Summary: On the way to Bill and Frank’s, you and Joel have an argument.
Warnings: 18+only due to smut 😛
A/N: This WIP topped my poll last week so here’s the full version 🥰
WC: 8.2k
Joel Masterlist
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The photograph falls out of the map at the rest stop.
You’ve both stopped to refill canteens at the old hand pump Joel rigged years back, and when he pulls the map from his jacket to double-check the last leg, a square of paper slips out from between the folds and drifts down to the cracked concrete, face-up.
It’s him – a much younger version – and a girl with dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. His arm is around her, and she has the sun in her eyes, a soccer ball tucked under one arm.
You pick it up before he gets to it. Not on purpose – just reflex. You bend down because something’s fallen, and your hand is already closing around it when his shoulders go rigid.
"Who is she?"
Joel's face does a thing you've never seen it do. It goes away. Like someone’s pulled the back off a clock and stopped the hands.
"Give that here."
"Joel, who…?"
"Give it here."
You hand it back. He takes it without looking at your hand and slides it into the inside pocket of his jacket, zips it shut and pulls the canteen back out of the pump trough.
"We're losin’ light so let’s move."
That’s the moment. You should leave it there and you know, even as your mouth opens, that you should leave it there.
"Joel."
"Move."
"It's a picture of you and a kid, I'm not asking for state secrets, I'm asking who…"
"It's none of your business is who."
You actually flinch. He doesn’t see it because he’s already turning, already shouldering his pack and starting up the road, and you stand there at the pump with cold water running over your hand for two full seconds before you remember to shut it off and follow.
You catch up to him within a hundred yards. He doesn’t slow down or look at you.
"That's not fair."
"Drop it."
"After eight months that's not fair, Joel"
"I said drop it."
"You can't just…you can't just throw out none of your business like I'm some stranger on the road, like I haven't…"
He stops walking so abruptly that you nearly slam into the back of him, and when he turns, the look on his face is so hot and hard you actually take a step back.
"Like you haven't what?"
"Joel…"
"Finish it. Like you haven't what?"
"Don't do that," you said, quiet. "Don't make me audit my own claim on you to your face."
"Then don't make a claim on me. Don't make a claim on every goddamn corner of me. Not everythin’ about me is for you. There's parts that ain't on the table. There's parts that won’t ever be on the table. You don't get those."
"I wasn't asking for…"
"You were askin’. Soon as you said who is she, you were askin’."
"To know who she was, Joel, that's not the same as…"
"It's the same to me."
He starts walking again, faster now, and you have to actually work to keep up, your pack thumping against your spine.
"It is exactly the same to me. You don't get to crowbar your way into somethin’ that's mine."
"Crowbar…"
"That's what it felt like."
"I asked one question!"
"And you're askin’ three more right now."
You stop on the road and let him walk ahead. He gets about fifteen feet before he realises you’re not behind him, and then he stops too, and stands there with his back to you for a long second, and finally turns, his face set.
"What?"
"You're being cruel," you say, your voice steadier than you expect. "I want you to know that, in case you're not aware. You're being cruel to me right now and I have not earned it."
His jaw works and he doesn’t answer.
"I'm going to keep walking," you say, “because we have to get there before dark. But I'm not talking to you the rest of the way. I'm not. Because I don't trust what I'd say."
"Fine."
"Fine."
You walk past him without looking at him, then hear him fall in behind you after a moment, and that was how the next mile goes – you ahead, him behind, the gap exactly the length of one person's stubbornness.
****
It doesn’t last.
It lasts about twenty minutes, and then the road bends past a collapsed barn and a stand of dead birches, and Joel lets out a long sigh.
"You think I don't wanna tell you."
You don’t answer.
"You think I'm punishin’ you. You think I'm just being a closed-off son of a bitch ‘cause it's a habit, don't you?"
You don’t answer.
"Look at me when I'm…" He cuts himself off and you hear him swallow the rest of it. "Just…stop walkin’ for a second."
You stop, but don’t turn around. You stand on the road, staring at a patch of yellowed weeds growing up through a seam in the asphalt and wait.
"It's not yours," he says behind you. "That's all. It's not anybody's. It's mine."
"Then put the picture somewhere I can't find it," you say to the weeds. "If it's that private don’t carry it in the map I help you read."
He’s silent for a long time before answering.
"That's fair," he says, grudgingly. It isn’t an apology but it’s something, and you could take it, could turn around right then, take what he’s offering and let the rest go. But you’re too tired and too hurt, and the crowbar comment is still sitting under your sternum like a swallowed stone.
"It's not just the picture, Joel."
"I know it's not."
"You said not everything about me is for you. Do you understand what that…do you understand how that lands? After eight months?"
"I was angry."
"So was I, and I didn't say anything like that to you."
"I'm not…I'm not built like you. I don't have your…your way with this. I say what I say. Sometimes it comes out wrong. You knew that goin’ in."
"That's not a defence, it’s a description."
"I know it is."
