Chapter 7 Avery
seven
Avery
Red River is worse than the radio made it sound.
Three sides covered, sound devices herding zombie clusters toward the east wall in waves. Organized. Too organized. Whoever is running this campaign has done it before and gotten better at it.
Jenna crouches beside me in the treeline. "Southeast corner," she says quietly. "That's where they stage the devices before they move them. Old Hawk always worked from the high ground on the right."
Dutch is already recalculating.
"Drainage tunnel," he says. "East side, not covered. Extraction route."
"How many can you move?"
"Depends how long you can keep them busy."
I read the positions. Count the devices. "Three hours. After that they'll figure out the tunnel."
"Three hours is enough."
"Jenna." She looks at me. "Northwest approach. Radio me if anything moves. You're the only reason we'll see it coming from that side."
She holds my gaze and then nods, and I watch her melt back into the treeline with the particular silence Old Hawk spent two years teaching her, and feel a complicated kind of gratitude for it.
Dutch looks at me.
Neither of us says the thing we're both thinking, which is that this is dangerous and we both know it and we're doing it anyway.
He kisses me instead, hard and fast, his hand at the back of my head, and I grab his collar and kiss him back just as hard.
"Don't get shot," I say.
"Same." He touches my face once. Quick. Then he's gone.
I find my first position and get to work.
Three hours is the longest I can remember since the Iron Wolves.
I take out the sound devices one by one.
Without them the directed clusters fall apart, zombies wandering without purpose, and the raiders have to scramble.
I work Red River's defenders by radio, shoring up weak points, keeping the south perimeter from collapsing.
I don't think about the tunnel. Don't track Dutch's position.
If I start doing that I'll make mistakes and mistakes here are measured in people.
The raiders break just before hour three.
They pull back in order, which means they'll regroup, which means whoever is behind this isn't done. But they're gone. Red River is standing.
Dutch gets thirty-two people out through the tunnel. Mostly children. Elderly. Wounded.
We lose eight.
I find him with the dead.
Not doing anything. Just sitting with them, which is something I understand completely. Someone should stay. Someone should know they were here.
I sit down in the dirt beside him.
We don't say anything for a long time. Around us Red River starts the slow work of continuing — people finding each other, counting who's left, doing what you do after.
Jenna moves through the wounded with a field kit, quiet and precise, her hands steady.
I watch her and feel Lisa's absence alongside something that isn't grief.
"Thirty-two," Dutch says.
"Eight."
"Avery."
"I know the math." I do. I know it and I believe it and it doesn't fix the eight. "I know."
The sun drops toward the treeline. The light goes gold, which feels wrong and also completely right. The world doesn't stop being beautiful because people died in it. I used to hate that.
I've been carrying something for ten days. Since the battle, since the gravesites at Clearwater, since I woke up with his arm around me and couldn't make myself tell him to leave. I've been carrying it and I'm tired of the weight.
"I forgive you," I say.
Dutch goes still.
I look at him. His face has gone carefully neutral, the way it does when he's working hard to hold something. "I forgive you."
"Avery?"
"I've watched you. I watched you fight for my people like they were already yours.
I watched you go through that tunnel tonight for thirty-two strangers and come out and sit with the eight we didn't save.
" I hold his gaze. "The man who didn't come three years ago is not the man sitting here.
I'm done carrying what happened to him."
Something gives way in his face. Quietly, the way things give way when they've been held rigid too long. He covers my hand with his and holds it there, eyes closing, and breathes. Long and slow. Like a man putting down something he's been carrying so long he forgot what his arms felt like empty.
When he opens his eyes, something is different. Still tired, but lighter.
He pulls me to him and I go, and we hold on while the last of the light goes out of the sky.
Red River's deputy gives us a storeroom with a bedroll and a door that closes.
"Worst romantic venue in the apocalypse," Dutch says.
"You should have thought of that before you climbed over my wall."
He laughs. I pull him down to me.
It starts differently than it has before. No battle behind us, no grief driving it forward. Just the two of us on the other side of everything, and the particular courage of that — of wanting someone without a reason, without an excuse, just because you do.
He cups my face in his hands and looks at me for a moment.
"You okay?" he asks.
"Yes." Completely. "I just didn't think it would feel like this."
"Like what?"
"Like something I actually get to have."
He kisses me before I finish the sentence and it's nothing like the night after the battle. That was urgent, desperate, both of us half out of our minds. This is slow. Deliberate. His mouth moving against mine like he's deciding to, like he keeps deciding to, over and over.
I stop thinking in words.
He undresses me like he has all night. Mouth following his hands — my jaw, my throat, the curve of my shoulder — and I let him, which is the strangest part.
I don't let things happen to me. I've spent three years deciding everything, controlling everything, keeping everyone at exactly the right distance.
His lips brush my collarbone and I don't do any of that.
I just arch into him and make a sound that surprises me.
"Look at you," he murmurs. Low and wondering, his eyes moving over my body. Not performing it. Just thinking out loud.
My stomach tightens. I reach for him.
He takes his time working down my body — my breasts, my ribs, the soft skin of my stomach — and by the time his mouth finds my inner thighs I'm already desperate, already pulling at him.
When his tongue finally touches my pussy I stop being quiet.
Three years of careful and controlled and not wanting anything too much, and none of it survives this.
He licks into me slow and thorough, learns exactly what makes my hips jerk and does it again, and again, his hands holding me open and pinned right where he wants me while I fall completely apart.
"Dutch! Right there!”
He doesn't stop. Slides two fingers inside me and crooks them and keeps his mouth working and I come so hard I forget where I am, thighs locked around his head, the orgasm tearing through me in waves while he works me through every single one.
I'm still shaking when he comes back up my body. I get my hand around his cock, thick and hard and he groans into my neck when I stroke him, hips rocking forward without permission. I feel how much he wants me and it makes me want him more.
"Now," I say. "I need you inside me now."
"Yeah." Rough. "Yeah, okay."
He pushes inside me and we both stop.
Just that. Just the fullness of him, the specific weight, his forehead dropping to mine. His eyes are open. So are mine. I don't know why that feels like the most intimate thing that's happened tonight but it does.
He fucks me slowly at first, deep and rolling, his whole body into it, and I feel every stroke everywhere.
His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, my mouth, and I wrap my legs around him and dig my heels in and ask for more without words.
He gives it to me. The pace builds until it's not slow at all, until the bedroll is moving across the floor and I'm clinging to him and saying things I can't hear over my own pulse.
"Don't stop." My nails in his back. "Don't stop, don't stop!"
"I've got you." His voice is wrecked. "Come on. Let go."
I come with his cock buried deep inside me, clenching around him, his name the only word I have.
He thrusts through it twice more and pulls out — comes hard across my stomach, shuddering, a sound grinding out of him that he's got no control over.
I feel the warmth of it on my skin and watch his face while it happens, the way it unmakes him completely, and I think: I want to see that again. I want to see that many more times.
Afterward we lie tangled in the narrow bedroll with our breathing the loudest thing in the room.
"I love you," he says. Into the dark. Not carefully. Just: the fact of it.
I breathe. Let it land. Feel the shape of it.
"I know," I say. Then: "I love you too. I've been trying not to for a while."
"How'd that work out?"
"Terribly." I press my mouth to his jaw, letting the stubble of his beard brush against my lips. "You're very hard to resist."
"You resisted me pretty effectively for the first several days."
"I was resisting very hard. Internally."
He laughs, low and warm, and pulls me closer, and I close my eyes and sleep like I haven't slept in years.