HELLO? I'm Melting, This Is Perfection!!!

HELLO? I'm melting, this is perfection!!!

excuse me in advance for being horny but thinking about javier peña eating you out on his desk 😌😌

okay anon

you sent this at a good time for me because what if it's older javier peña and what if he's in this little getup right here

and what if he's spent the day in meetings on the other side of town, praying for them to wrap up early so he can see you?

cw: pussy eating, because javi doesn't get to do that enough

but they don't wrap up early. they go on and on and on, one after another, mind-numbing bureaucratic bullshit he can't for the life of him care about no matter how important they might be because he wants to see you. he needs to see you.

last night he'd had you backed you up against filing cabinets in a dark corner after hours; kissed you so hard he'd smeared that pretty red lipstick all over your chin. he'd wanted more--you'd wanted more--but his cell phone rang just as his tongue met the juncture of your neck and shoulder, pulling him away from the soft velvet of your skin.

he books it back to the office on the off-chance that you're still there past 5, but your desk is as empty as everyone else's. he tries to swallow his bitter disappointment.

he pulls his jacket off and sulks his way back to his office, flipping on the lights and startling himself when he sees you sitting on his desk and swinging your legs back and forth as you greet him.

"hi, javi."

javier shudders at the way you purr his name. no one else calls him javi. it's always mr. peña, agent peña, javier--you're not so formal. his reputation never impressed you like it seems to impress everyone else. you treat him like any other man, like he has something to prove.

"evening, bonita," he says. he draws himself up, chest out and shoulders back, putting on that slow swagger the girls always seem to like. you raise your eyebrow, but he sees the way your lips part and your pupils dilate, even in the low light. you spread your legs just wide enough for him slot his narrow hips between your thighs.

"you have a good day?" you murmur, tilting your head and looking up at him through your lashes. something softens inside of him--he thinks you really want to know. he wants to tell you, too, but not right now. right now he can feel his pants growing tighter, his cock twitching against his jeans.

"mmhmm," he says, pulling off his jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his button up. your fingers make gentle circles around his forearms, rubbing against his skin like you just can't help but feel him. he doesn't elaborate, just kneels in front of you, smirking at the little gasp you let out.

javier runs his hands up and down your calves as he gently pushes your legs apart, sucking in when he sees you're not wearing panties under than little business casual skirt. "where's the rest of your clothes, baby?" he teases. you lean back on his desk and his cock throbs as you narrow your eyes at him. he groans and shoves your skirt up your hips, exposing your wet, needy cunt. "gonna let me eat this little pussy?"

you nod fervently, bottom lip clamped between your teeth. he kisses up, up, up your right thigh, skimming over your lips and making his way back down your left. you wiggle in grip, and he thinks of making you wait more, but you're dripping onto his desk, and saliva's pooling in his mouth.

"please, javi," you whisper, and he can't possibly say no to you. he spreads you apart with his thumbs, just to get a good, long look. you writhe in front of him and he growls at the arousal leaking from your softly clenching hole. he chuckles at the soft whine you let out.

"all right, baby, all right. c'mere," he soothes, pulling you to the edge of the desk and throwing your legs over his shoulders. he presses his whole face into your cunt, licking a long, solid strip up to your clit. you try to lift your hips, but he lays his forearm over your belly to hold you in place.

if he had you in a bed, somewhere private, he'd take his time. but right now he has one goal, and that's to get you to come all over his face before someone found the two of you. the noises you're making are too loud, but he needs to hear them. he'll just have to be quick.

he tries to remember the last time he had something so fucking warm and wet and soft in his mouth, the last time he felt dizzy from someone's scent. you're intoxicating, and he can feel his cock pulsing in his jeans as you cry out his name. he moans loudly into your cunt, unable to contain himself. you feel so fucking good. it doesn't take long. he wishes it took longer. you fall apart on his tongue, whimpering and shaking as he laps up every last drop.

"javi," you breathe, barely back to reality. "fuck me, baby, please."

he shouldn't. he shouldn't fuck you here, on his desk, where anyone could find you. he shouldn't.

~ sorry if this is trash i wrote it in a fugue state ok bye

PEDRO PASCAL and DAKOTA JOHNSON on the set of ‘Materialists’

Frankie Morales let me talk to you

the curls poking out from under the hat, the watch, the arm (especially the tricep™️), the patchy beard, the side profile, the way he’s sitting, how small his phone looks in his hand. HIM.

FABLE OF THE DOG : 1. The Two Headed Calf

Pairing: Joel Miller x FMC

Summary: Welcome home and buck up, cowgirl.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Cowboy/Heiress AU; Slowburn(ish); Original Characters; Alcohol & Drug Use; Discussions of Grief; Daddy Issues; Graphic Descriptions of Vomiting; Description of a Dead Body; Death of a Parent; Parental Neglect; Older Man/Younger Woman; Jealousy; Past Teenage Crush; Unrequited Pinning; Yearning and Longing Galore; Boss’s Daughter; Complicated Family Relationships; A Home is a Place but ALSO a Person!; Found Family

A/N: Disclaimer, I know nothing about Wyoming and it’s geography, ranching, or being a cowboy and just made all this up. Any and all misrepresentations are fallacy of my laziness.

The FMC tag was decided because she has a last name. It was just too difficult for me to speak in depth about her father without giving him a name, and thus her one too. After that decision was made, she kind of went away from me and devolved into her own person who I have come to be quite obsessed with. It’s still written in ‘you’ format, anyhow.

I’ve been having a whole lot of fun with this, I hope you do too.

Word Count: 10K

Read on AO3

1: The Two Headed Calf

“She’s been shut up in that house for goin’ on three days now, Joel,” Tommy says as the two brothers make their way across the lawn. 

The ride had been long and hard, and Joel is tired—he levels a dark look at him. “Just sayin’. Nothin’ you find in there’s gonna be pretty to look at.” He raises his hands in surrender at the brooding glare, that non-confrontational shrug that’s set Joel on edge since they were boys. 

“One of you’s should’a gone in there. Made sure she’s okay.”

“The housekeepers’ve been keepin’ an eye. And Frank tried to go in there and check on her himself, but she’s angry as a barn cat. Hissin’ ‘nd yowlin’, and just bein’ downright scary as hell, to be honest. You should be prepared is all I’m tryin’ to say.”

“Her father just died, Tommy. I’m not expectin’ pretty sights right now,” Joel gruffs, trying to swallow the panic that flutters in his throat as they crest the final hill up to the big house. 

The beautiful stone, oak, glass monstrosity that’s stood as monument to this place, this home that is not truly his, for over a decade now. The Kelly Ranch. The sky above is still a sultry, yawning blue, deep and tired, basking in the throes of dawn as the sun just now makes its way over the crest of the Tetons in the distance so that the house sits for just a moment longer in its pool of shadowed blues. 

Joel pauses on the border of that somber darkness, afraid suddenly of what awaits him inside; boots glued to the ground with the gum of cowardice. He doesn’t want to see her broken. He doesn’t want to see her hurting. But there’s no other recourse, he knows this. The death of the estranged father she’d fought with all her life, the inheritance of this world that seems suddenly too big for just one orphaned girl, all alone now. 

He’s afraid that he’ll walk into that house he’s always seen as other and home all wrapped into one—that Olympus that was so far removed and out of reach even when he walked through it’s halls to the man who’d given him sanctuary and salvation, to the man he knew mistreated her sometimes, didn’t love her enough—and not have the capacity to recognize her, this girl who’d always been familiar and stranger all in one also. 

Joel Miller suddenly feels afraid of the memory she exists as in his mind, in the face of the woman he knows she is now. 

When he lets himself in the back kitchen door, it’s still nighttime within. The cool dryness of the AC cranked up to inhuman temperatures makes him shiver once while sprouting a damp sweat along his nape. He should’ve showered before coming, should’ve washed the ride and the days of camp off his skin before walking into her presence, but all he’d managed were his hands and face. There’d been panic to make sure she was well, if not then alive, at least. But he should be more presentable for her. 

Hell, he should’ve been here for her when she came home for the first time in two years to the house where her father had died. He should’ve been here when the man died. 

But the herd had needed moving. He hadn’t thought it’d all happen so quickly, thought he had more time, that they all had more time. He’d hoped she wouldn’t return at all, if he was being honest. There was nothing here for her. Nothing except memories of a gilded and loveless, already motherless childhood. The reality of all she was set to inherit. The truth of an aloneness Joel didn’t know if she was prepared for. 

He moves through the house slowly, afraid to disturb the ghosts and the silence. The interior, immaculate and beautiful and solemn. Something out of a movie picture or the gloss of a magazine. Something covered not in dust but in sadness. The stairs are silent as his spinning mind makes up for the creak, the boots she’d sent him on his last birthday hit the richly piled rug at the top, and the hallway to the bedrooms yawns long and frightening in front of him. Two grand a pop, the boots—Lucchese, he’d looked them up on the iPhone she’d sent him the year before. A gift giver, generous to a fault, kind to a detriment. She sent something to all the ranch hands that’d worked for her father since she was a girl. Something for the entire ranch at Christmas. And all he managed each time was a perfunctory thank you card, like he did every year because he remembered, years ago, in her little voice, polite people send thank you notes, Joel, my grandmother told me so. Last year he’d written that they were too much, that she shouldn’t have, that he was grateful. There wasn’t much else to say. 

That was the extent of their communication, familiar and stranger in one, the far removed golden child of the Kelly. They’d all called him that, the Kelly, for as long as he’d known the man. As if he was some Scottish laird of old, ruling over his clan and half the world. Egotistical, was what it really was. He’d thought himself a god among men, in the face of his only child. Ridiculous was what Joel saw it all for, a put on play, a farce.

And wonder of wonders, she was entirely unlike him because of course she would be. Of course a man ruled by nothing more than ego and narcissism had been sent his polar opposite in the form of his only child. Kind hearted, was what she was—sending him a birthday gift every year. Remembering them all here always no matter how far she’d gone. He sent her a thank you note for each benevolence in return, a word of respectful gratitude for the fact that a person like her could ever remember a dog like him. 

Sometimes, Joel had wanted to go to him, the old man, Oswald Kelly, and ask him where his daughter was, why he wasn’t looking for her, keeping her closer, caring for her. He wasn’t the sort of man that could’ve ever understood such callous behavior towards one’s child.

The last time she’d been here, over two years ago: less than forty eight hours that had ended in screaming so terrible they’d all heard it down from the barn, sitting in uncomfortable, swollen silence, the spinning of tires ringing as she yelled at her father that he was never going to see her again, the man’s echoing laugh as she’d fled him. 

