Spring

I hummed as I rubbed wood oil into the stock of my little lever-action carbine. It was just a .22, so it didn't have a whole lot of stopping power when it came to fending off the infected, but it was handy for hunting squirrels and rabbit, and I'd once taken down a deer with a couple of quick, well-placed shots. More importantly, Joel had given it to me for my twentieth birthday, which made it one of my most precious possessions. I had gone through my post-hunting routine of cleaning the rifle barrel and wiping the steel down with a rag soaked in gun oil when I decided the stock was looking a little dull too. The wood was glowing from the treatment when I...I smelled smoke.

"Aw, fucking hell!" I dropped the rag on the table and ran for the kitchen, where smoke was pouring out of the stove. Grabbing a ratty dish towel, I wrenched the oven door open, coughing as I dragged the pan out. The rabbit I'd caught earlier was charred beyond recognition, and the dumplings I'd tried to make from a recipe I'd found in a library cookbook were just lumps of charcoal.

"Oh, no..." I moaned in frustration. I'd spent all afternoon tracking down that stupid rabbit, and I'd traded three more to the central commissary for flour and sugar. I set the hot roasting pan down on the stovetop, next to the suspicious-looking and probably equally failed pound cake I'd screwed up earlier.

"Crap." It was spring planting time, and Joel was coming off a long, hard week on farm duty. Everybody had to take a turn; mine was next week. I knew it was hot, backbreaking labor, and I'd really wanted to surprise Joel with a good meal tonight. The only problem was, I was a terrible cook. "It's a braise, Ellie," I muttered, repeating Maria's words to me. "It's impossible to mess it up." What the hell had I done wrong?

All right, she had told me I should cook it for two hours at two hundred and fifty degrees. But I'd gotten in later than I meant to, and it was getting late by the time I'd pulled the sadly flat pound cake out of the oven, and wasn't cooking it for half as long with twice the heat the same thing? I poked the charred lumps of meat halfheartedly with a fork. Apparently not.

Glumly, I opened the cupboard to assess our options. A dented can of twenty-five year old stew, or a couple of potatoes that I might be able to bake, if that cookbook had instructions on how to do it. I decided on the potatoes. Canned goods from before the pandemic all tasted uniformly awful at best, and would give you botulism at worst. The can wasn't rusty or bulging, but why take chances?

I flipped through Texas Home Cooking for instructions on how to bake a potato. We had some fresh butter and sour cream from the dairy, maybe this wouldn't be a total disaster. "Fuck, no baked potato recipes." It was probably one of those things everybody just knew how to do before. In frustration, I winged the book across the room, almost hitting Joel in the head as he came into the kitchen.

"Hey!" He plucked the abused volume out of the air, his reflexes still quick as a cat's, despite his advanced age of somewhere-north-of-fifty-now-leave-me-alone. His words, not mine, obviously.

I looked down at his bare feet. He was holding his dirt-crusted workboots in his other hand. "Serves you right for sneaking up on me," I said with bad grace.

Joel's smile uncurled slowly on his weathered face. "You know, this is the best part of my day."

"What, sneaking up on me?" I was still trying to hold on to my anger, but that smile was making it hard to do.

"No." He looked down, almost like he felt shy or something. "I mean, comin' home to you. Even when you're throwin' things at me."

My stomach did a flip-flop. Whoa. Where did that come from?

He examined the book in his hand. "Texas Home Cooking?" He made a show of sniffing the smoky air in the kitchen. "It doesn't smell like anything I remember."

My face went red. I casually interposed my body between him and the disaster on the stovetop. "That's because it's not ready yet. Now go..."

He was looking right over my shoulder, damn it. Some days I really hated being short. I could see him take in the sad cake, the burned dumplings, the explosion of flour on the countertop that I hadn't yet cleaned up. He was trying to keep a straight face, but his shoulders started to shake.

I could feel my disappointment like a rock in my stomach. "Aw, Joel, don't laugh."

