Reawakening

by Stein, Charlotte

  The one that she couldn’t quite let go of.

  She found herself creeping, anyway. One foot over the other, sideways so as not to show herself too soon around the corner of the metal shelving. Whoever it was, they’d gone directly to the top left corner, where the weaponry was. Which was a blow if it really was a member of the undead—but at least she still had the stairs. Fighting was usually better if there was only one, but running came a close second.

  She rounded the corner slowly. Some held to the surprise attack school of thought, but they were fucking idiots. When surprised, zombies did only one thing—went for you faster. Lunged at you harder.

  Far better to simply cark them on the back of the skull.

  Or not, considering that it was Blake. Not Jamie. Blake. He had such a great mess of dirty blond curls. She would have known it anywhere, even from behind.

  Though it was unfortunate that seeing him from behind only stirred up memories of the bad dream, now. Him standing at the fence, motionless. The blood on his arm. The zombies coming and coming.

  The feeling that he had been taken from her, forever.

  She let the crowbar drop a little, and reached out a hand. Then cursed herself for doing so, because that was just like the dream, too. It flashed in her mind, bright and brilliant—that idea of him suddenly turning. Eyes gone. Mouth red with blood, all twisted into a snarl the way theirs were.

  It made that one hand lock in position, halfway to his shoulder. It made her shake. No wonder there were boiling love triangles when she so desperately didn’t want either of them to die. It felt like holding onto spaghetti, with hands made of noodles.

  “It’s okay, June. I’m still me.”

  She almost clocked him one, anyway. Just out of shock, at hearing his voice. It was still different, to be surprised by a human voice instead of a zombie snarl.

  She let out a long breath. Then another. And another.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, then he turned his head and she saw the side of his face. His half-smile. It was good and warm and she didn’t know what to say about it.

  “You know, if I hadn’t known you were in here already, I would never have heard you sneaking up. That’s really a gift you have there, June.”

  She flushed through with pleasure, to hear him say it. Then went to her default position—embarrassment. Why did his words please her? God. God. Like he was some kind of adored teacher and she was his little student.

  “Practice makes perfect,” she said, and after felt bad about the slightly snarky undertone. Especially when he then went with—

  “Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I forget how long you were out there. What it must have been like for you.”

  She wished he hadn’t said those sorrys.

  “It wasn’t so bad sometimes, you know?” Dear Lord, what was she talking about? Wasn’t so bad. Jesus. He was making her tell lies as tall as the Empire State building. “I had Kelsey.”

  Well. At least that much was true. Sometimes it had been okay, when Kelsey was around. To sleep back to back with her. To keep watch. To be her friend.

  “It’s always better when you’ve got someone, huh?”

  Her hand felt suddenly sweaty, against the slightly grainy texture of the crowbar. Did he mean something else by that? She couldn’t tell.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

  “I mean, you must have loved her a lot.”

  Her eyebrows went up, then. She couldn’t have stopped them even if he’d been facing her. What sort of turn was this conversation taking, exactly?

  “I did.”

  “Yeah. We thought…”

  He didn’t finish, but that was okay. Because now, everything was clear! They’d thought she was gay. They had totally and absolutely thought she was gay. Suddenly, everything she’d done after Jamie had run into them had a different light shining on it.

  When she’d grabbed Kelsey’s hand because they had to run. The way she’d had a total fucking mental breakdown in the helicopter because Kelsey was dead.

  They no longer worried that she thought they were crazed rapists. They thought she was gay. That was why…oh God, that was why he’d said you don’t have to. Because he thought she was bending some kind of sexuality she didn’t have for him!

  “No, Blake…we weren’t…”

  She didn’t even know what to say. Why was this the fucking minefield? Why was everything still so fucking hard, even after everyone was dead and nothing mattered anymore and…oh. Oh. That was why.

  Because it actually did matter. It mattered more. She was the only girl in the world and they were the only boys, and they thought she was missing her dead girlfriend. They’d probably had no discussions whatsoever about who got to fuck her, because the thought hadn’t even entered their heads. Nobody got to fuck her. She liked vagina.

  They had the other thing.

  She wanted to facepalm again, desperately. No wonder Jamie had been so freaked out. He hadn’t even had the opportunity to have some kind of bro talk!

  “We weren’t together. Like that. Kelsey and me. Is that what you thought?”

  She had no idea why her voice had suddenly become a robot’s. All of the awfulness aside, of course. But it was okay, because Blake’s voice had gone one better than hers. He sounded like his had turned to paper.

  “I…”

  The word could have been I. But it sounded a helluva lot like a bunch of other vowels, too.

  “Blake, can I just ask…what exactly have you and Jamie been talking about? I mean, I kind of figured that…”

  What? What? She kind of figured that they’d expressed no desire for her because she didn’t look like a fucking supermodel? Oh Lord, this was a disaster. He turned around then, and that was even worse. He looked flushed. Like he was embarrassed about something even more disastrous than the things she was thinking about.

  “Oh—we haven’t been talking about you. And your…uh…friend. I mean—not like that. We haven’t…discussed anything. At all, really.”

  Oh Jesus, robot was catching. And what did he mean—like that?