You finally turn around and see him standing in the middle of the road maybe ten feet back, the sun cutting low across his face. He looks older than you usually let yourself see him, the lines deeper, his jaw rough. And you want to walk back to him and put your hands on his face, and you want to slap him at the same time, and the wanting both at once makes you furious.
"Was she yours?" you ask quietly.
He goes perfectly still.
"Was she your daughter, Joel?"
"Don't."
"That's a yes."
"Don't. I'm askin’ you…I'm askin’ you not to do this on the road with the dark comin’ and us still three miles out, I'm askin’ you…"
"Then ask me kindly, Joel. Ask me like I'm someone you love and not like I'm a damn dog at the door."
"I am askin’ you…"
His voice cracks open on it, suddenly louder than the woods around you, suddenly stripped of the careful flatness he's been carrying it in.
“I am askin’ you to leave it alone. Please, just leave it alone."
The please does it. The please lands in the middle of the road between you and just sits there, heavy.
You close your mouth. He stands there breathing for a second, then he looks away into the trees, at nothing, and adjusts the strap of his pack with a hand that’s almost shaking.
"We need to move. We're losin’ light," he says quietly.
"Okay."
"Okay."
You walk together this time, more or less. You don’t pull ahead, neither does he and you keep maybe a yard between you, both of you saying nothing.
But the silence is different now. Before it had been hot and now it’s cold, settled, the kind of silence that you know is going to outlast the walk and probably outlast dinner. He said please and you backed off. Neither of you has given any ground that matters. You’re both still standing exactly where you were standing at the rest stop, just further down the road.
Half a mile from Bill and Frank's, you finally speak, just to clear the air enough for company.
"I'm not going to make a scene in front of them."
"I know you're not."
"I just want you to know that, so you don't spend dinner bracing for it."
"I wasn't goin’ to."
"Good."
"Okay."
That’s the last thing either of you say before you reach the gate.
****
Bill meets you with his shotgun loose at his side like always. As though he either hasn’t been expecting you or has decided today’s the day he just blows the two of you away. His eyes do the brief catalogue they always do – you, Joel, the space between you – and one bushy brow lifts a fraction.
"You're late."
"It was harder to get out than we expected," Joel says, his voice perfectly even, as though the road hasn't happened, and something in you goes very cold at how easily he can do that.
"Hm." Bill steps aside. "Frank's in the kitchen."
The smell from the kitchen – garlic, rosemary, bread – hits you in the hallway and you almost cry for reasons unrelated to anything. Frank emerges with a dish towel over his shoulder and a smile that warms the actual air around him.
"There you are." He pulls you into a hug and you let yourself sink into it for two seconds before pulling back. His eyes rest briefly on your face, then he turns to Joel and claps his shoulder. "You look like hell."
"Walked twenty-three miles."
"Then you've earned dinner and a drink. Bill, get the good bourbon, not your varnish."
"It's not varnish, Frank, it's…"
"It's varnish."
They bicker into the kitchen, like the couple they are, and you stand in the hallway with your pack still on and Joel three feet away not looking at you. Frank glances back over his shoulder and catches the whole shape of it in one look. His face doesn’t change, but something behind it takes a careful note.
Dinner is extraordinary by any standard. Pasta with sauce that’s been simmering since morning, bread Frank has baked that day, a real salad, wine in real glasses and candles, because Frank is Frank and you’re his guests.
You eat, drink and answer questions in a polite middle register while the rest of you stays three miles back on the road.
"And the road?" Frank asks, refilling your glass without asking.
"It was quiet," Joel says.
"Yeah, quiet," you echo.
Frank's mouth does a small thing that isn’t a smile. Bill eats with the focused efficiency of a man who considers conversation an interruption to dinner, but he’s cataloguing too – the silences, the angles, the way you and Joel both reach for the breadbasket and then both pull your hands back at the same instant rather than risk touching.
"Bill rebuilt the south generator last week," Frank offers into the gap. "It took three days and approximately a thousand profanities."
"Eight hundred," Bill says.
"I rounded up."
"You always round up."
Frank catches you watching, and for half a second there’s something in his eyes that’s almost rueful. Then he’s asking Joel about the ongoing problems with FEDRA, Joel’s answering and you’re left to your wine.
Joel doesn’t look at you across the table, not once through the whole meal. He doesn’t look at you when Frank refills your glass or when you laugh politely at something Bill says. He eats with his eyes on his plate or on whoever is speaking, the wall of him complete, and you want to throw your wineglass at it just to hear it ring.
After dinner Frank waves Joel and Bill off into the workshop to look at a part for the generator and you start gathering plates without being asked, because what else are your hands going to do? Frank lets you, gesturing you toward the kitchen.
It’s small and warm and smells like everything good in the world. Frank runs the water hot, hands you a dish towel, and you stand beside him drying as he washes, in a silence that isn’t pressure, just space. That’s Frank's particular gift. He can simply make room for a person.
"He had a picture of a little girl tucked in the map,” you say after a few minutes. “It fell out and I asked who she was."
