeremiah’s front door opened late that evening and Joel came barrelling through like a thunderstorm, charging straight past you and into the hallway without waiting to be invited inside. He steamrolls his way to the kitchen and you close the front door and follow him.
“What the hell were you thinkin’?!”
“I need to do something, Joel.”
“No, you don’t. Now everyone's gonna expect you to go out there tomorrow.” He paces around the kitchen restlessly trying to find something to do with his anger. He eventually finds one spot to stand in and his hands find his hips. “You should’ve kept your mouth shut! This is not up to you. This is council business.”
“Is everything alright out there, my boy?” Jeremiah calls thinly from the direction of his bedroom.
Joel catches himself and stops, exhaling through flared nostrils and starting to move in repeated, agitated circuits around the kitchen again.
“Yes, Jeremiah, all good,” you call back. “Sorry for the noise.”
“Very well,” he replies. “Although, if Joel is giving you a hard time, please do remind him that I’m not above using my cane if the situation calls for it. I must rest and I would appreciate it if he kept his voice down.”
You press the inside of your cheek between your back molars. Joel doesn’t look even remotely close to finding it amusing. He comes back to you with the same intensity, but just more compressed now.
“You’re not goin’ out there, Joey. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can’t stay here and do nothing either. You saw how people reacted today. They want answers and they want someone to do something. Since they’ve decided this is my fault, I’m going to make it right."
“This is not your fault.” He says it with a firmness that does not invite any negotiation. He takes another step forward across the kitchen towards you. “I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks or says. You don’t need to be puttin’ yourself in danger for anyone.”
You stare back at him as the irony hangs overhead. The man who spent all this time measuring every move because of how it might appear to others, now standing in your home telling you he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. You don’t mention it, but he can see it in your face.
“You don’t get to make decisions like this,” he says. “Not without me knowin’ first.”
“What are we supposed to do then, Joel?” you say, getting frustrated in your own right. “Our entire patrol unit is either dropping out or dead. This has to end and it has to end now.”
“I know that! But I’m not havin’ you go out there like bait!”
You huff. “Wasn’t it you and Tommy who wanted to send me out there as bait in the first place? You sure seemed fine with it then.”
“Don’t,” he warns. “This is different. You know that. You should’ve consulted me.”
“Why do I need to consult you? This is my choice to make.”
“Because I care about you,” he says. “And I’m not willin’ to risk losin’ you. Think about Ellie. Think about the people here who care about you—”
“Joel.” Now you take a step closer to him, keeping your voice soft. “This is going to keep happening. They’re not going to stop and things will only get worse if nothing changes. I can’t let anyone else die and I can’t stay here if people don’t trust me. It’s only a matter of time before they start to question you too just for being around me.” You hold his gaze for a long moment. “So I’m going. Even if that means I’m going alone.”
His jaw goes completely rigid. His eyes move off somewhere beyond you and he has that distant, interior look he gets sometimes, like he’s being pulled into an old, unresolved memory.
When he comes back, he swallows once with his eyes glassy at the edges.
“If I can’t make you stay,” he says, barely above a whisper, “then I’m comin’ with you.”
“No.” The word comes out before he’d even finished speaking. You shake your head at him. “No. You‘re not coming.”
“Why?”
“Because Ellie, that’s why. If something goes wrong, she loses you. No one else here is dying because of me.”
“And what about me?” The sudden softness in his voice is disarming. “I’m supposed to just let you go out there alone and be okay if you don’t come back?”
“Yeah.” You pause, overseeing the stillness in him now. “You don’t need me, but Ellie needs you. You have to stay.”
He narrows his eyes ever so slightly and closes the remaining distance between you with one slow step, his voice dropping low enough that it can’t pass the walls of the kitchen. “What are you talkin’ about? I do need you. And so does Ellie.”
You look away, staring out into the vacant space between you and the stove, anywhere away from his face. “It’ll be easier for her if she only loses one of us. I’m not letting you—”
“What’re you gonna do, stop me?” Joel asks, settling on one hip now, his arms hanging loose by his sides. He analyses the way you refuse to look at him with an expression that’s more depleted than combative.
“There is no choice here, Joey. You’re my partner. I’m comin’ with you and that’s that.”
Biting back tears, your jaw aches from the rigidity.
He turns and starts to move back towards the hallway. One hand catches the doorframe and he pauses there for a moment.
“I’ll see you tomorrow mornin’.”
—
June 11, 2024
Unsurprisingly, no one else came forward to volunteer by the next morning. Because you weren’t expecting anyone to, you had hoped that maybe it would dull the sting, but it didn’t. At the same time, who in their right mind would go out there knowing what The Disciples were capable of? Maybe you should’ve thought about that too before committing to it yourself. But it’s too late now.
By the time you arrived at the gates with Joel and the horses, a crowd had formed. Standing there in the cold morning air, reading the mixture of expressions, it felt more like a send-off than a show of solidarity. Some wanted to be seen showing up, but others wanted to verify that you were actually keeping your word and going.
Joel came to Jeremiah’s at sunrise to walk with you. Ellie came along too, tasked with keeping Jeremiah company for the day and ensuring someone was there in case he needed help. Both of you said goodbye to them, trying to not make it sound like it was for the last time. It was particularly hard for Joel.
At the gates, Michelle finds you before you finish checking Dusty’s tack. Her arms swing around you and she pulls you into a tight embrace. “You better come back,” she says, her voice muffled against your jacket. “You hear me? Safe and sound.”
Carol’s hand rests on your shoulder as Michelle releases you, her expression barely composed. “Seems ridiculous to say, but be safe out there and good luck.”
Arron shakes your hand and holds it for a moment longer than would be considered normal. He stares at you directly and without performance. “You’ve got this. I’ll see you when you’re back.”
Lastly, Tommy‘s hand turns you around and he yanks you into him without warning, his arms solid and intentional around you. That was the moment where it felt like the ground beneath you became uneven again. The man who saved you, the reason you’re here in the first place, holding you in case its the last time he gets to do so. This really could be your last day, so you savour it all. His smell, his unrelenting kindness, everything about him that made you trust him.
“You two take care of each other out there, okay?” he whispers close to your ear. His lips press briefly and firmly against your temple before he lets you go, leaving you with a final pat on your shoulder. He turns to go to Joel.
You pull yourself up onto Dusty and take one last look back at the town behind the crowd, your eyes drifting across the rooftops you’ve come to know and the soft orange lights in the windows as the sun and the people here rise for another day.
Then you take in the faces below one more time. Michelle’s hand over her mouth, Carol and Arron tucked into either side of her, Tommy looking like he’s trying to think of a reason to call this whole thing off last minute. In your mind, you think about Jeremiah expecting you home this evening for tea and how Ellie will be sat by the window checking every few minutes, hoping to see you both walking back up the garden path like it was any other day.
The nerves had been somewhat manageable until the gates began to screech open once more. You’re suddenly more aware of how dry your lips are and numb your hands feel holding the reigns.
Joel climbs onto Old Beardy beside you and looks across. You meet his eyes and find more than worry etched plainly into his every feature. He looks at you the way he did when that Disciple almost killed you in front of him, and the way he looked at you in his bedroom when he’d asked you to stay. Like you were something he wasn’t prepared to lose.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
—
The ride out towards the trees is quiet, but there’s nothing peaceful about it. Birds somewhere overhead singing in another day, leather creaking and the dull rhythm of hooves on the ground beneath. Everything should feel the same as it always does beyond Jackson’s walls, but the air tastes different this morning. Your senses are more alight than they would be on a typical patrol. Even the sound of the horses feels too loud and exposing.
Joel barely blinks. His eyes move across the landscape methodically, reading the ground up as far as where the forest begins. He’s even more on edge than you, if that’s even possible. From the corner of your eye, you watch him, feeling the guilt travel down your throat and into your gut. He’s out here because of you. Every excuse you’d made last night about Ellie, the risks… He heard it all and still chose to come along. The man is as stubborn as you, also probably even more so.
At the treeline, you both dismount and tie the horses to a low enough branch set back from the path. The plan, agreed on the journey out, was to travel on foot once you were out of the open. Because you’d be covering unfamiliar territory, it made more sense to be able to adapt and cover yourselves without the two huge animals adding to the pressure.
The humidity inside the forest’s embrace is breathtakingly overbearing. Thick air and even thicker, unexplored undergrowth snagging at your boots with every step. Before you’ve even reached a few yards in, your palm is damp with sweat as it grips onto your rifle. You’re aware of it, the same way you’re aware of your own heartbeat, and now that you’ve noticed it, you can’t stop noticing it.
Every small sound or movement between the greenery causes a small flinch. A branch waving softly on a breeze, something small retreating into the leaves on your left… All of it a violent threat.
The catastrophising starts suddenly and becomes unmanageable before you can even try to contain it. Who would take care of Jeremiah, who looked thinner this week than last? And what about Ellie, who is expecting you both home tonight unharmed?
If The Disciples were still lurking around, finding them would mean them finding you too. The absurd conclusion you have reached is that if they found you first and today truly was your last day, at the very least, it would likely be the end of Jacksons troubles. The Disciples would finally have the pound of flesh that they so desperately wanted, and Ellie and Tommy’s family would hopefully be spared. Jackson would return to the undisturbed, thriving place it once was before you washed up there.
“Just realised you never really talk about home,” Joel says, keeping his eyes forward. “Back in Ireland. Before all this.”
Pulling your attention away from the sea of trees, you glance at him. There’s his attentiveness again. He’s been watching you withdraw into those tenebrous places in your mind. Months of shared patrols have clued him up on all the tells that something has a hold of you. He knows which of your silences are comfortable and which are unsettled. This is him offering you a way back to the light.
“What do you want to know?”
“What it was like over there. What your family were like.”
You think about it while navigating over a thick knot of roots without breaking your stride.
“I remember it being the most beautiful country in the world,” you say. “And the people— Jesus… There’s no people like the Irish.” A brief pause. “You’d have hated it though.”
He looks at you sideways. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, it rains for like eleven months of the year. The stranger sitting next to you on the bus will talk to you for an entire hour whether you like it or not. And it’s a nation of tea drinkers.”
Something about that makes him smile just slightly. His eyes drop to the forest floor for a second.
“So what made you leave then?”
A fair question that didn’t exactly have a straight-forward answer. The version of yourself that made the decision to leave faded away long ago. With two decades gone by and all that happened throughout, it’s hard to know for sure what your true motives actually were.
“I’m not entirely sure,” you say, attempting to work out the thought process in real-time. “Most of the people I grew up with had this dream of getting away from it all. Moving somewhere bigger and making something of themselves. Ireland was its own little world. It was safe. I think I just wanted to see what else was out there.”
“And out of all the places in the world you could’ve ended up in,” Joel says, a dry quality creeping into his voice. “You chose Brooklyn?”
You roll your eyes at him, feeling the pull of an involuntary smirk. “Brooklyn was great, I’ll have you know. It was less of a choice and more of an opportunity that just landed on my lap. I don’t know why, but I felt something in my gut telling me to go. I kept thinking I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t.” You let the thought resolve. “And look how that turned out.”
Joel continues to observe you from the corner of his eye, assessing you and the tone of the last sentence carefully, trying to figure out if it’s just your dark humour or genuine self-deprecation.
“How ‘bout your family?” he asks. “Think I would’ve hated them too?”
A grin forms before you can stop it. It’s a completely unexpected question. For whatever reason, you’ve never considered how Joel would’ve fit in that picture. As fast as the comfort of it hits you, your heart cracks a little, almost causing you to lose your footing. What could’ve been.
“Nah,” you reply. “If anything, it’d be the other way around. I’m not sure they’d warm to you very fast.”
He looks mildly put out by that. “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“My parents were pretty judgemental. Ironically strict Irish catholics. Impossible to impress. My da was very protective of us. I don’t think he ever really believed I could manage out in the world on my own. He insisted on doing everything for me. The issue he’d have with you is that you’d be his competition. I don’t think he ever envisioned another man looking after me. He would’ve struggled with that.”
Joel doesn’t have anything to say to that. His eyes stay forward, but his jaw grinds without giving any indication of what he makes of it. “How ‘bout your mother?”
“You’d have better chances with her,” you say. “She had the most opinions out of everyone, but she’d only share them with others behind your back. But I have a feeling you would’ve won her over. She loved a man that could do it all. The accent would’ve helped too. She loved an accent.”
“Is that what did it for you?” Joel asks, a hint of a faint smirk forming.
“It helped,” you admit playfully, feeling some of the tightness in your chest ease a little.
Then he asks, “And Anna? What was she like?”
The manufactured cushiness of the last few minutes expires.
Something heavy solidifies in your gut immediately. Hearing her name spoken out loud here amongst the trees makes you realise that you haven’t really spoken about her in a while.
“You don’t have to—” he says, catching himself quickly. “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t’ve brought that up—”
You shake your head and give him enough of a smile to let him know it’s okay.
“She was everything to me,” you start, your voice betraying you almost immediately. “She was the only thing that almost stopped me from moving to Brooklyn. I couldn’t picture a life without her in it. She was much younger than me, but she was my closest friend.”
The forest goes very quiet around you. All that registers with your senses is the sound of your boots crunching through undisturbed leaves below.
“I’ve never known anyone more full of life,” you continue. “Even after the outbreak. Even after we lost our da. My only reason to keep going was to keep her alive. So when she— when I lost her, I really thought that was the end.”
Joel turns his head to look at you, but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t interrupt. He just gives you room to keep going if you want.
“Every Friday after school, I’d bring her down to the video shop. We would take turns picking the movie for the weekend every week. One week, my pick, the next week, hers. She always chose based on the box cover. The more pink and flowery, the higher chance she’d choose that one.” Some sort of laugh-breath hybrid escapes you. “I didn’t mind though. We’d be on that couch all weekend snacking on dry cereal watching movies. Nothing really mattered back then.”
“Hold onto those memories,” Joel says quietly after a moment passes. “That’s what’ll get you through all this.”
“I try to.” Your voice thins and the tone of it changes. “But they feel… tainted now. Everything does. After what he did to us. I can’t think about her anymore without thinking about him…” You stare out at the trees vacantly. “I feel broken, Joel. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be put back together.”
He goes quiet again for a long minute, watching you carefully and wanting to offer you something he doesn’t have. He mutters an unvarnished apology under his breath and he means it, but he knows there’s nothing substantial he could say that would fix it right now.
“How about you?” you ask. “Did you have any family before all this? Apart from Tommy.”
As the words leave your mouth, it dawns on you too late that it probably wasn’t the right time for a question like that. It’s out there now though, suspended in the space between you waiting to be answered. He goes somewhere in his head again for some time, barely visible only by the vacancy moving across his expression.
Maybe it’s the surroundings, maybe it’s the worry that you’re both marching towards potential death, but something in him flattens with an eventual exhale.
“Uhh… yeah.”
Then nothing. A long stretch of nothing. Knowing him the way you do, he’s trying to structure together something he has the capacity to say.
“I had a daughter. Sarah. Her name was Sarah.”
The photograph. The girl with the spiralled, dark hair, wearing a soccer jersey and holding a trophy. Joel’s arm around her and his face carrying a pride you’ve never seen in him before. The suspicion was there since you found the picture, but now you have the answer and another part of his past takes shape.
Still, the implication of using the past tense when speaking about her can only mean one thing. He carries on regardless, and he doesn’t conceal how it hurts him to do so.
“I lost her. On outbreak day. Died in my arms.”
“I’m sorry.” It comes out on a weak breath and feels entirely inadequate. It felt like you knew it before you knew it. There’s a particular type of pain that resides deep inside of him, one that you’ve always sensed and one that has drawn you to him this entire time.
“What was she like?”
He stays silent for another moment. He’s not exactly reluctant, just simply trying to string together an answer to a question he seemingly has never been asked before, or at least not for a very long time.
“Smart. Too smart for a fourteen year old. Real funny too. Kept me honest.” His head lifts back to scan the view ahead.
“Sh-she was caring,” he goes on. “Independent. Felt like she was takin’ care of me more’n I was takin’ care of her. I’d be workin’ late and I’d come home and she’d already have dinner figured out for us.”
“Wonder where she got those instincts from.”
He glances sideways at you and his lip curves briefly and barely, gone before it could be fully acknowledged.
“Thought I’d spend my whole life worryin’ about her. College, boys, bad decisions… The world wasn’t ready for someone like her.” His voice drops and takes on a rough, abraded quality you’re hearing for the first time. “But she was mine. She was my whole world. The only thing I ever really had.”
Your heart shatters in your chest as you picture the photograph again compare how fractured he is now to the proud father you saw. She deserved to grow up, even in this barbaric, hideous world. And he deserved to watch her do it.
“What about her mother? What happened to her?”
Joel returns from whatever dark corner of his mind he went wandering in. “Uhh—… I don’t know. She left us when Sarah was real young. She had a lot goin’ on in her head. I wasn’t as present as I probably should’ve been. So she left. Never saw her again. Heard she might’ve moved back to Pittsburgh where she grew up, but… She told me not to go lookin’ for her, so I didn’t.”
One hell of a life for one man. Abandoned by the mother of their child, raised his daughter alone, lost her in the most cruel way and is now the guardian of possibly the only person in the world immune to the virus that tore everyone’s lives apart. The protectiveness you had once read as aggression reveals itself to actually be survival. His purpose and his instinct is and has always been to protect because that’s all he has ever known.
“You’re a really good man, Joel,” you say, softer than you intended.
He looks across at you again. “What do you mean?”
You squint up at the light filtering through the canopy above, trying to find the appropriate words. “I mean after everything you’ve been through, you could’ve turned out very different. You could’ve completely shut down. You did for a while, I guess. But you show up for everyone around you.” You pause and let him digest that much before continuing. “You wouldn’t have told me any of this a few weeks ago. That has to mean something, right?”
He stares flatly at you and then huffs silently to himself, shaking his head and looking forward again. “The only reason I’m sayin’ all this is because today might be our last. Don’t be naive enough to think this has got anythin’ to do with me bein’ a good person, because I’m not.”
You watch his side profile, mildly stung by that. A reply is already forming when you hear something sudden and harsh, putting every nerve on edge.
A single gunshot splits through the air, cracking through the trees and dispersing outward in a long, diminishing echo. You both freeze in place immediately to listen through it. Underneath the fade of it, a frantic human voice in distress, and just past that, the unmistakable shriek of runners.
“Help! Somebody help me!”
You’re already moving before a word has been exchanged. Together, you push through the undergrowth faster than is sensible, sacrificing caution for urgency. The sounds grow and separate as you draw closer, making your heart rate rocket upwards.
A clearing opens up ahead and you both drop low and slow yourselves, rifles raised and peering through the last curtain of foliage.
A man collapses in the centre of the clearing with four runners converging on him from behind. He looks like he’s been trying to get away from them for a while. He moves with ragged desperation, like he’s operating on the last of his energy reserve.
He feebly raises his gun and prepares himself for the inevitable, knowing that he won’t be able to take all four down in time.
But then, from where you’re crouched, the recognition hits you like an oncoming train.
“Marco!”
Eyes wide, you burst out from cover before a reasoning could be justified. Behind, Joel calls after you, “Hey, what are you—” but it cuts off into profanity when he realises he has no choice but to chase after you.
Two of the runners sense your approach and break off to charge at you instead. You draw your blade and drive it into the nearest one’s skull mid-lunge, leveraging its body sideways as a deadweight shield against the other to buy yourself half a second. With a wet resistance, you pull the blade free and put it through the second runner’s face before it can get a hold of you. It drops in a heap at your feet and goes into its eternal stillness.
Joel handles the other two, dragging one off of Marco and wrestling it in a way that looked like it required no effort. The second put up more of a fight but was no match for Joel’s brute force.
The clearing goes quiet, but your pulse is loud in your ears and your breath slams inside your chest. Eventually, the adrenaline starts its slow descent. The next thing you sense is Joel’s glare, communicating several things and none of them approving.
Marco is sprawled on the ground next to you, chest heaving and still coming to terms with the fact he’s alive. He looks between you and Joel with wide and cautious eyes. Then he reaches the same realisation you did a moment ago at the outline of the clearing and his shoulders sink with relief.
“Joey?”