Joel hadn’t seen her on that visit, it’d been so quick and angry. Flying down on the jet from New Haven for her father’s seventieth birthday and not even making it long enough for the festivities. This was what her life was, as he’d observed it from a distance for all these years, the singular daughter of this great house, coming to her father, attempting joy and finding nothing but disappointment at the end of him. 

She’d been right, a knowing streak running through her. Kelly had never seen her again, and Joel didn’t know if the old man had regretted it or not, the anger and the estrangement and the lack of love. But the last time he’d spoken to him, hours before setting off on their move, the herd always came before everything else, the ranch was all that mattered is what the man had always said, with death scratching at the window, his frail and withered body licked down to almost nothing from the austere and imposing figure Joel had always known him as, he’d asked for her. His only child. Do you think she’ll come, Joel? The dying man had asked him. My daughter, do you think she’ll come see me? Joel had lied a lie he hadn’t known was one, said she would, that he’d call her as soon as he was back. 

In the end, he hadn’t even afforded her that decency, a personal call.

He comes to her open bedroom door now, pitch dark as grief within, and the stench of sorrow and liquor seeping from the living grave. He looks down the long and empty hall for a brief second, wishing it didn’t have to be him, that again, he didn't have to see her any way other than okay. And he realizes that there’s something about her, as she will exist now, that makes him cowardly. Something about this house without the man who’d granted him the absolution of a hiding place all those years ago, who’d understood and sheltered Joel in the midst of his own past grief, that makes him cowardly. The house feels wrong without Kelly within it, wrong with only her as its holder now. 

Joel steps into her dark, and it’s a battleground—

—You are silent and motionless in the blue room. 

Nothing of the gleaming splendor that dresses the rest of the home sleeps in here. There are clothes everywhere, an exploded suitcase lies open and massacred in the middle of the plush white rug, a turned over bottle of red wine bleeding into your clothes. Shredded pages with scratched on writing slashed across them, the dusted white mounds of crushed pills, as if you’d smashed each one individually beneath the thumb of your grief. The sight makes him more afraid, the scent of weed and cigarettes heavy in the air, as he takes the final step towards the wrecked bed, and a single small foot hangs limply from the edge.

He stares at it long and hard for a second, afraid, afraid again, still, of what he’ll find. He says your name once, short and gruff like a dog’s bark. It’s what he feels like. Animal, bestial, lacking any sort of cognizance amidst this minefield. His heart beats against his spine, and he thinks he should do something else, shake you, check for a pulse, his bones throb inside his skin. He needs to fucking move, but the smell of smoke is so cloying he’s choking on his own tongue. 

Your ankle twitches.

And Joel sucks in a sigh of relieved air without panic, saying your name again. His voice is level now, maybe gentle, no more barking dog. His eyes move up the length of one pretty leg, and then quickly, he averts his gaze when he gets high up enough he’s met with soft-creased asscheek covered in silk. Swallowing his tongue, his eyes roll in their sockets, looking for anything else to look at besides the sight of panty clad ass. He steps closer again, gripping the edge of the sheet to pull it over your scantily clad body, eyes flitting to the silver spun clock on the nightstand, the warm glow of the hall light shows that they have two hours to get you sober and presentable before the funeral. 

Joel should have been here. He does not feel that he is even here now. And the guilt eats at him like acid. The fear too. 

“Darlin’, you’ve gotta get up now,” he says softly, taking hold of your shoulder, scalded by the feel of fragile skin, realizing with the suddenness of a gunshot that you’ll be the Kelly now. He gives you a gentle shake, “We’ve gotta get you ready,” and his heart pumps blood like a machine. The sight of the dry liquor bottle toppled on the nightstand, the shattered glass glittering the floor in crystal, the empty pill bottles, it all taunts him. His guilt is a cacophony in his mind. He knows he’s going to have to stick his fingers down your throat, make you spit it all up, that you’ll hate him for all of this afterwards, but when his gaze meets streaked rust, dark and shocking against the white sheets, he’s kicked into terrified action. 

He turns you over, your head lolling sickeningly in unconscious stupor, hair a tangled mess strewn about your face so that he has to dig for your eyes, parting the curtains of your fringe to uncover you. He focuses on your closed eyes, the too long lashes clumped together, lips cracked and parched. 

He should’ve fucking been here. 

Smoothing his fingers along the lengths of your arms, he keeps his eyes on your face and averted from all the skin that keeps peeking out below, searching the divots and slopes of your arms for hurts. When he gets to your right hand, battleground of a long ago broken hurt, he finds the drying crust of blood, the ragged split in the soft, small palm, thankfully shallow.

 His eyes smart, looking down at the broken glass, feeling the tear in you. 

Gripping you gently below the elbows he pulls you into his arms, cradled like a child, light as loss. Your head lolls again, neck crooked at an unnatural angle as he carries you into the restroom, careful of your head, knocking the lights on and putting you down in front of the toilet bowl. He pulls your camisole to rights, making sure everything is covered, and gathers your mess of hair as carefully as he can, trying his best to not snag the fragile strands in his too rough hands, but gripping you firmly in position. And ignoring the sound of your awakening cry, he sticks two fingers into your slack jawed mouth and down your throat until he feels the hot rush of vomit. 

Crouching behind you, his thighs bracket you, keeping your form from slumping over as you empty the poison from your belly, flushing the alcohol soaked bile as you struggle. He wipes his messy hand on the leg of his jeans and rubs soothing circles on your back, his fingers woven through the soft silk of your hair to keep your head in place and your face clear. His heart thumps in rhythm with your heaves, your too quick, panicked breathing. There seems to be not enough oxygen for the two of you and your grief in the too small room of the commode, and Joel gasps like a dying fish, trying to swallow calm breaths. 

When you finally stop your heaving, you rest your arms at the edge of the gleaming porcelain, head hung low, defeated, wracked with shivers or silent sobs, he isn’t sure, a strange and horrible keening noise, so small he barely catches it, held in your throat. There’s the finest down of peach fuzz that covers the tender slope of your vulnerable nape, and it makes Joel feel suddenly, just as vulnerable, just as unprotected. At a complete loss for how to help you. 

“Finally decided to show your face,” you croak, voice ragged with your sick. 

His fingers tighten once around your shoulder, a panicked tick of reminder that he’s here now, that he’s him. “I was moving the herd. It had to be done. Your father, he—” he stutters, trying explain, tripping over his own guilt ridden words. “I didn’t think it’d happen now, so fast, that you’d get here so soon. I thought we had more time.” 

We. 

Your skin seems to cool by the second beneath his fingertips, and then you’re shrugging his touch away, huddling closer to the porcelain bowl, further away from him. 

“Get out.”

“Let me explain. I—” And he’s begging now. He can hear the note of it in his voice. Begging for forgiveness. For a chance. 

“I don’t want to see you.” You don’t say his name. “Get out.” It feels worse than anything. 

“I’m here now. I didn’t know— I didn’t think.” He reaches to grab for you again, but you turn to face him suddenly. Wiping the back of your hand against your mouth, pushing your heels at his shins to kick him away. Your eyes are red rimmed, the hollows beneath bruised with lack of sleep. But fire spits from the deep color, all anger and hurt. 

“Go deal with your fucking ranch,” you fling the words at him. “It’s all you care about anyways.” And they weren’t shivers, he sees now, they’re tears tracked as proof of all his guilt, all his lacking, along the slopes of your fine grained cheeks. 

Your, you say. As if this place and anything in it has ever been his. He’s never wanted any of it like that, only ever seen a thing that needed taking care of, and him, with the ability to care for it. 

“I needed you,” you whisper as if the thought comes along on a second wind of anger, a realization that sends your voice breaking, hitching, your chest caving in on itself as the tears come faster and faster now. “He’s dead, and I needed you.”

“I’m sorry,” he begs. “I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks now too. He thinks he’ll cry now too, for the man who he also lost, who despite it all meant something to him, as well. For you, who’s lost even more. For Joel’s own guilt. 

But he doesn’t think you see any of that, not his apology, not his regret, not his own grief. You turn away from him again, laying your temple down again on your forearm. “Get out. I’ll be ready soon.”

And so he goes.

-

Your father is made small and withered in death. 

One of the wealthiest men in the entire world. A stranger, a titan, a nightmare of a man. 

It wasn’t something you’d ever considered, that a human body could look so colorless and frigid and not alive. Like a shock or a ringing bell, it’s a realization that you’re an orphan now. That you’re all alone. 

You feel something like a memory of regret. Or something that’s like the idea that you should feel regret, that you should feel guilt for how it was between the two of you. But all that is overshadowed by the reality of what you weren’t. All you feel even more, or in actual reality, is the old loss of what you’d never been to each other. That, you realize, is the seed of your grief. That long ago wound, that child’s understanding that he wasn’t like all the other fathers, that he’d never care for you the way other children were cared for. 

Looking down at the frozen face that looks nothing like the one he’d worn the last time you’d seen him, the wispy thatch of hair that hadn’t been so jarringly white before sickness had ravaged his body, you realize that this is no new loss, it is only a continuation, a reopening of a very old one. 

The cavernous cathedral at your back is silent, vacated by the sea of people that had congregated here earlier. And with sickening curiosity, you uncoil an arm from where you’ve got it wrapped around yourself, reaching out to press a finger against the ice cold back of his hand. Shockingly not alive; he feels made of rubber. 

Everyone that’d been here to bid farewell to this behemoth turned slip of a man, to catch a glimpse of you, packed like teeth into Jackson’s grandest cathedral; business men and heads of state from around the world, the oldest family names in the country, figures of the highest echelons of wealth and society, vipers circling the barrel—half the world here to see this person who was supposed to have been your father but was really only a stranger. 

You take your hand back, and you don’t say goodbye as you turn away from his body. There’s no farewell to really tell. 

And at the back of the church, hiding in a bright ream of sunlight, Joel stands propped against the face of a saint. Dark and silent and maybe even more far removed than your dead dad. Watching sentinel. Oswald Kelly’s hovering man—come to watch over him one last time. 

The silk of your stockings slide against each other at the junction of your thighs, the hiss of your skirt around your calves as your reed thin heels click against the stone, and you pull your armor as tightly around yourself as you can. There’s a hollow echo inside of everywhere and everything, your mind like a gong, reverberating, and his gaze is so steady, hazel bright, deeply shaded by the lip of his dark hat, beckoning you towards him from beneath the brim. 

Large and strong and steadfast, your heart gives a painful, longing thump—stupid, writhing thing—and you can only bear to look him in the eye for a second, and if you were to really think about saying goodbye to that father that never really was, lying behind you, slipping further and further away, you’d say it to the man that always stood as his shadow before the world, before you ever said it to the man himself. 

-

The drive back home is cast in frigid silence and made all the more uncomfortable because you can practically hear Joel’s brain clicking and ticking away with worry. 