Frank's hands don’t pause. "Mm."
"He told me it wasn't mine to know."
"That sounds like Joel,” he says with an exhale.
"We argued on the road for probably half an hour. I asked him outright if she was his daughter and he wouldn't answer but he wouldn't deny it either. And then he said please and I shut up, and we walked the rest of the way in dead silence."
Frank sets a plate in the rack and reaches for another.
"And now I'm here drying dishes in your beautiful kitchen, and I don't know if I want to crawl into his lap or shove him off the porch."
"Why not both," he says mildly.
You laugh, surprised, a wet little sound, and Frank glances over with that warm, patient look of his. "Frank, I'm serious."
"So am I. The wanting both at once is the part you don't have to be ashamed of. That's just love with the gloves off."
"He was cruel to me."
"Yes."
"That's it? Just, yes?"
"Yes, Joel was cruel today. Yes, you didn't deserve it. Yes, that's exhausting. Do you want me to disagree with you?"
"I want you to tell me what to do with him."
Frank shuts off the water, dries his hands and turns to lean against the counter, looking at you directly. His face is kind and a little tired in the way of a man who's had this conversation, in different shapes, many times.
"Can I tell you something?"
"Please."
"Bill didn't speak to me for three days after we first…" he gestures vaguely, “started whatever this is. He let me into his house, he cooked for me, we…well." Frank's smile twitches. "And then he didn't speak to me. Wouldn't sit at the same table. I baked him a pie and put it in front of him and he ate the entire thing without looking at me and then left to check the perimeter."
"Really?”
"Yes. He was so frightened, you see. He'd built an entire life out of not needing, and there I was, suddenly needing him, wanting things from him, and he didn't know how to do it at first. He thought he could wait me out. Thought I'd give up and leave."
"What did you do?"
"I stayed. I made coffee in the morning even though he doesn’t drink coffee. I asked him questions he didn't answer, and after three days he said one full sentence to me, and the sentence was the pastry should have been crumblier. And I called that an enormous breakthrough."
You laugh and it comes out closer to a sob than you intend. Frank pulls you gently into his side, one arm around your shoulders, and you lean into him for a moment with your face against the soft cotton of his shirt and let yourself not be okay.
"Listen to me," he says, soft, against the top of your head. "Joel has lost. I don't know what, exactly, but a man doesn't carry what Joel carries without having lost something terrible. And he’s so used to bracing for the next thing to be taken from him that letting himself have you is, I think, the bravest thing he’s currently capable of. He doesn't know how to do it without flinching. So sometimes the flinch comes out as a hand, and it hits you."
"It hit me hard today, Frank."
"I know it did. I could see it on you in the doorway."
"He said please. He said it like…like it was being pulled out of him."
"Then he meant it." Frank pulls back, hands on your upper arms. "Listen. When he tells you he's sorry tonight, and he will, it isn't going to come out pretty. It's going to come out crooked and rough and maybe without the word sorry in it at all. Don't make him say it the way you'd say it. He doesn't have those words. He has the ones he has."
"That's a lot of grace."
"It is."
"Why should I give it?"
"Because you love him." He shrugs smiling gently. "That's the only reason anyone ever does. And because, for what it's worth, I watched him watching you at dinner when you weren't looking.”
"He didn't look at me once."
"He didn't look at you when you were looking at him. The rest of the time he didn't look at much else. Bill and I did the same dance for two years, sweetheart, I know the choreography."
You stare at the soap suds in the sink.
"Now." Frank hands the dish towel back to you. "We're going to finish these and then I'm putting a little of the good bourbon in two glasses, and you're going to take both up to bed. And then you're going to fight with him a little more – because you need to, you're not done – and then, knowing the two of you, you're going to make up.”
You snort.
"Try to keep it down," he adds dryly. "The walls are not what they could be."
"Frank."
"I'm just saying. Bill sleeps light and he is not a generous man about lost sleep."
****
The guest room is at the end of the upstairs hall, small and warm, a battery lamp glowing on the nightstand. There’s a single small vase of dried lavender on the dresser, because of course Frank has put one there in the spirit of congenial hospitality.
You set the two bourbons down on the nightstand, undress, pull on one of Joel’s old shirts, get into bed and lay on your side facing the wall, listening to the house settle.
He comes in maybe fifteen minutes later, shutting the door quietly. He sits in the chair to pull his boots off then you hear the quiet rustle of him undressing in the half-light, the mattress dipping behind you when he slides in beside you.
"Frank pour you somethin’?" he says, finally, looking at the glasses.
"For both of us."
"Mm."
You can feel him on his back behind you, staring at the ceiling.
"I shouldn't have said crowbar," he says after a long silence.
"No, you shouldn't have."
"And I shouldn't have said the not everythin’ about me is for you, thing. That one's worse. I knew it was worse when it came out."
"Then why did you say it?"
He exhales heavily. "Because you scared me."