He enveloped me in a bonecrushing hug, still laughing. "Baby girl, you are a lotta things, but I'm startin' to think a cook ain't one of them."

"Fuck, Joel, let me go! You're all sweaty. And you stink." I pushed against his chest through the clammy t-shirt he was wearing.

He gave me an exaggerated, wet smack on the cheek before he turned me loose. "Gross," I said, wiping my cheek, but I couldn't help smiling. "Go shower and change. I'll sort these out." I pointed to the potatoes.

He yawned and pulled his wet t-shirt over his head, using it to mop his face. His chest was still broad and hard-muscled, lightly furred with graying hair and tapering down to his flat stomach and narrow waist. I could see the ugly scar from when he'd been impaled on the left side of his abdomen, still dark against his pale skin. Not bad for a somewhere-north-of-fifty-now-leave-me-alone-year-old, I found myself thinking, and then I blushed when I realized I was staring at his naked chest and had missed whatever he'd just said. "What? I was...I was just admiring your farmer's tan." I cringed inwardly. Of all the wisecracks I could have made. Admiring your farmer's tan? Why don't I just say I was checking you out? Because I wasn't, at all. That would be weird. Oh, god. This is weird.

Joel gave me a strange look. "I said, don't bother. I'm too tired to eat. All I really want is..." He trailed off as he looked past me to the cluttered countertop, a pained expression on his face. "Ellie? Is that...? Please tell me that's not the last bottle of beer."

"Uh...it's not the last bottle of beer." It was. I'd poured it into the pan with the rabbit on Maria's instructions, because apparently braising involved liquid of some kind.

Joel closed his eyes. My guilty tone was all the answer he needed. "I'm gonna shower and hit the hay, kiddo. It's been a long week." He left his filthy boots and sweat-soaked shirt on the kitchen floor and trudged upstairs.

I can still fix this, I thought. I took Joel's boots and t-shirt out to the garage and dropped them near the laundry tub, then I grabbed the little basket with its precious cargo that I'd been saving for the grand finale. Let's see how much beer these babies can buy me.

The water was running when I shrugged into my jacket and slipped out the door. I needn't have bothered with the basket; I ran into Maria on the front porch. She had just set down a sack next to the door, and she looked at me guiltily. "Shit. You caught me."

I pointed to the bag. "What's that?"

She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I thought...after what happened with the roast chicken...I'm sure it went fine today, but just in case..."

My heart leapt. "Did you...?" I peeked into the sack, where two bottles of beer were nestled up against a collection of foil-wrapped packages. I hugged her so hard that I squeezed the breath out of her. "Jesus, Maria, you're a lifesaver!"

She looked embarrassed at my display of affection. Maria wasn't the touchy-feely type. "It's just some pot roast and mashed potatoes."

"And beer!" The bottles of homebrew that had been put up after last year's harvest were already starting to become scarce. Anybody could still go down to the main commissary and get a mug drawn from one of the community's kegs, but the bottles had been a limited-run experiment that turned out to be wildly popular. People liked being able to pull a cold beer out of their own refrigerators at the end of a hot day. As a result, the bottles that were left were trading dearly, when you could find them at all.

Maria shrugged casually. "You said you were out." Then she smiled, a wicked gleam in her eye. "I'll find some way to make it up to Tommy."

"Ugh, thanks. Now I have to scrub my brain." We'd stayed with Tommy and Maria long enough when we came back to Jackson for me to know that they had a very healthy sex life. Like, really healthy. Like, every night kind of healthy. And sometimes in the mornings too.

I remembered one night during our first month there I'd woken up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and I'd padded over to Joel's room. Even though this was back when I was still mad at him for lying to me about killing the Fireflies and Marlene, I knew the only way I'd get back to sleep was next to him. He was sprawled across the entire bed, wearing just his boxers, and snoring like a motor. I shoved his shoulder until he rolled over, and then I lay down facing away from him, pressing my back to his.

"Sarah?" he muttered, his voice still thick with sleep.

I sighed. I wish I didn't feel like I'd always be competing with Joel's dead daughter. It was a competition I'd never win.

