“That one never had an ounce of game. Everything he learned, he got from me. If he found a girl in the apocalypse, she’d have to be the one making all the moves.”
“Do you think about him much now?”
Wade sighs, “All the time. Keep trying to remember what plan we had, but it’s a gaping hole in my brain. Don’t even remember being with him before I came to your apartment. Barely remember the start of the outbreak at all. Only fragments. Only bits and pieces from after Silas grabbed me. Fuck, I hope Cole’s okay now. Really hope he forgot about me after all this time.”
She scoops a handful of questionably preserved bread to eat off her fingers. “No one who knows you can forget about you.”
He looks away, red coloring his cheeks even though she hardly said anything scandalous. “You think too highly of me.”
“Or you don’t think highly enough of yourself…wow, I wonder how many boards are in the floor. Can you count them?”
Her train of thought is jumbled. But who is he to say they shouldn’t count the floorboards? “Thirty-one.”
“You did that in your head right now? You didn’t even use your fingers.”
“Weed makes me math better.”
“No shit. Useful.”
“Do you remember that New Year’s Eve we spent together?”
She grins. “When we almost made out on your sofa?”
“That’s the one.”
She coughs, blinking at him with a fond smile only a good memory can bring.” We were both so drunk. You kept going on about elephants. Whole conversation about elephant migrations and then the ball starts to drop on TV and you got so quiet.”
“Because all I could think about was kissing you at midnight.”
“You did kiss me at midnight.”
She isn’t wrong. They don’t count that moment as a real kiss. Never have. It’s a thing people do, only a tradition. Find the closest person and plant one on them at midnight but somehow it felt like so much more when their lips touched for all of zero point two seconds.
“Yeah, and then I got scared,” he groans. He remembers how hard his heart pounded until he feared she could hear it. How disappointed she looked when he backed away so quickly from such a chaste peck.
“Of me?”
“Of losing us.”
She shakes her head, her hooded eyes meeting his. “I made some weird elephant joke as a distraction and stole your beer can, and then you tackled me to get it back.”
“I wanted more than to get my beer back. I wanted—”
“I would have let you.”
She holds his gaze a moment too long, and he gulps at that revelation.
“Anyway, what about you?” she asks absently, fiddling with a pen from a side table.
“What about me what?”
“We know why my brief relationship failed. I’m too fucked in the head and emotionally unavailable. But you…before the world got sucked into a meat grinder, you went through a girlfriend a month at least. Why didn’t any of those work out?”
“Told you already.”
“It wasn’t meant to be, blah, blah, blah, whatevercakes. I know what you said back then, but I’m asking for the real answer. Come on, spill it.”
Maybe it’s the pot that gives him the courage to hold her stare for a long moment, drop his tone an octave, and let the vulnerable side of his heart peek through the armor that’s afraid to lose her. “You know why.”
