Silver ||Joel Miller||

you're a fucking piece of work, Joel

JOEL

What the fuck was he supposed to say? How the fuck was he meant to break the silence? Because he had let himself get far too fucking carried away in the middle of that room, and now he had to hide the flush on his skin and the way his hands shook.

"You seemed to act very easily back there," Laura said. Yes, right, his acting. Because there was absolutely no part of him whatsoever that felt fucking right holding her against him. Because there wasn't a single inch of him that burned as he wrapped his fingers with her hair and used the leverage to–

"I guess so." He replied. Because he had acted. There was no possible way he could actually be in love with Laura Richards. He would never allow himself to love Laura Richards because that would be... reckless. Yes, reckless was the right word, but not the only one. Stupid. Idiotic. Sadistic. It would only end in pain, which is why he didn't love her. "So why did we need privacy?" He wanted to move the conversation along as quickly as possible. The sooner it happened the sooner his focus could be on any other thought than pressing his lips to hers again, to maybe pushing her onto the bed and–

"I found out some information and we need to make a plan. We can't do that with our fucking shadow out there," Laura replied. Right, Sean.

"Alright, what did you get?" Joel asked. Between getting the bracelet welded onto his wrist and meal times, he'd pretty much done nothing all day. He'd offered to help out anywhere in the settlement, but instead he was told to rest and that he would be given an assignment the next day. Even though he knew they'd already given Laura kitchen duty, and they thought she was fucking pregnant.

"Well, what did you notice today?" She asked, and he shook his head. Beyond his failed attempts at squeezing information out of anyone he could talk to, there wasn't much he'd been able to notice.

"Not much," he answered.

"Well, some of the men have more than one bracelet. When I asked Katarina about it, she said those were widowers who remarried but didn't have their late wives removed from their wrist. I also noticed that only a handful of women are over the age of twenty, and that we are the two oldest people here." She explained. "Katarina kindly told me that older women tend to disappear without a trace after giving birth." Fuck. That's what she meant when she said she wasn't in danger yet. But she would be. If they couldn't find a way out then they would realise she's not pregnant and that she never will be. She won't be of use to them and neither will he.

"Then we need to go, now." Joel took a step towards the door, but was stopped by Laura's hand on his wrist.

"We can't," she said simply.

"Why not?"

"Because we don't have our things, we have to get your guns back and I'm not leaving the girls here without helping them."

"Laura-"

"What did you notice about the girls? Tell me exactly what you saw tonight but didn't want to believe." Laura let go of his wrist and crossed her arms over her chest. He took a staggered breath and thought back to the dining hall, to all the girls and the endless amount of steel bracelets and...

"They were all fucking pregnant." It was something he thought he'd imagined, or put it down to maybe a trick of the light. But the look on Laura's face told me him it wasn't.

"They marry the girls off the week after they have their first period. While that is an issue in itself, the worst part is that they aren't marrying the boys their age. They're marrying the men in the thirties or forties, and they're having children as soon as they can." Joel furrowed his brow at Laura's words. He guessed that was the other thing he'd noticed, that each of the girls dancing with a man that night had been with someone much older than them. "Sean seems to be the only person married to someone appropriate for his age..." Joel personally hadn't seen Sean with whoever the kid was married to. Hell, he hadn't even noticed Sean wearing a bracelet.