He’d sent your car and driver away with a harsh word while you collected your final goodbyes and words of respect from the last smattering of people congregated and waiting for the newly birthed heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. 

Hovering over your shoulder, he’d kept anyone from stepping too close or getting too friendly, so close you could feel the heat of his chest through the silk of your blouse, and then going suddenly full on aggressive when a reporter from the New York Times had approached, fishing for a quote on the future of the Kelly empire. Ushering you away with a hovering hand at the small of your back before the man could get half a question out, he’s opening the truck’s door for you as a haze descends over your eyes, the distant shutter and flash of cameras bursting in your peripherals, a latent hangover and sleep deprivation and not enough to eat in the last forty eight hours causing you to sag in his hold. Then it’s only his big fist wrapping around the span of your wrist as he lifts you into the truck, your eyes downcast and unable to take in sight or sound, vision all a blur. You murmur a barely there thank you with his hand fitting at the dip of your waist, big body blocking yours entirely from prying eyes trying to catch a glimpse or a stumble, and for a single second, your entire weight is suspended in his hold, allowing you to bypass the struggle of balancing your high heel on the step up, and then you’re sliding onto the leather of the seat, the whisper of your cashmere and silk rustling around you as he handles you like a child being spirited away from the scene of a crime. 

The door shuts gently behind you, face turned away from the flashing lights, the watchful eyes of the whole world, and worst of all, the assessment of his concerned gaze. All you’re afforded are thirty seconds of privacy to let out a single gasping sob. 

And now, an hour and a half of silent purgatory. 

You slip your heels off, flexing your smarting toes against the damp of your stockings and tuck your folded legs beneath you on the seat. Paying the frantic energy of his anxiety and lodged words no mind, you consider instead: your new reality. The burden of it all means very little to you now. The last of your worries is being readied for entombing as the two of you speed down the eighty nine, zinging past the bright Wyoming green. The thrum of his truck drowns out your thoughts, brand new, probably over a hundred grand, only the best for your father’s right hand man, and the Kelly Ranch insignia emblazoned proudly on the sides. A brand for the whole world to see just who exactly is being whisked away to her old home turned brand spanking new grave. 

You might be feeling a little bit dramatic. But then again— you’d just put your last remaining parent in an actual grave, surely that provides you some allowances. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his big paw gripping the leathered steering wheel in a death clutch, knuckles white with his frustration at the dilemma you pose, his own discomfort. You’re sure if he thought you wouldn’t catch him, he’d be squirming in his seat. 

You do something to him sometimes, you know this. Not in any way you’d like, not in any interesting way, that of a woman affecting a man, but something respectfully harrowing. Maybe something a little bit like fear. 

There has existed between the two of you, always, that strange intimacy of two people who’ve known each other for a very long time, and yet, have always remained at a far removed, arms length distance from one another. 

A professional intimacy of sorts. Your father’s foreman, shadow, fixer. The man who guarded that treasure trove you’d inherit one day, today; the thing your father loved most in the world. Two people who’ve known each other a long time, and yet, don’t really know each other at all. 

There has always been, however, the fact of the birthday. 

The birthday. Your birthday.

The way you’d latched onto that small, immense, detail when you’d first discovered it at fourteen, when he’d newly arrived at the ranch and the true weight of your first real crush had really hit you, it was probably not entirely healthy. But you’d thought yourself in love with your father’s man, the first figure of the male species who’d ever drawn your attention in such a way. 

He’d never paid you any mind; you were the boss's daughter, a figurehead or a responsibility, maybe a nuisance, although he’d never ever treated you as one. But the day someone had let slip it was his birthday, on the same day as yours, your teenage heart had swelled with the naive hope of fate. It was meant to be, the two of you were connected, so on and so forth, swallowed by girlish innocence and made buoyant by fantasy. 

But you’d had something to share with someone, which was what really mattered. Something tangible, even if only in your inexperienced little mind, something to wield as comfort so that the first time your father had forgotten your special day, fifteen, and what a tender age it had been, you’d had something to cling to. That's when your gifts to him had started. It was your way of making sure there was at least one person in the whole world who’d remember that was your day too. That you were alive, that you mattered. A reminder of yourself. And as the years and birthdays passed, sometimes, when he sent those coldly gracious notes of his, you’d wished you could’ve written back with honesty. Said something like, I’m so lonely, wish you were here, wherever it was in the world you’d found yourself at the time. 

And of course, he was gorgeous and older, strong and patient and capable, entirely unattainable. Impossible to forget. You’d gone so far, traveled wide, gotten yourself an overpriced education that would probably serve you for nothing, had lovers and parties and splendor, and always, you remembered your gifts for him, you remembered him. It was the single most important detail of your birthday every year. 

The leather creaks beneath his fist again, chapped knuckles set to burst before he flexes his fingers out, long and straight. Thickly built hands, strong, made for working or hurting, on a man who you’ve never seen be anything but stoically patient. 

He was strange in that way, neither wholly impulsive nor purposefully premeditated in his mannerisms. More so, it was that there was something extremely neutral about him, a middle buoyancy of personality. Strict with the cowboys, exacting, wielding his title as ranch foreman with an iron fist and your father’s blessing, and yet still, quiet, serious, with that patient gentleness about him. You’d seen it in the way he’d handled Ellie when she’d first come to the ranch, young and skinny with that hollow look of trauma kids who’d seen things they shouldn’t have shamed adults with. She’d been a little older than you, and with an air you’d not understood, a sort of lived past you’d been naive to the existence of, frightened when confronted by it, and yet inevitably, the two of you’d become fast friends eventually.

You’d even experienced it yourself, on two treasured occasions, that gentleness that you’d held onto for years. Nurturing the memory of him in your mind like a delusional bloom. 

He stretches his hand again, wheel caught between his thumb and forefinger, cinching it there, back and forth. His nails are meticulously clean, cut to the quick, and you imagine he must spend a great deal of time cleaning himself up when he works so hard at getting himself so dirty most days. 

You can see him sneaking glances at you, and he coughs once, a clearing of his nervous throat. Averting your gaze, you turn your face away so that you’ll be able to watch him through the reflection in the window. He monopolizes the space in the cabin of the truck, broad shoulders and hulking form, all the fine leather smell washed away in the scent of him. That bay rum aftershave he’s always worn, the one with the distinctive notes of bay leaf, cloves and citrus. An old fashioned scent, masculine and crisp. 

You’d snuck into the bunk once with Ellie, before he’d moved into the foreman’s cabin, before Switzerland, when the two of you were still girls running rampant and free through the ranch, clutching desperately at the last vestiges of any sort of happy childhood you could scrounge up for one another. You’d peeked in his things, found a whole world of Joel shaped curiosities. The glass etched bottle of aftershave, a hole spotted t-shirt with a burnt orange longhorn across the front, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories—something you found comforting, knowing he could read about the small, the freakish, real life; thinking that perhaps he was homesick for the comfort of the South, hungering for a taste of the life he’d had then, through books. And then, in a spine cracked copy of Suttree, the pages almost falling apart beneath your fingertips, dog eared and well loved, her picture tucked between the pages.

It had been the first time you’d done something you knew you shouldn’t have and actually regretted it, looking down at that green eyed photograph. 

You’d run back to your room after that, ashamed and something a little bit like jealous, desperate to know who she was, desperate for someone to keep a picture of you like that—as if they loved you. And years later, you’d found the scent for yourself. The little molasses glass bottle you still have and pull out on occasion, when you’re feeling extra bad, extra lonesome, extra far away from the whole world, just for a reminding of home. 

Beside you, he sighs again, coughs again, brings you back to himself and the present. Just spit it out already, you think exasperatedly, say something, anything else besides how sorry you are. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he starts, and you roll your eyes, scoffing quietly. 

“You already said that.” Sullen. Mullish. You wish you were a child who could still throw a tantrum and get away with it. Letting your eyes go unfocused from his reflection in the window, you brood at the sight of everything that’s yours now as he turns off the highway, passing below the iron eave of the Kelly Ranch entrance. Eight hundred thousand acres of pristine Wyoming land nestled into the deep valley surrounded by the Grand Tetons mountain range. 

“Well, I’m sayin’ it again.” He’s driving too fast, and you refuse to turn and look at his face. Your heart beats blood in your ears, and you screw your eyes shut to the dizzying blur of green legacy, not wanting to see any of it—him. 

Your belly swoops, going slightly nauseous and gurgling. 

“I didn’t think you’d get here so quick.” He swallows, “Hell, I didn’t think it’d all happen so damn fast.”

“I was already in New York,” you tell him, voice clipped with breathlessness. “I left Paris last week.”

“What? I didn’t know— I—”

“Why would you?”

“I would’ve called you. I would’ve gotten you out here quicker.”

“Ellie called. It’s better like this, Joel.” Finally letting yourself say his name out loud, it feels wrong and molten on your tongue, a heaviness being spit up from the depths of your stomach. “We don’t have to pretend anymore. He’s dead now.”

“There’s no pretending. He wanted to see you—”

“Please, stop.”

But he urges on unheeded: “He told me so before I left. Told me—”

“Stop,” you snap. Finally turning to look at him and hating him for it. For how gorgeous he is, for all the things he’s always made you feel for as long as you can remember what it was to feel something for a man, for all he did or did not have with your father when you had none of it or so much of an entirely different thing. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any of it. It doesn't matter anymore, Joel.”

“But you should know. You deserve to know that—”

“What?” Because that one hurts. “I deserve to know what?” That he actually had loved you but had just never been able to show it? That now it was too late? That the only person the great Oswald Kelly had ever been able to speak to of the supposed care he had for his only daughter was the hired help? You’d read once that one should never let their parents anywhere near their real humiliations. You’d tried your damndest to follow that as soon as you’d grown up. “It’s not your place,” you seethe with teeth bared, an animal shoved into a corner and made to fight for its life, deciding you won’t ever let Joel near them either.  

He spits a cursing, growled sound of frustration, but doesn’t continue. The two of you find yourselves at an impasse, and you turn back to your windowed mirror of him, eyes pinching hot, filling with tears. One of the things your father disliked most about you, your easy tears, and a single salt marred inadequacy tracks down the slope of your cheek, dripping off the edge of your jaw into the bandaged cup of your palm, and you breathe slow and measured through your open mouth, watching the fog cloud grow and shrink against the glass obscuring your vision of him. 

-

The last time you’d missed your mother, the one you’d never known, in any sort of real and true way, you’d been eighteen. Returning to an empty house after celebrating your high school graduation in a far off school, alone. 

