They did, I thought. They would have wanted to survive.
I wanted them to survive.
I needed them to survive.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked in a raspy voice. “How are we going to evict Matthias without innocent people getting mixed up in the middle?”
“We invited whoever wanted to go with us, to come. They’re all afraid of the road. They wanted to stay and it didn’t really seem like they cared who protected them as long as they were protected. They traded their freedom to ignore the existence of Feeders.”
I snorted a laugh. “Idiots.”
Vaughan’s all-seeing gaze snapped back to mine. “Are they?”
“Freedom is more than being safe,” I told him. “How can they not see that? How can they not see what they’re giving up and those particles of soul that they throw away with each of these seemingly meaningless decisions?”
Vaughan shrugged and leaned in closer to me. “Thank you for telling me that. I’m glad to have confirmation.”
It was my turn to shrug. “I just want us all to be safe.” I closed my eyes and admitted. “I just want my family dead and gone and to not have to worry about them anymore.”
He wrapped his arms around me and crushed me against his chest. He seemed to sense what a difficult battle that was for me to have. They were my family, whether I wanted them to be or not. And I couldn’t ignore the latent guilt that seemed as thick as the Earth’s crust and just as gritty… just as dirty.
I didn’t cry, but I let him hold me. His arms felt good. His body felt right. His smell, his warmth, his pressure, his strength…
He had seen the possibilities with my dad and anticipated the outcome.
He was so smart. Way too smart for his own good.
Had he done the same thing for me?
Had he looked at me and envisioned every possible way for us to go? Had he determined that the benefits outweighed the pitfalls? Had he decided that I was worth it?
Had he decided I was important enough to pursue?
I’d been assuming he fell into this as hard and blind as I had. But Vaughan didn’t do things recklessly or without forethought.
I pulled back and pressed a kiss to his cheek before disentangling myself from him. “I’m not ready for a relationship,” I whispered.
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Tyler-”
“You promised to listen,” I reminded him. “You’re partially right. There is something between us, I know that. I mean… I hadn’t really examined it before today. And I’d thought we were more enemies than potential lovers.” He choked on his own spit at that word. I wanted to smile smugly, but I didn’t. That would have been rude. “I’m not saying I won’t always be like this, but for right now I’m not ready. I’m still too wrapped up in… and I can’t imagine betraying that or him… and all this stuff with my daddy makes me… and I’m not even sure if I feel the same way that you feel about me, but I want-”
“I don’t feel the same way about you,” he blurted before I could keep going with my incoherent argument. Seeing that he’d finally managed me to be quiet, he repeated himself. “I don’t feel the same way that you feel about me.”
“Oh.”
That unfair smile pulled at his lips again and my body threatened to liquefy. Focus, Tyler.
“I’m starting to think I feel a lot more for you than you do for me.”
Oh.
How was a girl supposed to defend herself against that?
My heart plummeted to my toes and my stomach erupted with butterflies so intense I had to close my eyes against the sensation. My breath came out shaky and my hands started to tremble against the effort to keep them to myself.
God, Vaughan.
I had not expected him. I had never believed I needed to expect someone like him.
Essentially, I had a very similar relationship with Gage. He liked me so much more than I would ever like him. Only, it was exponentially different with Vaughan.
And I knew it was because my feelings for Vaughan were so exponentially different.
My bottom lip trembled when I told him, “You don’t want to be with me. I’m cursed.”
My face was immediately cradled in his big, calloused hands. “You’re not cursed, Tyler.” And his tone was such that he gave me no choice but to believe him.
Still, I argued. “Everything I touch wilts. Everyone I love dies.”
He pressed his lips against my forehead. “Those are lies someone else told you, Ty. You’ve lived an unfair life in an unfair world. You’ve faced tragedy, and you’ve fought monsters. But it is not you that causes these things. You simply survive them.”
A lone tear escaped my hold and slipped down my cheek. Vaughan’s thumb wiped it away before I could even move my hands off my lap. I leaned into him, and he pulled me into the crook of his arm. My arms immediately went around his middle, and I pressed myself against him tightly.
“My family’s crazy,” I reminded him. “I might be crazy.”
“You might be,” he chuckled. “But you’re not the same kind of crazy as your family. I like your kind of crazy.”
Did he have an answer for everything? I found myself not minding so much. Actually, it was kind of nice to trust someone with answers. “I’m not ready for a relationship.”
He didn’t answer that one right away. His arm tightened around me and he kissed the top of my head before he said, “Then I’ll wait. I’ll wait until you are ready.”
I pulled back so I could look at him. “And if I never am?”
Something dark flashed across his face, but he shook it away immediately. “Don’t you remember how you kissed me today? You’ll be ready.”
I blushed. Fiercely. From the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Those kisses…
He might be right about me after all.
