He was going to come. She could tell it without him ordering her to stop, because he couldn’t hold it off. She was going to make him come because she couldn’t stop sucking and licking and trying to take so much of him that it made her gag, and she was going to make Blake come with the slick clench of her cunt, and just those two ideas…just the knowledge that Jamie’s voice had gone all grating and Blake couldn’t stop moaning because of her…it was enough to get her there.
“Oh man, she’s coming,” Blake said, just in case she needed further clarification. His voice was just as hoarse as Jamie’s and he was making words and oh that was fantastic, but she was pretty sure nothing was quite as sweet as Jamie’s face when he suddenly pulled her away from his cock.
“Tell me, baby,” he said, and he looked…half-mad with lust. Maybe not even half. Getting so close to orgasm had broken Blake out, but she could tell it had bottled Jamie up—he could hardly get a word out and when he did, all four syllables relied on a kind of understanding between them.
But it was okay because it was there. She got it.
“Ohhhh yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming—God, don’t stop. Don’t let him stop, it feels so good, fuck.”
There wasn’t even a lie in it, either. She could feel that swell of pleasure breaking against everything inside her, could feel her pussy clamping down hard around his still working cock until he broke, too. He swelled inside her until she wasn’t sure she could take it, then there was nothing but the sinfully hot feel of his cum flooding her, his fingers digging tight into her hips, his hoarse shouts of utter relief and brilliant, bright sensation.
And all the while Jamie held her gaze and let his fist tighten in her hair, and just when she thought it couldn’t get any more intense or crazy he mouthed three silent words—I love you.
Chapter Eleven
Jamie thought she was asleep again, she could tell. She could tell by the way he waited until Blake definitely was asleep—just totally passed out the way she had, heavy and slowly breathing at her right side—then tugged at the sheets until he could pull them over her lower body.
It was cute that he pulled them over Blake, too. She loved him back, fiercely, for being that way.
Though she couldn’t decide how she felt about the other thing he was doing, which amounted to not being particularly bothered that he hadn’t come. What kind of person wasn’t bothered? He’d been all worked up that way and he was just going to what—let them snooze away in Sleepyland?
She got most of him, most of the time. But she couldn’t for the life in her get this. He was still immensely hard, after all. She could see it poking right up at her from where she was, half laid on his chest with her ear pressed right over his heart so she could hear it going.
It sounded fucking loud, unbearably loud and fast. Like he’d just run a marathon even though she knew for a fact he hadn’t crossed the finishing line. He’d pushed them over then just hung back, drinking a cup of fucking water or something. She didn’t know. She didn’t know why she wasn’t just on him and all over him until he went off like a small nuclear weapon.
Though it could have been something to do with how sweet it was, to hear him ask. To have him tell her. Maybe he’d even insist, if she waited long enough. Maybe he’d push her back on the bed and get on her like a ravening animal, unable to wait.
A girl could dream.
“You still awake, June?”
She didn’t look up at him before answering.
“I wouldn’t fall asleep twice. They’d take away my monocle.”
He laughed, low enough to suggest consideration for Blake’s snoring state. He had a hand in her hair again, and it made her wonder—did he have a little thing for it? Her dark curls were starting to pass her shoulders, now, and she knew some guys liked it. That kind of gypsy look.
Of course she’d never had a guy say or show her as much but TV made her hope. On TV, guys always liked girls with long curly hair. Until they’d all been eaten by zombies, of course.
“You got a little scar here, baby?”
She’d been meaning to use the calm silence to offer some sex thing if he really wasn’t going to ask. But then he interrupted with that little scar comment and she had to think about what he meant for a full thirty seconds.
Then she felt him rub his thumb over it and knew.
“I guess.”
Saying I guess was best. It was the other scar, after all. Not the ones done because she’d tripped while running away from drooling cannibals or because she’d been knocked sideways while firing her gun and accidentally shot a groove into her right forearm.
This was the one she probably didn’t want to talk about with anyone, ever again. And especially not when everything was all sexy and glowy and good.
“The one on your forearm—that’s a bullet, right?”
He knew his stuff, she’d give him that. But then—of course, he did. She knew it was a bullet wound scar all over his right shoulder. And it didn’t look half as pretty as movies said bullet scars did.
“Yep.”
“You shot yourself, right?”
“Okay, smartie-pants.”
He made a little amused noise.
“But this one—what’s this one?”
She paused. Had he been giving her a bit of time? Working up to it? She thought so.
“These…people. They’d made like a little camp. Barbed wire all around it—but you know. Not because they wanted to keep the zombies out. They did it so they could keep people in and then they…uh…they…wow. Nope. Still can’t talk about it.”
“Don’t reckon you have to. Sounds like the fellas we ran into down in Westbrook. The ones me and Blake sorta chopped up into little pieces and then set on fire.”
That same fire blazed through her, just once.