In the midst of your sophomore year, you’d been sent away to a Swiss boarding school. It had been something worse than devastating, losing your life in Wyoming, the only home you’d ever know, Ellie, the other people on the ranch… But it was far removed enough that you couldn’t bother, where you couldn’t ask for things like attention or consideration. The education had been excellent, the upbringing desperately lonely ending on a whimpering sigh despite your many accomplishments. You’d wanted her very badly then indeed, your mother. To have been there, to have helped you pick your dress, kissed your cheek after watching you walk across the stage. To have wiped your tears when she told you that your father wasn’t there because he was busy managing the whole world, but that he was proud of you, that he’d have been there if he could. You’d wished she could’ve been there to lie to you so that you wouldn’t have needed to lie to yourself. 

Peering down from your balanced perch atop the deck’s bannister, you survey the deep bed of Lily of the Valley, destroyed beneath the vindictive soles of your bare feet. He’d planted them for her all around the house after she’d died, her favorite flower. 

You’d always hated them. 

And that was the thing of it all, which you’d learned when you grew old enough to recognize such things like disdain. He couldn't stand you because you reminded him of her. Clichéd and old and tired. An excuse for being a neglectful father. The daughter who was too much like her dead mother, and thus did not deserve to be loved. 

You tip your head back, nursing at the lip of fine aged Macallan, and the sky is a glass mirror of blackened silver streaks. You’re almost positive that all the stars in the Milky Way are visible from right here at this very spot in the heart of Wyoming. The sight makes your broken heart feel full and falsely mended. 

You’re certain you’re painting a pretty picture right now: tipsy on a bottle of your dead dad’s sacredly hoarded whiskey that probably cost as much as someone’s house, staring up at the stars in your newly inherited home with a whole unappreciated life full of possibilities ahead of you. Basking in the title of your newly minted— orphan-hood? Orphan-ness? A peer of the orphans. 

You snort softly, sucking on the bottle again, letting the heat of it settle in your belly, smolder in your heart. Your head feels full of bubbles and sugar and sad. 

There’s a part of you that feels a little ridiculous, despite the circumstances. You’re good at compartmentalizing, good at being objective of your realities. Obviously: sad because your father is now dead, and it’d been nine months and eleven days since you’d last spoken to him. Sad because he’d never given a shit about you. Sad because you’re alone, dumped by the stupid French jockey boyfriend who you’d not even liked very much, just a few days before this whole pathetic ordeal of acquiring your orphan-hood, yeah, that’s what you’re sticking with, had occurred. Not to mention the army of looming lawyers and financial advisors and various heads of business vying for your attention, waiting for the what next?

And Joel.

A one man army of looming Joel. 

So you’re feeling morose, blue, maybe a little spoiled, but brought low and cut short. Depressed and unsatisfied with your life thus far. 

Poor little rich girl. Poor little orphan. Poor little me.

What you want? 

Someone to care. 

Someone to love you. 

Hard to come by. Impossible to buy. 

The stars gleam purple silver, winking at you. The bracketing black so dark it swallows the eye. Another taste of the nutty bouquet of smoked apple oranges, and soon you’ll be tipsy enough you won’t be able to balance your butt on the bannister’s ledge anymore. Maybe you’ll go humpty dumpty over the edge and crack your skull against your mother’s valley of destroyed Lily’s. 

You laugh again with sound now, not crazy, only an orphan, ha, but you think that it’s only that it feels shockingly as if you’ve fallen through the surface of your life. As if you are still falling with nothing and no one to grab on to, to help stabilize you. A really terrible, shit-out-of-luck feeling. 

Your eyes continue their infernal leaking, and you blow your nose loudly on the inside of your sweater. You’ve given yourself three days to do whatever the hell you want, be as disgusting as you may. When the three days are up you’ll plan to get your act together, take responsibility and hold of your life and become the woman you should be. 

Who that is? Still being decided. 

You think that maybe you’ll buy another jet before that time’s up. Or an island. Something ridiculous. Maybe you’ll sell the goddamn ranch. 

You eye the dark rolling hills of the valley with seething suspicion. Let’s see what Joel says about that. You, marching up to the highway entrance and spearing a For Sale sign in the dirt of the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the continental United States. Way more than that God forsaken surly frown is what you’d get. 

So long, Joel, it’s been swell. I’m done with this place. It’s time to pack it up and find some new hunk of land to care about more than you care about me or anything else. 

Maybe you’ll be real funny and put up a Craigslist ad. 

And it isn’t that you don’t love this place, the only home you’ve ever known. You do. In a way that is passionate and consuming and irreconcilable. Everything about it, the serenity, the guarding mountains and the deep woods, the home you’d been born in, that both your parents had died in. You do love it in your way. 

It’s only that every man you’ve ever loved—loved—had always cared more about the place than he’d ever cared about you. 

For the longest time, most of your youth until you’d decided that you officially felt an adult, you’d thought you’d hated your father. There was just so much anger and resentment and the resound of his ever furious words and insults and endless disappointment. The echo of no mother ringing so loudly in your ears that the confounding feelings had all been mistaken for hatred. But with age and distance and life, you’d realized you didn't hate him. You never had. You thought, actually, and this was a very good and mature thought of yours, that you were the only person in the whole world that had ever seen him as only a man and not a god. 

He was only a man, full of greed and grief and missing the mother of the child he’d probably never wanted. Nothing more or less. 

Maybe it was that you felt sorry for him. Not in the way of pity, but in the way of one person feeling empathy for another in a clinical and helpless sort of manner. And a numb, detached sort of sadness. A longing for something that you’d never had and had always wanted but eventually learned to live without. 

Ultimately, his disappointment had turned on him, and now it was all you felt you had for him at the end of it all. 

But, for some reason, and an annoying one at that, you do think that, if you try very, very hard, you could bring yourself to hate Joel Miller. There’s satisfaction in that possibility, vindication—resentment that even now, as practically strangers, you know he’d be able to pull that sort of feeling out of you which could result in hatred. Something strong and overwhelming and not easily escaped. 

Your stomach rumbles, and you smile blithely at all your inherited legacy, filling the hollow with more drink. Three days to behave very badly, as badly as you can. The whiskey is so good, and swishing it around in your mouth, you tip your head back further, gurgling it loudly at the back of your throat. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

You jerk, scrambling to keep your balance, choking a little on smokey apples and your own spit. A trickle of the golden amber liquor drips out of the corner of your mouth as you find him hiding in the dark across the deck. Accustomed to drooling over him, you wipe it away with the back of your hand. 

“Having a party. Would you like to join?”

“Are you drunk again?”

Tough crowd. Ugh.  “Never mind. You’re not invited. Go away.”

“You need to go inside and go to bed.”

You tip your chin at him, putting on doe eyes. “Alright. And are you going to be my new daddy also?” You say in a baby voice.

Fucking Christ, you hear him whisper under his breath, turning away to run an exasperated palm over his mouth. Frustration seethes off of him like sulfur. He’s tired. Of you maybe. Of the whole circus this place has become in the past few days—and rightfully so. 

“What do you want? I’m extremely busy, if you can’t tell.”

“Just thought I’d check on ya.” Courteous, always the gentleman, bullshit. You roll your eyes at him. 

“I don’t need you to check on me.” And you, ever the child. One day you swear you’ll grow up. 

But it can’t be said that you’re entirely selfish either. You have considered the fact of Joel’s own grief at the loss of your father. After all, they’d been much closer than you’d ever been to him for many years. And maybe, in his own cold and removed and superior way, your father had seen this man who you’ve thought yourself in love with since you were a teenager, as something like a son. 

Probably, that’s just your own wishful thinking: that Oswald Kelly had ever been capable of such tender feelings.

Maybe the fact of Joel’s own grief is the thorn beneath your nail bed that’s making you so angry with him, so needing of his attention. Maybe it’s that he’d failed to fulfill your silly and girlish fantasy that upon receiving the news of your only remaining parents death, he’d have been here waiting for you, at this home he’d guarded for you for so long, ready to take you into his arms and console and care for you. 

When instead, he’d been off doing what he’d always done for as long as you’d known him. Protecting your father’s interests, his legacy. 

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“How?”

“You, being difficult.” Driving me fuckin’ crazy— he adds again under his breath. 

“I’m an orphan now, Joel.” You’re becoming quickly addicted to the word. “I think I should be afforded a tiny bit of leeway to drive people fuckin’ crazy,” you mock his Southern drawl. Enough of your time has been spent in Europe over the past two years, kissing Europeans, that you’d sloughed off the last of your America twang; something of a vaguely European lilt peppering your words every now and then that Ellie likes to tease you for whenever the two of you speak on occasion. 

A muscle under his left eye twitches at the jab, and you take another deep swig of the bottle, provoking him with your gaze. Wishing you had whatever it is a woman needs to entice this man. Like the fucking vet. Fucking world renowned, brilliant, highly coveted, beautiful veterinarian. You know about her. You’re sure he thinks he’s been discreet over the years with their whatever they’ve had, Tess, but you know. 

Maybe you’ll be insane and irrational and possessive, taking advantage of your three crazy days, and fire her with your new found power. See what he has to say about that. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Obviously not. 

Despite your current hysteria, your goal is not to send the ranch head over heels into a tailspin.

But the imagining is soothing. 

“Want some?” You hold the heavy crystal out towards him in a peace offering, held precariously between two sweaty knuckles. “It’s probably worth as much as your truck. Would be a waste for me to finish on my own.” You eye what’s left of it, about half, and give him a sheepish grin. It really is very good. 

He looks at you for one long, solemn moment, always so silent and pensive, this strange enigma of a man. You get to watch in real time as he loses whatever fight it is he’s trying to fight against you, victorious when he shrugs and comes over slowly, resting his butt against the bannister—a carefully respectful distance away from you. 

When he takes the bottle from your swinging clutch, gripped from the base, careful not to touch you in any way, you see the real sad in his eyes. The dim lights bleeding out through the big windows of the family room without a family shine on his face in strips and bursts. A shadow here, golden warmth there. He’s got more lines around his eyes than you remember from the last time you’d been this close to him. Smile lines made bright white in the center and gold burnished at the edges from too much sun. There’s little bursts of silver threaded at his temples now too, a gleam here and there in his dark beard. Forty four years old, he’d turned on your last birthday. 

You dig your nails into the soft meat of your palms, and your belly smolders as he brings the bottle to his lips, tasting the exact place your own mouth had just been moments ago. You press your knees together as hard as you can, head a little woozy with the color of his eyes; the most gorgeous green, caramel hazel. 

You’d graduated two years ago with a degree in art history and had done absolutely nothing with it since. It was just that everything appeared boring and pointless and shallow. Your whole life had one day suddenly seemed just a little silly. Useless, overpriced degree, nothing to be done with extensive knowledge in color theory when your world is expecting such different things from you now. 

But you sure as hell can appreciate the color of his eyes in extensive and meticulous detail. There is that. 