“Who is he?” Joel asks flatly, not even acknowledging Marco.
You extend a hand down. Marco takes it and you hoist him back to his feet. He’s in a really bad way. Gaunt, malnourished, hollow yet somehow still breathing. Overgrown hair, greyed skin and weeks of filth caked into him. Hauntingly similar to how you looked only a handful of months ago.
“This is Marco,” you say, still taking him in. “I know him from Silver Lake.”
Joel turns away briefly, making a sound under his breath that has no politeness in it.
“You made it out,” you say to Marco. As you do, you suddenly become hyperaware of the space on either side of him where his young sons once occupied. Your stomach turns and you hope you’re wrong to presume. “Where are the boys?”
His face changes. That brief warmth that appeared from seeing you simply drains out of it, leaving him looking older and broken.
“They didn’t make it,” he says, moving through each word reluctantly. “They’re gone.”
There’s nothing adequate you can say to a man in his position, but you place a steadying hand on his shoulder. The agony of losing one child is unthinkable enough, but two… And at such a young age. It’s a wonder he’s still going.
“Why are you out here?” you ask eventually. “Where have you been all this time?”
He wipes a hand down his face. “Moving. Going from place to place. Trying to find somewhere… permanent. You know how it is.”
He takes a slow breath. You can sense Joel watching him closely from over your shoulder.
“Figured I’d try find Jackson,” Marco says then. “Is that where you ended up?”
You nod. “Yeah. That’s where we came from. It’s not far. You should come back with us—”
“No,” Joel says without any hesitation or ambiguity.
You turn back to face him. “Joel, he needs somewhere to go.”
“I don’t give a damn. He’s not our responsibility. We don’t know him.”
“I do,” you say, stepping up to him now and standing your ground. “Marco is the one who told me to go and find Jackson. I can’t just leave him out here. He’ll be dead within a week. Look at him!”
“I’m not gonna argue with you about this, Joey. We don’t take in strays. You know that by now.”
You scoff at him. “Really? Because this is exactly how Tommy found me. Lost, barely alive and a second from getting eaten. I wouldn’t be standing here with you if he hadn’t sent me in this direction in the first place.”
That seems to land. Joel’s jaw moves uncomfortably and his eyes bury themselves into yours, trying to find something else he can arm himself with.
“That was different,” he says plainly.
“In what way?”
He doesn’t answer, which is it’s own kind of answer.
Behind you, Marco lowers his backpack from his shoulder and unzips it. Joel’s grip tightens around his rifle.
“Please,” Marco breathes, starting to pull miscellaneous objects of survival and sentimental keepsakes out of it as some sort of desperate offering. None of it holds any real value until he presents one last thing.
An unopened jar of coffee.
You look at Joel and Joel looks at the jar. Maybe it’s a sign or just luck.
“Let him get cleaned up and go through NAP at least,” you say. “He deserves a chance. Just like I did.”
He stares at you for a long, uneasy minute before taking a few authoritative steps through the vegetation towards Marco and snatching the jar from his hands and returning to you.
“Check him for bites,” he says. “Take his weapons and whatever else he’s carrying.”
Marco closes his eyes and bows his head briefly, lips moving in the formation of something that resembles prayers and thanks.
You begin performing the usual checks, taking a look around the collar and sleeves, looking for any sign of infection or blood and finding nothing of concern. Marco willingly empties his pockets, places everything back into his backpack and hands it over to you without issue.
Joel watches from a few feet away, deeply unsatisfied with the situation and not even trying to restrain the displeasure radiating off of him. He doesn’t like this one bit and he’s not the type to pretend he does. Even with the unopened jar of coffee secure in his hand, nothing can quell his suspicious instincts once they get fired up.
“We’re done for today. Let’s head back,” Joel says once you finish and rejoin him. He looks at you pointedly. “And you’re gonna be the one explainin’ this to Tommy.”
AN: Hey everyone! So good to be posting again. Thank you so much for your patience while I took a break to write some more and deal with some personal life stuff.
I hope this chapter lived up to the wait!
I decided to post this weekend to dedicate this chapter to my dear friend @jaymee-draws for her birthday! She has shown so much support and provided incredible artwork (with more to come btw 👀), so I wanted to honour her with the comeback chapter!
Speaking of artwork, a massive thank you to Yomi for providing this beautiful chapter artwork. Our Joely protecting each other out in the scary world. I love it so much. Please go give them some love and follow if you don't already.
While I've been taking a break, I've managed to complete up as far as chapter 33, which to be honest, I was hoping to have a little more done by now, but life has been lifeing. I'm very likely going to switch to bi-weekly posting going forward as a happy medium so that way you guys still get the episodic experience I was going for but I also get a bit more time to get ahead of myself.
But seriously, thank you so much for the continued support and the kind messages while I was gone. It really means the world.
SO MUCH coming in these next chapters so buckle up! Hehehe 😈
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'Nettles' by Ethal Cain
Word Count: 4k
Previously: Arriving back at Jeremiah’s house after work, Joey was blindsided by Joel and left again to spend time with Michelle. Alone with Joel, Jeremiah managed to reach him and convince him to show up for Joey. Similarly, Michelle helped Joey see things from Joel’s perspective and encouraged him to give him another chance. Joey went to Joel’s to apologise for his outburst but when they embraced in a kiss they didn’t realise Tommy had witnessed it all from outside the window.
Summary: In this flashback chapter, we delve into Joel’s past to learn more about how he developed into the man he is today.
*Please read*
This chapter contains some themes and scenes that some readers may find upsetting (Abusive parents - This chapter contains physical, emotional and mental abuse from a parent). I also wanted to note that there is a scene in this chapter where children are playing a game that is believed to have a controversial past. While researching and writing for this chapter, I wanted to add details that were true to the time and place of these events. While this game seemed the most suitable for what I was trying to achieve, I did discover some articles and forums during the writing process that discuss how the name and use of the game had racist undertones and is now banned in many schools. It is not my intention to cause any offence or condone the use of the game as an act of racism. Please do contact me if you would like to add further context if I got anything wrong.
September 26, 1973
Joel Miller turns six years old today, though you’d never know it by the way he waits patiently by his father’s truck in the front yard holding his lunchbox like it’s any other school day. Asking for the day off for his birthday was something he wouldn’t dream of doing.
The air still carries some of the weight of the Texan summer, even this early in the morning as the neighbourhood starts to come to life with families starting their day. Mrs. Henderson’s lawn has just been mowed and is dispersing the sweet, sharp smell of cut grass over the chain-link fences. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where everyone’s lawn stay trimmed and everyone knows everyone’s business whether they like it or not.
Two houses down, Joel spots Danny Reeves. He's seventeen years old and wearing his maroon and white leather sleeved varsity jacket. Joel watches him tossing the ball to his younger brother with little to no effort like it’s nothing. His brother throws it back and Danny catches it, spins it in his hand and sends it back again. Over and over. It’s borderline hypnotic.
Something happens in Joel’s chest whenever he sees him. Danny looks like the boys you’d see on TV. He’s tall, athletic and every girl in the area adores him. His dark curls spring across his forehead when he moves, catching the sunlight in a way that demands Joel’s attention every time. He’s too young to understand or put language to why he can’t stop staring. All he knows is he can’t.
When Danny bursts out in laughter at something his younger brother says, the music of it carries two yards over, drowning out the other sounds of the neighbourhood around them. Suddenly, Joel doesn’t hear the vehicles passing by, neighbours greeting other neighbours, the drumming of his father’s boots coming up from behind him…
The smack comes so fast that it rips Joel right out of his daydream. One second he's standing there mesmerised, the next his right ear is ringing red hot and his lunch box has clattered to the pavement.
"The hell are you doin’?" his father’s voice says.
Joel looks up, eyes already wet as Javier Miller stands over him. All six-foot-three of him. His thick moustache twitches with irritation in that way that gives Joel nightmares.
His uniform is crisp and pressed like it always is, the officer badge on his chest glinting in the morning light.
Joel's mouth opens but nothing comes out.
"I asked you a question, boy."
"I was—" Joel's voice cracks. He's still holding his ear. The sting has started to radiate down his jaw. "I wasn't doin' anythin’. I swear.”
"You were gawkin'." Javier's eyes narrow and his jaw clenches. "Like an idiot. What have I told you about starin’?”
Joel bends down to pick up his lunch box, his hands now trembling from the aftershock of the hit. No matter how many times it happens, he never gets used to it. He doesn't look back at Danny's yard. He can't.
"Get in the truck," Javier says, already turning away and fishing the keys out of his pocket.
Joel shakily climbs into the passenger seat, buckles himself in, and stares at his knees the whole ride to school. His right ear burns for the duration of the day, and he has no concept of what he even did wrong to deserve it in the first place.
—
June 25, 1977
The summer heat has been brutal. It’s the kind of heat that makes the shimmering asphalt go soft and the neighbour’s dogs lie out flat in whatever shade they can find. Joel has been out in the yard since after lunch with Bobby Anderson and a few of the other boys from school. Bobby is his closest friend and has been since they met in second grade. They’re inseparable. Where one goes, the other follows.
Bobby lives three doors down. He's got freckles and a pronounced gap between his front teeth. He used to get bullied quite a bit for it. But then Joel came around. Joel is slightly taller and stronger and there was no way in hell he was going to allow other boys to target someone he cared about so dearly.
"C'mon, let’s go one more round," Bobby says, still catching his breath from the last one.
They're playing Red Rover. They have been for the better part of twenty minutes, running back and forth across the yard, trying to break through each other's clasped hands and are now covered in grass stains. It's the kind of game that burns off enough energy before dinner time.
"Red Rover, Red Rover, send Joel right over!" Bobby yells, positioning himself.
A grin splits across Joel’s face and he runs at full speed, crashing into his arms so hard that they both stumble back and tumble to the ground, leaving them laughing and breathless. Bobby is back on his feet first. He extends a hand and pulls Joel up to steady him. Joel doesn’t rush to let go of it. Bobby starts knocking grass off his t-shirt and straightening him up after the crash.
And that's when Joel sees movement in the living room window. His father is stood still behind the glass watching closely like a hawk hunting prey.
Joel's stomach drops and he lets go of Bobby’s hand so fast it's as though it suddenly became as hot as the sun overhead. He knows there’s about to be trouble.
The front door swings open and Javier steps out onto the porch, still in his undershirt and slacks from work with suspenders hanging loose at his sides. Instead of looking downright furious as anticipated, he looks eerily calm. That's somehow worse. He’s just as scary when quiet as he is when his voice booms through the house in his usual rage.
"Time for you all to head on home, kids,” Javier calls out, not threatening, just bone-chillingly even. "It’s getting late.”
Bobby blinks with confusion. He looks at Joel, then back over at Javier. "But we were just—"
“Home. Now.” There it is. That firm, authoritative tone that no kid would dare answer back to if they had a hint of a brain in their skulls.
Bobby throws one last concerned look over his shoulder to Joel and then starts to move towards the gate with the rest of the boys. "Alright, Mr. Miller. Bye, Joel."
Joel doesn't answer back. He’s too wrapped up in thinking about what’s coming as soon as his friends leave and he heads back in that house. He watches them filter out of the yard and disappear down the street, and suddenly he's alone with just his dad and the overbearing sun above.
"Inside," Javier says.
Joel's legs feel like they're made of stone, but he moves as fast as he physically can. He almost feels the need to shield himself as he walks past his father through the door and into the living room. The air conditioner hums in the window, but it doesn't do much to help with the stuffy temperature. Despite how quiet and empty it is, the house feels crowded and claustrophobic all at the same time.
Javier closes the front door behind them with a soft click that sounds even more foreboding than a slam would. For a split second, Joel contemplates making a run for his room and barricading the door to buy him enough time to try climb out through the window, but there’s a thousand different ways that that would end badly.
"What were you two doin' out there?"
Joel's throat goes dry. "We were just playin' Red Rover. Like we always do—"
“I’m not talkin’ about that.” Javier's voice remains calm and controlled, but there's an edge to it that makes Joel's pulse tick up. “What were you doin’ holdin' Bobby’s hand like that?”
“He was just helpin’ me get up. You have to hold hands to play the game. That’s how it—"
The backhand comes so fast that Joel didn’t even have time to properly brace himself. He knew it was going to come eventually, but the sting still sends searing pain through his body. It’s so hard and sudden that he doesn’t even feel the impact from hitting the tiled floor below.
"Don't give me no cheek, you fuckin’ pansy.”
Joel presses his hand to his face, fighting back tears and tasting the iron tanginess of blood on the inside of his cheek. His ears ring from the rattle of his head. ”I’m sorry—"
“Don’t talk back to me unless I ask you to."
Javier crouches down and grabs Joel by the front of his shirt before hauling him upright. Joel’s legs are unreliable and his knees wobble from the first knock to his head and the fear of another blow.
“Boys don't hold hands with other boys, ‘specially no boy of mine. I don't give a damn what kind of game it is. You understand me?"
Joel nods frantically, gasping for air.
"You want the neighbours thinkin' you're some kinda sissy, huh? You want 'em laughin' at you? Thinkin’ you’re weak?”
"N-no—"
"Then don’t let me catch you holdin’ no boy’s hand again. Ever." Javier shoves him back and Joel stumbles into the couch, barely catching himself. “I’m not havin’ you bring shame on this family. You hear me?"
Joel nods again, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes to prevent the tears from starting. Crying in front of his father would only make the situation worse. He just has to accept the feeling of his face being on fire and his chest aching from the misery of not knowing why his father treats him this way. He has seen girls holding other girls’ hands together when playing games. Why can’t he hold Bobby’s? Why would the neighbours laugh at him for it?
Javier straightens up, adjusts his suspenders, and walks toward the kitchen like nothing ever happened. "Clean yourself up and go to your room,” he says over his shoulder. “No dinner for you tonight.”
Joel stays on the floor until his dad is out of sight. Then he drags himself up, goes to the bathroom, and looks at his reflection in the mirror. His cheek is already swelling and alarmingly red. He runs cold water over his hands and holds them to his face to try and soothe it, but it doesn't help much.
Joel loves his father. He loves him very much. He would never want to bring shame on his family. He hates seeing his father so angry more than anything. He hates the thought of Tommy ever having to go through the same things as he does, even though he’s had a hunch that Tommy is favoured over him for quite some time now. He’s not going to let it get any worse. Things are going to change.
He and Bobby drifted apart for years after that day. And even when they found their way back to each other, they were never as close as they once said they would always be when they were just two young boys.
—
May 18, 1985
Prom night smells like hairspray, the musk of rented fabric and the desperation of boys bathed in their father’s cologne to disguise the fact that they’re nervous. Joel, now eighteen years old, is standing outside the gymnasium, away from the overstimulating lights and saccharine pop songs thumping through the walls.
His date for the night, Stephanie Martinez is beside him, unaware of the storm that has been brewing in his mind for the weeks leading up to this day. Her dress is a dazzling bright pink and her chocolate brown hair has been sculpted in a way that looks like it must’ve taken hours.
She’s very pretty. Joel knows that much at least. That’s why he asked if he could take her. She’s the type of beautiful that a few of the guys at school have voiced how jealous they are and wondering why he doesn’t look more thrilled about it.
He doesn’t have the answer to that. Well, he does. He just doesn’t want to confront it.
She did everything right. She got his father’s approval. She has a smile that lights up the room. She laughed at his conversation all through dinner. She held onto his arm when they walked in. She couldn’t be more perfect.
And yet he feels nothing romantically for her.
She’s not even the kind of girl he would hang out with as friends. They don’t like any of the same things. They don’t have any mutual connections. It couldn’t be any more thrown together.
"This is nice, right?" she says, her voice soft and turning a little uncertain at the end. “Much better than bein’ in there with all that ruckus.”
Joel nods, hands shoved in his pockets. "Yeah. It's way too loud in there. Not really my kinda music neither.”
She moves a little closer to him now, purposefully letting her shoulder brush against his. She picked up on the change in his attitude not long after people started dancing. She put it down to nerves and the fact he’s always had this reserved, shy quality about him whenever she saw him around school. He was never like the other boys.
But she’s starting to feel like his lack of presence is taking away from her experience.
“I’m having a really good time tonight, Joel," she says, looking up at him with those big, brown, hopeful eyes, her lashes thick with mascara.
"Me too.” He doesn’t mean it and he knows she knows. He’s just smiling through the guilt that she put in so much effort and she could’ve gone with anyone else and had a much better time than what he can offer her.
The gymnasium door opens behind them then and his stomach drops when he looks over.
Bobby Anderson steps out with his arm slung around his date and girlfriend, Joselyn Michaels. He’s never looked more handsome. He still has his freckles and the gap tooth that Joel always loved… He looks picture perfect with Joselyn. He looks happy. But Joel can’t help wondering what it would’ve been like if they existed in a world where they were leaving together with Bobby’s arm around him, laughing the way he laughs with her.
"Can I…" Stephanie hesitates, snapping Joel out of his thoughts. "Can I kiss you?"
Joel's stomach clenches. He's supposed to say yes. He's supposed to want this. That’s how this is supposed to work. He’s been constructing a version of himself for years now and has told himself that if he performs it convincingly enough, eventually it’ll become his true self.
"Yeah," he says.
Her face lights up, giving away that she wasn’t sure what the answer was going to be. It makes Joel’s chest ache more for her. She leans in closer.
Her eyes flutter closed as she reaches up. He closes his too and dips his head down to her until their lips meet.
As expected, he feels nothing.
There’s no spark or rush. Nothing except the vague awareness that her mouth is warm and much wetter than his. It’s completely and irreparably wrong. He had hoped the contact would trigger something that would finally prove that he was overthinking things and that all this was just worry that he never needed to carry around with him in the first place.
He can’t keep up the act any longer so he pulls back — a little too fast. She stumbles slightly and her eyes fly open again in surprise. She immediately senses the physical and non-physical space he’s put between them.
“What’s wrong?"
He takes a step back, and then another. His hands start to shake and he can feel his legs urging him to sprint. Doesn’t matter the direction or for how long. He just needs to be away from here.
"I—" His voice cracks. "I'm sorry, Stephanie. I gotta go."
"Wait, what? What do you mean?” Her face crumples with confusion and hurt. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No, you didn't—" He's already backing into the parking lot and towards his truck. "It's not you, I just—"
Instead of finishing that sentence and giving her the answer she deserves, he spins and walks briskly away from her. Behind him, he can hear her call his name, now alone and bewildered, the night girls like her dream about now spoiled.
She cups her hand over her mouth and smells her own breath. What Stephanie doesn’t realise is that no amount of bubblegum would have changed the outcome of the kiss.
His truck door shuts and he lets the immediate stillness and silence swallow his senses. He places his hands flat on his thighs to try and encourage them to stop shaking and then stares at the dashboard blankly until they finally do.
He was supposed to feel something. He was supposed to want to kiss her. Like all the other boys with their dates. Like his father would expect him to.
But all he feels is a cold queasiness the lives in the lowest part of his gut and the desire to be here with somebody else.
He thinks about Danny Reeves from all those years ago. The varsity jacket, the dark curls, the laugh that froze him in place when he was six years old. Then he thinks about Bobby. His freckles, his gap tooth, the way his hand felt in his that afternoon before his father’s struck his face. He should be holding his hand again tonight. He should be leaving with Bobby.
The heaviness of grieving someone he never got to be and will never get to be becomes too much. Sweat starts to form on his upper lip and his eyes start to warm from the threat of oncoming tears.
Boys don't hold hands with other boys.
Don’t let me ever catch you doin’ that shit again.
You want the neighbours thinkin' you're some kinda sissy?
You want 'em laughin' at you? Thinkin’ you’re weak?
I’m not havin’ you bring shame on this family.
His clammy palms find the steering wheel and visions of the way his father would look at him flood his mind. It was like he was looking for signs of weakness, proof that his cruelty was deserved.
Javier could never accept the way his eldest son turned out. He couldn’t accept that he didn’t want to end up in the same line of work as him. He couldn’t accept that Joel made him feel guilty for raising him the way his father had raised him. He couldn’t accept that Joel loved music and playing guitar more than he loved girls and football. Joel was never going to be the son Javier wanted, even though Joel tried his best to be.