“Yeah. Yeah, like that.” She set her jaw. Pushed the other words out. “I wasn’t brave enough to go in. So I clipped the fence and let the zombies in at them. It was easy, really. The zombies are easy, you know? I just let them do their thing and then I got Kelsey and the others who could walk out the other side.”
“And the scar?”
“One of the assholes grabbed my leg as I was getting under the barbed wire. I let it cut me all the way down from the nape of my neck to the middle of my back, to get free. Would have done anything to get free, if I’m honest. I would have let the zombies eat me to get free.”
That feeling flashed through her, remembering it. That feeling of her skin ripping like being opened up to something raw and terrible, and his hand on her ankle, pulling and pulling. Kelsey holding so tight to her hands she thought she might be torn in two. Kelsey with her eyes blazing and not beaten—not like the rest.
You’re fucking coming with me, she’d said, as though it had just been a matter of will, of choice, and not whether some guy beat her to the prize.
“I sure do wish Blake had let me torture them a little, first,” he said, but the more disturbing thing came before the words. Somewhere in the middle of all of her blathering about that mess, he’d started kind of…jigging. Like his legs wanted to run only he’d decided to remain lying down. Like he couldn’t stay still suddenly and needed to rock on the spot.
It was…disquieting. As was the fact that his words…they didn’t exactly sound frightening. And when she shivered and he told her sorry and how he didn’t mean it, not really, the words remained the opposite of frightening. They were almost a comfort instead, in the same way a lethal friend is a comfort when someone’s about to kill you.
Because she knew he did mean it. And he probably knew all kinds of ways to torture a person who had decided that the apocalypse was the perfect time to rape, murder and mutilate the remainder of the human race, too.
“Jamie?”
“Yeah?”
“What were you, before?”
He still had his fingers on the scar. It was a thin one, really, and it hadn’t taken long to heal. Not like some of the wounds Kelsey and the other two
girls had had. The little one, Petra—she’d died of them.
Only so much antiseptic and bandages and botched stitching could do, really.
“Uh…I worked for the government.”
“That all you’re going to say?”
“I reckon so.”
“You know, there’s nothing you could tell me that would change my mind about you.”
“That’s ‘cause you know me now, June. You don’t ever want to know about me then. I don’t want to know about me then.”
“Think I would have ever ripped my back open on barbed wire to get away from you?”
“No—no, Jesus, June. Are you crazy? I could never, I could never—”
“Then I’m okay knowing you, whenever. I don’t care what you say—you’re a good guy. You’re the best kind of guy. The things you’ve done for me, I—”
She couldn’t speak, then. The glow was almost completely gone—it would never return if she started bawling.
“Hey, hey—okay. Okay, baby. It’s okay.”
He stroked through her hair. It was becoming, like, his signature move. Good thing that it worked better than any other thing she’d ever experienced.
“Here—come on. Tell me how you almost shot your own arm off.”
That made her laugh.
“Yeah, there’s a fun topic. Zombies almost ate me so I accidentally put a bullet in myself.”
“Hey—people laughed when I did almost the same thing. Without the zombies, obviously.”
He shoved the covers off and crooked his right knee so she could see the inside of his leg. There was a groove just like hers, from the end of his thigh to the beginning of his shin. Though it looked even stranger, so fine and smooth and pink amidst the hair.
“You shot yourself? Nice going, Special Ops.”
“Hey—some sympathy, here! I thought we were brothers in arms on this one.”
“I’m not a trained government assassin!”
“Good guesses. You been watching a lot of 24?”
“Fine. Okay. I admit it—I don’t know anything about military and government stuff. ‘Government assassin’ and ‘Special Ops’ were the only two options I could come up with.”
“Do you even know what Special Ops is?”
“No. But I know that scar on your shoulder is from a bullet, too. You seem really clumsy for a government assassin.”
“I know, I know. I shouldn’t have let those eighteen ninjas fight me to the death and then blow a hole in me, in slo-mo, while I dived out of a twelve story window.”
“You’re so fucking funny, Jamie, seriously, so funny. My sides, they are splitting.”
“Okay—twelve ninjas. And the window was only four stories up.”
It was hard to be sarcastic about how funny he was, when she couldn’t stop herself laughing.
“Okay, okay. What about the one on your back, then?”
“You really don’t want to know about them, baby. Come on.”
“I doubt you could tell me anything worse than I killed a former ice-cream truck driver with a fork.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty bad.”
She wondered if he understood that it was true, too.
“Or I battered a former primary school teacher to death with a traffic cone.”
“Jesus, June.”
Yeah, he probably knew. He shifted beneath her until she was almost in the crook of his arm, cheek against his shoulder somewhere. Any closer and she’d be able to simply tilt her head a tiny bit and see all of his expressions, which didn’t seem like a very good idea.
Not yet, anyway. She still had a ways to go on the harrowing and knew the barbed wire talk had already done him in. She could hear it in the drilling sound of his heartbeat. In the way he was still kind of jogging on the spot, as though he wanted and needed to be ready for action.
