Although Michonne would never be able to be 100% positive, especially not now, not in this world, she was pretty sure it had happened that very first night.
"Michonne, wait up a minute!" A voice called from behind her.
Michonne knew it was Rick, jogging toward her before she even turned around.
There was a countrified guy if she'd ever heard one. She thought suddenly, as amused with her own smugness as she was with his thick Georgia drawl.
Even if they hadn't told her almost immediately upon her arrival, Michonne would have guessed that Rick was a small town sheriff just by looking at him. From his erect posture and the way he cocked his head to the side and put his hand on his gun belt as he spoke, seemingly sizing everyone and everything up, to the ingratiating "aw shucks" way he acted that totally belied his deeply calculating mind. Everything about him had just basically screamed he was a "good old boy" cop.
And though she caught herself still thinking it now, watching him walk toward her, as she'd thought it then when they'd first met, squaring off against each other, Michonne knew none of that had any place in their new reality. She'd come to realize quickly they didn't come any better than Rick Grimes. So even months later, she still felt some bit of regret for how uncharitable her early thoughts and feelings about him had been. She was surprised that still after all this time, she could so easily revert back to the more effete, ostensibly "cosmopolitan" judgments of her past life.
The real fundamental truth of their new existence was that those days were quite literally dead and gone. All those beloved cities that she thought were so great, and such important cultural-hubs were now filled with the exact same reanimate dead as the so-called "fly-over" states and backwaters she'd once disdained. And in this type of world, the new world, it was a guy precisely like Rick that you needed protecting your flank. It had taken her a couple months to recognize it but now it was as obvious to her as the nose on her face.
"Hey," she said smiling as he caught up finally. "What's up?"
"I just wanted to thank you again for the shaver."
"But still haven't used it yet, I see."
"Well," he said looking away at something beyond her.
He was doing that sexy, "aw shucks" thing again. She'd noticed over these months there was far more method to that than he ever let on.
"Afraid the guys won't let you stay in the 'He-man Woman-Haters Club' if you expose those soft cheeks and look like you're nineteen again?"
That was just meant as a joke. But he looked back at her suddenly in a way that revealed perhaps she'd hit far closer to the mark than she'd realized.
Michonne had always suspected there was a handsome guy underneath the growing neck beard and squirrel fur covering his face. His piercing pool blue eyes, square jaw and patrician nose all told that tale. But currently, he was moving more and more steadily into mountain man territory. She had hoped to head that off at the pass if she could. So earlier in the week, she'd come back from a run with an electric shaver specifically for him. And though at the time he'd looked at it as if he didn't know which end was up, she'd been confident that he'd use it.
That was days ago.
"Look, if you need to keep your face warm for the upcoming winter, Grizzly Adams, that's cool." Michonne laughed feeling naughty for not letting him off the hook.
His face reddened as he looked at a spot on the ground before slowly bringing his eyes back up to her face.
It was his own fault. He'd brought it up. She thought, mischievously enjoying his discomfort.
"Well," he said again, rubbing the back of his neck and squinting at her as if, even in the low light of dusk, she was backlit by a brilliant sun. "The truth is, I do have a baby face."
Michonne couldn't help the wide smile that broke out across her face, straining her cheeks.
Rick got redder, rubbing his bearded cheek with his knuckles as he struggled to say what it was he wanted to say.
"…'baby' as in sensitive. Honestly, my skin's too sensitive for an electric shaver. I can only use a straight razor." Michonne noticed his accent got noticeably thicker as he went on. He was trying to disarm her with that Southern charm of his.
She covered her mouth with three fingers, trying not to laugh.
"I use one of those thangs and in a day, my cheeks'll look like I got diaper rash like Judith."
She erupted, she couldn't help it. "Rick, why didn't you just say something?"
He shook his head sheepishly and shrugged as she laughed at him.
"It was really thoughtful of you to bring it. I just didn't want you to think I didn't appreciate it. I did. And I thank you for the treats and thangs you bring back for Corl and the clothes and stuff you get Judith."
He cocked his head to the side and brought his voice down to a near whisper. "I… appreciate everything you've done for us in the last few months, Michonne. I really do."
"I know." Michonne said simply, sobering up under his intensifying gaze. Heat rushed to her face making her feel suddenly flush too. Like he'd put her on the spot now.
Had it been her imagination or had he gotten closer too? She wondered as it seemed what had previously been an arm's length between them had halved.
"You do?" Rick asked simply. Though suddenly, it seemed like he was asking a whole other question. His eyes searched her face, as palpable as any caress.
