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Joel would never forget Tess.
No.
One does not forget their first and only great love.
But he would repress her, push her down deep to the place where her memory could no longer assail him; make him weak. He had to, because he had Ellie to care for, to guide across the treacherous post apocalyptic country. There was no room for grief, doubt and regrets. Not then. And Tess wouldn’t have wanted him to break. Tess would have wanted him to survive. Just as she had for all those miserable years.
But things are different in Jackson. It’s no longer a constant fight for survival. There is food, water, shelter and safety that is not in imminent danger of being snatched away.
Repressing becomes more difficult now that he has the leisure hours in which to remember.
Joel doesn’t want to remember, but he does. In his dreams, first. He catches glimpses, shadows of her, flashes of her hazel eyes, echoes of her voice. Small things, things he can ignore by daylight as he busies himself in his new community.
He doesn’t want to remember.
Because to remember is to bleed, and he has shed enough blood for a thousand lifetimes.
One night, three weeks after their arrival in Jackson, he is sitting on the front porch of the house that has been assigned to him. The air cool on his skin, the sun is setting, painting the sky a blaze of blush and violet. He strums his guitar absentmindedly, determined to stay up as late as his body will allow so that he might not remember so vividly tonight. If he wears himself out to the point of exhaustion; surely his brain will be too wracked to construct such vivid, yet fleeting ghosts.
Ellie joins him on the porch, leaning against the railing. For a moment no words pass between them. An understanding of companionable silence. But Joel can tell by the way she worries her lip; she’s got something on her mind.
“What’s up, kiddo?” He pauses with a large hand on the curve of his instrument, caressing it with all the tenderness of a woman’s hip. He doesn’t allow himself to think too deeply on the motion, on the memories it recalls unbidden.
“You’ll get mad,” Ellie says, leaning with her elbows against the railing. She’s staring at her shoes. They’re worn. FIlthy. Once white soles stained brown and yellow with dirt.
Joel shrugs his shoulders, “Try me.”
“You…” Ellie begins with a thick swallow. She meets his eyes. Her own gaze is brimming with curiosity, but also with hurt. “You told me not to bring her up.”
Joel chuckles, “What’re you on-
Oh.
She means Tess.
The floodgates of his memory threaten to burst at the mere mention of her aloud. A tempest of recollection threatens at the edges of his mind, but he fends it off, turning his attention back to his guitar.
He strums it lightly, playing a chord, and then another, but he cannot settle on a song, “What about her?”
“She was in my dream last night,” Ellie admits. “We were back at the capitol.”
Joel can recall the scene as clear as daylight. The smell of phantom blood assaults his nostrils. The brutal cut of teeth into the meat of his lover’s shoulder. Tess’s cries as he ran . He winces, his fingers still on the strings. What else could he have done but run? She asked him to.
“Who was she, Joel?” Ellie asks. “She died for me and I don’t know anything about her. I feel guilty .”
Joel’s lips thin into a line, the dam has burst. All of the memories wash over him like a wave of icy water. Kisses, touches, glances, laughter, tears, all of it. An entire life lived in tandem. Seventeen years worth of it. He feels faint, cold, weak, all at once. But his countenance is reserved, all of his grief is hidden behind a well cultivated mask of adamant. He will not crumble in front of Ellie.
“Nothin’ to feel guilty over,” he says, coldly. “People die. She thought you were worth dyin’ for.”
“But why?” Ellie beseeches him with an edge of desperation in her tone.
Joel shakes his head, rises to his feet. His legs are jelly beneath him. His chest feels cavernous and tight at the same time. It’s a struggle to keep his breathing in check when he swears he can smell her on the wind; sweat, sex, something sharp and metallic, a mysterious floral note at the base of her neck.
“I dunno,” he says. “I- I dunno .”
Why did they take that job again? Why didn’t they simply return to their apartment and spend a quiet evening together? He can’t recall. The details are muddied in his brain. The pain is exquisite, burning in his fingertips.
“Joel?”
He only shakes his head, words choked out by the stone in his throat.
Who was she ?