I felt him turn toward me, curling his body around mine and wrapping his arm around my waist. He kissed the top of my head and inhaled deeply. "Ellie." He held me tight, and I smiled. Now maybe I could sleep.

That was when the sounds started coming from Tommy and Maria's bedroom. They weren't exactly trying to be quiet about it. My eyes flew open, and I could tell by the tension in Joel's body that he was wide awake too.

There was a certain part of Joel's body that was really awake.

He rolled away from me like I was on fire and lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Jesus, Tommy was a wild man, judging from the way Maria was moaning his name.

"Uh," I said, "I think I'm going to go back to my room..."

"Okay." Joel couldn't bring himself to look at me, but he said, "You gonna be okay?"

I tried to ignore the thumping from next door. "Yep. See you tomorrow."

"Night, baby girl."

I don't think either of us slept any more that night, because we were both hollow-eyed and cranky the next morning. After that, Joel started hounding Tommy about fixing up a house for us, so we'd have a place of our own, but it was a long three months staying with them, listening to that every night.

I looked at Maria's bag again, inhaling the delicious smell of pot roast. I had to repay her for this somehow. "Come in for a sec. I have something for you. Maybe you won't have to use up all your sexual favors."

"Ellie!" Maria sounded slightly scandalized. I don't know why, she was the one who started it.

"Oh, please. Like I don't know what goes on at your house."

Maria blushed. She actually blushed. I mentally punched the air. Score one for Ellie! I could make the badass leader of Jackson City blush. Ha!

She followed me into the kitchen and made a sound of dismay when she saw the burned mess on the stove. "Oh, no! What happened?"

"Don't ask," I said. "I don't know where I went wrong with the cake. It's all flat."

"Hm." Maria stuck her hand in the cake pan and dug out a piece with her fingers. She didn't hesitate before she put it in her mouth. Much, anyway."Actually, this tastes pretty good." She surveyed the clutter on the counter. "Did you use baking soda, or baking powder?"

"There's a difference? I thought it was just two names for the same thing."

Maria laughed. "Well, it's official. You're a disaster in the kitchen. I'd put you on commissary duty, just so you could learn, if it wasn't for..." She broke off.

If it wasn't for the fact that I was infected, I finished mentally. For some reason, some people around here had a problem with someone infected handling their food. Even when Joel and I had proved years ago beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever mutated spores were in my system were not present in any numbers high enough to transmit to someone else. We'd been able to keep the secret of my immunity safe for the first couple of years, but a bandit attack a few years ago that left us with matching bullet wounds had forced us to confess. My blood had gotten into Joel's open wound when he was tending to mine, and we'd both been scared shitless that he would turn afterward. I might have accidentally yelled at the top of my lungs, "Fuck, Joel, don't touch me! I don't want to infect you!" Or something like that.

The town, predictably, kicked us out, and we'd spent the next week in a cave on the mountain above Jackson, waiting for the worst. Tommy was so relieved when we came back alive that I almost forgave him for letting the alarmist fuckers kick us out in the first place.

A visit to the town doc afterward showed no sign of infection in Joel's blood. There were still spores in mine, but the load was lower than the airborne spores everyone around here breathed every day. Not a high enough concentration to infect anyone, the doc said, unless they took a mind to drain me like a vampire. My saliva was clean, as were my other body fluids. "So, you know," he'd said, his face reddening, "all clear for...relations. If you want them."

"Jesus, Doc," I'd quipped, "How do you manage to deliver babies if you can't even talk about sex?"

"Ellie…" Joel's voice held a weary tone of warning.

Doc had smiled wryly. "No, she's right, Joel. I'm not much of an OB/GYN. I was a podiatrist before the pandemic, for pity's sake."

And that had been that. But even though Maria had called a town meeting where Doc had explained that although I was infected I was not infectious, there were still a lot of people in town who went out of their way to avoid contact with me. I'd mostly gotten used to it, but it did mean that my list of potential boyfriends was pretty empty.

