Chapter 3
three
Hazel
I wake to morning light and the smell of coffee.
Travis's crew is already moving around camp, breaking down tents, checking vehicles, rationing fuel. Jess checks my vitals while handing me a cup, and the first sip is so good I nearly cry.
"Feeling better?" she asks, studying my face with clinical attention.
"Human, almost." The fever's finally broken. My shoulder still hurts, but it's a healing hurt now, not the deep infection burn of before. "Thank you. For everything."
"Thank Travis. He's the one who wouldn't leave you on that road." She pauses, something flickering across her face. "For what it's worth, he doesn't do that. Stop for strangers, I mean. In a year of running together, I've never seen him divert a route for one person."
I don't know what to do with that information, so I just nod and drink my coffee.
Over the next two days, I learn the crew's rhythms. Ken and Patricia bicker constantly but never meanly—thirty years of marriage have honed their arguments into an art form, more performance than conflict.
They finish each other's sentences, anticipate each other's needs, and move around each other like dancers who've practiced the same routine a thousand times.
"You ever think about staying in a settlement?" I ask Patricia one evening while she's checking the ATV's fuel lines.
"Thought about it." She wipes her hands on her pants, glancing toward Ken. "But we spent our whole lives in one place. House, jobs, kids, grandkids—all gone now. Moving feels right. Feels like we're actually doing something instead of just waiting to die."
Eric hero-worships Travis but tries to hide it, always volunteering for the hardest jobs, always watching Travis for approval he pretends not to need. When I ask him how he ended up with the convoy, his expression shutters briefly before he answers.
"Travis found me holed up in an abandoned school. I'd been alone for three months after my family's settlement fell. He didn't have to stop. Could've kept moving, pretended he didn't see me. But he stopped." Eric shrugs, trying for casual and missing by a mile. "So now I go where he goes."
And Jess watches everything with quiet competence, ready for any crisis, her dry humor cutting through tension whenever it builds too high. She's the one who tells me about Travis holding my hand while I was unconscious, the one who notices things others miss.
They remind me of my own crew. The crew I got killed.
I keep expecting the grief to swallow me, but somehow Travis's people make it bearable.
They don't treat me like a fragile thing.
Don't pity me. They include me. Patricia braids my hair when my shoulder makes it too painful to do myself, her touch gentle and matter-of-fact.
Ken tells terrible dad-jokes that make me groan even as they drag reluctant smiles from me.
Eric asks about my medical training, genuinely interested, taking notes like he's planning to remember every word.
And Travis.
Travis is everywhere and nowhere. Leading discussions, making decisions, checking on me with such casual frequency that it takes a full day to realize he's watching over me specifically.
His attention should feel intrusive, surveillance dressed up as concern.
Instead, it feels safe. Warm. Like someone finally has my back.
On the second night, I couldn't sleep. The nightmares are waiting—Reggy's gap-toothed grin turning to blank-eyed death, Susan's braided hair matted with blood, Tommy's young face twisted in terror as he threw himself into the line of fire.
I slip out of my bedroll and sit by the dying fire, watching embers.
Travis appears beside me like he was waiting. Maybe he was.
"Bad dreams?"
"The worst kind. The real kind."
He doesn't offer platitudes. Just sits with me in comfortable silence, close enough that I can feel his warmth against the mountain chill.
"Tell me about them," he finally says. "Your crew."
So I do. Reggy, who taught me to shoot, who always said life was too short for regret, who proposed to his wife three times before she said yes, and never once doubted she eventually would.
Susan, who braided my hair every morning and told terrible puns, who'd been an accountant before the outbreak and still balanced our supply ledgers with professional precision.
Tommy, who was only sixteen, who wanted to be a medic like me, who died thinking he was protecting something that mattered.
"They did protect something that matters," Travis says when I finish, his voice soft but certain. "Those supplies will save lives. Their families will have medicine because your crew fought for it."
"Their families will have medicine because I survived when they didn't."
"Yes." He doesn't flinch from it. "That's the deal, Hazel. Survival isn't fair. The question is what you do with it."
"What do you do with it?"
"I keep moving. Keep connecting. Every settlement we link, every route we establish, every person we help, it adds up. It has to add up to something, or what's the point?"
I turn to look at him properly for the first time.
Firelight catches the strong line of his jaw, the dark eyes that hold more weight than someone his age should carry.
He's younger than I expected a convoy leader to be.
Younger, but not innocent. This is a man who's made hard choices and lives with them every day.
"You really believe that? Does it really add up?"
"I have to believe it. The alternative is giving up, and I'm not built for giving up."
Neither am I. That's why I kept walking all night on an infected wound. Why couldn't I drop the supplies even when my body was failing?
The realization hits me suddenly: I'm not dead. I should be, by any reasonable measure, but I'm not. I'm here, alive, with this man who found me and refused to leave me behind.
What am I going to do with that survival?
I reach for Travis's hand. His fingers intertwine with mine, warm and solid, and he doesn't pull away.
"I don't want to feel like this anymore," I whisper. "Like I'm already dead and just waiting for my body to catch up."
"What do you want to feel?"
"Alive."
He turns toward me, his free hand coming up to cup my face. "Hazel. You've been through trauma."
"I know what I've been through." My voice cracks. "I watched Marcus die. I held Sarah while she bled out. I couldn't save any of them, Travis. Not one."
"That's not—"
"I need to feel something else." I grab his shirt, fisting the fabric.