You roll over to face him. He’s on his back, one arm behind his head, eyes fixed on the ceiling like it owes him answers, half his face painted gold in the lamplight.
"You scared me," he says again, quieter. "You picked up that picture, and looked at me with that helpin’ face you get, and you were one question away from a door I keep nailed shut, and I…" His jaw works. "I shoved you. I shoved you with words because I don't know how else to shove someone I love."
You go still.
"Her name was Sarah," he says to the ceiling. "She was my daughter. She was twelve in that picture and fifteen when everythin’ went to hell. She didn't make it through the first night."
The air goes out of you.
His hand finds your wrist on the blanket between you and grips it like he’s holding onto something in a current. His fingers are rough, warm and a little unsteady, and you turn your hand under his, so your palms meet, lace your fingers through and hold on.
"Joel, I…"
"That's all I'm tellin’ you tonight," he says to the ceiling still. "That's what I've got in me tonight. Her name and how long. I can't…" His voice catches and he grounds through it. "I can't do more than that tonight."
"Okay."
"I'm not…I'm not sayin’ never."
"I know."
"I'm sayin’ not tonight."
"Joel, it’s okay."
He turns his head finally, looks at you, and his eyes are so raw, so wide-open and exhausted and seen that something in your chest cracks clean down the middle. This man, this impossible, careful, cruel, tender, stubborn man who said crowbar on the road like a slap and please like a prayer and her name was Sarah like a confession in a language he’s inventing as he goes.
"I'm sorry I made you say it on the road," you say.
"You didn't make me say anythin’ on the road."
"I pushed."
"You asked." He exhales again. "There's a difference. I was the one decided to be cruel about it. That was a choice I made. You don't take that for me."
"But…"
"I'm tryin’ to apologise," he says gruffly. "Let me do it badly."
You laugh and his mouth twitches at the corner.
"I'm sorry for what I said," he says, plain, with no scaffolding around it. "For all of it. The whole walk. I was cruel to you, and you didn't earn it and I knew I was doin’ it the whole time, and I did it anyway because I was scared and I'd rather you be hurt than me be cracked open. That's an ugly thing about me, I know it is."
"Yeah," you say softly. "It is."
"I'm gonna work on it."
"Okay."
"It's gonna be slow."
"I know."
He looks at you for another long second. Then, like the looking itself has become too much load bearing, he moves – rolling up onto an elbow over you, his free hand coming to the side of your face, thumb rough against your cheekbone, eyes searching yours in the lamplight.
"I love you," he says, like he’s admitting to something. "You know that."
"I know."
"I'm sayin’ it anyway."
"Say it again."
"I love you."
You reach up and get a hand into the hair at the back of his neck. You pull him down, and the kiss when it lands isn’t gentle. It has four hours of road in it, and twenty-three miles, and a crowbar, and a please, and a girl named Sarah, and eight months of you and him and every careful inch he's let you have. He kisses you like he’s answering all of it at once with his mouth because his mouth is the only instrument he has that doesn’t fail him.
You bite his lower lip, not playfully, and he growls low in his throat. His hand fists in your hair and tugs your head back to put his mouth on your throat instead, beard scraping rough, teeth grazing the tendon, and you arch up into him with a sharp breath caught behind your teeth because Frank's words are still ringing somewhere in the back of your head.
"Lamp," you breathe
He reaches over and snaps it off without taking his mouth off your skin.
The dark makes you bolder and quieter at the same time. Bolder because there’s nothing to see – no faces to read, no flinching to track, just the heat of him, the shape of him and the rough patient unhurried way his hands move. Quieter because the rest of the house is sleeping, the walls are thin and you’re absolutely not going to give Bill a reason to glare at you over breakfast.
Joel takes his time. He has you and he knows he has you. He isn’t going anywhere and neither are you and there’s no light to budget against. So the next kiss comes slow and deep, his hand cradling the back of your skull, his mouth taking yours with a kind of careful greed that makes your toes curl against the sheet.
"Look at me," he says quietly, which is a thing he sometimes says in the dark, even though neither of you can see, because it isn’t really about seeing but rather about being faced.
You turn your face to his and his thumb gently traces your bottom lip.
"I'm gonna make this up to you, alright?”
"You don't have to…"
"I want to."
He kisses you again before you can argue, and his hand leaves your hair and slides down the side of your throat and the line of your collarbone to the soft outside curve of your breast through the shirt. He rucks it up slowly, pushing it up under your arms, and lowers his mouth to your sternum, and then your breast, his beard scraping soft on the underside of you. His mouth is hot and unhurried, and he closes his teeth, just barely, around your nipple and holds there. You gasp out a sound into the back of your hand because that’s not going to be a quiet noise if you let it out.
He makes an answering sound against your skin and splays his hand flat across your stomach as his mouth moved to the other breast. You can’t lift your hips. Or rather, you can but only into the pressure of his hand, and you let yourself stay there and arch up into his mouth instead, feeling him hum approval against you.