Watching the slow slide of the amber liquor down the bottle-neck, the long pull of his lush mouth, the ripple of his strong throat, and the way his eyes go a little wider, shocked at how good it is. You laugh soft: “I know, right.”

He takes another pull, another swallow. That’s what you want to be—swallowed just like that. “Damn, that’s good.” His mouth is a little wet, bottom lip shiny with thousands of dollars worth of your father’s favorite whiskey, and his eyes are sad. 

You’d said you were going to be bad, but you don’t want to be bad to him. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

He swallows again, tipping his head towards you, trying to catch your too soft words—he’s got a bad ear, you know why—and turns to peer at you from beneath his low pulled brow, the tip of his tongue peeking out to swipe at the drop of liquor you wish you could suck off his tongue. 

“You’ve got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

The first time he’d shown you that gentleness of his: You’d fallen from your horse at school in your junior year. Something had frightened the beast, and she’d bucked you, sent you flying ten feet in the air, ragdoll-like, before you’d landed badly on your right arm, a comminuted fracture in your radius that you’d needed surgery to fix. At your insistence, and with only a few weeks left to spare, you’d been sent home for the remainder of the semester. Your father had been incensed but eventually allowed it. He’d been away from the ranch on business, after all, at no risk of being truly disturbed by you. But when you’d been readying to return to Switzerland at the end of the summer, arm healed, courage not, you’d not been able to get back on a horse no matter what you tried. Joel had helped you, before they’d shipped you off again. Trotted the corral with you for hours and hours before you’d finally been able to relax and sit on your own without tears and vertigo. No questions or admonishments, nothing but the quiet burr of his deep voice, guiding you and the mare along. 

It had been a kindness unlike any you’d experienced in maybe your whole life. 

“I’ve been bad.”

“Nah. You couldn’t ever be.”

The second time: “Did today make you think of Sarah?” Years after you’d found that green eyed photograph, he’d shared her with you. 

His gaze turns suddenly sharp, but you’re not worried you’ve stepped in unbreachable territory. “Yeah.” The echo of her name rings around the two of you. 

“In a bad way or a good way?” He takes another long swig, a low whistle through his teeth and a shake of his head before he’s handing the bottle back to you—again, carefully. 

“Both.”

You take your own swallow, slicking your tongue all around where his just was, and you’re drunk for real now. Drunk on a man. 

“Do you ever regret telling me about her?”

“Nah.” He tips his head back, looking up at the thick beams of the deck’s awning. He’s got the longest lashes you’ve ever seen on a man, thick and curling. The deepest voice you’ve ever heard too, sultry, a bedroom voice. A voice for fucking. Your belly swirls and dips, and you want so much you’re dizzy with it. 

Heart beating like it’s about to burst, out of breath on the verge of hyperventilating, you can taste his mouth in your mouth, the imagination flavor of it. This is what it must feel like to die. This is what your father must have felt like three days ago, this agony. 

His Adam’s apple bobs, and it’s so pronounced, the skin of his throat sun pebbled. There isn’t an inch of him that isn’t all rough-hewn man. “You needed to hear about her then, I s’pose.” 

Yes. “You told me when I needed you to.” After that lonely graduation, the last time you’d missed her really very badly, longed for a mother. Alone, alone, alone little girl. 

“You were missin’ your momma somethin’ fierce. Needed to know you weren’t the only one that felt like that sometimes.”

You laugh a not-laugh, butt scraping against the railing, slipping off your perch, socked-feet thudding beside his gifted boots. The pleasure you feel whenever you see him use one of the things you’ve given him is indescribable. 

“Silly,” you say with barely any sound, his bad ear reaches for your voice again. “At the time it felt like I was the only person in the whole world that had ever felt like that.”

“We all feel like that at one point or another, I reckon.”

“Will you miss him a lot?” You ask looking up at him, the beautiful profile, the strong jaw. You’ve always wondered how he sees you. If he’s ever thought you were beautiful. Other men do, it’s a common thing, a nothing sort of thing. There are always men, there will always be men. But this singular man—this one is not like the rest. 

“Maybe. Can’t tell yet, don’t think. But it felt wrong earlier, walking through his house without him in it.” His house, not yours. 

“Do you wish he’d been your father?” And he turns to look down at you at that, gaze snapping, and you can tell you’ve shocked him with the question. But you’d always wondered. 

“No. Never,” he says with such assuredness, an uncompromising shake of his head. 

And the answer doesn't necessarily shock you in turn. You don't think anyone could have ever wanted a father like that. But it also doesn't help you understand what it was that lived between them either. 

He sighs, perhaps reading the confusion in your gaze. “He helped me at a time when I needed it real bad. Gave me a place and a purpose and a thing to do and take care of. You get me? It was gratitude—maybe. He saved me in a way, after Sarah. Nothing more.” He thinks for a moment, and then, “Perhaps it was that we understood each other about certain things.”

You gaze across the sprawl of dark land as far as the eye reaches, that point of no return where the earth shoots up into the sky, purple blue behemoths in the shape of mountains. 

From this spot, rooted to the deck of your family home, it seems like the whole world is yours to keep. Also, like you’ll never be able to touch any of it with fingers or taste or meaning. 

Your love for this place is complicated—tied up in the people, the memories, the could’ves and should’ves, the whole dreamscape idea of the monument of childhood and all it’d really never been. The time away had felt eternal, like you’d never really been here to begin with, like the young girl who’d grown up on this land had never really existed. But you’d not forgotten them, this, despite your distance. Your home, the father that wouldn’t want you, Wyoming and all its splendor, the people you’d left behind, Joel and Ellie and shared birthdays that meant a secret world to you. Morsels of small happinesses interloped amidst a largely lonely and sad childhood. That’s what it was at its core. 

“Would you be angry with me if I gave it all away?”

He thinks for a moment, maybe you’re making him sadder, but then finally says with a swallow, “No. It’s yours to do with as you please.”

You eye the quarter of whiskey left, but your belly isn’t hungry for its warmth anymore. You want something heavier now. 

“Could you even do that—legally—sell it or somethin’?”

“Probably not. He probably tied it to my fucking life. Sell and die.” You mime your name in an imitation of your fathers deep voice, frowning at yourself the way he’d always frowned when he looked at you, but it pulls a laugh from him, and the painful memory is worth it. “But I have a billion dollars to spend now. More?” You tap your chin—you want to make him laugh again. “Gotta think of something interesting to do with it all.”

His mouth slides into an easy half grin. Like the moon—that beautiful. And he turns to face you fully. “You’re gonna be just fine. You know that, right?”

You turn to face him too, gripping the bannister for dear life. “What? Will you make sure of it?”

“That’s my plan.”

“How’re you gonna do that, d’you reckon?” The American twang bleeds back into your voice, and you’re all swollen lush on the inside, heart a beating fist in your chest. 

“Haven’t gotten that far, if I’m bein’ honest with you.” God. His eyes, the strong bridge of his nose, his mouth. He’s so tall your head has to crook back to look up at him. “I’ll figure something out.” And after another pensive second, and still with that soft, sloped eye smile, he asks, and nicely, “Will you stop drinking now—for me?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” you say with the same sort of smile in return. 

And then suddenly, like vomit again but maybe more humiliating this time: “Did you respect him?” Because you don’t know all the things about him that there are to know, but you do know that Joel Miller’s respect is a thing hard earned. 

He clicks his tongue, and you hear the pop of his jaw as he shifts it like he’s chewing on an honesty. His eyes, his eyes, they’re serious, mercurial, warm and deep also. You worry he won’t answer, that he wouldn’t want to disappoint you or something, but then: “No,” said real simple like.

“Why not?”

And the way he looks down at you, you know already, and it makes that falling through the surface of your own life feeling rise up inside you again, makes your ears pop with embarrassment. Ah. “He never did a very good job of hiding the way he treated you, sweetheart. I couldn’t ever respect a man like that.” 

This is reality right here, this is you falling through your life, this is the realization that it wasn’t only you imposing yourself, your existence, on someone with gifts they didn’t want or ask for. Joel had seen. Joel had understood. 

Someone else had noticed that you exist, and it had been him. 

What else had you ever wanted?

And in the blink of a desperate, yearning eye, drunk on a man still, you’re throwing yourself at him, pressing your mouth hot and heavy to his, kissing him full on the way you’d dreamt of since you knew to dream of such things.

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Broke my heart into a thousand pieces in the most beautiful way! What a wonderful way to look at Joel and the way he grieves. I’ll be thinking about this one for so long!

Prophesy

Summary: The end is never the end, it would seem.

Or, you died but your ghost keeps visiting.

Pairing: Joel Miller x f!Reader

Word count: ~7.5k

Warnings: death, mentions of canon-typical violence and injuries, grief, grieving, loss, very brief smut, two people who didn't say a lot to each other when they had the chance, Joel being very bad at letting go and being honest

A/N: You should definitely not consider listening to The Prophecy by Taylor Swift when reading this, if you read this. This is very, very loosely based on a ghost story I can no longer remember the name of. Thank you as always for continuing to put up with me, I love all of you so sincerely.

It’s always raining. 

The porch is dark; the light by the door that normally shines like a welcoming beacon, is switched off. 

The rain patters steadily against the roof, against the wooden steps and the puddles gathering like tiny oceans in the yard. A gloomy sun slowly rises, spilling more light along the slowly flooding yard. 

The windchime, carved by Joel’s hands, wooden and sturdy, clunks together and apart in the breeze, like the hollow tolling of bells. The sound makes something in your chest clench and ache. The pinch doesn’t ease, but knots itself up in your lungs, choking in its intensity. 

You touch one of the rough wooden legs, the memory of it when it was new surfacing like a flash of lightning. You remember the way Joel looked when he stretched to hang it, the tail of his shirt coming untucked from the back of his jeans, the skin of his wrist showing in the early morning light when his sleeve pulled down with the motion. You remember his chuckle when you called him talented, the shake of his head. 

Always disbelieving of any compliments, you just kissed his cheek and teased him for being shy. 

The memory vanishes, along with the warmth and faded golden glow of some long distant morning. 

The porch is still crowded with gray, with the sound of the slow drizzle. 

Your clothes are damp, your skin sticky with humid rainwater. You hold your hands out in front of you, watching the water bead and pearl on your skin, trailing down your fingers. 

Your fingernails are caked with dirt, mud streaks your forearms and torso and your jean clad thighs. You can only imagine what your face looks like, what you look like standing there on the porch. 

You turn and face the front door instead of the empty front yard, the emptier street, and the tiny view you’re afforded of the graveyard. Something raw opens up inside you at the sight of everything so quiet, so dead. 

A prickle of unease settles at the base of your skull, and you lift your hand to brush over the space. 

