by SP Durnin
It wasn’t long before O’Connor returned holding a bowl of Campbell’s vegetable soup and a roll of Ritz he’d scrounged from one of the kitchen cabinets. He handed Kat the warm bowl, opened the crackers, and all but shoved the spoon in her hand.
“Now eat.”
“Where’s yours?” Her mouth watered at the fragrant aroma wafting up into her nostrils.
“I’m fine.” The corner of his left eye began to develop a pronounced twitch.
Cho acquiesced and dug in. The rich broth sent a burst of flavor through her taste buds and she groaned.
“Good?” Jake asked.
“Nmm-grrm-mrph,” Kat mumbled, and swallowed the mouthful. “Yummy-yummy-yummy. You know, it still amazes me you’re actually a good cook.”
Jake’s mouth quirked. “Scoff if you like, but I did manage to learn a few things editing all those cookbooks. I didn’t do much to this though. Just opened the can and applied fire. Caveman dining at its finest. Still, I’m glad you like it.”
“It’s great.” She kept shoveling it in, alternating spoonful’s with several buttery crackers at a time. “What’s up down below? Are we safe here, or…?”
“I barricaded the hallway downstairs with the fridge and some other furniture while you were asleep earlier. It’s all backed up against the first landing again, now, so they’re impassible. I’ve been using a folding ladder I found out back to get up and down from the first floor. One sound from outside and I pull it up here with us, so we’re secure as we can be at the moment.” Jake motioned at her spoon. “Keep going.”
Once the bowl was empty O’Connor made it disappear and returned with a large glass full of freshly-made, fresh-from-the-can, orange-flavored drink. “Here. You’re probably dehydrated too.”
She gulped it down, then handed the empty glass back with a small burp. “Thanks.”
“You’ve done the same for me.” He shrugged. “I’m sure after I got stabbed you…”
Kat had seen the muscles in his jaw tighten when his shoulders rose. “What’s wrong?
Jake shook his head.
“You’re hurt, aren’t you? More than just that hella-good cut over your right eyebrow, I mean.” She demanded, eyes narrowing. The guilty look on his face told her she’d hit the mark. “Let me see.”
He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I’ve had a lot worse. You’ve been there for some of it.”
Cho unfolded her legs and stood up. “Lose shirt or we’re going to go a few rounds.”
After a moment spent evaluating her zeal, O’Connor relented and stiffly pulled the shirt off over his head. Kat’s mouth fell open. His torso was canvas of cuts and blunt-force trauma. The right half of his ribs looked to be especially painful. They displayed several large discolorations ranging from what resembled road-rash, to the all-out blackish-blue so common with deep tissue damage.
“It happened in the river.” He told her. “We got pegged by a log, or thrown against a rock, or something. I managed to take most of the impact, but I couldn’t keep you from getting hit too. I didn’t even see what the hell it was…”
“Turn around.” She was quite firm about it.
Licking his lips, Jake spun hesitantly to show his back. The bruising was worse there. Much worse. It ran up from the spot she’d seen on his ribs and flowered on over his Latissimus Dorsi, the wing-like muscle that runs up a person’s side beneath their armpit. A series of scrapes were torn into the skin of his back too, running diagonally through the bruises to the base of his right shoulder-blade.
“Holy. Shit.” Kat stared at the kaleidoscope of damage. “And you’ve been awake all this time?”
The cords in his shoulders rippled as he shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. “I snoozed in the chair there for a little while.”
“How long?”
Jake kept his eyes averted. “An hour or so, maybe? I don’t know. I kind of…lost track of time for a bit.”
Taking his arm in a firm grip, Kat ushered him to the nearby chair. “Sit down before I forget you’re hurt. And take your boots off while you’re at it! You’re getting mud everywhere.”
