Epilogue
NINE MONTHS LATER
Iwake up to my husband staring at me.
There are worse things to wake up to. I’ve learned that over the last year and a half.
Waking up to an alarm sounding because the lurkers have breached the borders, or news that we lost another survivor overnight.
To one of the fleeting power outages—that are less common lately, but still make my gut twist as I remember the first days after the Turning when we didn’t know what to expect.
Waking up to the new reality that I’m alone, that my twin is gone, that I shouldn’t have been the one to survive…
I’ve gotten so much better over the last nine months, and the biggest reason is watching me with a heated look in his pretty blue eyes, lips quirked slightly as his hair—in need of a haircut, but sexy in how tousled it currently is—sticking up all over the place.
He’s propped up on his elbow, cheek in hand, murmuring softly as I blink my eyes open.
Waking up next to Chase Knight, knowing that I’ll never be alone again as long as he’s right next to me… yeah. I smile over at him. “Morning, baby.”
Chase leans over, brushing his lips over mine. “Morning, sleepyhead. I was wondering if you were going to get up any time soon.”
Scooting a little so I can reach him, I cup my left hand around the back of his neck, pulling him close. What was a simple kiss turns infinitely more heated as I prove to my husband that I’m wide awake now.
When you’ve been dating since freshman year in high school, sexually active since you were seventeen, and married for the last eight months, morning breath… yeah. Who gives a shit?
I pull back, still smiling as I trail my hand down his neck, over his shoulder, fingers ghosting over his pec before I place my palm over his chest.
Chase takes my hand in his, lifting it high so that he can kiss the ring nestled on my fourth finger.
The ring catches the morning light coming in through the open window. For a second, I find myself staring at it, too.
It isn’t a particularly impressive piece of jewelry.
I was never the sort of girl who gave a shit about things like karats and settings and whether the diamond was “real” or grown in a lab; well, no, I was always against the idea of blood diamonds.
But the size of the rock? It didn’t matter.
I didn’t even need a ring—but after all these years together…
especially after he proposes with a gold-painted twist tie…
I realized that Chase needed to give one to me.
The one I’m wearing now didn’t come from a jewelry store.
Chase traded for it at Camp Sunnyside before we said goodbye and the two of us set off for the Grave; I had no idea until we made it home and he proposed for the third and final time with it.
I still don’t know exactly what he did to get it because the story changes every time I ask Chase about it.
According to the latest version, he helped Nicky repair a leak in Ross’s cabin, rebuilt a generator, rescued Annie when a fire caught outside the trading post, and killed a bear with his own two hands.
I do know there was an out of control fire after we made it back to camp.
Bears? Probably not, especially since there weren’t that many wild animals around the hills with the lurkers within reach and the survivors hunting for food before the zombies could get to it first. To me, it didn’t matter.
I always knew that it was Chase for me, but after how Ryan pointed out that I didn’t have a ring on my finger—just like how Xandra used to do the same so long ago—Chase was determined to find some symbol that would tell the other survivors that I belonged to him.
And eight months ago, in a simple ceremony held at St. Matthews, we finally had an honest-to-God, after-the-Turning wedding that began when Dad walked me down the aisle to Chase. He slipped this ring on my finger, and I put the twist tie into a memento box so that I can keep it forever.
“You’re really my husband,” I murmur.
He looks a touch offended as he squeezes my fingers gently. “You say that like you can’t believe it.”
Sometimes I don’t.
“You should,” he insists. “After all, I’ve been trying to make us official for most of my life.
” Letting go of my hand, he drops down, nuzzling my neck.
“You wonder why I wake up so I can watch you sleep? Because, half the time, real life feels like a fucking dream now that my wife knows she’s my wife. ”
Wife…
There was no courthouse when he finally convinced me that there isn’t anything I can do that will scare him off or push him away.
The former golden couple of Madison High has been tested, twisted, and broken down by the Turning, but we’re still surviving—and it’s better if we do it together.
So we promised ourselves to each other as Dad married us in front of half the Grave, and now I’m considered Mrs. Knight even if there’s no official piece of paper that says I am.