The porch is so dark, and you can’t understand why. 

The front light is never off. It’s like a homing beacon, always welcoming you back, guiding you home.

Maybe there’s a purpose to it. Maybe you’re being cast back, asked away. 

Before you can think better of it, before you can turn away, you raise your hand and knock. The wood is solid beneath your curled fist, and another memory surfaces from the wasteland of your mind; Joel greasing the hinges of this door in a fit of irritation one evening, even though the damn things had been doing so since you came to Jackson and never seemed to bother him before that moment. 

You shouldn’t have knocked, but it’s too late to take your hand back. 

Besides, where else would you go but home? But here? 

But the light is out, so maybe you aren’t quite welcome anymore. Maybe Joel Miller has finally tired of having ghosts hanging in his doorway. 

And you’re so filthy. You try brushing some of the detritus away, but it just makes it worse. It smears over your skin and you have to wonder how you died. You can never remember that particular detail, worrisome and niggling like the hollow space of a lost tooth, tongue sliding repeatedly into the bloody cavity. 

Joel shouldn’t have to see you like this. He shouldn’t have to keep seeing you like this. 

Light spills painfully bright across the threshold when the door opens, across your toes and bare feet and swollen ankles. The burst of discomfort that lances across your eyes only lasts for a moment before Joel comes into sharp relief, steady and solid and always there to open the door when you knock. 

“Is it always raining?” You ask when he just stares at you, joking only a little, trying to soften the blow of your appearance — both the way you look and your perpetual, repeated haunting. “I don’t remember it raining so much.” 

When he doesn’t answer, just looks you up and down, gaze raking over you, mournful and hungry and aching, so open and raw, all you can do is apologize. “I’m sorry, Joel, I’m sorry,” you whisper. “I wish I could stop.” 

Joel shakes his head and holds the door open further, relief spreading across his features in lieu of the grief, a gentle loosening in the tension around his eyes. 

He looks older than you remember, just as the wind chimes look worn by time you don’t remember passing. The lines on his forehead are deeper, his hair is grayer and pushes down and back behind his ears, longer than you ever remember seeing it. 

It makes your stomach turn. 

You are never certain how much time passes between your visits, but this time it is clear that you have missed years. 

“Sweetheart,” he breathes, ignorant to your panic. “C’mon inside. S’cold out there.” 

The sound of the rain is muted when you step across the threshold and he shuts the door behind you, warm fingers spread briefly over your spine, pulling you closer to the heat of his body. 

He’s trying and failing to hold himself at bay. You tuck yourself closer instead and are rewarded with the firm press of his hand between your shoulder blades, the winding of his arm around your waist, the shaky inhale of his breath against your forehead. 

“I wonder what would happen if you told me to go away,” you muse, pressing your forehead against his temple, his bowed head tilted toward you. His hand falls away from your shoulder to cup your cheek and keep you close, the other still firmly around your waist. “You should tell me to go away,” you say against his throat where you tuck your face. 

A long moment passes like that, silence between you but for the slow creak of floorboards beneath your feet when you shift. You pull back to look at him, fingers caught in the back of his shirt, like he might be the one to disappear. 

Joel doesn’t answer immediately, just keeps breathing you in, inhaling long and slow against your skin despite the layer of filth you’re covered in. 

He smells the same way he always has, just the way you remember. It’s a comfort, a balm, against something you can’t guess at. It’s not fair to him, either, that you should take comfort in him, in the way he feels and smells, when you haven’t experienced the long, slow shift of time the way he has. 

Eventually, he releases you, hands against your jaw, before he draws away entirely and takes the addicting heat of his skin away from yours. 

You have left streaks of mud behind on the color of his shirt, his jacket, the underside of his jaw.

Joel doesn’t seem to mind, or doesn’t notice. 

There’s a towel on the table in the entryway, like he’s been waiting for you since the moment you last left.

He wraps it around your shivering shoulders, looking you over with a sharp eye as he tugs the material close against your chest. “What if you told me to leave?” You ask again, knowing you should leave it alone. “You should just tell me to leave, Joel.” 

He shakes his head and rubs his hands up and down your arms, passing his warmth into your chilled, soaked skin. “It ain’t always rainin’ and we ain’t never gonna know what would happen if I told you to go away.” 

“You’re so good to me,” you say, tilting your face toward his, cataloging all the things about him you’d like to remember, for the next time you show up and too much time has passed: the particular shape of the scar over the bridge of his nose, the part of his mouth and the line in his bottom lip, the cast of his eyes, each new wrinkle and scar that has appeared on his skin, the spots of age and life lived starting to appear in the backs of his hands. 

Maybe you think about him all the time when you’re away, but if you do, you can’t remember it when you’re with him. There’s nothing but blank emptiness in your mind about wherever you go, if you’re formless and just plain dead, or in whatever afterlife might exist. 

“If I was really good to you,” he says, releasing the towel to hold your face in the cup of his palms. “I woulda figured out how to put you to rest by now.” 

“I am resting,” you say and lean into his touch. He’s as firm as you remember, as comforting as he’s always been. “It’s you I worry about.” 

“Mm.” His skin is warm; his eyes are pained. Joel’s loyalty and love are two of the things you loved most about him in life, in death you detest it because he’s alone. There’s no one left to love, no fealty left to give. “Don’t. Maybe that’s why you keep comin’ back, worryin’ I’m not all right.”

You cover his hand, press the calloused fingertips more firmly into your skin. “I don’t like to think of you alone. Why haven’t you moved on? I can think of a few that had their eye on you all that time.” 

He just shakes his head, rolls his eyes in that familiar way of his. The fold of his arms crease around you again, pull you into his chest, the heat of him that you’ve felt a thousand times before, that always somehow feels brand new and comfortingly familiar at the same time. 

The tip of his nose fits against your cheek, and when he breathes you in slowly, you feel the weight of all the years that passed between this moment and the last. He cups the back of your head, tucks you that much closer. His thumb slides slowly against the base of your skull, the back of your neck, his touch lingering there for a long moment. 

When he exhales and then replies, his voice shakes a little. “That’s real funny.” 

“I’m serious.”

“Uh-huh.”  

“I wouldn’t mind.” 

“Well, I would mind.”

Yes, you suppose he would, even after all the years that have passed. 

Joel is not one to give up or let go, not for anything. He holds it in his heart, with desperate, clenched fingers, refusing to give it up when it was so hard to let it in in the first place. 

There would be no one, nothing, else.

“Really,” you insist softly. “They didn’t think we were good together anyway. I was too mean and maybe they were right. I can see that now.”

“You weren’t, and they ain’t.”  

He rubs your back slowly, like he’s refamiliarizing himself with your shape and feeling.

An ache springs up in your chest, a little well of grief. He’s getting older and you’re missing it. He’s living without you and you’re missing it and so is he. He’s missing out on his own life again, buried under a mountain of grief. You should be here for all of it, for all of his life, but that’s just not how things work out sometimes. 

The lines by his eyes and the gray in his hair, you shouldn’t even notice it. If you were able to look at him every single day, you wouldn’t notice it at all. But you do now because you’re gone for weeks or months or, like today, years, and so you notice it. You see the toll of time on him. 

“Did you miss me?” 

“‘Course I did.” 

“I missed you, too.”

Something you never would have admitted to in life, not with words anyway. It gives him a second of pause. 

“I thought it was nothin’ for you? Ain’t you here everyday?” He smiles, and you know how glad he is that for you no time at all has gone by. Every single day, you get to see him. 

He doesn’t know it’s torture for you too, being the cause of such extended pain, such lonely heartbrokeness. 

“I missed you, even then. I know I did.” 

He nods, looks you over once again. “Well, you don’t got to no more. Let’s get you cleaned up.” 

Joel thought that he was losing his mind the first time you appeared in the rain, that the grief in his chest was too big and had swallowed him whole. 

It wouldn’t have been the first time after all. 

But you are as real as anything he’s ever known, as real as you had been in life. You’re warm to the touch, the scent of your skin is just like he remembers it, something he never thought he would smell again in the aftermath of your death. 

It’s all the same, you are the same, like nothing at all happened. 

You had known you were dead but not how, confused and anxious and fussing over him in a way that you only ever had when he was seriously injured or you when you suspected that he was. 

You aren’t haunting him; he doesn’t like to think about it like that. 

But that’s probably exactly what it is. Only Joel can shoulder the blame of your death, afterall, and maybe your spirit knows that. Most times, though, it just feels like you’re visiting after a long trip away. 

The only time he feels haunted is when you’re gone, when you disappear into some ether he can’t reach and the only thing left to him is your grave beneath a swaying tree. 

Your visits are infrequent, and you always appear when it’s raining. The rain is important, somehow. 

He waits for rain, begs for it.

Even thinks of praying for it, sometimes. 

You eat when you visit, not like you’re ravenous, just a normal human hunger. You sleep, and you feel warm though your hands are always cold. If it’s cold, you don’t seem to feel it. If it’s warm, you don’t seem to feel that either. 

The only troublesome thing about it, besides having to say goodbye to you over and over, is that you always turn up covered in dirt. 

He doesn’t like that, like you’d torn yourself up out of cold, dark earth without help, clawed your way out of damp dirt just to arrive on his front porch. 

Just because he can’t figure out how to let you go. You are being held hostage by his grief and guilt and he knows that even if you don’t. 

You sit patiently by while he runs a bath for you, ankles crossed and hands folded in your lap as your eyes rove around the bathroom, probably noting changes Joel no longer sees. His knee aches when he crouches and you frown when he groans getting back up. It’s embarrassing, aging, especially when you aren’t doing it with him. 

He’s glad that there are things you’ll never experience—aching joints and pained tendons among them—but it also means you aren’t there, you aren’t there with him to feel those things and do those things. You should be doing it together.  

It’s been a couple years since he last saw you. The longest you’ve ever been gone. He takes your hand and helps you undress, and it’s odd because your body is the same as it was when you died, younger than him, the space between you growing with each year that passes. It’s a particular, peculiar, cruel kind of grief that your body never got a chance to age along with his, to develop creases and lines, to accumulate new scars and marks. 

In other lives, in some other reality, he would have liked to get old with you. He’s had that thought about so many things over the years, about things out of his control and those in it, things that should have been different but weren’t, aren’t. In another life, he would have liked to go grocery shopping with you. In another life, almost exactly the same as this one, neither of you take so long to pull the other in and he gets more time with you. In another life, neither of you are as hard and distant as you are in this one. 

But he likes the life he got with you all the same, the time he got with you. He got to watch you soften in your own time and way after settling in Jackson. He got to go on patrols with you, and in this world, patrols sometimes amount to their own kind of grocery shopping. 

