Chapter 59 The Present #2
We did not move for the better part of an hour. There was nothing to wait for, but neither of us wanted to move. The exhaustion was not just in muscle, but in nerve: a weariness of having survived, of having to keep surviving, day after day.
Eventually, I fished a can of beans from the pack, wedged it between my thighs, and cracked it with the knife.
I took a spoonful, then another, but the food made no impression on my hunger. I passed the can to Caiden, who scooped up a mouthful and swallowed without comment.
The intimacy of the moment was so raw I wanted to laugh. We had shared a cage, a wound, a killer; now we shared a spoon, the backwash of our spit swirling together with the chemical tang of the beans.
I remembered a time, not so long ago, when the idea of touching anything that had passed Caiden’s mouth would have made me gag.
Now, the idea of not sharing it was what made me sick.
When he handed it back, his hand lingered, thumb grazing the inside of my wrist.
It was not an accident.
I stared at the point of contact, feeling the pulse there.
I wanted to say something, but the words jammed in my throat. He watched me, all focus, all waiting, as if to see what I would do next.
“We’re not gonna die out here,” he said finally. “I refuse.”
I made a noise that might have been a laugh or a cough or a sob. I wasn't sure. I was too tired to check.
“Good,” I said. “Because I’m not done hating you yet.”
The words had no teeth, no venom, but he seemed to understand the new gravity of them. The way “hate” was a lifeline now, a chain that held us together when everything else was wind and bone.
He grunted, and the silence held for a few more cycles before he stood. His fingers hooked through the can’s rim, and he lobbed it into the creek where it spun in an eddy, gleaming silver under the sky. “Let’s go then,” he said, voice gruff with something like hope.
We walked. The sun climbed and baked the earth around us, the heat a relentless press that made the sweat roll down our necks and soak the bandages.
My shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat, each step sending a new jolt of fire into my arm. I said nothing about it. He didn’t ask.
The terrain was monotonous and hostile, every rise and dip echoing the ache inside my limbs. We tracked the creek for a mile, maybe two, until the water vanished into a dry gravel bed.
I wanted to stop, to curl up in the little hollow and sleep until the next century, but Caiden just kept moving, head down, eyes glued to the horizon.
When I lagged, he waited. When I stumbled, he caught me. No words passed between us, but his hand on my elbow or the small of my back kept me upright and moving, putting himself in front of the worst of the wind.
When I looked at him, I saw the old Caiden—the bastard, the bully, the monster—but I also saw the shadow of the boy from the playground, the one who’d sat quietly beside me and watched the sky.
I hated how much I needed both of those versions of him. I hated how my body responded to the closeness, the heat, the memory of his hand on my stomach. I hated that the hate was now a thin film over muscle and bone, a web that bound us together even as it threatened to rot us from the inside out.
When the sun began to slant, orange and mad, we crested the first rise of the day and saw nothing but a new, wider valley, another stretch of rock and rippling heat.
Caiden stopped, sweat streaking his face, and let out a low, guttural “Fuck.”
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, and for a second I thought he might cry. I almost wanted him to. It would make it easier, maybe, to forgive him for all the ways he’d failed to be a monster.
Instead, he turned to me and said, “If we don’t see water soon, we’re going to have to slow down. You’re bleeding again.”
I looked at my arm. The bandage had become useless, blood seeping up and blooming through the gauze. It didn’t hurt as much as it should have.
“I can keep going,” I said. My voice felt like it belonged to someone else, some tougher animal that didn’t know how to shut up.
He gave me a look and shrugged. “Fine. But if you fall over, I’m not carrying you.”
A sick thrill ran through me at the thought of him carrying me. I imagined it: his arms under my knees and back, his jaw clenched against the effort, his breath damp on my face.
I wanted to snap at him, to say he’d never have the strength, but the words dried up in my mouth. The idea of being weightless in his arms made my body hum with a longing that had nothing to do with safety, or maybe everything to do with it.
He started down the other side of the ridge, boots crunching the crust of earth. I followed, letting my weight carry me forward, letting gravity do the work.
At the bottom, a wash of stone and eroded sand gave way to a patch of green. Grass, stunted and burnt, but it meant water. Somewhere underground, some trickle feeding the fragile roots.
My mouth flooded with anticipation. I could have devoured the landscape.
We searched for the source, kicking at rocks and poking at the dirt. When I found the seep, I almost cried.
We knelt, scooping at the liquid with our hands, sucking it from the ground like desperate animals. In the moment, I was nothing but thirst and want, lapping up the taste of life like it was the last drug on earth.
He watched me drink, and in his eyes I saw an echo of the fever that burned in my own. The way his lips parted, the way his gaze traveled my jaw, my throat, the curve of my shoulder, made the skin go hot under the bandages.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, daring him to look away.
He didn’t. His voice was soft, almost tender. “You have dirt on your face.”
“Yeah? So do you.”
He reached out, thumb brushing the smudge from my cheek. The touch was electric, a jolt straight to the base of my spine.
I flinched, but didn’t pull away. His hand lingered.
We crouched there, side by side, the silence between us suddenly taut and humming. I wanted to say something stupid, to break the tension, but all I managed was, “What?”
It came out defensive, as if I needed to remind him that I wasn’t prey.
He didn’t answer. His thumb moved, slow, deliberate, tracing the edge of my jaw.