"Anything else. I'm drowning in it—the guilt, the failure, the fucking helplessness.
I need..." I can't finish. Don't know how to say I need to remember I'm still alive, that my body still works, that I can still feel pleasure instead of just pain.
"Hazel—"
"I've been watching you for two days like you're the only solid thing in a world that won't stop spinning. I know you held my hand while I was unconscious. Jess told me."
"Jess talks too much."
"She talks exactly enough." I lean closer, until our foreheads almost touch. My hands are shaking. "Tell me you don't want this, and I'll back off. Tell me it's a bad idea and I'll respect that. But don't pretend you're only refusing to protect me, because we both know—"
He kisses me.
His mouth is demanding, tasting of coffee and sleepless nights and something raw. One hand tangles in my hair while the other pulls me closer, and I go willingly, desperately, climbing into his lap and wrapping my arms around his neck like he's the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
"This is a bad idea," he mutters against my lips.
"I don't care." I'm already pulling at his shirt, my fingers clumsy and urgent. "I need this. I need you. Please don't make me beg."
"Fuck." He captures my wrists, holds them. "You're grieving. You're hurt—"
"I know. And right now grief is the only thing I can feel and I can't—" My voice breaks. "I can't keep feeling it. Please, Travis. Just make me feel something else. Anything else."
I see the recognition in his eyes, like he knows exactly what I'm asking for because he's been there too.
We don't stop.
He lays me down on his bedroll with surprising gentleness, mindful of my injuries. Then the gentleness ends. His hands strip my clothes away roughly. Everything is discarded like obstacles between me and the oblivion I'm chasing.
"Fuck," he breathes, looking at me. "When I saw you on that road, covered in blood and still fighting. I haven't been able to think about anything else."
"Then don't think." I reach for him, pulling him down. "Just feel. Help me feel."
I pull him down and kiss him hard, fumbling with his belt, needing to feel him against me and needing the weight of him, the heat, the proof that I'm still here, still capable of wanting something.
He helps me strip him, and when his cock springs free—thick and hard and already leaking—I wrap my hand around it.
"Fuck, Hazel."
"I need to feel something other than failure." I stroke him, watching his pupils dilate, feeling the pulse of him against my palm. "Make me forget everything but this. Please."
He groans and captures my mouth again, his hands finding my breasts, thumbs working my nipples until I arch into his touch. The sensation cuts through the numbness, sharp and real, and I gasp.
"Tell me if this hurts your shoulder."
"Right now, I can't feel anything but how empty I am. How much I need your cock inside me. Need to be filled with something other than grief."
"Fuck." His hand slides down my stomach, between my thighs, finding me wet and ready. He pushes two fingers inside me without warning, and I cry out. "Already soaked for me."
"Please, Travis. I need more—"
He curls his fingers, hitting the spot that makes my vision blur, makes everything except this moment disappear.
"Your mouth. I need your mouth on my pussy. I need—" I can't finish, but he understands.
He kisses down my body, rough, biting kisses that will leave marks I can look at tomorrow and remember I survived today. When he settles between my thighs and looks up at me, I'm already trembling.
"I'm going to make you forget everything," he says. Then his tongue is on me.
He eats me like I'm necessary, his tongue working my clit while his fingers fuck into me hard and deep. The sounds are obscene, and I can't hold back the noises that tear from my throat. For the first time in three days, I'm not thinking about who I couldn't save. Just what I can feel.
"Don't hold back." He pulls back long enough to growl, "Let me hear you. I want to know what my tongue does to you."
Then he's back, sucking my clit between his lips while curling his fingers against that spot inside me, and I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me, white-hot and total, obliterating everything else.
I scream his name, profanities, sounds that aren't words.
For those few seconds, there's no guilt. No blood on my hands. Just this.
He doesn't stop. Licks me through the aftershocks until I'm shaking and oversensitive, then rises over me, his cock pressing against my entrance.
"Look at me." His voice is wrecked. "I want to see your eyes when I fuck you."
I meet his gaze as he pushes inside—one long, hard thrust that fills me. He's big, stretching me until I feel split open, and it's perfect.
"God, you're tight." He holds himself still, jaw clenched. "You feel so fucking good."
"Don't hold back." I dig my fingers into his shoulders, my nails leaving crescents. "I won't break. Fuck me like you need it. Like I need it. Hard enough that I can't think."
His thrusts turn brutal, deep, and hard, hitting the spot inside me that makes my nerve endings fire. His hand slides between us, fingers finding my clit and working it in time with his movements. Each thrust drives the thoughts further away. Each stroke replaces grief with sensation.
"Yes, fuck, just like that! Don't stop!"
"You feel incredible wrapped around my cock." His breath is hot against my ear. "Perfect. Made for me."
I bite down on his shoulder to muffle my sounds as another orgasm builds—this one even bigger, even more obliterating.
He's relentless, fucking into me with a force that rocks my whole body, his fingers on my clit driving me higher.
I'm chasing it desperately, needing it, needing to break apart and be remade into something that isn't just grief.
"Come on my cock," he demands. "Want to feel that pussy squeeze me. Let go, Hazel. Just let go."
I do. The orgasm tears through me, harder than the first, and I clench around him as everything else disappears. He follows seconds later with a guttural sound, burying himself deep and spilling inside me, filling me with his warmth.
Afterward, he holds me while our breathing steadies. Thankfully, we say nothing, because nothing needs to be said.
For the first time since the ambush, I feel something other than guilt.