He starts the engine and drives off, the prom and Stephanie’s pink dress shrinking in the rearview mirror until it eventually disappears. Not even the music on the radio can silence the chaos in his brain so he switches it off, opting to drive home in complete silence instead.
It doesn't matter how fast or how far he drives. He can't escape this.
—
May 8, 2024
Fifty-six years old. He still hasn’t managed to escape it.
Even now. He’s finally kissing him, the man who unknowingly uprooted everything Joel made himself believe since he was a young boy. Joey Byrne showed up in Jackson and seeped into the cracks of Joel’s fortress bit by bit, week by week, until he was consuming him from within. This man who he once saw as a threat, has become a saviour. Someone to show Joel the light and get him out of this place he locked himself in for all these years.
But he can’t have this. He can’t have him. Even if it’s as clear as day. Even though Joey appears to slot neatly into the gap Joel could never fill.
That same fear that his father bestowed on him as a child has outlived his failed relationships, the death of his own daughter and the death of the entire world. It still lives and breathes on this couch in Jeremiah’s living room all these years later.
All of it surfaces at once and sets off a trigger in a way that’s automatic but ancient. He feels the phantom sting of his father’s hand spreading across his cheek and the constriction of his airways at the thought of letting down those that matter most to him.
Every cruel word. Every hit. He feels it all.
He can hear his father's voice still echoing in his head even though Javier Miller's been dead for almost thirty years. He can’t hurt him anymore, but the hurt is still there nonetheless.
Joel pulls away from the kiss abruptly, like he’s awaiting the consequences before they’ve even been decided. Joey looks at him, flushed, confused, his eyes still soft with need.
Joel wanted this as much as Joey clearly did. He was desperate for it, even though he didn’t know how to show it. He’s wanted this since the day Joey saved his life. He only wanted it more when he saw the way Ellie slowly came back to life around Joey. He saw the roots of what could be the family he always wanted the day Joey baked a birthday cake with Ellie. He saw something worth protecting, worth dying for.
For the first time since Tess, Joel felt like survival wasn’t solely his responsibility. He felt like he could finally take his hands off the wheel because someone else was there to grab it instead. Joey offloaded some of his burdens without even knowing he was doing it, and it made Joel feel something more than just appreciation. He wants to chase that feeling. He wants to make Joey his.
But Joel’s a coward. At least that’s what he’s convinced himself after weeks of finding reasons to be close to Joey but then letting the fear make the decisions for him.
Joel had taught himself that sometimes it’s easier to let your instincts protect you rather than risk it for the sake of someone else. But he knows the walls he built to protect himself weren’t doing what they were intended for. Instead of protecting him and those around him, they were just keeping him contained.
He broke his own rule when he saved Ellie, and now he feels the same urge to break it again for Joey.
Instead, he gets to his feet and moves towards the front door of Jeremiah’s cabin, unable to let go and bring himself across the line.
“Wh—… Joel? Where’re you going?”
The disorientation in Joey’s voice brings back the same sharp ache he felt all those years ago for Stephanie, but somehow even worse now because of how bad he actually wanted this. This kiss felt so right until he convinced himself it didn’t. It felt like Joey’s mouth belonged there, so why would he pull back?
Joel stops and glances back at the man he left alone on the couch, his arms feeling weightless and useless by his side. “I—… I’m sorry.” He means it, but he knows it’ll do nothing to help.
And then he’s gone.
The chilled air hits him as he races out into the night and closes Jeremiah’s front door over, his chest already starting to seize with panic. His heart hammers like he can hear his father’s footsteps chasing him from beyond the grave.
The cabin light faintly reaches across the grass behind him. Inside, Joey is probably still sat there on that couch, trying to figure out what he did wrong, wondering why Joel looked at him the way he did. He doesn’t deserve to be left like this, but like with most cowards, there’s a thick layer of selfishness generously spread on top. Joel could walk back in there and make it right, but he won’t.
He’s been tired of running from himself for the last fifty years, and even though he doesn’t want to run anymore, he doesn't know how to stop. Not yet at least.
AN: The Joel flashbacks just do something to me 😭 I'm fine... I hope you guys... enjoyed? It was really hard to write this one, ngl. Even though I didn't have the same experience as baby Joel (baby Joel 😭) growing up, I do have vivid memories of wondering why the way I felt was such a bad thing when I didn't even really understand what I was feeling in the first place. As a foster carer, I've always found it fascinating how these experiences in the early development of a child can lay dormant or fester over time and then reemerge in really ugly, harmful ways. Not even necessarily in relation to one's identify, but behaviours etc. I just really loved the idea of Joel's issues with accepting the idea of a partner being rooted in those traumatic childhood events and then it was all kept sealed because... y'know... single dad, daughter dies, world ends... all that stuff. And the additional layer is that he's struggling with his orientation. Joey's going to need a lot of patience for this one I think...
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'Discovery Channel' by Hayley Williams
Word Count: 9.4k
Previously: In the aftermath of Jeremiah being rushed to hospital and diagnosed with lung cancer, Joel stopped by to visit Joey and brought him over some dinner. Afterwards, Joel poured them a glass of whiskey and they ended up on the couch talking more openly than they ever have. Joel took Joey by surprise by kissing him before suddenly pulling back and fleeing, leaving Joey confused and questioning everything.
Summary: Joey receives some advice that brings him to a place he never expected to find himself in.
May 17, 2024
The Wyoming weather can’t make up its mind in this transitional phase before summer. Some mornings, the sky is split open and pale blue, but by afternoon, dark clouds have rolled in to taunt everyone. It reminds you of Ireland in ways. It’s weather that you can’t plan around. Getting dressed before every outing feels like a gamble.
Before your shift at the school, you make your way to Tommy and Maria’s to return the casserole dish. It’s been propped on the draining board since Wednesday and it’s the first thing you see every time you step into the kitchen. It triggers a replay of that look on Joel’s face after he kissed you. That microsecond where something curdled behind his eyes before he abruptly got up and left without an explanation.
Unlike the weather, Joel has not been hard to read. He’s made his position quite clear.
You haven’t spoken to him since. You’ve seen him, but he’s been doing a really poor job of hiding the fact that he’s deliberately avoiding you at every opportunity.
You’d nearly crossed paths with him on main street, but he awkwardly froze like a malfunctioning robot as soon as he saw you coming his way and turned like he’d forgotten something at home. The other night, he abandoned his drink and walked out of The Tipsy Bison when you arrived for the darts tournament with Michelle and Carol. He even swapped out of every patrol shift you two were scheduled together for. That one in particular hurt.
It all stings more than you care to admit, but you’ve made a reasonable effort to not sit with it for too long. Keeping yourself busy with work, taking care of Jeremiah and being downright exhausted has helped, but your mind fills in the blanks on its own, mostly late at night when there’s nothing left to drown it out.
The two of you let something happen after months of trying to figure each other out, and his immediate reaction was apparently to put as much distance between you as the town’s geography would allow. It’s left you feeling physically sick.
The dish has overstayed it’s welcome. It has to go today.
Maria is out in the front lawn when you round the corner onto their street, crouched over some shrubs with one hand braced on her lower back and the other pulling at something in the soil. Her bump makes the whole procedure look a little too precarious. The morning light suits her, though. She seems to inhabit this quiet, tranquil Friday morning in the most natural way.
She looks up as you approach, brushing her hands on her jeans. “Ah, Joey! How are you doing?”
“Not too bad, thanks. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to drop this back in case you needed it.” You hold up the dish.
She straightens, takes it from you and looks at it with a confused frown. “My casserole dish. How’d it end up with you?”
“Uhh, Joel brought it round last Wednesday… He said you saved me some casserole.”
The expression she gives you is something between bemused and mystified. “Huh. That’s funny. He told me that was for Ellie.”
For Ellie? Your brain snags on that for a moment before you make the conscious decision not to pull the thread and unravel. It doesn’t need legs.
“Hm, weird! Must’ve been a miscommunication,” you say, waving it off with a smile. “Either way, it was incredible. Honestly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, including pre-outbreak. And that’s not a low bar.”
Maria’s face beams with a thankful, delighted grin. One hand goes to her bump almost without thinking. “I’m so glad you think so! You know you’re always welcome. Any time.”
—
You’re ravenous by the time break rolls around, and not the manageable kind of hungry, but the kind that makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else. You find Michelle at the teacher’s table and drop into the bench across from her with your tray and a huff.
Your appetite has finally started to return from having consistent meals at the community hall. It has made a drastic difference in how you look and feel compared to the state you were in when you arrived. Your hair’s got more weight to it, your skin doesn’t have that dull, grey tone and you’ve stopped hitting a wall around 3pm where your legs feel like they’re filled with sand. Now, when you face yourself in the mirror, you no longer see someone whose soul and stomach have been hollowed out. You just see Joey.
Meat still sits outside the boundary of what you can manage. It’s a line your body has drawn and for now, you’re fine with not crossing it. The fact that you can even sit in the company of someone while they feast on the stuff feels like progress enough.
Michelle has really picked up on the absence of it on your lunch trays without ever really making it a big deal. No questions, no judgemental looks, no well-meaning comments about how important protein is anymore. Instead, she just started showing up with suitable protein-rich snacks for you that she prepared at home. Hardboiled eggs or her homemade trail mix consisting of sunflower seeds, dried beans and pine nuts she obtained through trades have been your personal favourites.
It’s a level of kindness and generosity that you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to repay, and you’re not sure if you’ve ever had a friendship that worked quite like this.
“Is everything okay?” Michelle asks, sensing the energy radiating off of you as soon as your butt hits the bench.
“Yeah, just… long week.” You chuck a few chunks of fruit into your mouth and don’t quite meet her eye.
She squints and points her apple slice at you. “Hmm. I don’t think so, mister. There’s something going on. You’ve been acting weird since last week.”
“Everything’s fine, don’t worry.”
Michelle stops mid-chew and gives you a look that makes it very clear she is not doing this with you today and you’ll need to cut the bullshit and talk.
You roll your eyes and drop your own apple slice back onto your plate. “Alright, fine. I’m in a bit of a pissy mood.”
“Okay,” she says, carrying on with her mouthful now. “And why is that?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
You look at her for a long moment, weighing up whether it’s a good idea to share what’s been going on. Even though you trust her more than most, you know how unhinged it sounds.
Then you glance around the canteen, checking the nearest tables to ensure no one is within earshot and lean in.
“You have to promise me you won’t tell a single soul. Okay?”
She blinks at the sudden intensity. “Alright, Jesus… You didn’t murder someone, did you?”
“No,” you tut, taking in a deep breath and trying to think of the best way to word it. “I, uhh… Joel… invited me over to his place, back in March, after the hearing… and uhh, he apologised for… y’know, being a huge prick to me since I got here.”
“Joel?” Michelle asks flatly. “As in, Joel Miller?”
“Yes!” you whisper. “But that’s not—… Something else happened.”
She crosses her arms and is already looking at you like you’ve just told her the sky is brown, but she lets you continue.
“Last Wednesday, he showed up at Jeremiah’s cabin and he brought me dinner. Because I was so busy all week moving in and cleaning up the place and stuff—”
“I’m sorry, what?” she interrupts, putting her fork down. “What do you mean he brought you dinner? Joey, I get that he vouched for you and all, but there’s no way that sour sack brought you d—”
You groan. “You know what? Never mind. I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“No, no, no!” She flicks her hand at you. “I’m sorry. I’ll shut up. Keep going."
You readjust on the bench and take one more sweeping glance of the room to ensure only she can hear the next part. “We had dinner. Then we were just talking on the couch and…”
The end of that sentence hangs on to the tip of your tongue like its life depends on it.
“And?” Michelle says, both eyebrows raised.
“He kissed me.”
You can’t look at her. The noise of the canteen fills the silence between you, other people’s conversations, the scratch of chairs, someone laughing three tables over. It goes on for what feels like several minutes.
When you do finally look up, she’s just gawking at you. Then, she loses it. A wheeze of disbelief that splits into full, helpless laughter. She grabs at her sternum and tips forward, cackling loud enough that it draws attention from people at nearby tables. It carries on significantly longer than you’d like.
Eventually, she looks back at you, her eyes wet from tears. She finds you glaring at her with the flattest, most unimpressed expression she’s probably ever seen on a human face. The laughter dies down.
“Oh…” she says softly, wiping her waterline with her sleeve. “You’re being serious."
Your jaw grinds. “You think I’m joking? You think I’d make that up?”
She drags her teeth across her bottom lip, studying you closely.
“Joey,” she says, both forearms coming down on the table. “I’m gonna ask you something and I want you to be dead honest with me. Okay?”
You wait.
“Are you on drugs?”
Your palm slides down the full length of your face. “Oh my God. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m sorry!” She holds her hands up in defence. “It’s just— no offence, but you sound genuinely insane right now.”
“I know!” you hiss, dropping your voice again. “I’m aware it sounds insane, but it happened.”
Another beat of stillness and quiet. She idly pokes at what’s left on her plate, processing the information.
“Okay, so, why are you so upset about it?” she asks, in a tone that suggests she’s trying to be as helpful as possible. “Is he a bad kisser or something?”
“No, it’s not—,” you say, pressing a knuckle to your forehead. “He’s just been avoiding me like the plague ever since and it’s fucking with my head. You remember how he got up and left when we went to The Bison the other night? He’s swapped out of all our patrol shifts too. He doesn’t want to be near me.”
She grins to herself. “Maybe you’re the bad kisser.”
Under different circumstances, you’d have given her that one. Right now though, you don’t have it in you to find the humour in any of this.
“You don’t have feelings for him, do you?” she asks, quieter this time.
At first, you’re not sure what the answer is, but then you think about the way your mind drifts to him when he’s not around and the way your body reacts when he is. You think about how it felt sitting next to him on that couch, how it feels to patrol alongside him, his face right before the kiss.
“I don’t know, maybe…?” you mumble. “I just don’t know where he stands. I might actually be insane.”
She reaches across the table and gives your forearm a squeeze. “No! Good for you! I mean, he’s a handsome guy, right? Yeah, he’s a miserable, rude, cuntfaced, twatgoblin, but I’m sure a lot of people here would love to have a man like that giving them attention.”
“Well, like I said, he doesn’t want to give me any attention right now. He’s going out of his way to do the opposite, so…” You throw another piece of fruit into your mouth. “I just want to know why. Why go through all the effort of apologising to me, being so thoughtful, kissing me and then leave me to just… question everything.”
“Go to his house,” Michelle says matter-of-factly, like it’s the most obvious next step.
“What?”
“Go to his house,” she repeats, clearer this time. “Just show up. Ask him. You deserve some answers at least, right?”
“I can’t just show up at his house, Michelle.”
“Why not?” she shrugs. “What’s he gonna do, move to another settlement? Huh, if only. The worst that could happen is he closes the door in your face, but then at least you’ll know for sure where you stand with him.”
It’s irritatingly sensible. You sit with the thought of it, running through the different ways it could go, what you’d say, how you’d hold yourself depending on how he answered… Then, the bell cuts across everything loudly, bringing the lunch hour to a close.
Michelle starts gathering her rubbish onto her tray. “Arron is going to be absolutely devastated,” she says. “He’s been convinced this whole time that you had a thing for him.”
“I didn’t know he was into guys,” you reply.
“I don’t think he is,” Michelle says. “But then again, no one would’ve guessed Joel Miller was either.”
—
May 19, 2024
The sun started to set by the time Jeremiah was put to bed and you’d eventually plucked up the courage to drag yourself over to Joel’s. You’d spent most of Friday evening and all of Saturday catastrophising and running through every version of how this could go badly. Michelle was right though. The only way you were going to get any answers was to just show up.
A week and a half without him around impacted you way more than you’d anticipated. It didn’t register with you how much space he’d taken up in your day-to-day until he was gone.
Even Ellie has been scarce lately. She’s been more absorbed in her homework than usual or disappearing down to the animal shelter for hours. Whether that was her own choice or whether Joel had an influence in it, you don’t know. Either way, their absence was getting to you.
Every step down his street feels like it had some extra slog in it. Something in you wants to stall, think of an excuse not to go and turn back. You could go back to Jeremiah’s cabin, sleep on it and try again another day.
No. Keep going.
As you reach the end of his yard, you remember it’s Sunday. He could be at Tommy and Maria’s for their routine family dinner. There’s a gentle, domestic glow coming from behind one window though. Someone must be home.
You knock three times, measuring the force of each one so it doesn’t sound too demanding or hostile.
Familiar footsteps come rumbling towards the door from inside and your gut sinks with panic. Even if you ran now, he’d still see you. This is it.
The lock turns and the door swings open.
Joel’s face drops the moment he lays eyes on you. It’s the same expression he would wear if he answered the door to find you holding a gun to his face. He stands there in a grey t-shirt, plaid pyjama bottoms and socks. He looks oddly reduced somehow, like a smaller version of himself.
“H-Hey.” The greeting comes out coarser than you’d intended. “Sorry, I— uhh… just wanted to stop by. To talk.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. He just stands there gripping the door like it’s a shield with the colour drained from his face.
You fill the silence for him.
“Can I come in?”
He nods before dropping his gaze to the floor and stepping aside to let you through. As you walk past him, you feel a twinge of guilt. You’re clearly interrupting what was a quiet, peaceful evening for him. The last time he looked this fearful was right after the infected attack outside Wilson Elementary.
“Is Ellie home?”
You step into the middle of his living room and shrug your jacket off. The fire is going, everything else is exactly as you’d expect it to be. Nothing out of place and nothing to read into.
“No.” His voice is as rough as sandpaper like his throat is drying up. “She’s at Tommy’s. Won’t be back ’til late.”
“How come you’re not there?”
“Didn’t feel like bein’ around anyone tonight.”
That kills you a little. Choosing isolation, especially in this world, is never a good sign.
There’s no point wasting any more time with small-talk. You’re already inside his house. There’s no real graceful way to ease into what you want to say so you just take a deep breath and throw it out.
“Alright… What happened at Jeremiah’s?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. What was that all about?”
His jaw shifts. At some point in the last thirty seconds, his own home became a corner he’s been backed into. He stands completely still with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, the firelight casting golden warmth across his face like it doesn’t know or care about anything either of you might say tonight.
He exhales through his nose. “It was… nothin’. It was the whiskey, I shouldn’t’ve been drinkin’—”
“Bullshit.” The word cuts through him curtly before he can finish that made-up excuse. “Don’t give me that. You barely had one glass.”
He looks at you helplessly and loses the ability to speak for a moment. There isn’t really another angle on this he can try and sell you, and he knows that.
“Things like that don’t just happen, Joel. Was it a mistake? Do you regret it? Is that what it is?”
He turns to the fire now as it continues to crackle softly in the background. Then he shakes his head, almost to himself. “No…”
“Then why have you been avoiding me? Why did you swap patrol partners?”
“I— I don’t—…” He presses his mouth shut and then opens it again. Nothing coherent is coming out. He’s sifting for something to give you but ends up with nothing substantial to offer. “I don’t know.”
You let the silence do its work for a second before you carry on.
“Look, if you want to pretend like it never happened so we can just move on, I’m willing to do that for you. But it did happen. And as much as I hate to admit it, I was actually enjoying spending time with you. And not just because of Ellie.”
He can’t bring himself to look at you, but he’s listening. You can tell by the tension in his features.
“I was even starting to look forward to our patrols. Even though there’s about a million things out there that could kill me, I stopped feeling scared. I stopped caring. Because I knew being out there with you, I was gonna be safe. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry the way I always do.”
He swallows whatever he’s feeling, not even blinking as he keeps his eyes fixed on the flames.
“I’m sorry.” It comes out low and feeble. “I didn’t wanna avoid you. I… don’t know what’s goin’ on inside my head.”
His breath rattles, like he’s willing himself to say what he desperately wants to say. You hold your ground, letting him have the space to keep talking.
“I just… I can’t stop thinkin’ about you.”
The words land with a pain and desperation that don’t fit the sentiment. Your heart kicks behind your ribs and a warm tingle spreads to your extremities nonetheless. His admission seems to surprise him more than it does you.
“I haven’t been able to for a while now,” he continues. “And it scares the hell outta me.”