"Mmm-hmm." She nodded reassuringly…to both questions.
"Good." He said.
"C'mon." She told him turning slowly back in the direction she'd been going, up toward the prison. He came alongside, falling into step with her quickly.
"You really should have told me, you know. I have a straight razor."
"You do?" he asked again.
"Yep." She gave him a sidelong glance and a slight smile. "…And I give an incredibly close shave."
"I've seen you with that sword…I bet you do."
Michonne was surprised that alone in the woods forging all these months later the memory of later that night still had the power to make her blush.
Rick didn't get his shave that night, or any night thereafter. But Michonne had certainly gotten something else. A shiver ran through her fatigued body as she thought about it, about him.
She'd always thought that the best time for regrets was before things happened. That just a little forethought negated the need for any regrets at all. Not that she could or would really say she regretted her relationship with Rick. But what she could say was that she should have known better. They should have known to be more careful.
Her beloved Andre had been conceived very similarly…She was just that fertile.
That had been her and Mike's private little joke about it at the time. They'd barely finished discussing the idea of a baby before Andre was already taking up residence in Michonne's womb. It had happened while on vacation. Just after they'd celebrated their big decision by tossing her birth control in the drink and watching the pills float away on the evening tide. Then back in their real life, she'd made an appointment to get a clean bill of health and instead gotten the happy news.
She just got knocked up really easily. That was all there was to it. Who could have imagined that one day that would be a major liability?
So now, here she was again, but this time a ticking time bomb. Just four short months before she was strapped with her very own personal walker magnet. Never mind all the ways in which it was already slowing her down. She hated the fact that she saw it like that. When she thought about it, she wished the idea brought with it feelings of joy or hope, feelings similar to the ones she'd had about her son. But now she could only see all the ways in which it was a liability. A weakness she didn't need and a burden she couldn't unload.
"How'd you do it?" She wondered aloud.
Being alone again now she had far more people to talk to than before. The benefits of friendship, she imagined. She didn't just have her boyfriend Mike anymore. In her moments of disquiet, she spoke to Hershel, Daryl, Andrea… Rick. Though she still wasn't sure they were all dead, they might as well have been. She knew better than to imagine she'd ever see them again, and yet they haunted her like ghosts. Still surprisingly, she found that the one person she spoke with most, whose counsel she most wished to have was the one person she'd never actually met in the first place.
Rick's wife, Lori.
The woman whose memory had loomed so large in the Prison, having just died right before Michonne arrived. She left a huge void in the lives of her son, new daughter and husband. A void that Michonne had worried she was on the verge of getting sucked into. She had been a loner by both circumstance and choice, but suddenly to have this boy, Carl, looking up to her with admiration and his father seeking her out for counsel? It had proven seductive. She didn't want to care for them even as more and more she did. For so long Michonne had avoided touching the little girl—it was too much like Andre to bear – that she now felt almost like she owned Lori a profound apology. She should have held Judith for as long and as often as her caretakers would allow. Unfortunately for Michonne, the same should not have been said about Lori's husband.
Lori.
Michonne had never even laid eyes on the woman. She was merely a picture her son kept in a frame, and yet Michonne could conjure her vividly. Nearly as vividly, she imagined, as Rick had done once upon a time. That had been one of the things they'd bonded over originally. The way their ghosts kept them company, lingering forever on the periphery of their lives. Now Lori was here for her too. She wondered at the irony.
Walking these roads alone Michonne asked often, had Lori seen Judith's birth as the potential death sentence it was? That it had proven to be? Would she have made a different choice if she could? Lori's circumstances had been optimal in comparison to what Michonne's were shaping up to be and still she'd lost her life in childbirth. Did Michonne have any right to wish for better? She was alone and in two straight months of looking had yet to find a place safe enough to settle.
Some neighborhoods were emptier than others…but those were the ones that had been cleaned out the most thoroughly. Heavily infested enclaves still had some supplies but every time she entered, she ran the real risk of never leaving again. Going more than fifty miles from the Prison in any direction save back toward Atlanta was a no-go, Michonne had decided early on. She couldn't risk entering entirely uncharted territory. She didn't know how to make this all work out. And for as much as she asked, Lori was no help, and neither were any of the others for that matter. The one thing she did know, though, was that traveling deep into the country, alone and heavily pregnant was without question, ill-advised.
No, she concurred with the dead woman in her head, she would have to stick around the surrounding counties until she gave birth and was more mobile.
Still, making a plan and executing it were two different things. Michonne realized this as she added the small wild onion to her meager sack of food. As her food stores dwindled, she had come to see this more and more every day.