  “Have you discussed other things about me?”

  He shook his head, minutely. His voice came out higher than someone on helium.

  “No.”

  She thought about saying it. Just saying it. Have you thought about…being with me. Maybe both at the same time. Or one after the other. Or you know, just whatever you want. My dreams say it’s okay, so…

  But it sounded insane in her head so God only knew how it would sound coming out of her mouth.

  Instead, she went with something slightly safer. Slightly.

  “I mean, I know I’m not the most attractive woman in the world, but maybe…we should…talk…”

  She tried to force out the rest—talk about what happened between Jamie and me, the other morning. And how that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t have feelings for…that I don’t find you…

  But it just wouldn’t come. Not even in her head. Plus his eyebrows had found his hairline, now, and she had to backtrack over what she’d said to find the shocking and/or weird thing.

  Oh. Right. The attractive thing. She’d actual spoken aloud about some kind of desire based concept! She’d acknowledged that they were men and she was a woman! Nothing was going to go well from here on in.

  “You think…that we don’t think you’re attractive?”

  He spoke very slowly. As though it was both something he had to explain to a small child and an idea he had to pull out of himself in agonizing increments. She had a brief flash of him putting a pairs of pliers into his mouth and yanking out a tooth.

  “No, that’s not what I meant—I just…the other morning…”

  No don’t mention the other morning! her brain screamed. It was probably all just morning horniness, anyway! Stop, before you can’t take anything back and then have to spend eternity with two dudes who find you as alluring as a peanut and know that you totally want their hot bodies. You can’t even hide b
ehind gayness, anymore! You just told him you weren’t!

  “I find it hard not to look at you, June. Like, a lot. An uncomfortable amount. You don’t know what it’s like to get to look at a beautiful woman, again.”

  She froze. Like before, like before when Jamie had kissed her. That fist clench happened, again—only this time she had something to grip and did that very thing so hard the metal melted.

  “I do,” she said, but only because her mouth has switched to auto-pilot. Gushing, trembling, insane auto-pilot. “I do. It’s like looking at you.”

  It came out wrong, but that was fine. Surely it was fine. He’d know what she meant, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t a beautiful woman. He was the other thing, the other thing, the thing that was not a vagina.

  “We just…we didn’t want to scare you. Or ask you to change who you were or I don’t know. I don’t know. But you should always understand that we both think you’re this amazing, gorgeous, amazing, lovely, amazing…” He sucked in a rough breath. “I’m saying amazing a lot.”

  He was saying other things a lot, too. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him say so much in one go. All those words, all those words from closed down Blake, and they were about her.

  “I have to kiss you now,” she said and he seemed to understand. He didn’t hold it against her, at the very least.

  He just stood there, and watched her drop the crowbar as though it had no meaning at all, and let her crash into him. There had to be crashing. Like before with Jamie, when she’d fought with his t-shirt and his hair and just wanted to push all of him right down inside her until there was none of him left.

  It was like that with Blake, too. Insanely, it was like that with Blake, too. She had her hands in his hair and her arms around him and their triangle was suddenly…something else. A different sort of shape.

  God she’d always been so terrible at geometry.

  And at this other stuff. Kissing, and things. Kissing him, until her jaw ached and the realization struck that he’d kind of lifted her off the floor. Or at the very least, she’d half climbed the shelving unit behind him, in an effort to crawl up his body.

  She had one sneaker on an AK-47. He tasted different to Jamie—like mint. Cool, where Jamie was warm. But still kind of afraid, like Jamie, to put his hands fully on her.

  She felt something on her back, maybe something at her hip. But nothing grasping, nothing greedy. He only allowed his mouth to be greedy, which was almost good enough. The little half-beard he usually had rubbed against her skin, but not in the same rough way Jamie’s stubble had.

  Softer, softer.

  And he gave sounds away more freely—little gasps and sighs and hungry noises that flicked the switch in her brain from survival to desperately horny. Oh God, so horny. Didn’t he know? Hadn’t he known how much she wanted him? How could he not have known?

  He felt so strong and warm and alive in her hands. They both had. They both did. And she would have told him so if the door above hadn’t banged, and he hadn’t jumped away from her, suddenly, in exactly the same way Jamie had.

  Though she couldn’t really blame him for doing so. She did the same thing without even thinking about it. Maybe they hadn’t had the bro talk or decided who got to take her to the Prom or what the fuck, but it didn’t matter.

  It kind of felt like cheating, anyway.

  * * * *

  It was one a piece. So that kind of evened it out, didn’t it? Each kiss cancelled the other one out. Now she was back down to zero. Zero kisses. Nothing inappropriate. No issues. Apart from the eight million thoughts and questions about what the hell they’d been assuming for the last month.

  Yeah, apart from that.

  They didn’t look any different when they sat down for game night. That’s what it had become. Game night. Eight hundred rounds of Scrabble or Monopoly or this weird one Jamie swore up and down was his favorite from childhood. It was kind of like chess, only with little red minions and a big red brain that you had to capture.