“One time, me and Kelsey found this semi. And there was a whole bunch of them circling outside a grocery store we wanted to get to, so we just got in, and mowed that motherfucker right through them. When we got out, the front of it looked like a slaughterhouse exploded.”
“I can’t even tell you about my scars. They look dumb, next to yours.”
She wondered what expression went with that. More pained than when he’d told her how much he wanted to torture those men? Less pained? Would it make it better, if she said exactly what was on her mind?
“Yeah, but the difference is you got yours while everyone else was having a nice time, drinking coffees at Starbucks and eating Thanksgiving dinners. Attending parties, studying at college. I got mine once all of that stuff was done, and everyone had to deal with this harrowing bullshit.”
But he cut in fast, before it could soothe him in any way. Not that she really thought it would.
“I didn’t ever really have to deal with anything. A coupla hairy situations. One time, my unit got captured. This one here, on my back—it’s ‘cause they said they were gonna skin us. But as you can see, they never got around to really making good on that promise.”
Had he said skinned? Someone had threatened to skin him, before any of this nonsense went down? He just didn’t get it, he really didn’t.
“That’s as bad as my exploding slaughterhouse story.”
“You think so?”
“No zombie has ever threatened to skin me.”
“They threaten to skin you all the time! That’s what they do. They eat skin. And other stuff.”
“Do you think they’re just hungry? Or is it some kind of rage thing, like in 28 Days Later?”
He shifted again, but it was a better sort of shift. Less like running on the spot, more like getting comfortable.
“No clue, June-bug. They sure seem hungry most of the time.”
“We tried hurling rotten steaks at them, once, but they wouldn’t take the bait. I think they like things warm, and fresh. I mean, it’s not like they’re dead, I don’t think. They’re not really zombies. But they sure get rotten and gangrenous and they probably don’t smell as fresh and good as real humans.”
“You sure they ain’t dead?” he asked, and that was surprising. Part of her still used the term undead, and it sort of fit. But she’d always known they weren’t. It was obvious they weren’t.
“Sure.”
“How come? Some of them look dead to me.”
She wondered if he thought of the old saying—when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth—from Dawn of the Dead. If maybe he was religious at all, and if so what it had done to his religion, to see this happen. She didn’t think he was, particularly, but something suggested to her that he at least believed in God.
“It isn’t just a headshot that will kill them. Other stuff will, too—just like it would any other living thing. Electrocution. They can bleed out. I’ve found a couple that obviously starved to death—you know, trapped ones that couldn’t get at anything to eat.”
Hopefully saying something like that made it easier for him to continue believing, if he did.
“So eventually, they’ll run out of food and be gone.”
That took her out of the God thoughts. In fact, it pulled her up so short that for a moment she found herself just staring at nothing, unable to grasp what he was saying. Gone, had he said gone? As in no more rabid cannibal people?
As in no more of this?
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess they will.”
“You never thought of that, have you?”
The truth was—no. But that sounded so stupid she had to go with something else.
“Sometimes I imagined that we could just wait them out. But it’s hard to really believe that when you’re amongst them. They’re not like us. They can just keep going. They’ll do anything to survive—lose limbs to get at food, chew through whatever gets in their way. Where as we…well. I guess we didn’t want it enough.”
“You did.”
He said it quick, like he didn’t even have to think about it. Like it floated on the top of his mind at all times—how
hard she’d fought, maybe. Or how much she wanted to live.
It made her consider just what it was that made him love her.
“Yeah. I did.”
Was it that? Just that? How much she’d wanted to live? The quiet after she’d said it seemed to suggest so, but she couldn’t know for sure. And that was okay, too, because the quiet felt good and calm after all the fire and the bad memories coming down hard, hard.
She found herself running her fingers over the scar she could see clearest on him, the way he’d done it to her. Just feeling it out—the one on his arm, that ended in a knot. He didn’t flinch away when she did it and his heart rate didn’t go up, so she thought it might be okay to ask. Just this one more thing, so that they knew everything about each other and had nothing else to hide.
But once she’d asked so where did this one come from, then? She kind of wished she hadn’t.
“I did it to myself,” he said, real simple. There wasn’t even a waver in his voice, as though it hurt to say it. Instead he sounded ever so faintly rueful, as though it still struck him as silly to this day.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t find anything silly about it, at all.
“I think that’s worse than my exploding slaughterhouse story. And maybe my barbed wire story, too.”
She felt him shrug.
“Hey—it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Why did you? Why? Were you on some kind of medication or did you just—”
“Sometimes things just hurt so bad that you have to take your mind off it. That’s all. That’s all.”
“Don’t say it like that, like it’s small.” Funny, that she then found herself biting down hard on her lip. Replacing one pain with another just like he’d said, so that maybe it would sting behind her eyes but no real tears would come. “Was it before, did you do it before? You did, didn’t you.”
“Yeah, it was before.” He hesitated then. She could hear it, like a breath he hadn’t taken. “I’ve thought about doing worse things to myself since, though.”
Clearly he’d considered sparing her. Was it wrong that she wished he had?
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