“I would like to start as friends first. We haven’t really ever been friends.” He laughed at that too, but he had to know I was right. I had more than one reason to want to try friends first though. The first being that I didn’t want this to be about sexual tension. We had that… obviously. And I didn’t want to give up all my carefully constructed defenses because I was horny. I wanted to know there was something deep and abiding between us. I wanted to know my feelings for Vaughan could paint the sky and fill oceans.
Was that possible?
I didn’t really know, but I wanted to find out.
“We can be friends, Tyler. I think I would like that.” And he sounded like he meant it.
I sat up all the way and pressed another soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Thank you.”
His focus lingered on my lips as I pulled back. “Except that I really liked kissing you earlier.” There was that amused pull at the corner of his lips again, the one that made my insides quiver.
I laughed, and it actually felt good… It felt like I was made to laugh. Or at least made to laugh for Vaughan. “Now that is something I might like more than you,” I said honestly.
Those blue eyes flashed up to meet mine with an excited light sparkling in them. His sigh sounded contented but also anticipating. “We’ll be good together, Tyler.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“When you’re ready though.” His words sounded like a dare; almost like he was challenging me to a game I had no chance of winning.
I pulled back further. Had we made progress? Or had I just stepped into a game that would crush me? I could not figure it out. I stood up to leave. I was starving all of a sudden. I decided Haley needed help with supper. And I needed to check on Page again.
Maybe now was a great time for that heart-to-heart with Reagan…
Anything to get away from Vaughan so I could put myself back together.
“I’ll find you later, Ty. I’m glad we had a chance to talk.”
I growled. “Stop making everything sound like a sexual innuendo!” His voice would be the death of me.
He threw his head back with laughter and I
found myself joining him. When he finally settled that intensely focused gaze on me again, I felt pure waves of happiness radiate off him.
And miraculously, and for the first time in years, I felt the same feeling magnified in my own skin.
“I like you, Tyler. I like the possibility of this friendship going somewhere more. Don’t expect me to be gentle with you.”
I shivered as those words caressed my body with a heated flare of want. “I don’t.”
Then I turned tail and got the hell out of there before he followed through with all those threats. I walked back to the group with a smile on my face and a bounce in my step.
There were a million other emotions swirling through my head, but Vaughan had managed to help me forget everything else except him. My family faded into the background. The concerns I had with Page or the compound or the scientists all seemed to drift away. And in their place, the swelling feeling of foreign happiness.
I didn’t want to betray Logan, but with Vaughan it didn’t feel like I was. And I knew Vaughan would help me navigate everything that came up between us.
We were just friends for now, but the promise of something more managed to obliterate all that cynicism and rage I’d worshipped like nothing else could have.
Vaughan.
No longer enemies.
But not really friends either.
And somehow all that confusion and promise fit my life even as the world fell apart around me. There was hope in that. Hope in the knowledge that love could still survive when surrounded by death. Even if it wasn’t love yet, even if it was only the whisper of it.
Episode Nine
Chapter One
870 days after initial infection
I had a dream last night that the world was new again. I could have lived forever in those short hours of blissful oblivion.
I dreamt about my home, the quaint downtown, and my high school that felt so familiar and comfortable. I dreamt about the house I grew up in and my parents at our breakfast table, sharing the newspaper and a pot of coffee. I dreamt about my cheerleading uniform and texting Haley and Chris and thinking about college and what life would be like after graduation.
I dreamt about an ice cold Coke and hot summer days and snow-piled winter months.
I dreamt about me, what I used to be like. My hair was glossy and always heavy around my shoulders. My clothes were current fashions, fun, flirty and just a bit scandalous. I remembered how happy I always was… The perpetual optimist. I dreamt about laughing loudly, constantly. I dreamt about not having a care in the world, staying forever in that idyllic bubble of living under my parent’s guidance and protection but being old enough to enjoy most of life as an almost-adult.
I got lost in the smell of home and the fizz from the Coke that tickled my nose and coated my mouth, the feel of plush carpet beneath my bare feet. My music blared from speakers in my bedroom and I danced around my house simply for the fun of it, simply because I had nothing else to do. Everything floated around me in nostalgic familiarity. My life used to be so perfect, so perfectly small and uncomplicated. I used to be uncomplicated. Every part of me.
There wasn’t a difficult bone in my body.
When I woke up my back pressed against hard tile in a dusty, neglected antique shop. A gun lay across my stomach, my backpack was filled with more guns and more ammo lay under my head. I hadn’t had a proper bath in too many days. My boots were on and laced tight. My head pounded with the headache that had been bothering me for days and the various cuts and bruises painting my body ached with a new kind of familiarity- one that had kept me company for more than two years now.
Worst of all, though, was what happened inside of me. The real change could be found there. Obviously, I didn’t flounce around in miniskirts and crop tops now. My hair was always thrown back in a greasy ponytail. My fingernails were perpetually filthy and my body odor was never exactly as pleasing as I wanted it to be. But those were all surface things. They didn’t define my personality even if they revealed it in a way. They didn’t touch my soul, even if they reflected it.
