Tess thinks it one day as she waits for him just outside the wall. The rain is coming down harder now, stinging sheets of it that crack her hair against her face like a whip and she watches him, trudging through the patch of variegated wildflowers that bloomed late that spring. They talk inventory and it scratches at her throat, bubbling up to clot her voice and she argues with him so that he does not notice.

It's at the back of her teeth when she wakes up, her limbs entwined with his. The broad expanse of his chest is solid against her and when his breath warms the diamond of her neck she feels it once more, buzzing there at the tip of her lips. She muffles it into his skin, turns it into moans and shuddering gasps that taste like salt under her tongue.

He had looked at her once, as if it had slipped out somehow, staring down at her with hazy eyes that sought to tell her something indiscernible; but this world preys on the weak and the vulnerable and he knows that.

So she swallows it, clenching her teeth and grimacing; it's sickly-sweet and thick, something akin to the cough syrup he had brought her once after a cold had lodged itself so deep and wet in her chest that it rattled them both. It coats her tongue, the artificial grittiness burning her esophagus and souring her stomach as she forces it down.

But the taste of it lingers still in her mouth.

It occurs to Joel only in her absence, just after her screams had drowned out the sound of gunfire and her body lay in a crumpled heap, lifeless and bloody on the marbled floor. The clinging stench of death and decay soaking into her bones is what stings his eyes, he tells himself. Nothing more.

Yet it pierces his chest as another body lies at his feet, gurgling and twitching as he crouches, his knees creaking, craning his neck to look for her and instead facing a mop of auburn hair, green eyes so bright and wide and searching underneath. Keep moving, he tells her, and he feels it twist like a knife in his heart - coiled, kinetic power sitting behind the bars of his ribcage. You keep pushing forward.

It sinks in his stomach like a stone when he collapses into his Wyoming bed - his hand, the nail beds dark with grime and flakes of blood, reaches across instinctively to stroke the bruise-purple skin under the line of her jaw. What he finds instead is cold; the empty air so akin to the holes in his heart her voice used to fill.

He thinks he would have told her, eventually. Perhaps not in this life, but another where they are kinder, they are softer and death and decay do not cling to them, draping over the line of her shoulders like a morning shroud. Fragments of her weave into the edges of his dreams and though he wills his mouth to open, his lips forming the words (I loved you, I loved you, I still love you), he remains mute, he cannot tell her.

Not in this life, never in this life.