He takes his time – you’re not sure how many minutes – and he isn’t doing anything escalating. He’s just keeping you on the edge of something that’s building anyway, with his mouth at your breast and his palm flat on your stomach and the occasional drift of his other hand down the outside of your thigh and back up. Every now and then his teeth, graze your skin gently, carefully, just enough to make you breathe in sharp and hold it.
"Joel…"
"Mm-hm."
"You're…"
"I know."
"Joel."
He laughs against your skin, low and wicked, then his mouth moves down the side of your ribs to the dip of your waist. He lingers on the soft warm plane of your stomach, pressing an open kiss into the skin just under your navel and breathing out slow. His beard scrapes and his lips drag, and you feel something in your hips kick involuntarily up toward him.
His palm catches your hip and pins it back down.
"Easy."
"Joel..."
"I got you."
He keeps going lower, to the crease where your thigh meets your hip. He turns his head and presses his mouth there, mouthing at the hot soft skin and you bite down hard on the side of your own hand to keep the sound in. He notices and his hand leaves your hip, finds your wrist and gently pulls your hand away from your mouth, holding it down by your side, fingers laced through yours.
"Don't bite yourself," he murmurs into the inside of your thigh.
"They will hear…"
"Then you bite the pillow,” he replies with a kiss to the inside of your knee before moving higher. "Or you bite me. I don't care, but don’t bite yourself."
Then his mouth is on you, and you jolt violently. He's taken his time enough that the contact when it comes is almost too much, and the first long flat pass of his tongue is deliberate and unhurried and so exactly what you need that the sound you make is the kind of sound you absolutely can’t afford to make. You get your free hand into the pillow, press your mouth to the inside of your wrist and breathe through your nose hard.
He hooks one arm under your thigh, pushes it open and holds you there, his other hand still laced with yours down at your side. He set his mouth to you with the same unflagging concentration he brings to every careful important thing he does – no rushing, no relenting.
He learns what you wanted by degrees. Slow, flat strokes first, broad and warm and steady as he maps you. Then narrowing, his tongue finding where it counts and working there with small deliberate movements that make your free hand spasm shut around a fistful of pillow and your hips try, again, to push up toward him. His arm under your thigh holds you still and his squeezes yours once for reassurance.
You bite the side of the pillow as he shifts and changes tactic, circling slow at first and then more focused, building a pressure that’s almost mean in its patience. He doesn’t speed up to chase your reaction, rather he just settles in deeper, the scrape of his beard hot against the inside of your thighs, his mouth working with the lethal certainty of a man who knows exactly where he’s going and has no intention of being rushed there.
You squeeze his hand convulsively and he squeezes back as the pressure between your hips coils tighter. You try to lift up into him, and his arm holds you down, and you try to roll away from the intensity and his arm holds you down, and you realise you’re not going anywhere. You’re going to lie there in the dark, take what Joel’s giving you and you’re going to do it quietly.
The unfairness of it almost makes you laugh. He feels the half-laugh shudder through you, and his mouth pauses, briefly.
“Stay with me,” he murmurs against the inside of your thigh.
He returns to the same slow, merciless rhythm, the same precise pressure, and now he adds a finger. You feel the curl of him find the place and press, and your whole body locks up in a wave of sensation that’s almost too much. You turn your face into the pillow and made a small, wrecked noise that you absolutely can’t help.
"Quiet," he says, his voice amused. "Quiet, baby, come on."
"I'm trying…"
"Try harder, cause I ain’t stoppin’."
You whimper into the pillow, and he hums against you again.
The build is long, slow and unbearable. You feel yourself climb in increments, every small ratchet of pressure another notch tighter. Your free hand goes bloodless in his, your other fist white knuckles in the pillow as your hips make small, involuntary movements against the pin of his arm. He keeps on, and on, with the same exact rhythm that’s brought you up to the brink in the first place, because he’s that what gets you off is not a change but a commitment.
You break very quietly, turning your face into the pillow and pressing your mouth there to release a high, thin sound that’s almost a sob. Your whole body winds up tight and then unspools in a long shaking wave, and Joel's mouth stays on you all the way through it, gentling only at the very end as you start to twitch away from too-much. Even then he doesn’t pull off, he just slows and kisses you there with a kind of soft, tender finality that almost sets you off all over again.
He kisses the inside of your thigh once, then the skin above your hip, then your stomach before crawling up the bed.
He finds your mouth in the dark and kisses you, deep and unhurried, and you taste yourself on him and make a small sound into his mouth. He makes one back, low and pleased, and his weight settles over you warm and heavy and exactly where you need it.
You hook a leg around the back of his thigh and pull him in, feeling him hard against you, not pressing his case, just there. You reach down between you, get your hand around him and he growls into the side of your neck.
He pushes into you slow – that long slow controlled press he does, the one where he’s making you both feel every inch of it – and his forehead drops to yours, his breath coming out shaky and hot. You’re still half-trembling from the aftermath, and the stretch and heat of him sliding home sets off small, fresh shocks of pleasure through your hips that make you bite down on the side of his jaw.