  It was fun. And weird. And she had to question why they didn’t watch movies more often. The TV worked, after all. It only ever played fuzz or some kind of emergency striped screen, but they had a DVD player. And a bunch of mad films that only Jamie could have chosen.

  Clue, Erik the Viking, Thelma and Louise.

  But instead they always ended up around the coffee table, rolling dice or putting together words. She would have seen it as some sort of metaphor for the position they all found themselves in, if Jamie and Blake hadn’t spent all their time being peaceful and non-competitive.

  Things were supposed to be more fraught than that, weren’t they? Things did not seem fraught. Not even when they touched her more and did things like wink at her—Jamie definitely winked over poker—and she was just left with a rising tension of a different kind.

  When. When, when, when were they going to do it again? Was she the one who had to do it again? Get the ball rolling, make a pass, ask over breakfast—hey, do you think maybe you could both kiss me again? Possibly at the same time?

  Even if that seemed crazy. It happened in her dreams, but it couldn’t really happen like that in reality. People just didn’t…well. They did. But not after six billion people had died.

  Though then again a lot of people didn’t do a lot of things after six billion people had died.

  “What you thinking about, June-bug?” Jamie asked, after raising her two hundred. They were playing with Monopoly money, but still. Two hundred—seriously? She was willing to bet he’d hit that flush draw.

  “About how many spades you’ve got in your hand,” she said and he laughed. Just like that, he laughed. Everything was cool. It was fine.

  “Funny, ‘cause I was just thinking about whether those two Jacks did you any favors.”

  As it happened, they had. And so had the four that had come before them both. But she played it tight and called him. Nothing more.

  “Nah, I’m guessing no three of a kind for you, June-y,” he said, because he wasn’t a good poker player. Neither was Blake, really. They both shoved it out there too fast and didn’t hang back when they scored a hand.

  Blake called and dealt the river, and she could just tell. It didn’t help either of them. Jamie had already made his flush and Blake had maybe a pair of fours? Two pair, possibly? Nothing more.

  When Jamie raised this time, she took him over the top. No hardship. But she was surprised when Blake called her, too. And even more surprised to find he had rags. Nothing at all.

  And Jamie hadn’t made the flush. He turned his cards and there was zip there—a pair of tens. They’d both gone in on nothing, expecting nothing, while she’d played high stakes and taken them down with a full house.

  Man, was there ever a metaphor in that. It stuck out like a sore thumb and she sat back against the couch, suddenly numb and completely unsure. Jamie just laughed and futzed around with the cards, while Blake asked what they all wanted to play next.

  She thought about suggesting a rousing game of Bedroom Antics. She thought about saying—there’s this game, right. Everybody used to play it, and I heard it’s really fantastic. Basically, one person says they love some other people.

  Then the other people say it back.

  But instead she said nothing, and followed them up to bed, and laid down, and dreamt, again. Only this time, this time there were no pretexts at all. Nothing holding her down. No magical oils that cured zombie.

  They were all just in a big tangle on the bed and when Blake pressed his wet, open mouth over hers, she felt Jamie’s hand slide over her arm. She’d reached up for something—to grasp that curling pleasure, to find something to anchor her body—and he just found her hand and linked their fingers.

  Not like before, when one had fucked her. Then the other. Totally separate and sort of abstract—not like any concrete idea of a ménage in which three people really, really liked each other.

  When three people really, really liked each other, they held on to one an
other and linked fingers and didn’t think about turns. She didn’t think about turns in the dream of tangled limbs and two sets of mouths on the same place, only minutes apart.

  Oh God. God, it was good. It wasn’t cheating. It wasn’t like the time before, where glitzy people did this sort of sophisticated thing all the time. It felt, instead, like holding on to as much as you possibly could before everything awful dragged you under.

  And when Blake kissed her mouth and Jamie kissed the place between her legs, heat rolled through her body like a tidal wave and up, up out of her mouth.

  Of course, it was even more embarrassing this time. Because not only had she moaned aloud in her sleep, but she’d somehow gotten a fistful of Jamie’s t-shirt and kind of…yanked on it.

  And naturally, he was awake for the whole show. She’d never seen him look so awake in all her days, as though maybe he suspected a completely different intent to the shirt-yanking. Like she’d decided he was a zombie in her sleep then tried to murder him with his own clothes.

  She wondered how long it would be before he realized it was the other thing. After all, her face felt like an inferno. Her nipples were still hard. In the middle of it, she’d curled her toes—and they weren’t uncurling any time soon.

  None of which seemed like a zombie fighting sort of stance. For a start, a person couldn’t effectively run on curled toes. That was just a fact.

  “June? You kinda have hold of me.”

  That was fair of him. In truth, she was getting close to choking him with his collar.

  “Oh,” she said. It was all she could manage. Every effort was going toward letting his t-shirt free, but her body just wasn’t obeying. It wanted to hold on, tightly.

  But then he said, “Easy, baby,” and some of that feeling sort of cycled down. How sweet it was to be told easy baby, by anyone. About anything. Just so sweet and good, while he worked on soothing the tight clasp of her hand open.

  And when he’d finally worked himself free, he didn’t stay that way. He replaced the t-shirt with the firm link of his fingers—like in the dream.