For a second I thought he would kiss me, and I wanted it too much to find words for the wanting. The ache moved through me, a pulse that rewrote every old hurt into something raw and new.
Instead, he just said, “You should rest,” and stood, his hand falling away.
I watched the muscles in his back flex under the thin shirt as he walked back toward the patch of shade. I hated him for stopping. I hated myself for wanting him not to. I hated that we had nothing else in the world, no other horizon but our own ruin.
But I followed, because I didn’t want to be alone with the old ghosts.
We huddled under the shelter of a boulder, knees drawn up, the heat radiating off the rock like a fever. I peeled the sodden bandage from my shoulder and wiped at the blood.
Caiden watched, face gone shuttered and blank, but his hands twitched in his lap, restless.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
I flexed my arm, wincing. “Not bad enough to die from.”
He grunted, the sound a soft rumble. “You’re such a liar.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” My voice was too thin to sound like anything but defeat.
He dragged a hand over his face, and I watched the lines it left in the grime, the way the muscles bunched in his jaw.
He looked up, finally, eyes catching on mine with a ferocity that made me want to crawl out of my own skin. “You always were,” he said, something almost gentle in the words. “You lied to everyone. But you never lied to me. Maybe you tried, but I could always see through it.”
I almost laughed. “That’s because you never believed anything I said. Or even cared. I didn’t feel the need to try to put on a mask.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes fixed on me. “I believed you,” he said. “You just never knew what you wanted.”
The words sliced. I thought of all the things I’d ever wanted. My sister alive, my mother sober, my own skin to fit better, the violence to stop.
Now, all I wanted was a can of beans, a handful of water, and this moment to last longer than the next disaster.
“We should keep moving,” he said, already up. “If we stay in one place too long, predators will start circling.”
I stood, the ache in my shoulder now a dull, needy throb, and followed. The sun was sinking, the sky bruised purple.
We walked in silence, the rhythm of our steps a counterpoint to the howl of the wind. Each mile hollowed out something deeper in me, and the hunger for Caiden—for the gravity of him—grew as relentless as thirst.
My head felt floaty, half-anchored, as if I were walking at the bottom of a glass tank. The pain in my arm was now a background whisper, less urgent than the quiet that had settled over us.
I tripped on a rock and caught myself, palms scraping open, and then just stood there for a second, blood seeping into the cracks of my hand.
Caiden looked back, sighed, and circled to me. “You’re gonna bleed out if you don’t start paying attention,” he said, but there was no bite in it, just a dull annoyance that felt almost reassuring.
“I can make it,” I insisted, even as the sky kept tilting and my knees went rubbery.
He made an irritated noise and dropped the backpack to the ground, kneeling to rummage through it. “Sit,” he ordered, and I obeyed.
He yanked open the first aid kit, found a strip of gauze, and without preamble took my wrist in his hands. His touch was rough, impatient, but careful in the way he pressed the pad to my palm and then wrapped the gauze around and around, tying it off so tight my fingers tingled.
“You don’t have to treat me like I’m glass,” I muttered, hating the way my voice trembled.
He snorted, but his hands stayed on me a beat longer than they needed to.
“I’m not treating you like glass,” he said, voice gruff. “Glass doesn’t bite back.”
“You wish,” I said, but the words had no venom, just a tired kind of gratitude.
He rolled the bandage up to my elbow, inspecting his work, then let my arm fall. “You lost a lot of blood, Amelia. You can’t go much further like this.”
“I’m fine.”
I was not fine. I could feel the fever crawling up my spine, eating holes in my concentration, making the world go swimmy at the edges.
But to admit it aloud would have felt like a betrayal. Of him, of myself, of the way we’d managed to stay alive this long.
He was close, crouched so his face was even with mine, the dirt smudged into the lines under his eyes. “If you pass out, I’ll just drag you,” he said. “But it’ll slow us down.”
I thought about this image: Caiden with his hands under my armpits, hauling my limp body up a ridge or through a dry creekbed, grumbling the entire way.
He would do it, too, and not even for me, but because he’d sworn never to let anyone die on his watch, not unless he’d promised to kill them first.
“Deal,” I said, and tried to get up again. The world tilted, but less this time.
He grunted and shouldered the pack again. “We’ll try the ridge tomorrow. If we don’t hit a road, at least we’ll get a better view.”
I nodded, and we started walking again, the world around us shrinking to the sound of breath and boot scrapes.
By dusk we found a patch of scrub that half-hid us from the wind, and we made camp. The night was colder than any before, the stars pinwheeling overhead like a thousand sharp knives.
We huddled close, an inevitable gravity, neither of us wanting to be the first to bridge the last inch of distance. Hunger gnawed at me, but I was too tired to eat.
He lay down first, pulling his knees to his chest, arms wrapping around himself as if he could squeeze the ghosts out through his bones. I watched the line of his spine, the way the muscles bunched and shifted as he breathed.
I lay down, arms stiff at my sides, and stared up at the sky, letting the cold burn the fever out of me.
His hand crept over, just barely, knuckles brushing the back of mine. Not a real touch, just enough to acknowledge the boundary and to test if I’d push back.
I didn’t. I let it sit there, the closeness of him, the warmth pooling between our skins and the way his presence made a barrier against the dark.
I fell asleep before I meant to, and the last thing I remembered was the wild, uneven rhythm of our breaths mingling in the air.