Joel lets you balance one hand on his forearm as you never would have in life to lower yourself into the bath. You used to be adverse to any kind of help. I don’t need help, stop looking at me, I can do it myself, it doesn’t hurt. 

In life, you never really got better about showing affection. Pushed away from it, allergic to it, only fitting with and around him in the dark. 

Not ashamed, but afraid. Like if the world looked too close, it would all just be ripped away. Joel should have known it would be the other way around. That the world would inevitably take you from him first. 

Now, though, in death, you hold onto his arm, and then squeeze his hand. You lock your fingers with his and rub his wrist in gentle circles. 

Maybe you’ve realized all the same kinds of things that he had, that so much was wasted, never realized. 

You watch him carefully now, eyes drinking him in, when he kneels next to you. “I like your hair like this,” you say, lifting one hand to twitch a piece of his hair back. “And I can do this myself.”

There it is.

He doesn’t answer, just dips the washcloth into the water and drags it along your skin. 

Soft skin, damp and warm and so alive. But he knows when he inevitably lies his head against your chest later, he won’t hear a thing. Your heart is still. It will never not be still again. 

The other thought he had the first time you showed up, was that you had turned. That worse than death happened, that he’d made some kind of critical error and you’d become what you so wildly feared, that he promised he would never let you become. 

Your death had flashed violently behind his eyes, your blood soaking into the ground turning the whole world a bright, rusted crimson. He feels the weight of his revolver in his hand, sees the unending mess of your death, the splatter of the back of your skull—

But infected don’t knock at the door, don’t smile, don't talk and walk and remember everything that ever happened to them. Most of everything that ever happened to them, anyway. 

And infected ain’t human, not anymore, not as they’d once been. 

Besides, he’d seen you die, felt you die, sure as sure that you could never become one of those things.

“I wish I could stop,” you say gently, the bath water turning slowly brown, curls of steam rising from the tub, washing him in the unfiltered, raw scent of your skin undercut by the smell of his own soap because he’d long ago run out of yours, and no matter where he looked, he could not find it again. A cosmic punishment, maybe, that even your scent can be lost. “I don’t know how to stop. I wish I could leave you alone.” 

He shakes his head. “I don’t.” 

It’s quiet for a while, the rain continues to patter down, splashing against the panes of the open window, birdsong spilling in the air beyond the crush and shush of the leaves twisting in the early morning wind. The air smells sweet with rain, like the slightly earthy tang of perchitor. 

“How long has it been?” Your fingers circle his wrist when he wrings out the cloth, holding his hand to your chest tightly. “It’s been a long time hasn’t it?” 

Joel shrugs. “I thought maybe you were finally at rest.” 

You swallow, he feels the echo of it in your chest, heart still silent, though he’s feeling it’s silence before he planned to. “How long?” 

“Two years. Almost three.” 

You suck in a sharp breath and shift, the water twisting around you in the tub. Dirty water, now, that reminds him of that night, all that rain. . . all those—

“Oh, Joel.” 

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not.” You shake your head, the fierceness you’d shown in life creeping into your voice. He ignores the way the temperature falls several degrees. “This is—I’m torturing you.” 

“It ain’t like that,” he disagrees. “You’re here.” 

You make a frustrated noise. The grip of your hand around his is painful, and he can’t stop thinking about the still heart beneath it. “It’s exactly like that. Next time, don’t open the fucking door. I won’t even knock. I’ll dig myself back into the ground where I belong.” 

He cups the side of your head with his other hand, feels the impossible heat of you, the mocking life of you. “Don’t you even think of it.” 

“This hurts, Joel.” 

“I know.”

He pulls you closer, your forehead against his, palm cupping the back of your head, that place on your neck. Just smooth skin there, nothing else. “This hurts you.” 

“No.” 

“You’re alone.” You pull back, eyes blinking up into his, brows tilted in and mouth skewed to the side. Angry, anxious. More than that, protective. You could grit your teeth through anything. But not this. “I never wanted that.” 

He has to repress the urge to slide his hand along the back of your skull again. “M’not. I talk to you all the time. You just can’t hear it.” 

He visits your grave everyday. 

Most days, the graveyard is quiet. It was the best place he could have buried you, even if it was outside Jackson. 

Birdsong, the steady swish of water in the nearby creek, the sun moving through ever swaying branches of leafed trees. 

The world there teems with new life, creatures to keep you company. 

Always, a pair of deer that slink between the headstones, nosing at the sprouting grass and budding flowers. Birdsong and the chittering of little creatures. The hush of wind through trees, the fluttering sound of a cool morning breeze. 

It’s nice. 

It’s always nice, if a little lonely. 

“Three years.” You pause, anguished about it. Then, “How’s Ellie? She must be all grown up. What does she look like? Does she—” 

“‘Bout the same,” he cuts you off. You don’t need to know just how alone things have gotten.  “Taller. Skinner. Patrols a lot now.” 

“By herself?” The note of pride in your voice makes him chuckle, releases the tension caught up in his throat . 

“Well, with someone else, as a pair. You know that.” 

You nod and hum. “Yeah. I wish I could talk to her. Do you have a picture?” 

“Downstairs.” Joel touches the curve of your shoulder, the scar that runs along your collarbone. You’ve always had that scar, a permanent fixture on your body from before the time you’d known each other. 

You used to be angrier in life. It’s like death has mellowed you out a little. Why shouldn’t it? What worries could the dead have?

Besides him. 

You worry about him. 

Sometimes Joel worries that you aren’t you at all, or that one day you’ll remember more than he wants you to, and all that buried rage will come right back up. 

Where do you think you go, really? He wants to ask. And is it a place I can follow someday? Do I deserve to? 

Or will you show up here one day to an empty house, to bones and dust and nothing else and think he abandoned you? Or grieve in death for him, unable to reach each other? 

A mourning ghost.

Maybe you hate him. Maybe wherever you go, you know the truth and you hate him. Maybe you’re so angry your spirit can’t rest, and that’s the real reason you’re still around. 

Maybe this is supposed to be torture to him like you said, a punishment, but he loves you too much for that. He loves you too much for this to be anything but a gift, even if it hurts like hell every time. Even if it’s like losing you all over again each time. 

Because there’s this. 

There’s rain and quiet and you, real and in front of him, your skin soft and clean beneath his fingertips, your voice in his ear and your laughter he can swallow down. The water is a murky, thin brown by the time you get out of the bath. You dress in fresh, clean clothes, and then he wraps your swollen ankles and pushes his thumbs into the soles of your feet. 

“I think you’re getting too old for that,” you say, one hand on his shoulder. “I can do it myself. You know it won’t matter anyway and my feet don’t hurt too badly.” 

No, because you’d just show up again in the clothes he buried you in, with your ankles swollen and feet sore again, just like they had been the night you died. 

Joel will never forgive himself for not making you stop that night, to at least wrap your feet. Maybe then you would have missed the—

He pushes the thought away. 

He’s kneeling on his bathroom floor, with the warmth of your ankle in his palm. He stares at the knob of your ankle and feels the soft down of the hair on your leg when he slides his hand up your calf to cup the back of your knee. He misses you so badly in that moment, he feels it in the back of his throat, choking him. 

“I love you,” he says, because he isn't sure he ever said it when you were alive, and if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s not making the same mistake twice, even if all his mistakes prove fatal. The words are thick on his tongue, almost clumsy, and your face crumples with them. You slip to the floor and kneel with him and something about it feels so wrong. 

“Yeah,” you say. “I know. I know. I love you too.” 

You would have never said it, before, either. You never said things to each other, and maybe you should have. 

The only sign of your otherworldliness is the glow you put off. You shimmer around the edges, and he half expects you to disappear each time he blinks. You look like summer sun has permanently infused itself under your skin. 

When you eventually make it down to the kitchen together, he heats something up for you to eat. He’s still as bad at cooking as he’s always been so it’s the best he can do. 

It’s just stew that Tommy and Maria sent over a few days ago, but you eat it slowly and savor each bite. He shows you a fairly recent picture of Ellie and you look at it like you might cry. “She’s all grown up.” 

Joel nods and lets you hold onto the picture. 

He doesn’t tell you that they don’t talk anymore. 

Whenever you visit, Joel bars himself from the world. 

You’re only there for a day, less than 24 hours, usually, and he needs all that time with you. How long would it be until he saw you again? Three years? Longer? Never?

This might be the last time he says goodbye to you, and he isn’t sure if that’s better or worse. 

“I get afraid sometimes, you know,” you admit, threading your fingers through his hair, your naked skin pressed to his, humid and tacky with sweat. It’s so human. It’s so alive. 

You smell like you, like the trees and earth you died among. 

He never says anything about how cold your hands are. He’ll miss the icy press of them through his soon enough.

“Of what?” 

“Do you think we’ll find each other? When you die?” You pause. “Many, many years from now, of course.”

Joel tightens his arms around your waist, feels the contraction of your lungs. It’s so strange, hearing the in and out of your breath, the pump of your lungs, but not the beat of your heart. He slides his hand down your back, over the length of your spine to the small of your back. Your leg flexes against his hip, the warmth of you folded around him. “What if you move on? And I still don’t know how?” You only pause for a second, “Or what if I move on, and then you don’t know how?” 

He pulls back to meet your eyes, watches you squint at him through the yellow gray of the afternoon air. Already the sun is arcing down through the sky, the end of another day within reach. 

The curve of your cheekbone, the line of your jaw muted in the pale sunshine straining through the gray and purple mass of clouds that have not dissipated. Your brows are drawn together, lips pulled down into a frown. Maybe if it keeps on raining, you’ll get to stay longer, you’ll never have to leave him again.

There’s no world where he doesn’t tear it apart to find you, and he tells you so. He’ll find you, somehow. 

“Joel,” you say gently, and it feels like being caught, being found out. He knows what you’re going to say before you say it. “I think you should tell me how I died.” 

Joel shakes his head. “No.” 

His voice comes out mean, a snarl, warning. 

It’s the one thing you don’t remember, the one thing that remains out of your reach. You don’t know how you died. You don’t remember that day at all, not any of it, and it’s better that way. “It’s better you don’t know. Ain’t nothin’ you need to know.” 

“But what if that’s—I do think I need to know, Joel. What are you trying to protect me from? Why don’t I know that? What if that’s why I can’t stop haunting you?”

He presses his forehead to yours, feels the warm swell of your breath against his lips, the slick slide of your body against his. “I can’t,” he repeats, softer this time.

It hurt too much to even think of. He’s lost too many people that way, bloodied and scared, but those are his memories to hold onto, not theirs, not yours. That’s something he can keep. He can keep you safe from the memory of that terrible moment, that horrible night.   

“Why?” You stroke his hair, the shell of his ear, and he can’t help but think of how different you are in death. This sweet side of you, it must have been you before the outbreak, before everything. “Joel,” you say so softly. “Did you kill me?” 