He complied, then lowered himself into the chair. Kat raided the drawers over the bathroom sink, quickly coming back with a trio of washcloths and a partial bottle of hydrogen peroxide. After dumping a good amount of the sterile fluid onto one of the cloths, she began cleaning his wounds as best she could. Jake gave a muted grunt of pain and stiffened once when liquid sizzled into the deeper slashes on his ribs, then exhaled slowly as it hissed and bubbled, killing off microbes that might cause infection. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes as she continued to work on him, but didn’t flinch again. By the time she’d finished, his breathing was back to normal and he seemed relatively relaxed.
Cho, however, was livid.
After tossing the soiled washcloths and the now empty peroxide bottle into the bathroom wastebasket, she took an angry stance in front of his chair. Jake opened his eyes to see her hands balling into fists and prepared himself for a blow. He hoped she’d aim for his left side. Kat had one hell of a quick jab, and the right half of his face still hurt quite a lot.
“You are a stubborn ass.” She said acidly. “Don’t you ever get sick of playing hero?”
Jake tried to reason with her. “I didn’t have any choice. We’re on our own out here, so—”
“Shut! It!” Cho raged, her index finger in his face. “Just shut it! I am so tired of going through this with you, over and over and over again. Let me ask you something: Do you want to die?”
He didn’t know how to respond to that question. “Would I have even attempted getting us all the way to Texas, though god only knows how many of those things, if I did?”
Kat snorted. “Well, you sure could’ve fooled me! You’re just a self-centered prick who doesn’t give a damn, then? Too wrapped up in his own little world, his own losses, to realize there are people who care about him? Is that it?”
“I think you know me better than—” Jake started to turn his face away.
“Look at me!”
His head snapped back to regard one very pissed off ninja-girl.
“Don’t you dare shut down when I’m talking to you!” Kat was almost ready to swing on him. “Now you tell me once and for all, what’s your problem? Why do you trying to act as if you’re some kind of superhuman? Is it because of Molly? Yeah, I know about her. Don’t look so shocked. What happened to you in Bosnia was horrible but that was a long, long time ago. Laurel? I don’t think so. She told you to keep living. I know because I was there, so you don’t get to use her as an excuse to pull into yourself anymore. Karen, maybe? You fought tooth-and-nail trying to get her back. Her death is on Nichole, who’s currently sucking-off demons in the underworld. I don’t know about you, but I for one couldn’t be happier with her current situation, but what she did doesn’t reflect on you in the slightest.”
O’Connor slumped in the chair and looked at his hands. “It’s nothing like that. Ever since the zombies... Everybody’s treated me like I’m some kind of messiah, and I’m trying to keep it all together, but I’m doing a real shit job of it! I’m nothing but a scared writer with a cloudy conscience, who knows a few dirty tricks and has a little bit of information some claim to be useful. At least, it seems to be since the whole damn world has gone swirling. But I’m no hero, and I suck as a leader. When you get right down to it, I’m nothing special. There are a hundred other—”
Jake’s voice cut off. He actually couldn’t continue speaking, because Cho’s slender hand was took quite a firm grip on his jaw. She’d blurred forward, knocking his legs apart with a knee while the other came up to lodge against his sternum, which pressed him into his chair.
“You are to me!!” Kat hissed into his face.
“Why? Everything, every-single-goddamn-thing I do, gets people killed! Laurel, Karen, Donna, Penny! Nichole and Barron too, even if they’re no big losses... It doesn’t matter that Pool and Rebecca were both crazy, either. All th
eir followers were frightened, living survivors! And every one of them is gone!” He wheezed, still short on air. He could have moved Cho easily but refrained. While her hand was making it hard for him to breathe, it wasn’t life-threatening. “So why, Kat?”
Angered past the point of human speech, Cho released her hold on Jake’s face and waved her hands, sputtering wordlessly as she did. He waited for her to get a grip on herself and took shallow breaths against the pressure of her knee.
“Really?” She demanded. “How the did you make a living as a combat journalist? Or manage to not get your head ventilated in war zones? How have you survived for this long the zombie apocalypse, for that matter?”
“Hey, I—” Jake began.
She cut him off. “Because I’m in love with you, you fucking idiot!”