There’s nothing you could say that would match the weight of it. Nothing articulate, anyways.
For the relatively short amount of time you’ve known him, one thing about Joel was always clear: vulnerability was where he fell short.
He’s courageous in ways, pathetic in others. He’s a man that’s moulded by the things that have happened to him and those he loves. And standing here before you, is a man that’s terrified of his own natural instincts. You’re catching a glimpse of a version of him that he may never have allowed anyone close enough to see.
He waits for you to respond stood still as stone.
“I can’t stop thinking about you either,” you say before you think, barely above a breath.
His eyes come up then, wet at the edges and glistening in the dim light. Something behind them changes. There’s a relief and disbelief in them. It seems as though he wasn’t anticipating it.
The fire continues to burn and the room holds its breath waiting for one of you to do or say something.
You start to close the distance slowly. One step, then another, and another, until you’re right in front of him. He doesn’t move back or withdraw. He just watches you enter his space and chooses to let you stay in it. But there’s a war in his mind. He’s grappling with the question of whether he’s allowing himself this, whether he’s capable of it without letting something break somewhere down the line.
Your eyes drop and you trace the backs of your fingers up his forearms at a languid pace, feeling for any hesitance, but there is none. Your hands travel up to his shoulders and then his neck until they’re cupped against either side of his jaw, thumbs brushing just beneath his ears. His skin emanates the warmth you’ve craved since you last felt it.
Somewhere in the inch between you, he sways forward slightly like a magnetic pull is bringing you together. You gently guide him the rest of the way, bringing his face to yours.
The kiss starts careful at first, just like last time, but before long, the carnal need takes over. His hands find your hips and they haul you into him until there’s no gap left. Your knees dissolve slightly and your legs almost buckle from the sudden euphoria coursing through you, but he anchors you in place to keep you upright.
It’s uncoordinated and a little graceless at first with the both of you scrambling to find a rhythm. He moves as you do, like two people who haven’t been able to be like this with someone in far too long. It’s like you’re both learning it all over again — teeth gnashing, controlling your breath and letting go of whatever holds you back so you can give yourself fully to each other fearlessly.
You take clumps of soft, greying curls at the back of his head and feel him push further into you with a low sound from his chest like you hit a switch.
He starts turning you around, walking you backwards until your shoulders find a place against the wall so he’s got you trapped there. All of his broadness and weight stationed against you leaves no room to move. Not that you’d want to.
His hands cradle your face now, holding you together while yours drop to grab the hem of his t-shirt. You notice the absence of whiskey on his tongue as it finds yours. Instead, there’s an irresistibly fresh yet muted scent of vanilla, pepper and something woody on his skin. He must’ve showered not long before you showed up and used something created by the local soap-maker on the east side of the settlement. He was pampering himself tonight.
He nudges your chin sideways with the bridge of his nose to expose your neck before digging beneath your jaw with warm, wet kisses that dismantle you even more. The graze of his moustache against your pulse point followed the pull of his mouth has you grasping at his chest just to stay vertical.
You’re making little sounds you can’t remember ever making and it seems to just spur him on more. It gets to the point where his arousal becomes more pronounced and is pressed against your leg making it impossible to ignore. His knee slots perfectly between your thighs to give you support and something to roll against as your body starts to move not of its own accord.
When you try to angle your head away to buy yourself a moment’s reprieve, he shifts with you, easily finding another spot to attack like you’ve offered it to him as a gift. It’s relentless enough that it’s maddening, but you let him do it anyway because nothing has ever felt this good.
He eventually eases off slowly after a few minutes, giving you a chance to reassemble and manage your surging heart rate. His mouth traces your jaw and returns to yours, softer now with the urgency dialled down a notch.
You rest your palms flat on his chest then. Beneath them, his heart hammers just as wildly. Something about actually feeling it like it’s evidence hits more profoundly than anything that was said tonight.
He pulls back just enough to take in your flushed face and dizzied, wrecked state. It makes him become more heedful when he examines and realises he’s responsible for it.
“Was that too much?” he mumbles with his voice low and tender.
You shake your head, still not quite back in your body yet. “Joel?” His name comes out on a thin breath. It’s suddenly too much to look at him directly, so your eyes fixate on his mouth until you manage to ask the question. “Can you… take me upstairs?”
He’s still got you pinned against the wall, but his breathing starts to slow. He’s thinking. You can feel it in the way his chest moves under your touch. Letting you in this much and giving in to his desire has already taken a mental and emotional toll. This is asking for considerably more, possibly too much. But he sees the same need he has in your eyes and hears it in your voice.
He studies you deeply for one more long moment before swallowing and nodding. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Okay.”
He doesn’t say anything else. He just finds your hand and leads you to the foot of the stairs before stepping back to let you go ahead of him first.
That momentary separation as you start to climb does something unexpected. Clarity comes rushing in uninvited. What are you doing? This is a mistake. You’ll end up regretting this.
It floods your mind for exactly a second before you forcefully flush it out. You’ve wanted him since the day you first laid eyes on him, even if you hadn’t realised it yet. Over these last few months, you broke through his exterior and found fragments of what was buried beneath.
And now there’s just the two of you and the libidinous hunger you’ve both finally realised you have for each other. Whatever this is or whatever it’s about to be, it’s been coming for a long time and now it finally belongs to you both.
He directs you towards an open door at the end of the landing and pushes through it ahead of you.
You step in after him and go still. His bedroom.
Streetlight bleeds through the windows, casting shadows across his blue-green walls. There are cluttered surfaces everywhere, but it’s somehow not untidy. It’s the organised chaos of someone who makes and fixes things. Wooden desks and cabinets line every wall. Shelving units hold small toolboxes, ornaments and carvings of different animals in various stages of completion.
Then you see a horse you recognise.
It stands proudly on the desk in the corner like it was recently finished. It’s powerful and carved with an incredible levels of detail. You drift over to it without thinking. Up close, you register that this is unmistakably an immortalised sculpture of Old Beardy. It has the same scars running along his flank, rendered in careful cuts. The fact it even exists makes your heart swell. There’s no doubt a lot of time and care was put into it. It’s exactly what Old Beardy deserves.
Behind you, Joel moves somewhat anxiously around his room, pulling flannels off the back of a chair, turning on lamps, drawing the curtains closed. He’s tidying up. Making the room presentable for you now that you’re in it. It somehow feels more intimate than the kiss.
When you turn around, he’s at the foot of his bed watching you again.
He crosses the room to you as you toe off your boots, losing an inch of height in the process so now he’s just slightly taller than you. As you stare up into his face, you see a particular tension in his forehead, like there’s something holding him back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’.” He pauses. “I just… haven’t done this before. With another man, I mean.”
Maybe that should be obvious, but it still surprises you for some reason that he’s thinking about that. You turn the thought over for a second, then wet your lips to speak. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s been so long that it might as well be new for me too.”
He nods, not quite cracking a smile, but still holding something stringent in his chest. You can see it in the clasp of his fists.
“It can be slow,” you say gently. “It can be just for us. We can stop at any time.”
Something in him releases then. It’s subtle but visible in how his shoulders drop half an inch and the weight in his brow loosens. You’d never thought you’d see Joel Miller look like he might crumble. You want to gather him up and be the thing that makes him feel as safe here as he makes you feel beyond the walls of Jackson.
His eyes fall shut when you reach up and push a curl back from his forehead. Then you take his face in your hands and pull him back down to you where he belongs.
The kiss deepens by degrees after a minute. His hands move to the front of your flannel and he fumbles with the buttons as he works his way down. You shrug it off before pulling your t-shirt over your head. He’s already removed his by the time you surface. The first press of his hot, bare skin against yours pulls a needy gasp from your chest. It’s like first time experiencing comfort in your life. Everything clicks into place.
He walks you around to the side of the bed now and lowers you down, his arms tucked beneath you like he’s carrying something valuable, something that matters to him. Then he settles over you. It should feel stranger than it does to have him on you, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
His weight sinks you into his mattress, your legs curl into his waist and your arms loop around his neck to keep his mouth on you. He starts dragging his lips down your jaw and throat, pressing a string of soft, half-open kisses that makes the front of your jeans throb.
He starts moving lower, his mouth now on your chest, then your ribs, every kiss astonishingly attentive. His facial hair grazes the scar on your stomach on the way to your navel and your whole body flinches with an involuntary jerk. Your hands fly down to his head to grab his hair with no real intention of stopping him.
He rises up onto his knees and looks down at you, taking a breath for himself. He steps back off the bed entirely, shoving his pyjama bottoms to the floor and kicking them away. He reaches for your belt buckle then, swiftly undoing it, unbuttoning your jeans and working them down your legs. You kick them the rest of the way off. He picks them up and folds them neatly before draping them over his chair.
By the time he turns back, you’ve already pulled off your boxers. He goes completely still at the sight.
He’s not staring at your body necessarily, he’s just staring at you, the whole of you, rearranging any idea of you he had in his head before tonight. His throat moves as he swallows. The reality of it seems to be resolving all at once. You’re here, on his bed, no longer confined to his imagination.
He exhales through his nose and pulls down his own boxers. They take a thin, gleaming thread of precum with them as he steps free, kicking them away without caring where they land.
Now there’s nothing left to hide behind. You’re both completely exposed, figuratively and literally.
Unlike him, you ogle him without apology at first. He’s always had a physical authority about him, but this is way different. Then, the poignancy and sensitivity layers over it. Whatever fear you harboured for him when you first arrived is long gone. You just see him as the man he is. The man you sensed was beneath the armour this entire time.
Stripped down and standing in his own lamplight, you can’t deny that he’s one hell of a beautiful specimen. His posture, the breadth of him, his tanned skin, the dark eyes still fixed on you — it’s enamouring. His cock is full and glossy, commanding in how it takes up the space between his thighs. It makes your mouth water and leaves you silent, but not out of shyness.
He slowly climbs back onto the bed, crawling over you again and picking up where he left off, kissing you like he’s been thinking about doing it long before tonight. You feel him wet against your thigh, his precum warm and coating wherever he drags against you. You return the favour. Within a minute, you’ve left a similarly sticky veneer between your stomachs.
For you, this feels like finally doing something you’ve deprioritised for the last twenty years because there was always something else to handle. For him, it’s more complicated. It’s a lifetime of repression that’s unwilling to stay buried any longer. But in both of your cases, this is only happening because you both feel safe enough to let it.
When the opportunity presents itself, you manoeuvre your legs to roll him over. It takes him off guard. That brief, boyish flash of surprise crossing his face as he ends up on his back and finds you above him instead. You look at each other. The same thing passes between you that passed downstairs earlier, that hushed, total transfer of trust. You want him to really feel it.
Starting at his ribs, you drag your mouth down his side, making him jolt from each kiss. Small but rough heaves catch in his throat. You shift your body down between his legs and settle there, your palms smoothing up and down the planes of his body, learning his shape.
The scent changes the closer you get. It’s richer, muskier and more primal. His cock twitches impatiently at your jaw, flushed and waiting for you. He watches you with his lips parted and his palms pressed flat like he’s grounding and preparing himself.
A combination of kisses to his inner thigh opens his legs a fraction. Then you take his shaft in hand and notice how much more warm and rigid it is compared to the rest of him.
More precum bubbles at the tip as your hand starts to move, but you bypass it for now and move lower instead. When your mouth finds and bathes his balls, he loses any composure he was holding on to. His head snaps back into the mattress, eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he rasps, his throat turning red and corded from it. His hand grasps your shoulder and squeezes tight.
You take him in at last, your lips closing around his swollen head. The groan that comes out of him is raw and instantaneous. There’s no performance in it at all. One of his hands seizes a fistful of sheets, the other takes your hair and grips, his knuckles pressing hard into your scalp and his back bowing up off the mattress before he forces it back down.
From below, you watch his chest rising and crashing with each breath. He’s quivering already and his legs draw up the sheets on either side of you and then fall back like he can’t decide what to do with himself. You keep your mouth moving at an irritatingly lax pace, taking far too much pleasure in watching him writhe and come apart with unstoppable tremors.
It’s starting to get to you too. The heat and taste of him. The salty and tangy warmth keeps you chasing more. His sounds don’t help. Each one pulls you a little further into it, making you want to give him more just to hear what comes next.
“Fuck, Joey,” he mutters, your name sounding like a frayed plea now.
You come up for air, breathing harder than you thought you would be. “Is that good?”
His eyes find yours. “Yeah,” he pants, and there’s nothing casual about how he says it.
All of this starts to get under your skin. A man like Joel Miller, someone with a reputation, has been reduced to a moaning mess for you. He really does want you.
“I wanna try on you,” he says then, starting to prop himself up. “Lay back.”
Following the order, you release him and reposition yourself in the middle of the bed. He sits up too fast, blinking hard like he’s seeing stars and still reeling from pleasure. Then he makes his way down between your legs and stares up at you, quiet and a little uncertain but trying not to show it.
He starts with his mouth at your thighs. Soft, patient, careful kisses that make your fingers curl into his hair before you’ve consciously decided to put them there. Your legs are already shifting and shaking from the gentleness of his lips.
He copies what you’d done beat for beat. His tongue flat and dragging carefully against your sack, an attentive grip on your shaft and enough effort to send hot electric through your entire body. His other arm hooks under your leg and his palm lays flat on your stomach. When you reach for his hand with yours, he takes it, lacing your fingers together and squeezing back to let you know he’s got you.
Then he takes you into his mouth without preamble and immediately registers the new taste.
Your spine rises off the mattress and the sound you make is unplanned. He makes another of his own, messy and guttural against you as he finds his rhythm with your length pulling back and disappearing again with each movement of his head.
He watches everything. Every hitch in your breathing, every time your hips move up into him, every time your grip tightens around his fingers. He’s really trying. He’s learning this and you as he goes.
You’re barely coherent and shivering from ecstasy by the time he stops minutes later. Blissfully spent, panting and damp at your hairline and lower back. He climbs back up your body and finds you waiting for him, and something in his expression eases at the sight of the state you’re left in.
He combs the wet tips of hair away from your forehead with his fingers, studying your face in the low light with a lingering thoroughness.
“How’s that?”
“Incredible,” you manage, still half-gone. You pull his body flush against yours again.
The smile that forms on his face is sheepish but grateful. He turns a knuckle and gently strokes it slowly down your cheek, continuing to stare. No words. Just intense intimacy.
“Do you want to keep going?” you ask. “Like, further?”
He reads your expression carefully, looking for any doubt behind the yearning. He seems to find what he needs, because when his eyes land on yours again, the tension in them has shifted.
“Yeah,” he murmurs quietly.
His mouth finds your chest again, then your throat, then the soft skin just under your ear. He shifts his weight and eases your legs apart with his knees. When he rises over you again, he stops. A small crease appears between his brows.
“Uhh…” He glances between you. “How’s this gonna work?”
You sit up on your elbows again and it hits you as you look around the room, as if a solution might be sat on top of one of his shelves. The only lubricant you see is an old slightly rusted can of WD-40. The two of you arrived at this point on momentum and need alone. Too entangled in each other for practical considerations.
“I suppose we just use what we’ve got. Spit.”
He doesn’t look convinced, but you can see his problem-solving dials turning. “I got vegetable oil in the kitchen. That any good?”
You huff a small laugh and wince at the idea. “Probably not. I don’t think it’s— no. Spit’ll do.”
He lowers himself and starts to place kisses against your forehead. “I don’t want it to hurt you.”
The thoughtfulness and instinct only makes you want him more. You nuzzle your face into his, pressing a couple of loose kisses to his chin in return. “It won’t. Don’t worry. We just go slow, remember? Start with fingers. I’ll be fine.”
He lets the last of his resistance out in a breath against your cheek and watches as you settle back down against the mattress. Behind his eyes, there’s something silently resolute telling you he means it. He wants to handle you with care because that’s just how he operates. He wants to get this right.
Between the two of you, you gather enough saliva to manage for now. It’s not graceful in the slightest, but there’s no way for it to be. If your past experiences pre-outbreak have taught you anything, it’s relaxation is key. Even more so when you’re working with no lubricant and someone who hasn’t done this before.
You let your eyes close and consciously try to let the tension dissipate out of every muscle until you feel light under him. The pad of his finger finds your rim and circles slowly at first and you feel the attention in every movement. He’s learning the language of what your body does when it’s touched like this, cataloguing every change and reaction with that concentrated look on his face.
Then the pressure begins. Your breath snags and you start talking yourself through it internally: relax, breathe, relax, breathe. The tip of his finger eases in and an unintentional but honest sound slips out of you. He continues steadily until his knuckle rests at the threshold and he’s watching your breathing go shallow.
“How’s that?”
“Fine. It’s good,” you say hoarsely, eyes still squeezed shut and chewing on your bottom lip, trying to sound convincing. It’s like you forgot how meaty his hands and fingers were.
He’s not sure if he believes you, but he starts to move in and out with a rhythm that’s slow enough that it doesn’t ask too much of you. He’s realising in real-time what kind of tightness he’s working with.
Then you feel the first give of loosening, the initial surrender of tissue beginning to yield, giving up the tautness in increments. The sounds you start making are small and are almost words. He feels the moments your hips shift closer to him, a wordless invite for more.
When he works a second finger in alongside the first, the stretch tests you further, even with more spit and care applied with it. It’s a slow negotiation of the limit. Your hand finds his sheets again and your knuckles burn white from the grip. He sees it and dips down to press his lips to your sternum, then your collarbone, then your throat. A slothful stream of kisses as his fingers keep pumping in and out of you.
And then he curls them slightly.
The noise you make isn’t one you’ve heard yourself make before. “F-fuck!”
“Yeah? Like that?” He keeps the angle. Keeps pumping slowly.
All you can manage is a nod and weak whimper. Each kiss he presses to your mouth doing its own work in relaxing you further into a blissful stupor. Gradually, he begins to move more freely and your breathing pattern becomes less restrained. He’s managed it.
“I think I’m ready for more,” you say, low and almost lazy with want.
His eyes scan yours again and sees the ease and comfort in them. One more worshipping kiss pressed to the centre of your chest before he pushes himself upright and settles back between your legs. He still has traces of uncertainty about his own ability in his face, but he pushes through it.
He props your leg up on his shoulder and you watch as he coats himself with one last palmful of spit, measuring and turning the next move over in his head. Then he shuffles in closer to you, his thighs resting against the back of your legs, one hand holding them apart and the other gripping the base of his shaft and guiding his tip into position.
He looks up, letting you know it’s coming.
Your voice cracks a little when you speak. “Slow. Okay?”
Relax, breathe, relax, breathe.
The warmth of him arrives first before the force, and then it builds until there’s no ignoring it. Joel holds himself still, barely breathing, maintaining just enough to keep you working against the resistance. When his tip breaches, the sting is sharp and splitting, making you clamp your eyes shut and grind your teeth to keep the noise inside.
“S’that hurt?”
“No.” The lie hisses through your teeth. “It’s fine.”
He reads into it, pulling back and adding more spit to try again. He gets in a little further this time. Minutes slip by and barely any progress is made. The room goes quiet around the two of you, just breath and effort, the stubborn work of it. He grunts with frustration when he leans in harder but can’t seem to pass through more.
“Jesus, it’s so fucking tight.”
“Twenty something years’ll do that.” The attempt at diffusing the strain with humour does absolutely nothing for either of you.
He’s determined and keeps at it, enough that your eyes snap open with the shock of it when it feels like it’s about to work. Your hand goes searching for his and you clasp your fingers around his thumb when you find it, squeezing hard and puffing air out through pursed lips.
And at last — finally — he sinks all the way in, his pubic hair pressing against your skin and that feeling of fullness making you gasp. You let out a string of small, helpless sounds as you feel the pulse of him inside of you and your body starts to adjust around him. Your forehead and chest shine with the sweaty result of every muscle in your body getting you through it.
“There we go…” His voice goes soft again. His hands planted either side of you. “How’s that feel?”
“Good…” A breath. “Really good.” You exhale slowly, taking the silence that follows to let yourself settle around him. “You know, for someone who’s never done this before, you did a great job.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. His chocolate brown eyes melt for you even more. It’s funny, even a little ridiculous, but it clearly means something to him regardless.