"Don't worry about it, Maria," I said. "Joel's a good cook, and I can at least grill stuff." I'd gotten pretty good at cooking meat over a fire during our cross-country journey. It was the damn oven that baffled me, so here in Jackson, Joel did most of the cooking, and I did the cleanup afterwards. It was only fair. I guess Joel had picked up a few culinary tricks when he was raising Sarah.

"I want to thank you for this," I gestured to Maria's sack, where I'd put it on the counter, "so I'm going to share my haul with you and Tommy." I picked up the basket I'd carried in from the garage and proudly folded back the towel that was covering its contents.

"Ellie, you don't have to give me…" Maria's eyes lit up. "Are those strawberries?"

I grinned. "Yep." There were maybe four big handfuls of the tiny wild strawberries, ripe and red as little jewels against the white towel. A veritable gold mine, especially this early in the season.

"Oh, wow." Maria's face was reverent. "Can I…?" She reached toward the basket.

"I said I was sharing." I watched her face as she popped one of the berries into her mouth, a blissful smile spreading across her face as the tart sweetness hit her tongue. I knew exactly what she was tasting; I'd probably eaten more than I'd put in the basket this afternoon when I'd stumbled across the patch of wild berries curling along the ground next to a stream.

I carefully transferred half of the strawberries into a cracked cup and pressed it into Maria's hand. "Here. Tell Tommy I hope this makes up for the beer. And thanks for all your help, Maria. Sorry I'm such a shitty student."

At that moment, Joel wandered into the kitchen, yawning. His hair was wet, and he was wearing nothing but a thin bath towel wrapped low around his hips. I hadn't heard the water turn off. "Night, baby girl…" He froze when he saw Maria.

"Hey, Joel, you want to put some clothes on?" I was laughing. "I don't know how Maria is going to go back home to Tommy now that she's seen the magnificent sight of you in the nude."

Maria laughed, but gave me a sharp, almost knowing look, her eyebrows raised. What was that look? I wondered.

Joel's face colored. "Hi, Maria," he muttered, looking very uncomfortable.

Maria, still laughing, said, "I'll let myself out. Good night, you two." She cast one more smirking look my way before she left. I was going to have to corner her tomorrow and find out what the hell that was all about.

"You can't go to bed now!" I was almost hopping with excitement. "I have surprises for you!"

"Ellie, I don't have the energy for this right now." His stomach rumbled audibly.

"You're hungry. Go put some clothes on and come back." I steered him by his broad shoulders to the kitchen door.

As quickly as I could, I fixed two plates of Maria's pot roast and mashed potatoes. My mouth was watering by the time I plopped the plates down on the table. She'd even included a little cup of gravy, which I poured liberally over everything.

Joel ambled back downstairs in a pair of sweatpants and another one of his ratty plaid shirts.

We sat down at the table, and I handed Joel a fork. "Eat up."

Joel took a tentative bite, and his eyes closed. "Oh, my god."

"What? What's wrong? Did I put too much gravy on?" I felt so anxious I couldn't take a bite from my own plate.

Joel opened his eyes and looked at me, that slow, lazy smile spreading across his face again. "It's good. Really, really good. Did you make this, baby girl?"

I grinned in relief. Joel was happy. "Nope! Maria saved the day. Oh, that reminds me…" I jumped up from the table and returned, triumphantly setting a bottle of beer in front of him.

Now Joel's smile took up his whole face. I hadn't seen him look that delighted since...well, ever, really. I took the church key and popped the top off of the bottle before handing it to him. He took a long swig. "Oh. That is…" He smiled at me again and winked. "You know, I was lying earlier. This is my favorite part of the day."

The wink threw me until I realized what he'd said. Then I punched him in the shoulder. "Jerk."

He laughed. "Eat your supper, baby girl."