“Well, that’s just... Wait. What?” Cho grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his lips to hers, forgetting about her protesting muscles, the cut on her cheek, his bruised side, all of it. Because she’d said it. After months of hiding her feelings, of keeping a lock on her heart, of giving him space and time to heal, she’d finally told him.
When they broke apart, both were more than a little breathless and O’Connor stared at her. Kat pressed her forehead against Jake’s, shut her eyes, then she laid it all out for him.
She told him about the way he’d made her heart race when he’d busted in to drag Allen and herself lengthwise across Columbus in an attempt to rescue Laurel. She told him how afraid she’d been for him when he’d fought a pack of ghouls in the alley behind Foster’s safe house. How his kiss in the parking lot after made her knees weak, once they’d turned the creatures into chutney. How every kiss they’d shared since only caused her to crave him more.
She told him everything that happened during their assault on the Purifiers’ fortress. What she’d said and what she’d done when they’d almost lost him. How crushed she’d been when Rae told them all about the loss of his memory, and suggested they not speak to Jake about it to avoid traumatizing him further. She couldn’t keep it from him any longer. Their too-near brush with the Grim Reaper in the floodwaters of Langley had been the final straw and she was all kinds of done with that.
“You and Laurel, the two of you had something special and I didn’t want to screw it up. You have to believe me, I tried so hard to keep away! Gertie warned me, you know. She said it would hurt too much, that I should follow my heart and tell you the truth, but I didn’t listen.” She took his face in her hands. “Laurel’s gone. I know you’ll always miss her, because I will too. She was my best friend. It still feels like somebody cut one of my arms off every time I turn around to tell her something, and then remember that I can’t. I’ll be missing her right up until they finally put me in my grave, but I can’t keep waiting for that perfect moment to present itself.”
Jake’s face remained utterly blank while she spoke. To a casual observer, this could have been misconstrued as lack of interest.
“Very soon, one or both of us will probably be dead. Or worse, we could end up as one of them,” Kat stomped on her emotions so she wouldn’t start crying. It would only make her already puffy-feeling eyes actually puffy. “So I need to know: Are we just friends? Because that doesn’t work for me anymore. And it’s making me totally miserable.”
O’Connor didn’t speak when she finally wound down, but the pieces were falling into place in his head. She could see it in his eyes. Cho’s heart beat so fast as she waited for him to reply, she felt as if it would pound from her chest.
“Say something,” she demanded. “Anything!”
O’Connor looked at her and she couldn’t read his expression. “Are you finished?” he asked.
Kat wanted to curl up somewhere and have a good, long cry. She stood and pulled away, clearly hurt and shamed because she’d just made a monumental fool of herself. “I knew this is how you’d react. Shit... Okay, I get it. We’ll—”
Jake’s hand shot out, grabbed hers, and he used it to yank Cho to him again. She stumbled due to the overtaxed muscles on her left side, and ended up half-straddling his lap.
“Stop talking,” he said firmly, interrupting her tirade. “I was gathering my thoughts. Writers do that occasionally. My turn now, okay?”
She kept quiet.
“Alright. Let me first say I can’t believe you held all that in for months. It explains why you’ve been ready to fly apart half the time. Don’t do that anymore. If you need to talk about something, say so! Also, please, don’t listen to any advice Rae sees fit to give you when it comes to relationships. Ever again. If for no other reason, then because if she and George don’t have sex really soon, the rest of us may very well kill them both in their sleep.”
“I volunteer to smother Rae,” Kat said quickly. “Heck, I’d part with an ovary to—”
“Mouth closed, ears open,” Jake went on hurriedly. You just knew some conversations would not go anywhere good. “Third: I’m still more than a little pissed you thought I could drop you on the dam.”
“I—”
Jake ground his teeth. “If you ever pull that crap again? I will do my level best to whip your Smurf-topped ass, which would be very difficult because: One-you’re a woman, and I don’t hit women, and Two-you’re a goddamn ninja. You probably know half-a-dozen ways to kill me with your nail file.”