He waits for you to level out and then his hips start to roll. The friction burns at first. He sees it in your face and dials it back, waiting, giving your body time to catch up and meet him. His focus is entirely on you.
“Feels so fuckin’ good,” he mutters, watching himself disappear inside of you.
It's not quite there for you yet, but the heat is building and your head goes back firmly against the mattress. It’s enough that it feels good for him.
He sees the exposed line of your throat, the red flush rising up your neck, and he folds himself down into you, his mouth finding your skin again, pressing delicately against your Adam’s apple and then towards your shoulder. His moustache grazes and it dissolves you entirely. Every muscle fizzles at once and your whole body turns to liquid underneath him.
He feels the ease of how he slides in and out of you now. “Yeah, that’s it,” he breathes against your ear, building a pace that starts to make the room blur and spin.
He begins to thrust a little faster and with your body fully relaxed, his girth starts to work for you rather than against you. It’s a type of pleasure you’d long forgotten. It takes the air out of your lungs and makes your legs shake as they try desperately to hold on to him.
The headboard is now rattling against the wall in an unapologetic way. His face is pressed against your clavicle and the things coming out of his mouth get filthier and less coherent the deeper he gets into it and into you.
You take a fistful of the hair at the back of his head again as the sounds barrelling from your throat change from shy whimpers to something unbound, each one interrupted by the force of his thrusts.
He’s sweat-slick and scorching to the touch, the aroma of his labour at full intensity. You reach a hand between your bodies and take hold of your own cock and feel your first, clean shot of uncomplicated pleasure as you start to tug.
You don’t get the chance to do much with it though. His moans suddenly morph into something hoarser and urgent, the pace quickening as he starts to lose the thread of control. He grunts unselfconsciously against your neck like he’s past the point of holding back.
And then it happens.
Unannounced, he seizes with a full, shuddering convulsion as he cums, his cock pulsing deep inside as warmth spreads through you. His thrusts lose their strength one by one until he slows to a stop.
You hold him through it, one arm around his back and the other in his hair, keeping his face close to yours and steadying him through the aftershocks as they ripple through him. He shakes vigorously against you as everything drains out of him entirely. He goes heavy against your chest, his cock still twitching inside of you while his breath remains ragged and warm against your neck.
“Fuck… holy shit,” he pants.
You weren’t ready for it to be over just yet, but you hold on to him because you’re not sure what else to do. By the time he pushes himself up and looks at you, you haven’t got your face together to disguise what’s going on in your head.
He finds something he was afraid of finding and you watch it register with him in layers. Shame first, then the embarrassment of the clumsily early finish, the rawness of being this exposed, and then the same expression that broke you after the first kiss. The immediate fear followed by the urge to put the walls back up. He looks like he knows he can’t undo what he just did. He fights it, trying to stay present and out of his head. You can see it happening right in front of you.
“‘M sorry,” he says quietly and slightly panicked.
“For what?” You keep your voice even and gentle. Not just to protect him, but you as well. “That was great.”
He looks at you like you’re being kind rather than truthful and swallows. The doubt sits plainly in his face and he doesn’t try to hide it, which is almost worse. Joel has nowhere to retreat to. He’s in his own home, his own bed. He starts pulling away, out of you, out of the bed, before you can say anything else. He looks around his room like he’s searching for the nearest escape route.
“Gonna go clean up,” he says, already stumbling loose-legged towards the en-suite.
You listen to the water running, to him clearing his throat once, twice… the ordinary sounds of someone trying to collect themselves. Your own mind starts to kick up in the quiet, retracing those last few moments and looking for the point where he snapped back, whether it was inevitable, whether you could’ve done something to prevent it.
Just as you’ve worked yourself into a state of low-grade dread, he reappears in the doorway.
You climb out of his bed and meet him halfway across the room, pressing a kiss to his mouth that’s barely returned. His eyes remain open for it.
“Be right back,” you say, slowly slipping past him and into the bathroom.
The clean up is brief and rushed, but you grip the edges of his sink and pause a minute to stare at yourself in the mirror once you’ve taken care of the bodily fluids leaking out of you, which included a small trickle of your own blood.
The marks of passion cover your body, but your eyes have a consternation about them. He’s going to wound you again. He’s going to withdraw into himself for days, maybe weeks, maybe forever. This could be the last time you ever have any sort of contact with him. You can’t let him do it to you. Not again.
He’s back in bed when you return, on his back with his forearm draped over his forehead. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling with a particular blankness in them, like has been arguing with himself for the last several minutes. You hover in the doorway and watch him for a moment before speaking up.
“I think I’m gonna go.”
It seems like the fairest, most sensible thing to do. Give him the privacy to spiral in peace and deal with whatever has a hold on him. Keep yourself distant and out of his way and try to find something else to keep your mind preoccupied until the hurt goes away.
But his arm comes down and his head turns. The look on his face is immediate and undefended, like he’s stricken by it. “Huh?… you’re leavin’?”
You don’t know what to make of it.
“Yeah. Jeremiah’s home alone. I need to check on him. And Ellie could come back any minute.”
He sits up like he might need to get out of the bed to stop you. “No, n-no. She won’t—” He stops and gathers himself. “Stay for a while.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Joel.”
“Please—” His voice is dry with desperation and his longing eyes hold you in place across the room. “Even just for an hour.”
Two contradictory things happen in your chest at once. Your heart breaks a little for him because of the particular vulnerability it takes for him to ask out loud like this. But it also warms at the fact he’s asking at all. He hasn’t retreated yet or gone cold like his history would lead you to expect. He’s sitting there with it written all over his face and he’s letting you see it. For someone like Joel Miller, this might be one of the bravest things he’s ever done.
“Okay,” you nod. The word comes out soft and shapeless. “An hour."
You lumber back to the bed and climb in beside him. He lays back down and watches you settle and pull the sheets up over you. Some of the tension leaves his face now that you’re there next to him.
Then, without a word, he turns over, faces out towards the room and shifts back against you. You understand straight away. He wants to be held by you. You move in closer, chest to his back and your arm sliding under his. Your lips find his shoulder and then the warm, thick skin at the back of his neck. His hand comes down over yours and closes around it. He exhales slowly and lets himself go heavy in your arms, sinking back into you like he’s finally found serenity.
Silence and stillness befalls the room. There’s nothing but the sound of the two of you breathing yourselves into a haze of calm.
For that one hour, nothing else exists except his warmth. The suffering of the last two decades, the threat of what the future holds — none of it matters here in his bed.
All there is is this.
And that’s enough.
AN: Heh heh heh... FINALLY! This was a chunky one and took a lot of time and rewrites to get it the way I wanted it. Take it as a sincere thank you for sticking with the story this long. I really hope it paid off and you enjoyed it. As always, there is plenty more of that to come, which I'm sure Joey will be thrilled to hear lmao. We just have to let our boys warm up to each other, shake off the rust of the last twenty years and figure each other out. But who knows, maybe something really tragic is coming in the next few chapters. WHO KNOWS? 🫠
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'I'm Your Man' by Leonard Cohen
Word Count: 7.6k
Previously: Tommy interrupted Joel and Joey’s private kiss and tasked them with a last-minute supply run to Dubois, a town the community hadn’t visited yet. Once alone, Tommy confronted Joel about the kiss, assuring him he just wanted him to be happy. On the supply run, Joel and Joey were ambushed by a group called The Disciples. Joel brutally tortured one of them for information but they had to flee when a horde of infected showed up. Their only discovery is that The Disciples are somehow led by David.
Summary: Joey’s home alone, still shaken from the events in Dubois. He intends to spend the weekend in solitude but a knock on the door disrupts those plans.
June 1, 2024
Saturday morning rolls in like a welcome breeze. You’ve just cleared the last of the dishes and put the kitchen back in order after breakfast. Jeremiah has marched himself back to bed now that he’s been fed and sorted. The only thing left on the agenda for the morning is to brew yourself a fresh cup of tea. The ritual of it alone feels nostalgic, like the last twenty years never happened. As long as there’s teabags in the tin, you’ll always have that connection to home.
When Tommy tasked you and Joel with the supply run to Dubois, time off duty didn’t seem that impressive of a reward. But now that you have days ahead of no responsibilities other than to relax, it feels like its actually paying off.
Hot steam rises from your mug and it’s just about to reach your lips when there’s a soft knock at the front door. The specific kind of knock that can only belong to one person.
You set the mug down and march into the hallway, pulling the bolt back and swinging the door open to find Joel standing there with his hands tucked into his pockets acting like he just happened to be passing by. He straightens fractionally when he sees you. It’s as though he wasn’t expecting it to be you answering the door.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hey,” he answers in a quiet voice that matches his knock. His eyes flick over your shoulder and then back. “Is everythin’ okay?”
You frown and follow his line of sight, checking behind you. Strange question to ask. “Yeah. Why?”
He lingers on you for a moment, still scanning for some sort of problem he was preparing to find. “Oh. Uhh… I just… didn’t see you yesterday so… I wanted to make sure you— everythin’ was alright.”
You lean against the doorframe, hang the tea towel you’re holding over your shoulder and try to figure out what this is about. “Everything’s fine. Was I supposed to come find you?”
A visible awkwardness takes over him then, the slightly bowed head, avoiding eye contact… He’s realising whatever reasoning he had in his head to be here sounds different out loud.
“No… no,” he mutters. “Uhh… Just thought maybe you—… maybe you’d’ve stopped by. That’s all.”
Then the penny drops.
The supply run has changed things. You spent two full days in close quarters, slept rough together and survived yet another near-death experience when you were ambushed. He must’ve expected that thread would carry on without a break once you got back. A little over twenty four hours apart and he’s on your doorstep assuming something’s wrong.
The man fucking misses you.
You chew down on the inside of your cheek and try to keep your face neutral. He’s becoming more and more insufferably endearing with every passing day and he’s getting really bad at hiding himself.
“Oh,” you say a little sheepishly. “Sorry. I was just wrecked after we got back. I still feel a little… off, to be honest. I haven’t really left the cabin. Jeremiah had a rough day yesterday too so… thought it’d be best to stay in.”
His posture adjusts subtly, his shoulders decompress like they’ve given up on carrying unnecessary worry. “Wish I’d known,” he says. “I’d’ve stopped by.”
“I know,” you smile. “But I’m fine. Really. Nothing I can’t handle.”
He accepts that with a nod and euthanises whatever else he had been queuing up to say because he’s now fully aware that his concern is starting to look like hovering. There’s no way he’s going to apologise for turning up, though. That much is evident.
“Well...” He clears his throat and his eyes drift away for a half second. “Seein’ as Tommy’s got us off patrols for a while… figured we could… y’know… spend some time together. Properly. If you wanted.”
Properly.
Nearly every hour you’ve spent in each other’s company has been underwritten by something else or tied to some form of duty. He must have noticed the distinction too. As much as you enjoy riding the route for patrol alongside him and putting yourself in danger for the sake of the settlement, the idea of just being together with no need to be on the defence sounds like a dream.
A grin bypasses your composure and surfaces on your face. The tops of your ears go pink and you’re suddenly more aware of your heartbeat.
“Just us?” you ask. “As in, like… a date?”
Saying it out loud makes him shift on the spot and dip his head with a crooked, shy smile. At fifty-six years old, in a world that has been largely inhospitable to joy for two decades, the word “date” should sound absurd to someone like Joel Miller. And judging by his face, it does. He seems to find it more funny than mortifying though, which feels like progress.
He pops a shoulder. “Somethin’ like that. Yeah, I guess so. If that’s what you wanna call it.”
You feel your cheeks going embarrassingly rosy. “Alright then. How about this afternoon?”
The speed of it almost makes him stumble. “Uhh… Sure. Did you have somethin’ in mind?”
“Nope,” you say simply, still smiling. “That’s your job. You’re gonna have to surprise me.”
You can pinpoint the exact second the gears behind his eyes start to malfunction. The task, the timeline, the fact he’s been commissioned with less than four hours notice and no idea where to begin. His eyes trace briefly down the street before returning to you with something to offer.
“Meet me at the stables,” he says. “Midday. There’s someplace I wanna take you.”
That alone kindles something in your chest.
You throw a glance up and down the neighbourhood to make sure no one’s about and then step out from the doorway, taking two fistfuls of his jacket collar and pulling him forward into a kiss. He clearly wasn’t ready for it because his hands haven’t even made it out of his pockets by the time he’s in it, but his mouth goes soft against yours in the way that it tends to.
You hold him there for longer than strictly necessary, partially to make up for those lost twenty four hours, but mostly just because you want to. When you let him go, it takes him a second to come back.
“See you later then.”
You’re back in the cabin and the door’s closed shut before he’s managed to catch up and reassemble himself. He stands there on the other side of the door, flustered and disorientated, now needing to focus on getting himself organised for midday.
—
Joel is halfway home when he becomes aware of how fast he’s moving. His stride is stretched to the point it’s almost a sprint. His arms work at his sides and his breath has picked up from the pace of it. Anyone that happened to see him would assume he was late to something very important.
Hand the man a faulty pipe or wonky chair and he’d have it fixed before you’ve even finished explaining the problem. Planning a last-minute date is another matter entirely, and one he has had zero practice at.
By the time he’s through the front door, there’s a damp patch forming between his shoulder blades and under his armpits. He takes the stairs two at a time, does a frantic and rather ineffective job at fixing himself up in the bathroom, then grabs his backpack from his room and heads back down to the kitchen.
The plan is straightforward enough: pack a suitable and decent lunch, get to the stables before midday and don’t embarrass himself in the process.
He starts opening and closing cupboards like a maniac, taking things out, reconsidering and putting them back. It goes on for longer than he’d like. Eventually, he arrives on something universally loved and within his own capabilities — peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
He lays out four slices of bread and reaches for a knife in the drawer. It slips out of his hand and cracks against the counter. He picks it up, swears quietly to himself, scoops up some of Elise’s chokecherry jam and drops it again with another sharp clatter. This time, it leaves a dark, sticky smear across the surface.
He stands there for a moment and stares at it, trying to keep a lid on things.
He cleans it up, resets and tries for a third time. This time, he actually gets as far as getting the jam onto the bread, but he’s too rough with the knife and tears a large clump clean out of the centre of the slice.
“Fuck,” he spits, chucking the knife into the sink with way more force than is called for.
The noise disturbance draws Ellie out of her room. She comes rumbling down the stairs and rounds the corner into the kitchen, unsure of what she’s about to walk in on.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothin’,” Joel grumbles, shoving the ruined piece of bread to the side.
She cranes around him, too nosey for her own good. “Peanut butter and jelly? Why are you making peanut butter and jelly—”
“Mind your business.”
She pulls a face at the back of his head, the same one she does whenever Joel gets a little snappy. “Well, if you don’t wanna tear up the bread like that, try using the back of a spoon instead. That bread’s too soft.”
He glares at her over his shoulder with a look that communicates, among other things, that he did not ask for her advice.
“Joey taught me that trick,” she adds smugly. “Works every time.”
His jaw tightens as he stares at her for another moment, then opens the cutlery drawer and fishes out a spoon.
“Is that other sandwich for me?” she asks.
“No.”
“Then who’s it f—”
Joel sets down the spoon with a little too much feeling behind it. “Why do you always have so many questions?”
She shrugs, completely unbothered. “Just asking. I already ate something. And I want to know who you’re making a second sandwich for.”
“A friend,” he says plainly before returning to the bread.
She stays put, looking at him with her head at a slight angle when she notices something unusual about him. He feels her staring from the side and looks back at her.
“What?”
Her brows pinch together. “Did you comb your hair?”
At first, he doesn’t know how to respond. He lets the silence hang for a sliver too long. His hand almost reaches to tussle it back to his usual state.
“Uhh—… hair’s just gettin’ a little long,” he says, continuing to coat the bread and praying that’s the end of her interrogation.
He shunts the discarded slice of bread across the counter to her with the spoon. “Here. Eat it. Don’t let it go to waste.”
She approaches eagerly like she’s about to claim a prize but then stops when she gets close enough to him. She leans slightly more and sniffs the air around him, picking up on an unfamiliar woody, spiced scent clouding around him.
“Are you wearing cologne?”
He freezes and turns two shades paler.
Now he’s really caught. In 2024, cologne is reserved for the most special of occasions. Funerals, weddings, anniversaries, dates… Certainly not for random Saturday afternoon plans with a “friend”. People trade medicine for cologne. The stuff is like liquid gold.
Instead of giving her any sort of response, he just privately curses her sharpness and finishes wrapping up the sandwiches in cloth with rushed concentration so he can get out of the kitchen as fast as possible. He tucks them into his backpack along with two flasks and a couple of other provisions before zipping it up, slinging it over his shoulder and bolting.
“I’ll be back later,” he says. “Do your homework. Tidy your room.”
“Have fun,” she calls after him, taking a bite of her mangled bread with a satisfied smirk plastered on her face.
—
Joel has Dusty ready and waiting by the time you get to the stables a little after midday. Dusty senses your presence first. Her ears swivel and flutter pleasantly the way they do when you’re near. Joel notices it and follows her attention around to find you crossing the yard in his direction.
His face does something that will take time for you to get used to. It opens like the sun breaking through dark clouds when his eyes land on you. It’s unfathomable that this is the same man who sat across from you at your council hearing four months ago radiating pure hostility.
He reaches up and smoothes over his hair with his gloved hand.
“Sorry,” you say, a little out of breath. “Traffic.”
He ducks his head into a chuckle.
“You look…” You pause to take him in close up. “handsome.”
He short-circuits behind the eyes. His brain clearly hasn’t been wired to receive compliments, so he starts glancing around shyly like an appropriate response might be spray-painted on one of the stables.
“Uh— thanks. You too. But… you always do, so… s’not really… anyways—”
His awkwardness is disgustingly charming. All you can do is smile wide.
“I— uhh… was startin’ to think you were standin’ me up,” he says.
“I thought about it,” you tease playfully. “Jeremiah talked me out of it though.”
His expression changes from thinking you were being serious to realising you were joking. He huffs another little laugh and then sets Dusty’s body brush aside. “How is he?”
“Better than yesterday. More like himself this morning. Bit more stable.” You look out in the general direction where his cabin would be. “I just felt terrible when I realised I’d be leaving him on his own all day. He said it was okay, so… But I managed to rope Arron into checking in on him later. That’s why I was a little late.”
“Well,” Joel says. “I’ll try not to keep you to myself for too long. We’ll just be gone a few hours.”
Then, he does a quick scan of the yard to ensure no ranch hands are about, grabs hold of your hand and steers you around the side of the building where the stabled back up against the fence line. It feels like it happens in one fluid motion. One moment you’re by Dusty, the next, your back is up against the wood and he’s on you.
He kisses you warmly, like he’s finally getting back at you for the kiss at Jeremiah’s front door. His hands settle at your waist and anchor you there while he does his thing. His hips press into yours and the breadth of him swallows you up.
Admittedly, you’re still a little rankled with the arrangement of having to sneak around and stay in the shadows to feel safe. It’s a tax that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It won’t last forever because it can’t, but for now, it’s just him and just you.
When he eventually pulls away, his breath grazes your face and his eyes have gone soft in that way that drives you insane.
You breathe him in, and when you do, you catch something out of place with it. Something artificial and intense. Not his usual scent.
“Are you… wearing a fragrance or something? You smell different than normal.”
His cheeks flush pink and a small, reluctant smile follows. “Uhh, yeah. Little bit. Why, how do I normally smell?”
“Like… man. And… outside.”
He grins wide, unable to take his eyes off of your lips as his thumb makes a single slow pass across your cheek, right below the scratch caused by the wall chipping after the Disciple shot at you. “That a bad thing?”
You lean and take another kiss from him, then another. “Definitely not. I’d take that over whatever the hell that is any day. It’s nice though.”
He gets you back immediately by digging his fingers into your sides, making you fold against him laughing and trying to shield yourself. You’re both left grinning when it subsides, and you can’t help but compare and contrast him to the version of himself that would’ve been incapable of this level of openness mere months ago.
“Ready?” he asks, once you’ve both gathered up enough composure to be trusted in public again.
You nod, your cheeks still warm and eyes twinkling at him. It feels like your heart is physically expanding in your chest the more you let him in. There’s only one word to describe how you feel in this very moment: smitten.