He asks himself that question as he crawls between his sheets. He’s got a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, three sleeping pills in his belly. He wants to push it down again, down to his feet, to the tips of his toes, as far away from his mind as he can because he simply cannot endure such biting agony as this.
How had he ever let it go? How had he ever gone a second without her on his mind? He’d somehow numbed himself to it; to the lancing pain of bitter memory. But how? How can he return to that state of passive, blithe, ignorance when Tess is dead on the floor of the Boston Capitol Building? She received no burial, no quiet memorial. How can he stop imagining her there, bleeding, dying alone ? She must be nothing but bones now, bleached white by the sun pouring in through the shattered windows. How can he forget?
Joel doesn’t know, because now she encompasses everything.
Who was she ?
She was his world for seventeen fucking years, and he hadn’t known it until she was bitten. Rendered cruelly from his side. They’d never said ‘I love you’, but words were a very superficial mode of communication. They were so much more than that.
He remembers the first time they met, when he was thirty-five and she was eleven years his junior. He remembers how fiery she had been, how determined and tenacious. She was a survivor, a creature of immense fortitude and endurance. He had respected her instantly despite their age difference.
He remembers fucking her for the first time three weeks later. They were both drunk, stoned out of their minds. And then it was like he had never lived a life without her. She moved in without any discussion. One day she walked in and never left. They worked together, ate together, drank together, fucked together. All of the Boston QZ knew that they were a team. A pair. A couple.
And yet it was complicated; because they couldn’t say ‘I love you’, their respective traumas would not allow for it. And they butted heads often. They never really talked about their problems, not when sex and booze and more sex was an option.
When in doubt fuck it out. Tess had declared once after an argument and several rounds of vigorous apologetics.
Joel croaks a weak chuckle at that recollection.
He remembers her body under his. In his hands. Lean, lithe, too thin. Her lips on his throat, his jaw, his mouth, his-
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
He can’t.
But he has.
He’s hard in an instant as the memories gather beneath him like a sheet of ice on a coursing river of bitterly cold water. They carry him forward, away towards some unknown precipice as he fishes his cock out of his sleep pants. He’s big. Thick. Hard and veined. He could have any woman he wants in Jackson; but there is only one who occupies his mind, his dreams.
He remembers her breasts, full despite her litheness. How they felt in his hands, how she would moan when he put his mouth to those dusky nipples. He remembers her hips, wide and powerful under the span of his fingers as she rode him. Sitting atop him with her hands planted on his pecs. Her eyes alight with an erotic fire from which he could not look away.
Joel touches himself in long, slow strokes. Hand nothing like the one he wants on him. His is too large, too calloused. Hair dusts his knuckles where hers were bare and scarred.
But he is not in the present moment where he masturbates pathetically with tears in his eyes. He is far away; what might as well be a million miles. Boston. Their apartment. Their bed. Tess is under him as he presses into her. She bites her lip, eyelids fluttering with pleasure even as tears prickle at the stretch of him.
He kisses them away, kisses her. Tess.
Joel remembers the tight, hot, sheath of her body around him. Squeezing, massaging as he would thrust his hips. He remembers the sound of their flesh clapping. Their bodies tangling, sweat mingling, breaths coming hot and fast between their faces.
He remembers the tight clench of her around him. The flood of wetness that eased his passage even further. How she would howl, lock her legs at the small of his back, hold him tight as his own climax overwhelmed him and he spilled inside of her.
In the present he tenses at the memory; spills pearly white across his tight fist, hips pushing up and into his hand, imagining the dry, pathetic glide to be something far more wet and inviting.
It is only once he has wiped his hand clean on the sheets that his body shakes, and he realizes he is sobbing.
Because he remembers, too, the consequences of those wild; passionate nights.
He remembers the first miscarriage. They hadn’t even known she was pregnant until they saw the blood in the toilet bowl. Until the cramps brought Tess to her knees and they rushed her to the nearest medical facility.
That grief had been strange and small. Because they hadn’t known. Not really. They had never discussed even the inkling of the possibility of children. Even if that was ultimately something they both secretly desired.
