Page 35 of Resurrection
I don’t want to think about that though. Any of it. But, reluctance aside, I know how much we need to. Planning for the worst makes us prepared to be at our best. I just hope we’ve done enough, because the road ahead is impossible to see from our vantage point.
Chapter Nineteen
Aly
“Please, don’t do this,” I beg, the tears in my eyes not seeming to hold any sway over his decision. It’s already made, regardless of what I might have to say about it.
He takes me by my shoulders and stares down at me, placatingly, only I don’t want to be handled like a fucking child. We’ve been planning this. Preparing for months for me to come join him down south. To leave behind my life and everything I had ever known in New York to begin a new one with him in North Carolina. And now he decides to pull this shit?
What in the ever-loving fuck?!
He sighs, squeezing my shoulders when my body becomes infinitely more tense at how relaxed he is.
How the fuck is he being so calm?!
“Mi alma, thisis best for both of us. Please, tell me you understand.”
No, I don’t fucking understand.
In the beginning, before he decided to join without even asking how I felt about it, I was there. When he packed up all of his belongings and said his goodbyes, I was fucking there. When he was ripped away early for bootcamp to fill a fucking quota, I was there. When he graduated and, afterwards, was assigned to his duty station, miles away in fucking North Carolina, I was there.
I was there through every single life-changing, soul-breaking, ‘sorry, but if the military wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one,’ bullshit thing!
But now? All of a sudden, after everything we’ve been through, after all of the dedication I’ve put into the idea ofus,he no longer wants me there. I don’t fucking get it. Did something happen? Did I do something? We’ve been together for years, through the good times and the bad. We even spent the past couple of months apartment hunting in the area just outside of his new base. We picked out fucking curtains! Hell, just this morning he declared his love for me in every physical way imaginable. What. The hell. Happened?
He picks up his bag and, with a frustrated sigh, turns to the TSA check-in line. He was only visiting for the weekend. It was supposed to be one of the last before I permanently moved down to North Carolina. He wasjust promoted to lance corporal. We had a party with stupid pretentious hors d’oeuvres and a freaking cake….
Doesn’t seem like there’s much to celebrate now….
I try not to react impulsively. We’re in the middle of an airport, after all. The last thing I want to do is cause a scene and get kicked out before I can properly talk to him. But, in all reality, how is that even possible? He spent the entire weekend with me. Happy… with me. But now… forty-five minutes before take-off… he decides to call it quits, all because he thinks it’s for my own good. As if I don’t get a say in any of this.
Regardless of my feeble attempts to keep them at bay, tears begin to fall down my face, my body resigning to a fate my mind can’t fathom or comprehend. This is the end and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve been trying to understand his logic for almost an hour now, and I’m still just as dumbstruck as when he first dropped the bomb on me. He keeps on talking about ‘a better future’ for me, and that I don’t deserve to be forced to live this life he chose. That he wishes me the best…
It’s fucking bullshit.
“I love you. I always have and I always will. That’s why I’m doing this. Please… remember that.” He kisses me on my forehead one last time and pulls back, searching my eyes with his own watery ones, hesitating for only a fleeting moment before he turns towards the gates, leaving me and our past behind him, never to be seen again.
Tears coat my lashes and my heart pounds wildly in my chest as the sounds of distant voices pull me from my nightmare. I wake slowly, in a strange bed, in a strange place… covered in crumbs?
Oh, awesome, the best part of waking up is Tollhouse in your bra cups….
I push the box over to the side and sit up. I’ve been thinking about him more and more lately. It has to be due to how close we are to the base. Or maybe I just miss him. It’s not as if I ever stopped missing him. Caring for him. Being angry with the big, dumb, stupid asshole.
Still, to this day, I don’t understand why he left me. I guess, now, I’ll never understand because he washere. I know he never changed duty stations; North Carolina was it for him. In fact, in my long journey south after the contagion began, it was him I was traveling towards, hoping and praying he survived just as I had. But then I remember Hawk telling me how the entire base was overrun and no one made it out alive. Regardless of how much I try to hide it, the pain of knowing he was there during the initial outbreak hasn’t diminished in the slightest since the revelation.
I miss him. Even though I’ve moved on with Jax, Cole, and Hawk, I miss him. Our love wasn’t one you could simply walk away from. Well… at least in my case, it wasn’t. I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore either way.
Deciding I need to free myself from the clutches of past relationship Hell, I shake out my body and headto the bathroom. There’s no running water, but I’m still able to at least pee without having to go outside. The voices from the main living area continue with urgency, so I take the cue to walk over to the kitchen and find some sort of caffeinated beverage.
Fingers crossed for some spicy bean juice...A whole damn tub of the stuff...I could bathe in it at this point.
“So, what do you think we should do? Camp out here until we run out of food again? Try to find a replacement vehicle now that we’re out here in the boondocks and no longer bogged down in the city?” Hawk asks.
“We could try looking for a new car or truck, but good luck. It took us all damn night just to find shelter, and unfortunately, the old residents of this place left with whatever vehicle they must have had.” Jax replies looking frustrated. Like really frustrated. Even from way over here, I can see the vein above his eyes is practically throbbing out of his head.
You can totally ease his frustration by tending to something else that throbs...
“Shut. Up. You. Whore,”I whisper to myself, regaining my senses.
