Alone

Chapter: 6 // i can't go on without you •

His gentleness, his icy blue eyes that I recall, were closed. His lips, I ran my thumb over them, and his unkempt beard and how it felt rough on my face but I loved the feeling of it.

His biceps I traced with my fingertips over his button down shirt, like I was an artist with a paintbrush filling in his silhouettes with color. Our warm embrace.

Then tragedy strikes.

A gunshot goes off in the night, prompting a visit from a shaken up Gregory, prompting us being caught kissing.

He was relentless, and we exchanged some pretty ugly words, and Jesus being himself tried to break up the altercation and reason with him, but it ended up getting him thrown out.

Gregory told me to smile, as I was sobbing on the ground after Jesus was booted. He said that I should be with someone my own stature and youth, and I kicked him in the groin, him swearing that he didn't mean anything by it. Though it came out that way.

My eyes burn with tears, I fold my diary over and tuck it under my thigh. My throat is dry, scratchy, and sore from the poor air quality and my skin is dry and tight.

Enid comes out of Jesus' trailer where Maggie and Sasha have been sleeping since before we arrived, the door jerks closed behind her in this all too familiar thud, making my breath hitch.

"Hey, there you are." She kicks rocks, her hands tucked in her Jean pockets. "I knew you didn't lose me back at the gate."

I stare at my lap, "I'm sorry." But I don't mean for leaving her on purpose.

"No, you're not." She said as she sat on the ground by me.

"I wasn't talking about that. I'm sorry I lied." I pick at the ocean blue on my fingernails.

"You're just saying that to make yourself feel better." I nod, and a tear drops down my cheek, I pull my sleeves over my freezing hands. "It doesn't."

I nod again, I wipe my cheeks and take a deep breath. "I don't want to know why you left me, just in case you were going to tell me."

"You and Carl," I bite my cheek. "I saw you both in the woods." My chest feels less heavy, having said what had been bothering me besides Jesus since we got here.

She suddenly has nothing to say, or she does but she can't say it. Either one, she's oddly quiet and vacant like on the porch.

"I told you I care about Carl more than myself, so if I tell you this, well, maybe you'd understand why I had to." She begins. "I thought he came to come to Hilltop with me, but he was only following me to find Negan. He wants to take out Negan, and I couldn't- he sneaked in one of their trucks to follow them to the compound. I couldn't stop him. I did it to sway him into going back home with me."

She stars to cry, her hands over her eyes. "Please don't tell anyone else about it." But I did, I couldn't sleep that night and I jotted it down in my diary, my 18th entry.

I flip through the pages ranging from happy thoughts to sad ones to angry ones and in between ones and undecided ones.

Almost all of them include Carl's name, and so I go back and erase his name from all of my thoughts. I read back to the beginning, when he called me squirrel girl and stated that he liked me for the second time.

And maybe he didn't care back at the church, maybe he didn't save me because he liked me, maybe it was one of those things you're just supposed to do.

Maybe I imagined our conversations, that almost, almost kiss, the way I imagined Jesus would stay at Alexandria with me, how I imagined he wouldn't or couldn't hurt me.