"Quiet," he reminds you, very ragged.
"You shut up too…"
He kisses you to end the sentence then moves, deep and unhurried at first, every stroke landing fully, every stroke deliberate. Your hand fists in the hair at the back of his neck and his hand fists in the sheet beside your head and the bed creaks, once, under his weight, and you both go very still for a beat.
He huffs a laugh against your throat. "Christ."
"Frank is going to kill us."
"Bill is gonna kill us. Frank's gonna be delighted."
"Joel."
He kisses you again, biting gentle at your lower lip, and starts moving, slower now, but no less deep, the new restraint making it somehow worse, more intense, every movement controlled and deliberate and full. His hand slides under the small of your back and tilts your hips up into him, the angle doing something that makes you utter a loud noise you absolutely should not make.
His hand comes up gently over your mouth. "Shh."
You bite it lightly and he hisses in a breath through his teeth, hips stuttering, and you feel his control slip a notch, the satisfaction of that running through you like heat.
"You are gonna get us killed with that mouth," he mutters into your hair, but he doesn’t take his hand away.
He keeps moving and you’re so wrung out from before that every stroke is a small unfair pleasure, sensitivity stacking on sensitivity. You’re not sure you can come again but he doesn’t seem worried about that. His hand leaves your mouth eventually, slides down and finds your throat – not gripping, just resting there, the warm wide span of it across your collarbones, thumb at the hollow of your throat – and the weight of his hand there does something to you that you aren’t going to examine right now.
"Look at me," he says again and you turn your face to his.
He kisses you, slow and deep, breaking off when his rhythm changes, hips going harder, more urgent, the bed creaking again and both of you going still again to listen. Then he huffs a laugh against your mouth and continues more carefully whilst you laugh too.
"This is the worst sex of my life," you whisper, delighted.
"Liar."
"Worst behaved."
"I’ll give you that one."
His hand slides down to find you, his thumb working in small slow circles, and you suck in a sharp breath because your body’s decided, surprisingly, that it actually has another orgasm in it and he’s building you back up with a kind of efficient devotion that has you fisting both hands in his shoulders within minutes.
"Joel…"
"I know."
"I can't…"
"You can."
"I…"
"You will."
You do, because you always do, but this one takes you almost by surprise. It’s quieter than the first because you’ve nothing left to make noise with, just a long shaking shudder that runs through you from head to foot, Joel's name on a near-soundless breath, and the convulsive grip of you around him.
That’s what pushes him over. You feel it happen, feel the moment his control breaks, his whole body drawing taut, his hips stuttering and then driving deep one last time and holding there, his forehead pressing hard to yours, his breath coming out in one long, broken exhale into the side of your neck as he spills into you.
He stays there a long moment, shaking very slightly, and his arms tighten around you like he’s trying to keep you both from coming apart.
You hold onto him and after a long while he shifts, just enough to take his weight off you, but doesn’t go far. He pulls you against his chest in one practiced motion, your cheek against the dip of his shoulder, his arm heavy around your back, his other hand coming up to push damp hair back from your forehead with a tenderness that’s, honestly, almost worse than everything that’s come before.
"You think they heard us?" he says, low, into the dark.
"Joel."
"I'm just askin’."
"Frank warned me before bed."
"He what?"
"He said Bill sleeps light."
There’s a pause, then Joel makes a sound that’s a real laugh, low and rusty and surprised at itself, and you feel it move through his chest under your ear, and you think there, there he is, that's the man.
"Frank's a menace," he murmurs
"Frank’s a saint."
"Frank’s a menacin’ saint."
"True."
He’s quiet a long moment as his thumb moves slow against your upper arm, absent and soothing. The kind of touch he does when he isn’t thinking about it, which is the most honest kind of touch he has.
"I'll tell you more about her," he says. "Eventually. I want you to know that. I'm not…I'm not gonna keep her locked away from you forever. It's just gonna take me a while. Some nights I'll get a sentence out, some nights I won't. I need you to be patient with that."
"I can be patient."
"I know you can. I'm askin’ anyway."
"Okay."
"And I'm gonna mess it up again. The way I messed it up today. Probably more than once. I'm gonna say somethin’ cruel and walk three miles before I figure out how to take it back. That's…that's how I'm built. I can work on it, but I can't promise I'm done with it."
"I know."
"You sure?"
You tip your head up. You can’t see him, but you find his jaw with your hand and run your thumb along it.
"I’m here, Joel. I'm not going anywhere. You can mess it up again. I'd rather you mess it up and come back than be perfect and distant. Mess it up and come back – that’s the deal."
"That's a generous deal."
"You're worth it."
He turns his face into your palm, and you feel him exhale against your wrist, slow and shaky on the way out, like he’s setting something down.
"Sarah used to put hot sauce on everythin’," he says, into your hand. "I used to tell her it was a personality defect, and she used to tell me I was borin’."
You hold very still, like a deer has wandered close.
"She would've…" he takes a breath. "She would've liked you. She had a smart mouth too."