Driving a knife through his heart might have been kinder than asking, but it might have been kinder, it might have been right, to tell you the truth a long time ago too. He feels like he can’t breathe, the memory of your warm, sticky blood on his fingers, the way you’d gone so still and the way he hadn’t been able to move for hours afterwards, your cooling body in his arms, deadened inside, numb. 

“Joel?” You don’t sound mad, even though it’s obvious you guessed right. “I’m already dead. If you killed me, I know you must have had a good reason to.”

You’re so level headed about things, in death. If you came to him in nightmares and horrors, ripped paintings off the walls, broke furniture, screamed and wailed and made the house bleed from the floorboards, at least that would be understandable.

You were rarely so reasonable in life. 

He doesn’t answer, just palms that place at the base of your skull where a bullet hole should be, where the wound he inflicted should still be, but isn’t, shattered bone and viscera. “I killed you.” 

“Why?” 

“You—” 

He spent hours with you, listening to you struggle to breathe, listening to you cry,  listening to how afraid you were of what was to come, begging for him to do it, to kill you, that you couldn’t do it yourself.

I don’t want to be one of those things, Joel, not even for a second. I don’t want to know if they’re in there. I don’t want to know if people have been in there all this time. Please.  

He had wrapped the bite on your ankle and felt eerily calm, trying to think his way out of something final. 

Maybe, some part of him had desperately thought, you were like Ellie, immune. Maybe he was lucky enough for that to be true twice. But he’d seen Ellie breathe in spores, and she never sounded like you did then. 

The rattle in your lungs was the worst of it, how you struggled to breathe and he wouldn’t let you die. 

It had been raining that evening, and you had been angry at him about something. Even now, he can’t remember what you were arguing about—just that you were being stubborn and so was he, that you weren’t talking aside to bark at each other about something, that your feet were so sore you could barely walk and wouldn’t let him touch you. He’d been rolling his eyes, stiff shouldered, annoyed. It had reminded him of the first time he had to wrap your feet, two days after Sam and Henry died, your pace so slow you might have never made it out of the state, let alone the suburbs of that city, snapping that you were fine.

After the first time he wrapped your ankles and then found you better shoes a couple days on, you let him do it again without all the snarling and snapping at each other.  

The night you died, you had been outside the wall without the horses, and he can’t remember how that happened either. 

Why you were out there. If something happened and you lost the horses or—

He supposes it doesn’t matter, really.

It had been dark, the soft shush of rain against the canopy of leaves overhead the only sound in the caress of night. Then you had come on the soft, decaying bodies of several clickers leaking red into the burble of the creek. 

They were all dead. 

Or, he had thought they were all dead. Joel hadn’t been thinking about anyone getting bitten because they were all already dead, and the real problem had been who was that close to Jackson leaving bodies behind, and that he’d have to come back in the morning with Tommy to clean up the mess and look around, reckoning already with not being able to get any sleep. 

He couldn’t look at you when he did it, that was the final injustice of it all, after hours of putting it off, dawn starting to leak over the horizon, the rain finally abating. So you laid face down and told him it was okay, and then he shot you. His hand didn’t shake until after it was done, and he couldn’t remember what your face looked like and there was no seeing it again, not after a shot like that one at point blank range. 

He tells you all of this now in so many words, whatever he can manage to get out without losing it. 

“Oh,” you say, your fingers drifting to the back of your neck, that place at the base of your skull he always touches so tenderly. “But none of that is on you. You did the right thing.” Your voice warbles. “I’m sorry I made you do that. I should have been able to do it myself.” 

“That’s not—I wouldn’t have let you,” he says. “I wouldn’t have left you alone.” 

He would not have let you die alone. 

“No,” you agree, “you wouldn’t have.” For a moment, he thinks that’s it. It’s over, you know now, and maybe you’ll disappear but you don’t seem angry. “Joel,” you murmur. “I’m so sorry. It must have felt like I was—like I was waiting to—I don’t know. You didn’t just lose me once, you’ve lost me so many times. I can’t imagine losing you over and over and over again.” 

He closes his eyes, can’t look at you. “We never learned how to grieve,” you continue. “Not for each other, and not for anyone else.” 

“We were mad at each other,” he says instead of answering.  

“Were we? About what?” 

“That’s the damn thing. I don’t remember. Probably somethin’ stupid, like usual.” 

You touch him again with your icy, cold fingertips. The press of it firm against his skin, like you might leave craters behind in his flesh, scars of you left over on his skin. “It was always something stupid.” 

“Yeah,” he agrees, because it was. “I miss it.”

“I can fight with you right now, if you want.” 

“That’s all right, honey,” he laughs. 

“Was I always so mean and angry?” 

“No,” he says. “You was always real nice to Ellie. Sam, too.” 

“Kids.” 

“Kids,” he agrees with a nod. “And me, after a while, in your own way. You got to be real easy with me. By the time we got here, to Jackson, you were nice enough to find Tommy tolerable.” 

“We liked to tease you,” you say, like it’s something you’re just remembering. “Me and Tommy.”

“Yep. Sure did.” 

"You can say I was mean."

He almost laughs. "You were a little mean. You almost killed me when we met."

You do laugh. You can; you aren't being left behind, being asked to move on. "I didn't trust you until you found me those shoes. Maybe I should have tried harder."

It's only quiet for a beat.

“Joel,” you say, and he has to look at you. “It’s not your fault. What was the alternative?” 

The sun slides from behind a cloud then, the steady patter of rain not abating. “Maybe I was too quick with it.” 

You breathe out sharply. “The way you tell it. . .we both know that’s not true. You did what I asked. I never had to find out what it’s like to be one of those things. Because of you.” 

“Don’t make it any easier. Don’t make losin’ you easier.”

Doesn’t make the jagged sharp memory of your final hours any easier, doesn’t make the weight of that gun in his hand any easier to bear, your blood on his hands.

“And I’m still sorry for that.” You touch the back of his head with cold fingers, the place that echoes the would be wound on your own. 

“I think. . .I’m here because you need me. Not because it was your fault. You don’t want to be alone.” 

He can tell you anything, more than he ever did when you were alive. What did it matter? Really? You would leave and take those parts of him with you. You might never come back, might not remember, anyway. 

Something cracks, spills from the center of his chest. 

“I can’t do this again. I can’t lose someone like this again. I don’t think I’ll survive it.” 

“You’ll be okay.” 

You don’t understand, and he can’t unburden that on you. “I know.” 

“Ellie will come around, Joel.” 

His head jerks up, but you just nod and stroke his skin, the chill of your hands making a shiver run down his spine. “She will. I promise.”

“You know.” 

“Of course I know.” You don’t look away. “I know you. I know her. Of course I know. Give it time.” 

That’s pretty much the one thing he suddenly has too much of and not enough of. 

When you kiss him, it’s gentle. You part your legs when he presses his fingers against you. 

The drizzle returns to a downpour, the clouds blacken, bruised purple and green at the edges. The pattern of it against the window is distant, far away. He sinks into you, feels the hollow, shuttering intake of your breath like it’s your own, feels the sticky, warmth of you, easy, tight. 

“I can’t do this again.”

It’s said against your throat, words he didn’t mean to say.  

You cup the back of his neck, your lips press against his ear. “You have to let go. And I’ll always be sorry,” you cradle him close, “for these last few years. You deserved—more.” You shutter against him, words are lost. 

He wakes. 

Every window in the house is open. 

Wet footprints lead from the bedroom to the landing, down the stairs and out the front door. 

It’s a new day. 

It’s not raining. 

He dresses slowly, eats a hollow breakfast by the window, watches Ellie leave for the morning from the chair by the window. 

By the time he has his boots on, the first patrols of the day are already gone.

Tommy doesn’t ask him where he’s headed. 

He stops only once.

Most days, the graveyard is quiet. 

Birdsong, the steady swish of water in the nearby creek, the sun moving through ever swaying branches of leafed trees. 

But it’s spring, now, and the world is teeming with new life. 

A pair of deer slink between the headstones, nosing at the sprouting grass and budding flowers. One makes a sound like a sneeze. They move away, hooves disappearing into the shallow creek bed before the trees and shadows swallow them whole. Birdsong and the chittering of little creatures. The hush of wind through trees, the fluttering sound of a cool morning breeze. 

It’s nice. 

It’s always nice, if a little lonely. 

Then, the sound of footsteps cutting through it all, the steady, heavy fall of boot treads that send the deer deeper into the woods, send the rodents dashing, hiding under last year’s lost foliage, freezing the songs of a hundred birds and stilling their wings. 

The world goes silent and very, very still. 

The sunlight blinds you, and then he’s there, broad shoulders blocking the light, carefully stepping between graves until he reaches the edge of the graveyard where you perch on the top of a headstone. 

You knew he’d come. He always does. 

“Hey, honey,” he kneels and lays the bouquet of flowers by your swinging toes, replacing the wilting blooms from the last time he must have visited. 

Ivy creeps along the stone, time and elements obscuring the carefully carved names and dates your fingers absently reach down to trace. Joel carved the words out with his own hands, and you hate that he had to. 

“Hi, Joel.” 

He doesn’t hear you, doesn’t feel your touch. You wish you could remember these moments when you’re with him, that you could tell him you know how he mourns, how he refuses to let go, and that it’s okay to. 

He looks up. 

You turn and look with him. 

The marble statue, blinded eyes, one palm reaching up, cradling the whole wide world in a moss covered palm.  

You scoff. “Jesus. She’s not me.” 

He shakes his head. 

“You need to let go.” 

“I’m gonna let go. Try to.”

“Good. Tell Ellie to come see me.”

He rises from the ground, leads against the headstone next to you. “I’ll see about gettin’ her out here eventually. She was so mad at me when you—Well, hell, she’s mad about a lot more now.” 

The air flutters with light. “You’ll figure it out.” 

He nods, like he can hear you. You nudge your knee into his, just to make sure he can’t. “Wait for me, please.” 

“I wouldn’t ever be that unfair to you. Of course I will.” 

“There ain’t nobody else for me, so don’t go lettin’ anyone else take care of your ankles just yet.” 

You laugh, the tree above your grave shivers, leaves turning. Joel looks up, and you track the little flecks of gold in his eyes. 

When he gets up and starts back toward the overgrown path that leads to your graveyard, a scrap of paper falls from his pocket. You read over his shoulder. 

I’m sorry for not being better to you. 

“You weren’t that mean. Sorry for keepin’ things from you.” 

“Thanks for being honest with me. You always get around to it eventually. No more wasting time. Go.”  

“Bye, sweetheart.” 

“See you around, Joel.” 

💕 Thank you for reading! I would love to hear any thoughts you might have! 💕