The old world put a lot of faith into pieces of paper.
Marriage licenses. Birth certificates. Deeds to houses, and diplomas hung on walls.
All those documents that told us who we were, what we owned, what we’d done, and who we belonged to.
Then that world ended, and most of that paper became kindling.
But a marriage vow between two people obsessed with each other? Try burning that.
So the Grave knows my new surname is Knight. I’m still Holden, too. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use my birth name again, but the name I adopted at the camp… it seems right.
Just like promising forever to this man when it seems like we might actually have a forever to look forward to is what I was always meant to do…
As Chase’s gentle nuzzle turns into something more insistent, I turn so that I’m facing him. The sheet covering my naked body shifts, revealing my tits as Chase’s quick kisses drop from my collarbone to the height of my breast.
One of his hands lands on top of the sheet, finding my hip. The other slides under the fabric, dipping between my legs so that his fingers can tangle with the pubic hair there before slipping inside my folds.
I shudder. I can’t tell if it’s his possessive touch or how his tongue is now lapping at my erect nipple, but it’s obvious that his hum of pleasure has as much to do with him discovering that I’m already getting wet as it does the taste of my skin on his tongue.
Tapping his jawbone, stroking his cheek, I wait until I see his darkened stare peeking up at me through the fringe of his eyelashes to raise my eyebrows at him.
“Again?” I say breathlessly.
He doesn’t even bother feigning any sort of innocence.
With one finger slowly breaching my entrance, testing how ready I am for him, he stops sucking on my nipple long enough to say, “I spent months believing my wife was out of my reach. Can you blame me for making her mine whenever I get the chance?”
I shift my position to give him easier access to my cunt. “We’ve been married for eight months, Chase.”
“And?”
“And I’m beginning to think you might be overcompensating.”
Not that I’m complaining. Our sex life was put on hold for the most part during the weeks-long travel back to the Grave.
With it only being the two of us, it wasn’t often that we were able to sleep together.
Either I was watching for lurkers or Chase was, and whenever we got horny enough that danger-banging seemed like a decent enough risk, he’d slip a condom on, fuck me against the nearest tree, and we’d be on the move before our sounds of pleasure attracted a lurker or a rogue.
Then we ran out of the condoms, and Chase convinced me again that live jizz was enough to keep the monsters away.
As long as he pulled out, we were just helping the cause by fucking like bunnies—until he lost control, came inside of me, and I spent the rest of the trip convinced he’d slipped and knocked me up.
He didn’t, and one of the first things I did when I was settled in at the Grave—after our marriage—was ask the community’s nurse, Audrey, if we had any kind of birth control since I still didn’t want to get pregnant until healthcare was more reliable than simply slapping a bandage on it.
Just like back at the camp, she had enough of a store of both Plan B and an over-the-counter birth control pill that was initially looted after the Turning from the convenience store within our borders.
Its expiration date is only two months from now, so I’ll have to figure something out then, but for now…
We have our own place. Jack kept the Finches’ condo, but despite his obvious disappointment when I told him that I would be moving into Chase’s family home so that he wasn’t alone any longer, he understood that his married daughter might want to have some privacy with her husband.
After so long on the Outside and the shit we went through, I don’t have any shame.
I’ve fucked Chase using blood as lube and when I haven’t showered in weeks.
He went down on me as a former convict rubbed one out to forcing us to fuck in front of him.
There was that time in the cell with cameras trained on us…
if he’s still that desperate to have me now, there’s no way I’ll ever refuse him.
Never again.
But, before I can tell him I’m all for a little morning sex, he gives my shoulder a small nudge, telling me wordlessly to go to my back. “Just lie there,” he says huskily. “I’ll be done in a minute.”
I snort. If I thought he meant it, I’d tell him to go fuck himself. But since there’s no denying the light-hearted tease, I do what he said even as I ask, “And that’s fun for who, exactly?”
“Hush.” He kisses the curve of my tit before I can further complain. “I’ll make it worth it for you.”
Plopping my head on my pillow, I giggle up at the ceiling. “Wow. Romance really survived the apocalypse, didn’t it, baby?”