BItter hearts

Chapter 6

Y/N’s POV

The bedsheets tangled around your legs as you tossed and turned, the window cracked open to allow a little air into the stifling heat of your bedroom. One of the upper offices, you’d commandeered the room as your own when you’d first taken over the block, liking that it got the sun in the mornings and had a view over what was once a park on the edge of town, now an overgrown grassland, dotted with smatterings of wildflowers that swayed in the breeze. Tonight though it felt claustrophobic despite its generous size, and the humidity made it feel unbearable as sleep continued to evade you.

It had been a long week. The hours spent at the Sanctuary had been eye-opening and productive, but your brain had been exhausted by the piles of spreadsheets and stock lists, new names and faces to remember, and the following days spent assigning new tasks to your army, sending them out to Negan’s outposts with orders to take over and maintain control. And your run-in with Negan back in his office had affected you more than you’d like to admit. You’d replayed it in your mind all week, how you’d lost your temper, pushed to your limit by the blasé way that he’d referred to your past, the non-relationship that you’d almost had that had shredded your heart into teeny tiny pieces. For him, it seemed, it was something to joke about, to use to taunt you, and you hated that it had mattered to him so little; that you didn’t matter to him and apparently never had.

You should have killed him. The voice in your head had been repeating that simple truth over and over since you’d had him bound and loaded into the back of your truck, and you’d refused to listen to it, to pay it any mind, for the most part. Each night though the inability to sleep and endless hours of darkness that stretched out ahead of you only amplified the words, making them impossible to ignore, and you rolled onto your back and drummed your fists against the mattress in frustration. You should have killed him. Had it been anybody else talking to you that way, disrespecting you like that, you would have. You’d have taken your gun and put a bullet through their brain without a second thought, and then you’d have called one of your guys in to clean up the mess. But not him…

Why not him?

The same reason, you imagined, that he was able to get under your skin at all. Because you still remembered what it was like to love him. You still remembered how it felt to give yourself up to him, to have his hands burning hot against your skin and feel him fall to pieces. You still felt a flicker of affection deep in your heart when he smiled, no matter how much negativity you dumped on it to try and extinguish that persistent fondness.

And, you supposed, there was an element of curiosity too. It had been nearly two years since your paths had last crossed and you had questions that you wanted answers to, though you hadn’t yet been brave enough to ask them. To open up, to seek the answers, would be to show a little humanity, a sliver of weakness, and you didn’t trust him not to take advantage of that, to use it to try and break you. Where was his wife? That was the main one. It had become obvious almost immediately that he was unattached, despite the harem that your men had delightedly told you about, and you wondered whether he’d lost her before or after; whether the cancer had claimed her or if she’d fallen victim to the plague of the undead. Or, maybe, just maybe, she’d had enough of his cheating, lying, scheming ways and kicked his ass to the kerb before either outcome had had the chance to come to pass.

You wanted to know what his life had been like after you’d left. You wanted to know if he’d had others, whether he’d tempted them into his bed with his charming smile and false affection, and whether they’d been as crushed by his betrayal as you had been. You wanted to know when the world had ended for him and how he’d come to lead a place like the Sanctuary. You wanted to know who he was now, so you could be sure that you were right to hate the man he’d become, instead of a shadowy figure from the past.