—
The sky above Jackson opens out wide as you pass through the gates, pale and washed-out blue. It makes the whole stretch of land feel bigger than it is. The sun is out and bright white overhead, but it doesn’t offer much warmth.
Five minutes down the trail and you’re still having to remind yourself that there’s no checkpoint to reach or report to fill out today. Joel chose a direction and you’re following. The only thing that is expected of you today is being by his side.
Most people would feel the need to fill the pockets of silence that linger between you on the road. You don’t with him. There have been maybe four people in your entire life that have made you feel like you can be quiet in their company without them thinking it’s time wasted. Joel is now one of them.
Instead, you find yourself watching him from a few paces behind. He rides Old Beardy with an effortless authority. His eyes comb the landscape with that systematic quality of his. Your thoughts drift to the way he assessed you from above in his bed. You try to steer your mind away from it before too much heat pools in your gut and it becomes a problem.
“You’re still on the lookout,” you say.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t break focus. “Habit. Can’t be too safe. Not out here.”
He’s not wrong. The Disciples wouldn’t hesitate if they saw an opening. The infected don’t know today is your day off. The world outside the walls doesn’t allow you to ever truly take your guard down. The difference today is that he’s not watching out to protect the settlement, he’s watching out to protect you.
“Feels weird, doesn’t it?” you say. “Having no duty today. I was nearly going to drop in to the school just to find something to do while the kids were home. But then you knocked.”
He glances back over his shoulder at that, one eyebrow slightly raised and a smile just beginning. “Well then, aren’t you glad I did? You say that like you’d rather be at the school.”
“Of course I’m glad,” you say. “I just hope the surprise is worth the trip.”
He turns back to the road ahead with a quiet laugh moving though him. You find yourself smiling at the back of his head like an idiot, eager to get your hands on him.
“Have you been playin’ that guitar much?” he asks then.
“Yeah, actually.” You smile to yourself. “Usually in the evenings. I’ve played a few songs for Jeremiah. I’m still a little rusty, but it’s some entertainment for him at least. It’s been nice getting back into it.”
He tilts his head back, eyes moving upward to the canopy like he’s trying to construct what that scene looks like in his head. Jeremiah in his armchair, you with the guitar on that same couch he kissed you on, strumming away by the fire.
“What was that song again? The one Ellie said you were gonna teach her.”
“Take On Me,” you reply. “My all-time favourite song. I promised I’d teach it to her soon actually… I must get on that.”
“I wouldn’t worry for now,” he replies. “She’s gotta get better at chords first. Been tryin’ with her, but she ain’t there yet.”
You glance sideways at him. “She’ll get there. Look how quickly she picked up the bow.” It’s silent for a few seconds. “How long did it take you to learn to play?”
He sits a little taller in his saddle. “Been playin’ since I was a kid. I… always thought I’d be a singer growin’ up.”
That steals your attention. “A singer? You sing?”
“Not well.”
“Huh,” you sigh, nudging closer on Dusty. “Now you have to sing me something.”
“Absolutely not.” He doesn’t even hesitate.
“Why?” It comes out in a half-laugh.
“I’m not singin’ in front of you.”
“Come ooon,” you press. “Just something small. For me?”
“No. Forget it.”
You let it go for a total of five seconds.
“Maybe I just need to get a few whiskeys into you.”
“There’s not enough whiskey in the world. S’not happenin’.”
You nudge Dusty up even further until you’re level with him. “Mark my words. Before I die, I’ll make you sing for me.”
—
“Are we almost there?” you groan, massaging your fingertips into the base of your neck where tension has been building for the last hour. “My back is killing me.”
“Uh huh.” He tips his head forward. “There she is.”
The trees fall away on either side. The trail lifts and crests before bringing the surprise into view. Jackson Lake.
It’s vast brilliance takes your breath away instantly and makes you still on Dusty without meaning to. The pale but luminous water extends out far and wide and shimmers like crown glass. Green crowds the banks and beyond it, the mountains stand tall and resilient, their peaks dusted with snow that still hasn’t left. It’s enormous in a way that makes everything else feel small and unimportant.
Across the water, a row of faded red cabins sit along the far bank beside what appears to be a boathouse with a narrow pier stretching out into the shallows.
It looks like a fucking postcard.
Neither of you speak for a long moment. Joel doesn’t need to. He’s too busy enjoying the view of watching you experience this for the first time from the side.
“How did you find this place?” you ask once your breath comes back.
“Been out here a few times,” he says. “S’pecially lately. Usually when Ellie’s at school and I need someplace quiet to clear my head. Thought you might like it.”
He takes the horses closer to the shore where the ground flattens out, ties them to a post and settles them.
Once again, he’s bringing you into a space that he keeps only for himself. It’s hard not to wonder what brings him here when he’s in need of an escape. Some of it is probably obvious, but the longer you know him, the more you’re starting to understand that Joel’s history is confidential. He’s not an open book by any means, but he’s slowly allowing you to turn the pages to discover new details every day.
When he returns, he shakes out a red and white blanket over the most suitable patch of grass and places his backpack in the middle to anchor it down. The pair of you lower yourselves with mutually aged grunts. Your boots are off and you’re leaning back on your hands to take the pressure off your spine within seconds. The breeze moves over your socks, soothing your sore, overly warm feet. The sun casts down across your skin and the sound of distant birdsong fills the air.
Joel has barely looked out at the lake since you arrived. He’s still too transfixed watching you take it in and the way you’re squinting into the sunshine and how it highlights the subtle sheen of sweat along your hairline from the journey.
“So,” he says. “Whatcha think? Like it?”
You give a soft hum of agreement first, unable to pull your eyes away yet. “Sometimes I forget places like this still exist out here. Outside the walls.” You turn to him then, meeting his gaze. “It’s beautiful.”
There’s no hiding the satisfaction on his face. There must be something significant about seeing you sat here admiring a place where his mind has castigated him.
He reaches into his backpack and starts laying things out between where you lay. Two cloth-wrapped bundles, a couple of apples and some napkins.
“What’s all this?”
“Lunch,” he says. “Peanut butter and jelly.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah,” he chuckles lowly. “You really think I’d take you all the way out here and not feed you?”
“No, it’s just—” You watch him set an unwrapped sandwich out in front of you on it’s cloth. “I’ve never had peanut butter and jelly before.”
He pauses unwrapping his own. “What d’you mean you’ve never had it? It’s PB&J.”
“It’s not really something we had in Ireland,” you explain, picking it up and examining it curiously. “Even when I moved here before the outbreak, I just never got around to trying it.”
He takes a large bite of his own and chews like he was eager to eat. “Well, go on then. Try it. Lemme see.”
You look at it one more time before committing. It’s not something you’d call beautiful. The colour clash is rather unappealing and the mix of textures is questionable at best. And yet, despite the aesthetics, the fact he made it for you makes it special.
You take that first bite.
The softness of Elise’s bread hits you, then the salt of the peanut butter clings to the roof of your mouth. Finally, the sweetness of the jam pulls it all together and makes it a masterpiece.
“Lord almighty,” you manage around your mouthful. “That’s fucking delicious.”
His expressions softens even further somehow.
You tear off a corner of it with your fingers and hold it out for him. He looks at it tentatively before leaning to take it in his mouth. Unplanned, you smear a blob of jam on his nose, leaving him frozen in place and both of you tittering like teenagers.
“Hold on,” you say. “Come here.”
You stretch over his way and shamelessly suck the jam off the tip of his nose, leave it with a single kiss and retract back.
“I did bring napkins, y’know…” he grimaces playfully, wiping the trace of you off with the back of his hand.
“Can’t let Elise’s jam go to waste.”
The sandwiches are done when he dips into his backpack again and pulls out one of the maroon coloured flasks and hands it to you. “Brought you some coffee too.”
That’s what does it. A small breath comes out of you. You take the flask and stare at it. To him, this is just a thrown-together picnic he had virtually no time to prepare for. For you, it’s proof that something you stopped believing in still exists when people put in the effort.
On the shore below, the lake moves with a slow, serene rhythm. Your heartbeat eventually matches the pace without trying and suddenly it’s really obvious why he would travel all the way out here.
Over thirty minutes of sharing stories from being on the road go by in a blink and suddenly your hands are wrapped around your flask and your nose hovers over the steam, chasing the heat with every sip.
Joel notices when he looks over. “You gettin’ cold?”
“A little bit,” you reply, looking up at the sky like someone’s to blame for turning the temperature down.
“Why didn’t you say?” He’s already clearing the clutter from the space between you. “Get on over here.” He opens an arm out like it’s an invitation you can’t refuse.
You shimmy across on the blanket into his side and his arm draws you in close. Now you can both just gaze out at the pale water and watch it wash in and out against the banks.
Joel reaches down and takes one of your hands and turns it over in his as if he’s examining it for something. His skin is coarse and calloused where yours is soft, but there’s an indisputable warmth from him that seeps into you. His thumb moves gently across your palm, tracing idle circles before his fingers fold over yours.
“Jesus, your hands are really cold,” he mutters.
He lifts it to his mouth and presses brief kisses to your fingertips. His breath follows, hot against your skin as he exhales over them. Then he closes your hand back in his again and holds it like he’s determined to keep the heat in.
“I think we needed this,” you say after a moment goes by. “After the last few days.”
He makes a low sound of agreement deep in his chest. He looks down at the top of your head resting against him. “Thought that might’ve been the reason you stayed away yesterday.”
You tilt your head up slightly to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“What happened before we got out of Dubois…” His eyes glaze over for a second. “Thought maybe I scared you off… or you felt different about me now.”
There it is. The real reason he was on Jeremiah’s doorstep this morning.
“No,” you say, resting your head back down. “I don’t feel different. I think I just forgot what it’s actually like out there. Having a place to call home again — a real home… Having people I care about. Having people that care about me. I think I was starting to let myself get a bit too soft. Dubois just reminded me you can’t be soft. Not anymore.”
“You sure that’s all it was?” His mouth remains close enough to your hair that you feel his words as much as you hear them. “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad guy.”
You shake your head. “I don’t. But does it still feel that way for you? Do you still feel it? Does it all still feel wrong? Having to go to these lengths.”
He looks off into the distance now, the breeze lifting a few strands of his hair. “Yeah,” he murmurs eventually. “But we did what we had to do.”
That brings you some relief. Maybe subconsciously you feared that the brutality came and went a little too easily with him, even the type of brutality that was necessary to keep you both alive.
“I just kept seeing it on the ride back to that farmhouse,” you say. “His face. The blood. I kept replaying it over and over all night. But I understand it.”
His expression loosens then like he was bracing for a different reaction.
“I’m still scared though.” You stare out at the water. “Of The Disciples. About what that guy said. They know where we are. What if he wasn’t just crazy? What if David is still out there? What if he’s coming for Ellie—”
“Stop,” Joel says firmly. “David’s gone. We’ve been through this.”
“But what if—”
“Joey.”
It’s not unkind, but the tone in his voice makes you lift your head again. He meets your eyes and holds them.
“Today’s not for that. Today’s just for us. Nothin’s gonna happen to you or Ellie. Not while I’m here.”
His unreserved adamance makes you go quiet so you can only listen.
“I don’t want you to be like me,” he says. His thumb starting to run along the back of your hand again. “I want you to be soft. It’s better for Ellie, havin’ someone like you around. You can give her things I can’t. You’re strong in ways I’ll never be. And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it that way.”
It’s less of a promise and more like a declaration of intent. And you have no choice but to believe he’ll see it through. The next breath you let out takes some of the worry with it.
You reach up and slide your hand to the back of his skull and let your fingers thread into his hair. You’re drawing him down, but he’s already moving into you without resistance. His lips are warm against yours, giving more than they take and alleviating the last of the tension in you.
He sets your flask aside and guides you down onto the blanket carefully until you’re flat against it. His body follows and presses you into the grass, grounding you there beneath him.
Sunlight dapples with calm flickers on the surface of the lake behind him and the breeze picks up for a minute, but the broadness of him absorbs it before it has a chance to reach you.
His hand travels over your sternum before slipping beneath your flannel searching for contact and your heat. That first touch of his skin against yours near your waist pulls a small jolt and gasp from you. He remains focused on seeking out your little sounds like they’re your own language he’s still learning.
Your arms stay draped around his neck, keeping him there while the rough slide of denim on denim makes your chest flush red with arousal. Your legs snake together like they belong and his hand travels further up until he’s got a hold of your breast. The smell of his skin, the lingering taste of lunch, the way he takes his time with you… it pulls you apart where you lie until you’re a puddle.
When he finally lifts away, you’re left chasing your own breath. The world around you has gone slightly blurry now. He’s the only thing you can see with edges.
He props himself on one elbow and stays close enough that he blocks out the sun still. He studies the smoothed out lines around your eyes, the movement of your throat, the way your bottom lip disappears behind your teeth as you look back up at him. He brushes a stray curl from your forehead with the back of his fingers.
A barely visible smile blooms in his expression. It’s as though he keeps expecting you to stop being real and is persistently surprised every time he realises you still are.
—
The day is already ceding by the time you’re on the road back home. The sun hangs lower in the sky and the late-afternoon chill starts to make itself even more known. Clouds of flies hum in clusters around the nearby trees, floating like a set of breathing lungs.
Joel rides beside you, eyes still scanning ahead but quietly pleased with what he’s left behind at the lake.
“I’m headin’ to Tommy’s tomorrow night for dinner,” he says after a stretch of silence. “Gonna fill him in on Dubois.”
You glance over at him. “Oh yeah? Thought you would’ve done that already.”
“Made more sense to wait ’til Sunday dinner. Have everyone there.”
You nod and focus back on the road then. Any sort of treks outside of the settlement, particularly ones that venture into new territories, are always reported back in-person. That’s just how Tommy likes it.
“Hm, good luck with that one,” you say. “Don’t forget to mention all of the wonderful things you can buy down at The Pleasure Chest.”
Joel shifts uncomfortably in the saddle then, and not because of the joke, but because of the implication behind it. “You not comin’ along?”
It’s something you weren’t necessarily expecting him to question. You think on it for a second before replying.
“I don’t know… Might be best if I don’t. I thought maybe we should give it a bit of time before we start… y’know… being around Tommy together. Give him a chance to get used to the idea of it.”
That makes him pause in a way he never has before. It’s unclear whether he’s genuinely considering it or feeling some sort of guilt that his own fears have bled into how you think through these things too.
“No,” he murmurs eventually, shaking his head and looking back out in front of him. “I don’t want us to do that. We went to Dubois together so we go tomorrow together.”
A lump forms in your throat. Maybe he’s running on the high the day brought with it or maybe he’s truly changing. Even though some part of you is genuinely anxious about being around Tommy and allowing him to see you in this new light, it’s still peculiar to hear Joel push for it. Tommy’s a good friend to you and he was clear he had no issue with it, but the circumstances in which he found out still puts you on edge.
“You sure?” you ask quietly.
Based on the faraway look in his eyes, it’s evident he’s going through the exact same thought process you did and questions it one last time. Being sat around a table with you and his family should be the same as it has always been, but it won’t be this time. It could all feel a little to exposing. But Joel gave you his word. He said he was going to make this work.
After a moment, he sniffs and exhales when he lands on a decision. His posture straightens and he nods.
“Yeah.”
—
The ranch hands are long gone by the time you make it back. Lamplight pools in the stable corners and the horses start to settle into their evening with pleased huffs and the occasional flick of a hoof in hay. The two of you work through the routine of untacking and brushing down Dusty and Old Beardy and getting caught up in the comfortable domesticity of it.
When you straighten up and turn around, he’s already finished and leaning in the doorway with his hands tucked into his pockets, watching you patiently in a way he doesn’t bother trying to conceal.
You rinse your hands in the basin and towel them dry before joining him at the entrance. “Ready to go?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes your hand and pulls you back out into the cooling evening air and around to the back where the lamplight doesn’t reach. He places you against the wood and surveys every detail of your face before closing in and trapping your body against the planks with his. His mouth finds yours in the dark. He always starts soft. Moving your head with his, following the give and pull of it.
Not even a minute goes by before he’s migrating below your jaw and into your neck. He knows exactly where to go now. He’s learned your favourite spots and how to undo you without mercy. When you start vocalising what it’s doing to you, he just gets more laser-focused on drawing more sounds out of you. One hand cups your face, the other holds you by your waist. His knee slots between your thighs and when he starts to feel you squirm helplessly against him, it just makes him worse. He’s hell-bent.
Then you feel it against your hip.
Firm and insistent through the denim, his cock presses into you. The moans have gotten to him. His hips roll carefully into you and his own breath starts to shift into a different register.
Your hand moves down and over the front of his jeans without deliberation, feeling the taut strain of him trying to break through. Within seconds, your other hand has his him unbuckled and unbuttoned. Your hand dives into his boxers and pulls his cock free. It’s warm and heavy in your palm and already slick at the tip.
The cool hits him and he pulls a sharp breath through his nose.
He groans into your mouth when start with long, purposeful pulls of his shaft. He breaks the kiss to look down briefly, as if just to confirm what’s happening, and then his lips are back on you.
Lubricated with his own fluid, you add a slight twist of the wrist to your motions, and when you do, the kiss slows to a stop. His mouth stays pressed to yours but he goes still. Small, fractured breaths jet out every other second and his eyes remain shut. His brow furrows like he’s desperately trying to keep hold of his composure.
His forehead drops to your shoulder and his palms land flat against the stable wall on either side of your head. The sounds he makes against your neck are rough and untamed. You don’t let up. The pace builds into fuller strokes as the minutes pass. Eventually, his weight starts to increase against you and his hips pitch forward like he’s chasing the end.
“Are you getting close?” you murmur against his temple.
He nods, his head becoming even heavier on your shoulder. “Yeah… Keep goin’… Don’t stop…”
Now you’re determined. You work harder, maintaining your grip but allowing enough of a slip to move smoothly. “Yeah, that’s it…”
“Aw, fuck— Joey…” He makes a quiet, strangled sound and his palms ball into fists. “I’m gonna cum—”
His mouth slams back over yours to inhale you as he tips over the edge, spurting warmth through your fingers in hard pulses and spilling into the grass below. You slow gradually, easing him through orgasm and lightening your grip at the tip, wringing out the last of it until he’s jolting against you in oversensitive aftershocks. The shaking subsides slowly and his breath finds its way back.
Lazy kisses scatter across your neck and then up your jaw, his mouth not quite following a particular direction, just pressing wherever it lands while his cock twitches back to softness in your hand.
When he pulls back to look at you again, there’s very little left in him. Just traces of relief and longing. Nothing needs to be said. The dark holds the moment and the intimacy of it still carries the newness of this underneath.
“I’ll get you a towel,” you say at last.
You slip around the corner and return a moment later. He cleans up in silence, buttons himself back up and sighs, his eyes not calming until they find yours again.
He leans against the wood now, reaching low for your hand and leading you back into his space. He settles his hands on your hips and keeps you there, observing your face like he discovers something new about it every time.
“Let me walk you home."
—
As you make your way back through the settlement, your instinct is to keep a sizeable distance between you. The cold is making that hard to adhere to though. The temperature has dropped enough that you’re hunched over with your hands buried in your pockets and trying not to brush up too close to Joel.
The streets are oddly quiet for a Saturday evening. The Bison should have people coming and going by now or neighbours should be making their way between houses for weekend plans. Instead, there’s almost no one around. There’s just the quiet electrical hum of the streetlights overhead and the crunch of your boots on the gravel below. The cold snap must’ve convinced people that staying in was the better option.
Once you’ve moved through Main Street and are closer to the residential areas, you do a quick sweep in front and behind before slipping your hand into his. Straight away, you feel him freeze and almost pull away. He looks down at your joined hands and then also performs a quick scan of the surroundings.
“What’re you doin’?” he asks under his breath.
“My hands are cold,” you reply. A long moment of silence passes. “Is that okay?”
He exhales softly through his nose. “Yeah, just— we gotta be careful.”
“No one’s around. It’s fine.”
His hand stays loose in yours rather than closing tight around it, so you can’t even fully enjoy the warmth of him without feeling like you’ve caused him to be on alert again. Sure, it’s risky to show a public display of affection like this, especially for him. But after the day you’ve just shared together, it has left you embarrassingly needy and craving his closeness even more.
