Nights Like This One { a joel miller fanfiction }

XX.

"You are the ever-living ghost of what once was."

— Band of Horses, No One's Gonna Love You

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There existed a great many things Lily regretted over the span of her life.

She regretted some of the trysts she'd entertained in college, though those were so buried now they may as well have occurred in a different lifetime. She regretted how vehemently she'd let her mother's apathy toward her weasel its way into the fabric of her life as a younger adult. Sometimes she regretted the things she'd done to keep herself and her friends alive after the world fell apart. But now, most of all, like some sick and rotten seed planted and maturing in her gut, she regretted how little she'd touched him before, before he became whatever shell existed of him now.

She'd spent too much time trying to push him away, trying and failing to deny the gravitation she'd felt toward him from the very start. Months of her life she would never get back, ones she could have spent wrapped up in him, now lost, carried away and burned in the fall of what had happened to the world, what had happened to him. She would never get them back, would never get that version of him back.

He touched her now, when it seemed that he couldn't help himself, couldn't continue isolating himself in the confines of his house. Something sickly desperate and greedy had broken open inside of him after that evening they'd gone out on patrol together. She could see it, swimming in those hollow eyes, like it existed as a parasite, some lingering piece of him from before that hadn't quite died off just yet. He touched her now, but it wasn't like before. He touched her, but he did not let her touch him, not really, not in all the ways she needed to, not in any way that would cease the screaming or mend the cavern that had been carved out of her chest.

He touched her and it was relief and agony in some unholy marriage that sometimes left her feeling even more empty than when she'd thought he was gone.

He sought her out now, followed her in the shadows, ghost of the man she'd once known staring at her from across a room, stalking behind her when she walked home from the mess hall or the stables, always far enough away that she could just make out his heavy footfalls, but still never close enough to touch, even when he was buried inside of her.

He fucked her on his conditions, when it seemed like he couldn't restrain himself any longer, quick and brutal or slow and pained, but never like before. And she let him, let him take her in the stables before going out on patrol, in the entryway of her house, pressed up against the bricks behind the mess hall. She let him because having him this way, any way, was still better than not at all.

But God, she wished she'd touched him more before, when she was allowed to, when he fucked her like he loved her not like he needed to solely to keep breathing.

Lily walked down the street toward the mess hall with that familiar tug at her back, the heavy thud of boots behind her, whose owner she knew without even having to turn around.

Leslie was already there, serving food, and Caleb was out on patrol with Eugene until sundown. Those were the pairings, at least for the time being, her with Joel and Caleb with Eugene. She'd tried to talk Tommy into putting her on the schedule with Caleb, even though the idea of losing that time with Joel did make something inside her ache. But it hadn't mattered, because Tommy had brushed her off, told her they both needed more time with someone seasoned before he'd let them out on their own.

"You know," Lily called out over her shoulder, only giving the hulking man behind her a brief glance, "for someone who hates me so much now, you sure seem to follow me around a lot."