No, the real change… The real decline started inside me.
I rolled my head to the side and looked at the family I had once been a part of huddled together on the floor and in various pieces of furniture pushed up around Page. They slept peacefully. They slept… communally.
I rolled my head the other way and looked at the two prisoners asleep on the opposite side of the lobby. Nelson watched over them with fierce determination. His gun constantly trained on their sleeping forms as if even unconscious they posed a great threat.
I rolled my head back to the center and looked up at the ceiling overhead, obscured by darkness.
How symbolic.
Here I lay, in the middle.
I knew where I wanted to be. I knew where my heart belonged and where I so desperately wanted to belong again. I knew exactly where I didn’t want to be, but where I’d been pulled anyway.
And because I could never let myself belong on one side of the room and I was not exactly accepted on the other side anymore, I lay down in the middle and tried to redefine my place in the world.
The contented peace my dream had given me drained away as soon as my eyes opened and reality came crashing down again. I desperately tried to hold onto those sweet, heartwarming images, but they fled from my new world, shrunk away from the dark horror of it all.
In my head, those two worlds could not coincide. Immersed in death, destruction and chaos and remembering what my life used to be like, I could not look around myself today. I was not physically capable of holding both those thoughts at the same time.
My heart ached from the loss of that world. Tears stung my eyes as I remembered my parents’ faces, so vivid and alive in my dream but blurry and indefinable now that I was awake. My lungs seemed to constrict when I thought back to my simple existence and how happy I used to be and how easy it was for me to laugh and smile.
Now, especially now, there was none of that left for me. No moments of happiness or joy existed; not even the memories could coax a smile.
Quietly, so not to wake anyone, I shook myself out of this depressing pity-party. I hadn’t dreamt of home or life before the infection in more than a year. I didn’t know why all those beautiful memories came to me now, in the worst of it so far.
Hendrix’s long body had been curled up in a squat, rounded chair. His head tilted precariously to the side and I knew just by looking at him that he would have a crick in his neck when he woke up. His extra-long legs extended in front of him and crossed at the ankles. One hand rested on the gun in his lap; the other flung over the side of his chair and dangled in the air. His mouth hung slightly open; his eyes closed with sleep. His hair tangled on his head and hung disheveled around his face. His scruffy beard was longer than usual, a sign that we hadn’t had good bathing conditions lately.
He was beautiful.
And my heart hurt all over again just by looking at him.
God, I missed him.
And yet, I was so furious with him. I wanted to stand up, walk over to him and kick him in the shin. My heart hurt in a way that made it difficult to breathe, made it impossible to think about anything else other than the enormous void he’d left in my crumbling life.
My feelings of abandonment had only grown over the last five days. I played over everything that happened with Kane and him and the kidnapping a thousand times a day and could not find where I was at fault.
Except to stand up for Kane’s life. That was the one thing I knew Hendrix could hold against me, but I was stubborn enough to feel vindicated for my actions.
Hendrix had promised me the world and forever. He was the one that pursued me and made us into something I believed was unshakable. I didn’t want any of this. At least not in the beginning.
I was a big enough person to admit that once I fell for Hendrix, I fell hard. And I walked into this relationship with my eyes open.
I just thought… I
thought we were invincible.
I thought he loved me enough to see me. To see me through whatever bullshit threatened to take me away from him.
I had been wrong.
Hendrix didn’t see me. Not really. He saw the pieces he wanted to see and he filled in the rest with what he wanted to believe.
I was not perfect. I did not even pretend to have my act together. I was as lost in this nightmare-filled world as I’d ever been, and daily plagued with guilt, regret, longing and despair. Even when we were together and happy.
He wanted someone that was strong enough to hate everything they we were supposed to hate, kill everything that threatened his way of life and move on without emotions or regret. I wasn’t that person. I felt too much. I saw too much. And it was destroying me.
But he didn’t want to see that. All he let himself believe was that I had somehow betrayed his trust and fallen for another man. And those things were not true.
Those thoughts left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. They also made me question everything. Even while I tried so very hard not to let my overemotional state dictate where my thoughts went… I couldn’t help it. I was hurt and betrayed. I was traumatized and in serious need of a vacation. I couldn’t make sense of Hendrix’s actions any more than I could his thoughts or words.
It all culminated into a web of heartbreak and betrayal and I was caught right in the middle.
Hendrix had broken me like Kane never could. I didn’t think Hendrix even saw how deeply he’d devastated me. And I didn’t want him to.
I didn’t want anyone to see.
Weakness in this world made a person stupid and got one killed. I couldn’t afford either of those things. And so I would push on, like I had after my parents died, like I had after I killed Chris and like I had every day for the past two and a half years.
Love and Decay, Season Two Omnibus: Episodes 1-12 Page 50