His hand slips from yours when you reach Jeremiah’s tiny front gate. He pushes it open with a soft screech and walks you the rest of the way up to his door where the small porch light barely reaches his face.
He takes you in one last time, checks the perimeter and then leans in and kisses you. It’s soft, but way too brief for your liking. He pulls back before you’re ready for it to be over and you almost follow his lips without realising.
A look passes between you that doesn’t need explaining. This is what it’s going to be for a while. Exhilarating highs behind closed doors and then the dull crash of checking over shoulders and standing apart when others are around. This isn’t what you want and he knows that. Switching between different versions of yourself to shield him from shame takes a toll even though you’re willing to pay it if it means you get to be his.
The apology lingers permanently in his eyes and you’re learning to get used to it. If you tell yourself this is only temporary enough times, maybe the sting will go away.
“Thanks for today,” you say quietly. “I really enjoyed it.”
The smile he gives is just with his mouth, but it’s genuine. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Frustratingly, it only makes you need him more hearing his voice so quiet and delicate.
“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
Once you’re inside, you close the door gently behind you and press your forehead against it. You stand there in the quiet of Jeremiah’s hallway and listen until his footsteps reach the end of the garden path, the front gate screeches shut and the sound of him is gone entirely.
AN: 🫠 Oh to have Joel Miller show up on your doorstep all needy and missing you...
I really hope you enjoyed Joely on a date <3 I love planting little easter eggs in this story by the way, iykyk!
Some BTS updates... When I started posting TTGWM back in December, I had twelve chapters backlogged to give myself plenty of stuff in the bank just in case I had a busy week or was not at home to post. Five months later, and I now have 2 chapters left in my bank ☠️ Life has been busier than expected and I've also spent a lot of time further developing later parts of the story which has naturally eaten into actual writing time. I really want to keep this a weekly thing, so in order to do that, I will very likely be taking a week or two (maybe more, I'll keep everyone updated on my socials) to just top up the bank a little bit and focus on just writing. It might seem like I'm taking a "break", but I assure you, I will be tippy tapping furiously on this keyboard because there's so much coming and I want to dedicate sufficient time to it while also not becoming irregular with posting. It works out nicely, because chapter 29 (which is where this pause is going to start) is the end of this current act. Chapter 30 is where we reintroduce some chaos, so enjoy the fluff while it lasts 😈 I guess Chapter 29 is the end of TTGWM S1 if it were a HBO show.
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'I Walk the Line' by Johnny Cash
Word Count: 3.8k
Chapter cover artwork by @valevntine
Previously: Discovering that Joel was being secretive with Tommy and Maria about his time with Joey deeply hurt him. This led Joey to want some space. However, during patrol, Joel attempted to apologise but Joey wasn’t ready to see things from Joel’s perspective.
Summary: Friends offer both Joel and Joey valuable advice that could change the trajectory of their budding relationship.
May 27, 2024
For Elise’s second masterclass, she had settled on making oatmeal cookies. At every station, there are tubs of rolled oats, bowls of soft brown sugar and butter that was left to soften since this morning. You’d spent most of the morning at Elise’s side weighing portions out for each student pairing, and now you’re content to just hang back against the far counter and watch it all unfold.
Elise wraps up her introduction with a natural, welcoming ease as if she’s done this a million times. It’s like watching a nostalgic comfort cooking show. “Any questions before we get started?”
A hand goes up at the far left. Daniel, a fifteen year old, sitting forward in his stool.
She gestures for him to speak.
“Your oatmeal cookies are my favourite thing from the bakery,” he says. “My mom tried to make them once, but they turned out all crunchy and weird. How do you make them so chewy?”
The smile she makes could warm the room. “Years of practice and plenty of butter.” A few chuckles move through the room. “They were my husband’s favourite too, actually. I used to make a batch every single Sunday morning and they would be long gone before dinner time.”
Her gaze drifts out across the rows of students then. She suddenly appears to be a little unfocused.
“I stopped making them for a while when my husband passed. They kept reminding me of him. But then I missed making them because that was the whole point. So I started again. And now I get to share all that love, all those memories with everyone. There’s nothing more important than sharing whatever love you’ve got with the people around you.”
Without realising, you stay stuck on that thought as she moves into the demonstration. Elise is a product of what Jackson offers people. She arrived here hollowed out and alone without much to have faith in. Tommy and Maria gave her solid ground to grieve on, helped her reclaim the passions she once had and allowed her to rebuild. There’s a profundity to it that pulls you so far inward that you lose track of time for a few minutes.
“Now, I’m gonna need somebody to volunteer to be my kitchen assistant to help with this next part,” she says.
Half of the room’s hands go up. Ellie’s arm shoots up so fast she almost knocks over one of her ingredient bowls.
Elise looks over the sea of raised hands and laughs, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, gosh. I can’t possibly choose. Joey, my dear, will you pick someone for me?”
You push off the counter and clear your throat like you’re giving it real consideration. Your eyes move slowly across the room. The students stare at you eagerly, but you already know who you’re choosing.
“Ellie.”
The grin that splits across her face is immediate and enormous. She’s off of her stool and weaving through to the front of the room before everyone’s hands are down.
You watch her track Elise’s every move with a level of attentiveness she only reserves for things she actually cares about. She follows every instruction given to her with a confidence she didn’t possess a couple of months ago. Something about it, something about her, makes your chest warm.
All you can do is watch from the back of the room, smiling privately to yourself.
—
By the time you’re walking up the small footpath to Jeremiah’s cabin door, the last light of the day is stretching with a golden glow across the overgrown grass. Between the morning prep, the masterclass itself and the demands for a third one, you’re already mentally horizontal and ready for an evening of absolutely nothing.
You should be flattered and leaping at the opportunity for more work to keep you busy, but the thought of another morning gathering and measuring out ingredients fills you with a specific type of dread. That's a worry for another time. For now, the priority is tea and getting the pressure off your feet and lower back. Jeremiah’s front yard has never felt longer.
After pushing through the front door, you hang your jacket up and make your way to the kitchen, already imagining what it’s going to feel like collapsing into your bed later.
Jeremiah is pottering about near the stove, which is a sight that still brings on a small wave of relief every time you see it. He has his better days and his worse ones. There’s still an occasional hitched breath, still a carefulness in how he moves from one surface to the next, but he’s upright, alert and still managing to click the kettle on, which means he’s comfortable.
“Ah, Joey, my boy,” he says, turning at the sound of you. “How was the masterclass?”
You open your mouth to answer, but you see something at the corner of your eye that almost makes you jump out of your skin.
There’s a familiar pair of work boots sticking out from under the sink cabinet. An open toolbox beside them with a wrench resting on top. The figure shifts and Joel pulls himself out from underneath, looking straight at you with both hands braced on his thighs.
The silence it takes you to recover lasts long enough that it’s noticeable.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” you ask.
He hears the hostility in it immediately. His jaw goes rigid before he lets out a quiet breath, his eyes breaking away from yours and then coming back. “Fixin’ the leaky pipes,” he says. “Like you asked me to.”
The problem is he’s not wrong. You did ask him to. A couple of weeks ago. Right before he kissed you. Before he left a bad taste in your mouth.
You’ve been returning the favour and carefully avoiding him over the last few days. Turning the other way when you were about to cross paths, leaving when he entered the space you were in, making sure you weren’t going to be alone with him. And now here he is, crouched under the sink in your home. This is a well-timed ambush dressed up as a pre-accepted favour. It’s forced proximity.
You chew the inside of your cheek and say nothing, which he reads perfectly well.
Jeremiah watches you both from beside the kettle as it starts to climb in temperature, taking in the weather of the room with a patient attention. He has seen enough disagreements between people to know when to stay out of it.
“Right,” you say finally. “Well, in that case, I’m gonna head back out for a while. I’ll come back later.” You turn to Jeremiah. “I’ll be at Michelle’s."
“My boy, don’t you want a cup of tea first?”
But you’re already back in the hall, unhooking your jacket and closing the door behind you. You stand on the footpath for a second in the cooling evening air, not entirely sure what you’re doing with yourself.
The kettle finished its boil with a resolute click, steam curling from the spout into the silence left behind by your abrupt exit.
Jeremiah makes a low, ruminative sound. “Hm. Seems as though he’s more upset than he let on.”
Joel looks up from the floor. “Huh?”
“I know, Joel.” Jeremiah turns to the counter and begins preparing his tea. “I know what’s been going on between the two of you.”
The back of Joel’s neck prickles but his face remains stone still. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” Jeremiah tuts, but not unkindly. He tips the hot water into his mug carefully. “He didn’t mention any names, as such, but I’ve been around long enough to connect the dots without needing the lines drawn for me.”
Joel’s tongue goes bone dry. “What did he tell you?”
“He tells me most things.” Jeremiah prods his teabag with the back of his spoon, watching it bleed dark into the water. “We’ve become rather close, as you know. When you spend as much time laid up in bed as I do, it’s only natural to want to know what’s going on outside these walls. I always loved a gossip. I like to know what’s going on with him.”
“There’s nothin’ goin’ on between us.”
Jeremiah sets down his spoon. “Well, there certainly won’t be if you carry on this way.”
Joel says nothing. He lets his eyes drop to the floor, his hands still planted on his thighs.
“I’m no fool, Joel,” Jeremiah says with gentle authority. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop taking me for one.”
The room goes still for a moment. Joel breathes out through his nose and his shoulder sink. It isn’t quite defeat, but it’s close to it. His version of being cracked open.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says at last. “I tried to apologise. I’m tryin’ to show him that I… that I care. About him. I just don’t know how other people will take it.”
Jeremiah reaches for the milk, letting that hang in the air before speaking. “What I’m hearing is that you care a great deal more about what others might think than you do about what Joey feels.”
Joel’s face tightens. “No. That’s not—” He shakes his head. “That’s not true.”
“That,” Jeremiah says, tipping the milk in, “is precisely how it sounds. And, to be frank, I think that’s rather selfish. Don’t you?”
Quiet.
“You remind me a great deal of Jim,” Jeremiah says, throwing his mind back into his memory. “When we first met, he carried himself rather like a closed fist. It took him a long time to admit what he already knew.” He lifts his mug to his lips and blows across the surface, steam building against his glasses. “I was patient, but I’ll tell you this, there were days I nearly gave up waiting for him to loosen up and take my hand.”
He takes a sip, considers the thought and continues.
“And I can tell you from experience, whatever anyone thinks or says or does when they find out, it’s worth it. Every stare, every comment… every punch. Not a single day went by after he finally let go did he wish he chose the easier option. We lost years to caution and other people’s comfort. It would be a great shame if you lived out the rest of your days living that way. Nothing and no one should come between you and your happiness, or between you and someone else’s.”
Joel’s gaze drifts to the kitchen window. The evening has turned the glass into a dark mirror now.
“I see it,” Joel says, quieter now. “I see how he is with Ellie. With Tommy and Maria. It’s like he’s always been here. Or should’ve been here.” He pauses. “I want to let go and just let it happen. I just don’t know if I can.”
Jeremiah folds both hands around his mug, absorbing the warmth of it. “Of course you can. Jim did. I did. Joey did. There comes a point for all of us where we decide whether we choose to live as who we are, or let everything that’s waiting for us pass us by.”
He watches Joel grapple with his own thoughts like he’s reliving what he went through with Jim all those years ago.
“This world takes so much from people,” Jeremiah carries on, his voice dropping to something more careful. “There’s so much pain, so much loss… And yet here you are, feeling something entirely human and real. People would kill to be able to feel what you feel right now.” He pauses, placing his mug down again. “Joey is here for good. This is his home now, and it hopefully will be until his last day. This won’t go away. And I cannot think of anything sadder than pretending it will.”
It sinks into his cracks with a permanence he can’t deny. There’s no distance far enough, no task tricky enough to put between him and this.
“What should I do?"
Jeremiah’s expression warms with something almost triumphant behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes crinkling further at the corners.
“Pull yourself together,” he says, “and do what you already know you should do.”
—
“Jesus, Joey,” Michelle says, sliding a freshly made grilled cheese sandwich across her kitchen counter to you. “You’re being a bit harsh, don’t you think?”
The look you give her could curdle milk. You just spent the last half hour laying everything that happened since the kiss out for her, and this is what you get. No outrage on your behalf. Not the solidarity you’d expect from a best friend. She’s standing there feeling sorry for Joel.
“He lied to Tommy’s face,” you remind her. “He stood right in front of us and tried to act like nothing happened that weekend.”
“Yeah, but—” She takes a bite of her own sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. “Calling him a closet case and a coward is a bit mean, no?”
“It’s accurate.”
“Joey…”
“What?” you pull the plate towards you. “That’s what he is.”
She swallows and chases it with a glug of water. “Look, I get where you’re coming from, and you have every right to be upset, don’t get me wrong. But what I’m hearing is he’s dealing with this part of himself, probably for the first time in his life, and you’re going straight for the jugular. I think you need to give him a chance.”
Her words make you pause mid-chew and blink with disbelief. “A chance? Michelle, the man is fifty-fucking-six years old. I had this shit figured out by the time I was 12.”
“You didn’t grow up in the south like he did though,” she says, levelling her gaze at you. “You’ve both lived very different lives. You’ve been through completely different things. You’re smart enough to know that without me having to say it. Cut the man some slack.”
You look away, tapping a finger repeatedly against the counter, starting to doubt yourself. Maybe you were a bit too harsh. Maybe you did take it further than he deserved. The image of his face after you kept putting him down hasn’t left you alone since and you hate it. You’d rather just be angry without the guilt nipping at your ankles.
“He’s gonna have to earn it.”
She tips her head at you, a strand of black hair escaping from where it was tucked behind her ear. “Based on what you just told me, it sounds like he’s very much aware of that and trying.” She takes another bite of her sandwich, collecting the cheese pulling from the edge. “And to be honest, I think it’s kind of adorable. Joel Miller, of all people.”
“Oh, don’t,” you say, rolling your eyes and trying to ignore the heat blooming up your neck despite your best efforts. “You’re gonna make me sick. I can’t believe you’re actually trying to make me feel bad for him.”
The corner of her mouth pulls up.
“I think you already do feel bad for him,” she says. “You just want my permission to feel that way. You know I’ll support you no matter what, and I want you to be happy. And if Joel gets his shit together, I think he could make you very happy. But if he hurts you again, I will murder him.”
That gets a small, appreciative smile out of you. You let the silence sit for a second before a long sigh comes out of you like you’re deflating.
“What do you think I should do?”
“Go to his house.”
“Here we go,” you groan. “And say what?”
“Tell him where you’re at. Apologise for calling him a coward. Hear him out. And then, ideally, kiss and make up.” She says it like it’s a shopping list. Like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
“You’re so deeply unwell,” you say to her flatly. “And a full-blown enabler.”
“Maybe,” she says, shoving the last bite of the crust into her mouth. “But do you want him or not? Genuinely.”
A breath in. A breath out. She could probably answer that question for you. “Sadly, yes.”
She gestures her hands like the case is closed. “So what the fuck are you still doing in my kitchen?”
—
The crickets are the only sound as you come up onto Joel’s porch later that night. You knock and stand there, listening to your own heartbeat and feeling the nausea rising up your throat. It’s right then that you realise you didn’t even think about what you’re going to say on the walk over, which is clearly the perfect time to realise.
The door opens before you’re ready.
He looks the same as the last time you showed up at his door unannounced. Old blue t-shirt, pyjama bottoms and socks. Surprise moves across his face first, then a guarded concern, like he’s waiting to figure out what version of you he’s getting tonight.
The air leaves your lungs. Any opening line you might’ve had erodes on your tongue.
“Hey,” he says, breaking the silence for you.
“Hi,” you eventually manage. “Can I… come in?”
His eyes search your face. “You’re not gonna yell at me, are you? Ellie’s asleep upstairs.”
You shake your head. “No.”
He steps aside and lets you pass through.
The house is quieter than you’ve ever heard it. The fire’s gone out, so there’s not even the comforting crackles to keep you company in the silence. There’s just a few lamps on in the living room as you step in, the ticking of the old clock on the mantlepiece and whatever warmth is leftover in the walls. You stop in the centre of the room and turn to face him.
“How did it go with the pipes?”
He sniffs and nods. “Should be all good now. Found a few other problems while I was there but… I took care of ‘em for you.”
It’s hard to even look at him. “Thanks,” you say, mostly to the floorboards. It comes out quieter than intended.
He observes you closely, reading into your body language and how you almost look like a puppy waiting to be scolded. “Why are you here?”
You release a breath and force yourself to look at him in the eye. “To say I’m sorry. For what I said. For calling you a coward.”
He tilts his head, quietly touched in a way he wasn’t expecting from you. “You don’t need to apologise,” he replies. “You were right. I am a coward. I just didn’t like hearin’ it.”
That somehow makes you feel worse. Your nose twitches and you dig a thumbnail into the side of your finger.
“I’m not going to apologise for feeling hurt, though,” you say. “Not after what you did.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.” He holds your gaze, his arms hanging loose by his side. “But I am tryin’. And I do wanna make it right.”
“I know you are.” Your eyes drop to the floor again. “I’m trying too. To understand you better."
He goes completely still for a moment, and you can sense him working through the idea of someone even bothering to try. To put in an effort to see him for who he is.
“I wish it was easy,” he says then, his voice remaining low. “I wish I didn’t feel like I had so much holdin’ me back. There’s just a lot goin’ on inside my head. There always has been. It just got worse when you came around.”
You wet your bottom lip and then bite down on it. “Well, tell me then. What’s going on in your head?”
His gaze remains fixed on the floor like he’s working out where to even begin.
“It’s just hard,” he manages eventually. “I was raised to be strong. For everyone. My whole life. And I’m tryin’ to be strong for Ellie, for Tommy, for the people here… But this, and the way I feel about you, because you’re a man… I don’t want people to think I’m weak.”
“You’re not weak—”
“I know. I don’t feel that way or think that way, it’s just… I know some people do.”
The admission crushes you. It’s disheartening seeing someone live like this after everything that has happened over the years. There’s no doubt this is his reality. You can see it living in every part of his body, even in the way his voice changes when he’s speaking to you.
“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” you say. “Why any of that matters. Why you care so much about what people might think.”
“That’s why I said I need time,” he says. “I don’t wanna be this way no more. I don’t wanna care about what anyone else thinks. Not if it costs me you.”
Silence. Just the steady ticking of the clock filling the emptiness between you.
Joel moves then, taking a step forward in your direction to close that space. “And I don’t want you to wait around for me. You shouldn’t have to. Your dignity’s worth more than that. I just—” His eyes land on yours again. “I just don’t want you to hate me for it.”
You shake your head. “I don’t hate you,” you say, your voice breaking at the end. “I hate that you kissed me before you were ready. I hate that you let me into your bed.”
“I know,” he says, standing close enough that you can hear the slow exhale through his nose. “I shouldn’t have done it. And I’m sorry. I just can’t stay away from you.”
You take that final step closer, now feeling the heat of his chest reaching out for you. “I don’t want you to stay away from me.”
Before you have time to talk yourself out of it, your hands move up to hold his face, pulling him down to you. He comes to you without resistance, his arms circling your lower back and pulling you flush against him like it’s where you were supposed to be this entire time. The kiss is charged and desperate, but more than anything, it’s bittersweet. Bitter because you know it’s wrong, sweet because it feels right anyway.
Outside, at the foot of Joel’s yard, Tommy stands frozen in place behind the low fence, under the streetlight and bundled in his jacket.
Through the window, he takes in the full, clear picture. His big brother. You. The two of you passionately pressed together in the glow of the nearby lamp. There’s no mistaking it. It’s no illusion. The entire scaffolding of what he thought he understood about Joel rapidly collapses around him.