The tears come quiet and neither of you make anything of them. He just holds onto you, and you hold onto him and somewhere down the hall Bill is probably awake now, glaring at the ceiling and Frank is probably curled into him, smiling, knowing exactly what has happened and being insufferably pleased about it.
You'll take Frank's smugness in the morning. You'll take Bill's glare. You'll take all of it.
"Tell me one more thing about her," you whisper. "Just one, then we sleep."
He’s quiet for a long second.
"She was stubborn," he says finally. "Worst stubborn kid I ever met. I used to think it was the worst thing about her."
"And now?"
His arm tightens around you, fractional and deliberate.
"Now I think it's how people survive.”
You close your eyes against his shoulder. Outside, the compound hums and holds. Down the hall, the house sleeps, or pretends to. In here, in the dark, a man who’s spent a day being cruel to you because he’s frightened has laid down a name and two sentences about a girl who liked hot sauce, and that was more than he’s given anyone in a very long time.
You know it, and he knows you know it, and the both of you hold on.
****
You wake to grey light through the curtains and Joel's arm heavy across your waist and the very distinct sense, somehow even before you’re fully conscious, that you’re going to have to face Bill at some point in the next hour.
Joel’s still asleep, which is rare. He usually wakes before you at the first change in the light with his hand already drifting toward whatever weapons is nearest. This morning, he’s on his back with his mouth slightly open, one arm hooked around you and his breathing slow and even. You watch him for a minute in the soft early dimness and let yourself just have it – the unguarded shape of him, the grey in his beard and the small twitch of his lashes.
Then you remember Frank's warning, remember exactly how thoroughly you hadn’t adhered to it, and pull the quilt over your head with a groan.
Joel stirs, his arm tightening fractionally.
"Mornin'," he rasps, voice gravel-deep, eyes still closed.
"We have to go down there."
"Mm."
"Joel, we have to go down there and look Bill in the face."
He cracks one eye open and pulls the quilt back down off your head with his free hand, looking at you with the private warmth he saves for first thing in the morning, and your chest does the thing it always does.
"How bad you figure?”
"Frank will be insufferable."
"He’s always insufferable."
"More insufferable."
"Mm." He shifts and kisses your forehead. “Bill’s gonna glare at us. Guess we could always climb out the window."
"It's a two-story house, Joel."
"I've done worse."
You laugh against his collarbone, and he holds you a moment longer than strictly necessary. The night is there between you, settled, not gone but not raw anymore either. You run your palm up the warm flat of his stomach, and he catches your wrist gently, turns it, kisses the inside of it once, and lets go.
"Come on," he says. "Let’s get it over with."
Frank’s at the stove when you go down, dressed in a faded green sweater with the sleeves pushed up, scrambling eggs in a cast iron pan. He doesn’t turn around when you come in but you can hear the smile in his shoulders.
"Good morning," he says brightly. "Coffee's on. Sit."
Bill’s already at the small table with a mug in both hands and a newspaper from approximately 2003 open in front of him. He looks up over the top of the page. His eyes meet yours, hold for a second then move to Joel’s. He sets the paper down with the deliberation of a man putting a weapon away.
"Sleep well?".
"Bill," Frank sings from the stove.
"I'm asking a polite question."
"It is not a polite question, and you know it."
"It's an extremely polite question. I could've asked something else."
You sit down quickly and Joel sits across from you with the kind of careful composure he usually reserves for negotiations with armed strangers. Reaching for the coffee pot, he pours two mugs without comment and slides one to you.
"Thank you," you whisper.
"Mm-hm.”
Frank sets a plate of eggs in front of you with a flourish, then one in front of Joel. Then he leans down by your ear, just briefly, as he sets bread on the table, and murmurs, "I did warn you."
"Frank, please…"
"I'm just acknowledging. He's a very light sleeper."
"Extremely light,” Bill says from behind his paper.
Joel’s gone a particular colour across the cheekbones that you’ve not seen on him before and that you intend to remember for the rest of your life. He looks intently at his eggs then clears his throat.
"Apologies, Bill."
"Mm."
"Won't happen again."
"It will absolutely happen again," Frank says cheerfully, sitting down with his own plate. "Don't make promises you can't keep, Joel, it's unbecoming. Toast?"
He passes the basket and you can’t help noticing that he’s glowing, because there’s nothing in this world Frank loves more than a small domestic embarrassment that he’s personally seen coming, and you’re going to live with this triumph of his forever.
You take the toast and eat the eggs. They’re predictably perfect and Bill eats behind his paper and makes the occasional dry comment about the structural integrity of upstairs floorboards and the general principle that walls are not, in fact, soundproof.
After the third one, Joel sets down his fork and looks at him. "You done?"
"Almost."
"Take your time."
"Just one more." Bill turns a page. "The lavender on the dresser is for calming, Frank, I told you it was wasted in there."