I did. The pot roast was delicious, of course. As I ate, I stole glances at Joel. He had changed in the five years since we'd come to Jackson. There was something easier and more relaxed about him, and he didn't carry that haunted look around in his eyes so much any more. It was like the spring inside him that kept him wound so tight had uncoiled, just a little bit. He was less hard, I finally decided. Not that he couldn't still kick the ass of any and everyone in this town, but that he didn't feel like he needed to, so much. He was still strong, I could see it in his hard-muscled shoulders, even if he was old. Although, he wasn't that old. Funny. When I first met him, he'd seemed ancient to me; when I was fourteen, north-of-fifty might as well have been dead. Now, he was just...I don't know, just right.

"You gonna eat that, or just stare at me all night, Ellie?"

Shit, he caught me. Was I just checking him out again? No, that would be weird. I swallowed the bite I'd been chewing and almost choked. I shoveled more food into my mouth for an excuse not to answer.

He pushed his plate away. "Well…" He started to get up.

"No, not yet!" I said. Or actually, I said "Nah, moph neh," because my mouth was full of food.

"Ellie," he said, a pained expression on his face. "What have I told you about talking with your mouth full?"

I swallowed the enormous bite, and said, "Bad table manners, I know. But Joel, there's dessert!"

"You're kidding me." He laughed.

I jumped up from the table again. "I made it myself. It didn't turn out like it was supposed to, but Maria says it still tastes good, and I found this big patch of wild strawberries in the forest today, I'll show you where, it's a good place for hunting…" My run-on sentence continued while I cut big slices of cake for each of us and divided the strawberries between them. Oh my god, Ellie, shut up, shut up, shut up, I said to myself. I was running on at the mouth like I did back when I'd first met Joel, too nervous in his presence to be comfortable with silence. What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I so nervous? It's just Joel.

"You made this? Yourself?" he said. I nodded. He took a big bite of the cake, and didn't move his mouth for a second. My anxiety mounted as he slowly chewed, and then swallowed the bite with apparent difficulty. He didn't say anything.

I couldn't stand it any more. "Well?" I demanded.

"It's...it's…"

"God damn it!" I sat down, utterly deflated. "Maria said it was okay."

Joel grinned at me, an evil gleam in his eye. "I'm just fucking with you, Ellie. It tastes delicious."

I let my breath out and glared at him. "You...you asshole!"

He laughed again and took an enormous bite of cake. "Mmmmmm mmmmm." He rubbed his belly exaggeratedly.

I snorted. "Don't think that makes it up to me. Just for that, you get to do the cleanup."

He shrugged agreeably. "Tomorrow. Tonight I just want to go to sleep. After I finish this delicious cake, of course."

"Compliments won't get you off the hook." I frowned severely at him, trying not to laugh.

"Yes, ma'am. It was worth a try, though." Joel finished his last bite of cake and yawned a huge, jawcracking yawn. He looked down at my plate, which was almost untouched, and hesitated. "Ellie, I really am bushed. You mind if I don't wait for you?"

"Go ahead," I said. "I'll be up after a while." I needed time to think, anyway, to figure out why I'd been so damn jumpy tonight.

"Okay." He stood and came over to kiss me goodnight. Usually he just dropped a kiss on the top of my head, or gave me a quick peck on my cheek, but tonight I was distracted, so I was moving my head when he leaned in to kiss my cheek. His lips landed right at the corner of my mouth and stayed there longer than usual, more from surprise than anything else, I think. My lips pursed of their own accord, kissing him back.

Oh.

He stood up again and cleared his throat. "Night, baby girl." Was it just my imagination, or did his voice sound as strained as I felt? He walked upstairs without looking back at me.

I sat there in the gathering dark, still feeling stunned. When Joel's lips had touched mine, an unexpected jolt of electricity had run through my body and torn the lid off a simmering cauldron inside me, and I realized in that moment that I wanted him to kiss me. Really kiss me. Joel was my best friend, and there was no-one on earth I'd rather spend time with; I loved him like that. He was also a surrogate father, and I loved him like a daughter too. But this was new. This was...

I'd been nervous not just because of the cooking, or the towel, but because somewhere along the line I'd gone and fallen in love with him.