AN: Uh ohhhhhh... 👀🫣😨 Well, at least they're back in each other's arms I guess 😅 Just to make it known, I don't necessarily support Joey's decision here to let Joel back in but strictly for the sake of the plot, yay. There's something really twisted about knowing it's not a good idea but gambling on getting hurt again because it feels so good to be with them. Let's just hope Joel doesn't fuck this up again, huh... 😒
Also I'm just very glad I managed to get a chapter out this weekend at all. I really thought I was going to have to skip a week for the first time since I started posting because this week was particularly chaotic, but we made it! All my plans went really well and I'm just looking forward to vegging out for the rest of the weekend and recovering for next week 🥲
And can we get some commotion for the utterly breathtaking chapter cover artwork by the insanely talented and sweet @valevntine? 😍 It was such an honour and a pleasure to have her work on this for me. As you probably noticed, she also made my pfp, so this is very special to me. She was such a wonder to work with and the way she made visions come to life was so magical to witness. If you're thinking of commissioning her for something, do it already. Every artist I've had the pleasure of working with to create pieces for this story have just been dreams and I'm so in love with them all. Please support artists. 💙
Tags
Suggested Listening: 'Hurt In Your Heart' by John Martyn
Word Count: 4k
Previously: After Joel left Maria’s casserole dish behind following their kiss, she was surprised when Joey returned it. She’d been told it was for Ellie so she was confused. Joel avoided Joey but when Joey expressed his concerns to Michelle she suggested confronting him. He did and Joel confessed his feelings and admitted he was confused about them. They ended up in bed together and Joey chose to stay a while after to hold Joel through his internal spiral.
Summary: Leaving Joey in a cloud of uncertainty after their evening together, Joel, as men often do, manages to potentially ruin everything before it even has a chance to flourish.
May 19, 2024
Ellie arrives home from Tommy’s close to midnight with a belly full of Maria’s cooking and one of Joel’s jackets draped over her arm. She lets herself in and shuts out the chorus of crickets and rabbiting of toads disguised in the dark. The quiet of the house wraps around her immediately.
She finds Joel on the couch with a book cracked open over his chest and lamplight catching the lenses of his reading glasses, which have migrated to the very tip of his nose. They make him look about a decade older than he’d like.
“‘Sup.”
He lifts his head and closes his book over. “Hey. How was dinner?”
“Good. You missed out on apple pie.”
He lets out a soft grunt as he shifts, swinging his legs down to the floor with a stiffness that reveals how his back started turning on him many years ago. He doesn’t say anything.
Ellie lingers in the doorway trying to read him. Something feels off with him tonight. She’s learned to pick up when something is on his mind. He’s always been a man of few words, but there are signs she knows to watch out for.
“Get up to much?” Ellie asks.
“Nothin’.” He pulls his glasses off and folds them one-handed. “Just been enjoyin’ the peace and quiet.”
“Uh-huh.” She pulls at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I passed Joey down the street just now. Weird for him to be out this way so late.”
Joel holds one lens up to the light and then rubs at it with the hem of his t-shirt. “Hm. Always seems to be doin’ somethin’.”
She waits but he offers nothing more. She holds up the jacket instead. “Tommy told me to bring this back with me. Said you left it at his place.”
“Oh. Thanks.” He barely glances at it. “Leave it on my chair if you’re headin’ upstairs.”
He settles back into the cushions and opens his book again. She takes that as a cue.
She heads upstairs, stifling a yawn against the back of her wrist. She steps into his room and drapes the jacket on the back of his chair as instructed. When she turns to leave, she notices something and stops.
Joel’s bed looks like a crime scene. Sheets dragged halfway across the mattress, pillows knocked sideways… It’s complete dignified chaos. She stares at it for a moment, genuinely baffled. Joel makes his bed every single morning without fail. He’s made a point of reminding her to make hers too since they got here. Multiple times and with zero patience.
Strange.
She heads back downstairs, not wanting to miss her opportunity to make a remark.
“All that shit you give me about making my bed,” she announces, appearing in the doorway again, “and you leave yours like that?”
“Language,” Joel says reflexively, sitting up again and looking at her. “What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Your bed,” she says, jabbing her thumb back at the stairway. “It looks like a tornado went through it.”
Cold realisation moves across his face then but disappears before she can fully notice it. “Uhh… I had a nap earlier.”
Ellie raises an eyebrow, letting the momentary silence do the heavy lifting. “Must’ve been one hell of a nap.”
He levels a flat look at her, unamused and not willing to let her read into it further.
“It’s late. Go to bed. You’ve school tomorrow.”
—
May 23, 2024
It’s a fresh Wednesday morning with the sky still pale above the rooftops as people start to move about the settlement with purpose. Yours is to head to Elise’s and drop off the final brief and attendance list you put together over the last few days for her second baking masterclass.
It has been a manageable enough distraction to keep your head occupied for the most part, but it could only do so much. The quieter pockets of the days since Sunday have been unkind to you.
You haven’t seen much of Joel at all. You’ve been telling yourself that you’ve both just been busy, which works until it doesn’t, which is usually in the early hours of the morning when you start replaying everything. What if he’s avoiding you again? What if that level of intimacy with you scared him off for good? What if he decided this was all indeed a mistake after you left his house on Sunday?
You did catch a glimpse of him yesterday when he was coming back from patrol on Old Beardy, trotting in the opposite direction. You could've sworn he gave you that small nod of his, but he could just as easily have been jolted by the horse moving beneath him. Annoyingly hard to say.
Still, you’d expect more from the man you let inside of you after a heart-to-heart less than four days ago.
Just as you talk yourself out of another anxious spiral, you round the corner to main street and spot the back of him. Those broad shoulders and greying curls you’d recognise anywhere. He’s angling towards Tommy who spots you a second later and raises a hand to gesture you over.
“Joey!” Tommy yells. “Just the guy I wanted to see. C’mere a second, will ya?”
Great.
You cross the street to join them. Joel doesn’t appear to be trying to get away. He just goes still and watches you approach and then offers a quiet “hey” when you get close enough. There’s nothing in it. It’s just neutral.
“Perfect timin’,” Tommy says, beaming at you both. “How are you two doin’? Get up to anythin’ over the weekend?”
You glance sideways at Joel.
“I was actually over at Joel's—”
“Nothin’—”
He cuts straight across you and snips the end of your sentence without hesitation.
The overlap sends the three of you into an unbearably awkward silence which goes on for longer than it needs to. Tommy’s gaze moves between the two of you, picking up on some unspoken tension that’s trying to keep its lid on. He waits for one of you to speak, but neither of you do.
“Somethin’ the matter?” Tommy asks.
“Nope.” Joel’s voice is colourless and unwelcoming to any further comment.
You decide to say nothing at all.
Although Tommy senses something, he chooses to shift gears slightly to dig from another angle. His hands go to his hips.
“You know, now that I have you two here — Maria mentioned that Joey stopped by to bring back her casserole dish. Said you’d brought him round some. I thought you said that was for Ellie?”
Joel moves uncomfortably where he stands. The life recedes from his face by a few degrees and something behind his eyes recalibrates.
“Uhh, she wasn’t hungry,” he says. “Didn’t want it go to waste. Thought Joey might take it instead.”
Tommy stares at his brother and his brow creases. “So… you walked all the way over to Joey’s to see if he wanted some casserole?”
Joel somehow goes even more still. “Yeah. I don’t like wastin’ good food. Dropped it off and left.”
Tommy looks to you then, almost as if for confirmation. You swallow whatever’s collecting at the back of your throat and give him a nod.
“Hm.” Tommy seems to, at least on the surface, let it pass. “Awfully kind of you, brother.”
Joel’s eyes find yours then. There’s guilt carved into every feature of his face. It’s like a wordless apology. Meaningless. You look back at him without warmth or much of anything and let him sit with it.
The lie itself is one thing, but what hurts more is how swift and easy it came out of him. The way he deliberately reduced you to unwanted leftovers he dropped off. The implication that nothing worth mentioning happened that night or after. Not even the dignity of yeah, we hung out. Just pure erasure. It’s not like Tommy needs to know the full nature of what happened, but apparently he can’t even know you shared any time alone together outside of duty.
“Anyway,” Tommy says, pivoting to you with a breeziness that says he has things to do and places to be, “the reason I called you over, we’ve had some last minute changes to patrols. Few folks have rejoined now that things have quietened down a bit so Joel has updated the roster. Head down to the board and take note when you get a chance, alright?”
“Yeah, no problem,” you say, because it’s all you’ve got right now.
Tommy may be oblivious to the subtle changes in your body language and mood, but Joel certainly is not. He knows what you’re thinking. It’s written all over his face.
With a shoulder clap and a toothy grin, Tommy heads off. Joel starts to move too, but hesitates and hangs back long enough to take a last look at you, one more attempt to search for forgiveness in your face. You hold his gaze for half a second before stepping around him and walking off without a word.
—
The drop-off at Elise’s takes less than two minutes. Before she has the chance to pull you into a conversation, you hand over the brief and attendance list, exchange a few words neither of you will remember and leave. The sick feeling of humiliation in your stomach makes the idea of exchanging pleasantries unbearable.
On your way to the community hall, you try to fold and store it away. There’s plenty of other things on your plate to be worried about right now. There always is. But the thing about hurt is that it doesn’t wait its turn. It will always shoulder its way to the front of the queue every single time.
You’d let yourself think, maybe foolishly, that Sunday meant something to him. That you might one day have meant something to him. You let him in, and now he’s there, whether you like it or not.
The community hall is already bustling when you push through the main entrance. Clusters of people gathered in simple conversation, the low drone of a town running its business. Nobody registers or even acknowledges you as you cross the room to the noticeboard.
The updated roster has a substantial amount of familiar names added that disappeared after Kai and Archie’s heads came home in sacks. A few weeks of relative calmness has apparently been enough to coax them back to duty. It’s no wonder Tommy was in such good form. With this many bodies on rotation, no one person will be getting stretched too thin.
You skim down the sheet to find your name.
When you do, something snags in your chest because of the name added next to it. Joel.
He’s switched himself back as your partner.
You know what this was supposed to be. The version of you three days ago would have felt butterflies in your stomach and that embarrassingly warm tingle you get in your chest when you’ve been chosen by someone you want. It would have felt like he was saying something without words in that way only he does.
Instead, you just stand there with a flat, leaden feeling spreading behind your sternum. He ruined the gesture before it had a chance to mean anything. The sweetness of it has already curdled.
The first shift with him is tomorrow, and the last thing you want right now is to be alone with him.
—
May 24, 2024
The sky is still that bruised, pre-dawn colour when you arrive at the stables the next morning. The rest of town isn’t even awake yet. You’d consciously left early, earlier than Joel would typically leave to ensure you wouldn’t have to occupy the same uncomfortable silence at adjacent stalls. All this effort to avoid giving him the opportunity to try and talk to you.
Even Dusty is a little agitated from being disturbed at this hour.
By the time Joel comes into view with Old Beardy in tow, you’re already standing by the front gates long enough that the cold has worked its way into your bones. He walks like he spent the night rehearsing what he should say and how he should act. The guilt from yesterday still sits plainly on his face despite the effort he’s making to hide it. He knows today is his penance.
“Hey,” he says with a brief glance when he gets close enough, his voice rough at the edges and quieter than usual. It’s the undeniable sound of a bad night’s sleep.
“Ready?” you reply plainly, speaking more to Old Beardy than to him.
You pull yourself up into Dusty’s saddle before he can try say anything more. He reads it immediately and knows how it is. He just gives a single nod that functions as his full range of small-talk for the morning.
With that, you look up to the guard in the watchtower and give the signal. The gates start to grind open, disrupting the morning peace as the world outside comes into view, a clash of colour and grey. The plains stretch out vastly around you with the wind cutting low across the land.
Neither of you speak a single word. Just the rhythm of hooves, the creak of leather and the occasional snort from one of the horses. It holds like that all the way through to the tree line, the trail narrowing as the canopy closes overhead. You don’t mind the silence at all. You’re glad it’s there. It almost makes you forget he’s a few feet behind you. Almost.
It’s only when the trees open out again onto the clearing by the riverbank that Joel says something.
“Look.” He points a finger at the familiar mast rising at the water’s edge. “It’s that osprey again. Chicks must’ve hatched by now.”
You let your eyes drift over long enough to confirm it’s there. It stands with that same imperious stillness like it owns the whole bend of the river. You make a vague sound of acknowledgment and look back to the trail, nudging Dusty forward a little.
“Are you plannin’ on ignorin’ me all day?” he asks.
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Well, you’re not talkin’ to me either.”
“What is there to talk about?”
“Anythin’,” he says. “I know what you’re doin’ and I don’t like it.”
“Oh, do you not?” you say. “Well, that’s unfortunate, isn't it?”
He exhales hard through his nose and you hear Old Beardy’s pace pick up behind you until he draws level with you, close enough that you can feel him looking at the side of your face.
“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday, okay? That was wrong of me. I’m just— I’m still tryna figure all this out.”
“Figure what out?” You finally turn and look at him properly now. “It’s not even just about yesterday, Joel. You also lied to Maria. Covered your tracks over a fucking casserole. Why are you trying to hide the fact you’ve spent time with me?”
“I’m not tryna hide— I’m—…” He stops and starts again. “It’s complicated.”
“What’s so complicated about it? That you kissed me? That you fucked me? In your bed?” you say, letting it sit for a second. “You’re gay. So what? You’re acting like it’s a big deal.”
“I’m not gay—…” He breaks off again. “I don’t know what I am. All I know is I want you around. And I wanna be around you. It’s just… harder when there’s other people there. When other people know. Nobody needs to know what happened.”
“So, you want me around only when it’s convenient for you? And then what? You want me to tuck myself away when Tommy and Maria come by?” You shake your head.
“I’m not a secret you get to keep, Joel. I know no one needs to know what we did, but are they not allowed to know I was with you at all? I’m not going to let you sneak around behind people’s backs or treat me differently when someone’s around. I’m not doing that.”
“I’m not askin’ you to do that,” Joel says. “I would never—”
“It sure sounds like you are.”
He falls silent. You press on.
“You know, I hoped guys like you died out with the old world,” you say. “The last thing I want to be dealing with right now is a fucking closet case.”
Joel’s jaw visibly tightens and there’s a flash of something hot behind his eyes. “You’re bein’ a goddamned dick right now. You know that?”
“Am I?” you say, not even attempting to sound the least bit concerned. “Well now you know how it felt. I’d rather be a dick than a coward anyways.”
You pull ahead on Dusty, widening the space between you. The quiet at your back feels raw. It landed right where you aimed it, and you definitely drew blood.
Maybe you went too far. Maybe. But he’s spent the better part of the last four months making you feel small and unwelcome, like a problem that needed to be eradicated rather than a person to be known. All you expected was for him to at least be comfortable enough to tell his brother that he gave you the time of day, that he actually chose to be in your company. That shouldn’t cost anything.
—
The rest of the route passes without a word between you. Joel falls back and stays there, giving you the lead without needing to ask for it.
The checkpoint emerges into view eventually and you dismount first, looping Dusty’s reins around the tree at the base of the steps. Joel pulls up alongside a moment later and ties Old Beardy next to her. You’re already moving towards the door before he’s finished.
It’s at the door you stop, patting your jacket, your pockets, front and back.
“Fuck,” you say under your breath. “I forgot the keys.”
Behind you, Joel follows up the steps. A second of silence passes and then you hear the metallic clatter of keys being pulled out of his jacket. He knew you’d forget.
You turn to find him holding them, not with any particular smugness or satisfaction about it, just standing there being as dependable as he always is. His reliability is deeply irritating, particularly in this very moment.
He brushes past you, unlocks the door, pushes it open and steps aside to let you in first. No eye contact or comment. This is just duty.
“Go sign us in,” you order, already starting to move off into the hallway. “I’ll do the walkthrough.”
He doesn’t push back or question it. His chin dips slightly and he turns for the stairs, making his way up with a quiet compliance knowing he's not in a position to argue.
Meanwhile, you move through each room with the dull, methodical focus of routine, checking windows, locks, the usual, hoping it’ll hold you together for a little while longer until you can leave.
—
The checks are done within fifteen minutes. You head upstairs and find the report room door ajar. Joel is at the desk with his back to you, slumped over the logbook with the pen moving slowly across the page.
“Nothing to report,” you say from the doorway.
He glances back over his shoulder, then jots down that last piece of information to finish the entry and sets the pen on the table.
“Ready to go?” you ask.
He twists around in the seat now to face you. “You don’t wanna eat somethin’ first?”
He bends down for his backpack, unzips it and roots around inside, producing two wrapped cloth parcels from it and holding one out to you. “Brought you a cheese sandwich.”
You stare at it, then at him. The thoughtfulness should warm you, but it just twists the knife. You can’t help but think about how different today would’ve gone if yesterday hadn’t happened.
The same man who neatly excised you is the same one that thought to pack you a sandwich this morning and carried it four fucking miles on horseback. You almost wish he was consistently terrible across the board. It’d make all this easier.
“I’m not hungry,” you reply, your voice coming out drier than you intended.
Joel drops the sandwich on the table and stands, planting his hands on his hips. The patience on his face is wearing visibly thin.
“Come on, Joey,” he pleads. “I said I’m sorry.”
“And I heard you,” you say. “That’s all well and good, but an apology isn’t a rewind. It doesn’t change the fact that even after how you made me feel since I got here, all the shit you made me put up with, I still wanted you. I still let you in. And then still, you couldn’t even bare the idea of someone knowing that you’d spent any time with me of your own will.”
“It’s not about y—” He stops and curses quietly at the floor. “It’s got nothin’ to do with you, okay? It’s me. I’m just… I’m not ready for people to know about my business before I do.”
For a moment, the heat cools a fraction. You look at him and some part of you aches for him even through the anger. But that ache and that anger are occupying the same space and you can’t cleanly separate them.
“I'm still trying to understand you, but I don’t,” you say, as gently as you can. “No one cares about that stuff any more, Joel. The old world’s gone. We’re past all that. We’ve been past it for twenty years. We’re all just trying to survive.”
“That’s easy to say for people like you,” he says, his tone careful and even.
“What do you mean people like me?”
He exhales roughly. “Before all this, this was normal for you. Easy. You had your life. You had your boyfriend. Lived in a big city. Had a family that loved you. Not all of us got to have that. Not where I come from.”
His words hit you hard in a place that’s soft, and for a moment, you don’t have anything to say back. You hadn’t considered how far down it could root. You’d assumed the world ending and the passage of time would’ve dissolved all that, but apparently for some, it just buried deeper and calcified.
He comes towards you in slow steps then, approaching you like something he might frighten off if he’s not careful. “I just need time. That’s all I’m askin’ for.”
“Time?” you say, still clutching to your right to feel hurt. “You’ve had decades, Joel.”
“I don’t know what else you want me to say, Joey.” His voice cracks open just slightly as his composure starts to come apart at the seams. He comes even closer, right into your space, his eyes moving over your face with something almost desperate in them, searching for the slightest give.
He looks down and his fingers reach for yours, brushing the edge of your hand. “Please,” he whispers. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
You hold his gaze for a moment, fighting the urge to give in. It shouldn’t be this difficult. The two of you were strangers to each other a matter of months ago, and now there’s some sort of pull between you that makes it impossible to stay away. Your thoughts were completely consumed by him long before the kiss and before the sex. Joel Miller has hooked himself into you so deeply and you don’t know how to shake him off. Even if you did, you don’t know if you would.
And here he is, pleading for you to let him back in with his disarming, dark caramel eyes, working overtime trying to soften your edges so he can hold you again.
Regardless of his explanation, you’re hurting and you’re confused. Taking on Joel would mean more than just forgiving and forgetting. Is this something you can really endure?
You pull your hand back before his can close around it.
“I’m the one who needs time,” you say, taking a step back and putting the doorway between you.
His face drops and his hand lingers where it was reaching for yours.
“And I want to go home. Sign us out.”
AN: Damn, Joey... 🥲 Idk, do you guys think he's overreacting or was he justified in being pissed and hurt? Leave a comment and let me know!
Also, a little heads up, I have a pretty insane week ahead of me yet again. Outside of work, I have two dates with two gorgeous guys, I'm filming for a TV show and I have my best friend's wedding, so I don't know if or when I'll have time to post the next chapter. I might post 24 right after this or at some stage this week if I get a chance -- I haven't decided yet. The next couple of chapters are DELICIOUS, so I'm very much looking forward to hearing what you think.
As always, thank you for your continued support. I do this for you. 💙