Cho watched O’Connor swallow hard to gain control of his voice.
“Finally,” he moved his ragged arm around her waist. “So there are no further questions on the subject: Do you know what I thought when we first met? The day all this crap started?”
It was Kat’s turn to swallow audibly. “No... What?”
“I thought, Wow, Elodie Yung is even prettier with blue hair.” Jake admitted. “I didn’t know the first thing about you at that point, so I used her as a comparison. That said, and all due respect to Ms. Yung, whether she’s still breathing or not, she can’t hold a candle to you. She was an actor who portrayed adventurous, sexy…and sometimes absolutely bug-fuck crazy…warrior women. You actually are one.”
Kat gaped at him.
O’Connor’s face looked pained. “You ask if I care about you. I’d think the answer was obvious, especially after all that’s happened over the last few days. You could just settle for ‘Yes’ I suppose, but it would be a cosmic-sized understatement. It’s like if someone were to say the sky is only blue. That water is only wet. Or that zombies only smell like poop, for that matter.”
And Kat knew.
She kissed him again, sighing into Jake’s mouth as he cupped the rear of her neck with one hand and tilted her backward slightly. She’d waited for this, for him, and she hurled her whole being into it. Finally free to hold him openly was everything she’d wanted, and a frightening, new strength flowed through her limbs. Kat suddenly felt like a superhero. Invulnerable. Unbeatable. Immortal. If a ghoul had entered the room at that moment, she might very well have torn it apart with her bare hands, then gone back to ravishing his lips with hers. Still locked to O’Connor, she rose and drew him up from the chair. She knew he was battered and still hurting just like she was, but need won out over pain. Without opening her eyes or halting their kiss, she trailed her fingertips down across his stomach and worked his belt buckle loose.
Jake attempted to slow her down and took a gentle grip on her wrists. They probably shouldn’t be together right after admitting mutual affections, but she was having none of it and simply shook his hands away. Despite his best efforts, Cho undid the button on his filth-stained pants.
“Off,” she breathed against his lips.
“Kat—”
Nimble hands worked deftly at his zipper.
“Get them off.” She insisted.
Her eyes bored into his and O’Conner swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. “Look, I’m not going anywhere. We’re both stressed and scared and—”
“A shin no tame ni!”
Cho exclaimed ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ while using both hands to mom
entarily pull at her blue hair in frustration, then shoved him roughly. Jake went airborne for an instant before his shoulders hit the bed, causing a sharp twinge in his ribs. She leapt forward to grab at his waistline, virtually ripped his pants away, along with his briefs, and threw them across the bedroom before sliding quickly out of her underwear. He managed to sit up and scoot forward to the edge of the bed, just getting his feet to the floor again before Kat straddled him. The dry shirt he’d scrounged for her joined his pants on the other side of the room, followed immediately by her purple bra. Jake absently realized he’d seen the same intimate article before on the roof of an Agri-Supply on the day the two of them, along with Leo and Elle, had rescued their blond companions (affectionately dubbed ‘The Barbie Duo’) Gwen and the now deceased Donna.
There was no time for him to reminisce however. Her mouth welded to his, one hand wrapping behind his neck as her other went down his abdomen, engaging in activities designed to smash his reluctance into powder. Her pain forgotten, Kat’s body demanded he attend to a different ache, and she had every intention of making him obey the commands it hastily screeched in her ear. Cho bit at her lower lip when she felt him rise against her and had difficulty focusing on anything else. Her world narrowed down to taste and heat and-
She pushed onto him, relishing the first touch of O’Connor’s flesh as a low moan forced its way from her throat and her eyes fell closed.
The sound sent a thrill of electricity up his spine, but he remained still as best he could while she squeezed over him haltingly. Once she reached her limit Jake pulled Kat up, mouth still busy on hers, then slowly reversed course to slide her hips down once more. The motion created such delicious friction that she shuddered and had to lean her face against the side his neck as reality tilted. Tears began to seep from beneath her eyelids as her tongue moved along his throat. He noticed the moisture and froze.