Frank laughs so hard he has to set his coffee down and, by this point, you’re also laughing, in a kind of helpless way, your face in your hands. Joel's foot finds yours under the table and presses there, warm and steady, and when you look up at him through your fingers, he’s watching you.
****
Frank refuses to let you leave without a packed lunch – actual bread, actual cured something, an apple each, a small jar of preserves with the lid wrapped in waxed paper – and Bill, gruffly, while Joel is checking your packs, presses a small repair kit into your hand.
“The strap on your left pack’s going to go in about a hundred miles, I patched it but watch it.”
“Thank you,” you reply and he nods and moves away.
Frank hugs you at the gate, long and warm, and when he pulls back, he places his hands on your upper arms and looks at your face.
"Better?"
"Better."
"Good." He kisses your forehead like a brother. "Come back soon. And next time, find some wheels so I don't have to feed you both quite so much. I'm only saying,” he says on your look. “The pasta sauce takes hours."
He hugs Joel too – and Joel lets him, which is its own small miracle – and Bill nods and says something low to him that you don’t catch. Joel nods once and there’s a beat there of two stubborn men acknowledging each other across a small understood distance.
Then the gate clangs shut behind you, and you’re back on the road.
The morning’s beautiful in the way late October can be when it decides to show off – pale sun, sharp air, leaves coming down in slow drifts, the road stretching ahead through a tunnel of yellow birches. Your packs and bellies are full. Frank's preserves are wrapped carefully in the top of your pack and you’re going to have them on bread at some point in the afternoon and you know it’s going to be one of the better moments of your year.
Joel walks beside you, his pace matching yours without thinking about it.
About a quarter mile out he reaches over and takes your hand, his warm palm folding around yours, fingers lacing through, the small adjustment of a thumb across your knuckles.
You look at him.
"What?" he says, eyes on the road ahead.
"Nothing."
"You're lookin' at me."
"I'm allowed to look, surely."
"Mm."
You walk on as the leaves come down and a bird screams somewhere off in the woods. His thumb keeps doing the slow thing on the back of your hand and you think about how many ways there are to apologise and how some of them aren’t words at all.
"Frank's going to dine out on that for years," you say eventually, “even if there’s nobody to dine out on it to.”
"Frank’s gonna dine out on that until one of us is dead." After a minute, he glances sideways at you, a sly smile at the corner of his mouth. “Worth it?”
"Don't fish."
"I ain’t fishin’."
"You are absolutely fishing."
"Maybe a little."
You squeeze his hand. "Worth it.”
A while later – maybe a mile, maybe more – he speaks again, looking ahead and not at you.
"She used to like this kind of mornin’.”
You don’t look at him because you know better. You keep your eyes on the road and your hand in his. "Yeah?"
"Yeah, cold like this. She'd get up earlier than she had to just to be in it. Used to drive me crazy in the winter. She'd be out in the yard at six a.m. with no coat, breathin’ steam." He pauses. "I'd yell at her about the coat, tell her she was gonna catch her death. Seems ironic now."
"Did she put it on - the coat?"
"Eventually. Made a whole production of it though."
You smile at the road. "Sounds like she got her stubbornness from you."
"From me and her mother. Poor kid didn't stand a chance, frankly."
The frankly is so dry and so Joel that you laugh out loud, and he looks over at you finally, his eyes warm with the look you saw this morning in bed, the thing that means he’s here – all the way here, not braced for the next bad thing.
"Thank you for telling me," you say.
"Mm-hm."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." He looks back at the road. "That's why I told you."
You walk with his hand warm in yours. Ahead, the road curves up out of the hollow and into the next stand of trees, and beyond that is however many miles and you’ll take them all as long as he keeps his hand where it is.
"Joel?"
"Mm."
"Frank put a jar of preserves in my pack."
"I saw."
"Let me know when you want lunch.”
“I will.”
“Because I’m starving, just so you know.”
He laughs, squeezes your hand, and you walk on into the morning together.
Obviously they don’t look like the characters in the game. Can’t copyright stuff, right?
But that isn’t the point, and i know its AI and a lot of people are against it. But these are the characters i loved to create. Cause i’m not artistic and i don’t have the skills to draw like this (yet).
But this is the story me and my friend create through Roleplay writing, and i love to creat visuals for it. So i can dive more into the story as it is.
So yeah, this is Joel (tlou) and Tess (tlou) even though she looks a lot different. And Casey, my own OC. And i love them 🥰
[ FILES RECOVERED – PROJECT NEW DAWN // NEW HAVEN QZ ]
“For the safety of the nation and preservation of humankind.”
Internal research, circa 2038. Status: Restricted. Subject: 23–0412 — Female, 14 years old. Result: Partial immunity.
They said the QZs were built to protect us. They never mentioned the lives they sacrificed.
Project New Dawn wasn’t a cure—it was an experiment. They called the ones they took “volunteers.” Orphans. The sick. The forgotten. People no one would come looking for.
Testing without limits, without regard of the subject. Not many survived. But some did…
titsay
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
gummygunk
gamechangershow
andulkaphoto