The second was a thing of unspoken yet immense sorrow. Because, without ever really saying so, they had been trying . They had done away with any form of control or protection in the months previous. They hadn’t spoken a word of it, but their desires were made clear in the bedroom, on the couch, in the kitchen, in the shower. Anywhere. Everywhere they had each other. Not a pill nor a condom to be seen.
Maybe it was stupid. Perhaps it was foolish to be filled with such limpid hope. Hope for a family, a future. Things that the quarantine zone crushed more often than not. Precious things. Delicate things. Things that had no place in the new world. And yet, they had dared to hope.
In Jackson, if Tess had made it there, they would have had babies. Joel knows it. In Jackson it is safe to have hope. But Tess isn’t in Jackson. And she never will be.
Tess miscarried at five months.
It had been traumatic. Bloody, to happen so late in the pregnancy.
It happened at home at least. Where he could hold her, kiss her hair. Murmur that they would try again. The loss nearly took her from him. A pain that, at the time, he simply could not imagine. Because Tess had become his entire world, he had allowed himself to love again. To place all of his hopes and fears into the life of another.
It was foolish, perhaps, after Sarah. But Joel was, is , a protector at his core. And what is a protector with nothing to protect?
They never did try again.
They went back to pulling out. Condoms. Pills. Because it wasn’t worth the risk of enduring such pain a third time.
Until it was.
A quiet discussion, two weeks before she died. A rare thing between them, to discuss anything .
Joel had nearly forgotten. But now he remembers. He remembers and he burns.
Let’s try one more time, she’d said. I might be too old, but I want to try one more time.
They never got the chance.
Unless she had been in the early weeks when she died; a possibility which Joel cannot bear to even consider. Not when he had left her to fight and die alone, cordyceps coursing through her blood.
But Joel never forgot the babies Tess tried to give him. The family they might have made together. How that would have mended his broken heart. How she had mended him, made him whole in those intervening years.
He hugs a pillow to his chest. Sniffing, choking on a sob for his lost little ones. For their mother who died to give him Ellie.
And was that not her final gift to him? A daughter. A child to protect. The hope of the whole world thrust upon her little shoulders and Tess had beseeched him, voice desperate, eyes wild, to save the girl.
He would have left her. He would have died with Tess happily in a heartbeat. He had wanted to fight by her side until the bitter end.
But her dying wish. The dying wish of his woman; was for him to see that Ellie lived.
So, he decides. In a way. Ellie is the last baby Tess gave him, and by far the most precious. It hurts to even think about it, the family they would have become if Tess hadn’t been bitten.
Joel goes to the bathroom, washing his hands and splashing his face with cool water to wipe away the tear tracks.
A strange calm settles over him.
He goes to Ellie’s door to find the girl awake, reading her comic book in bed.
“Joel?”
He enters, sits on the edge of the bed. Clears his throat.
“Tess was a survivor before anythin’ else,” he begins. “We met when I was thirty-five and she was twenty-four… and somehow in all the years we knew each other, she became very special to me.”
“Were you guys married?” Ellie asks, placing her comic neatly in her lap.
Joel shakes his head, bitter regret tightening his throat once more, “No.”
He would have married that woman in a heartbeat. In Jackson, if Tess had made it, he would have gotten down on one knee and begged for her hand.
“... did you love her?”
His eyes flash, suddenly far away. Back in Boston. In a tiny one bedroom apartment. He remembers waking up next to Tess a thousand times. Sunlight breaching their blinds in long golden stripes across the sheets. A warm sprawl across his chest. Head tucked under his chin. He would kiss her hair, her temple, the apple of her cheek, her eyelids. Finally her lips. He’d give anything to make it a thousand-and-one.
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave her?” Ellie inquires, voice reserved, eyes pensive. “Why’d you choose me?”
Joel reaches out, cups Ellie’s cheek. A small smile pulls at the corners of his mouth as he finally comes to terms with Tess’s final words, her final thoughts, the symbolic meaning behind her final moments.
“It wasn’t about choosin’. She gave me you, Ellie.”
Ellie breaks.
Joel holds her as she cries.