Archive of Our Own

What happened was nine months of relative peace. In the Bricks she would have wondered how much of her pathological liar teenage self resided in that perspective. Here, none.

The first hammer strike landed before sunrise to wake the birds from the trees beyond the eastern field. By the time the sky went from black to blue, Maggie stood at the edge of the land they had claimed and watched the remaining messy patch of Central Park be sloped away from her boots in a long stretch of churned dirt and waist-high weeds. Men and women moved through the morning in pairs, dragging brush, marking rows, hauling lumber. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and pulled the clipboard closer to her chest. They needed a third reserve storage building. Then there were the new fields. She had stopped embellishing things, and then they got really good, and then they got messy.

Negan had killed four of the newcomers, posterior to Maggie realizing she didn't sleep well after twenty new strangers entered the island for the first time in nearly a year. Her bed was cold, because when Luis wasn't awake, she was. She dreamed of hands outstretched, when she did sleep. Nearly naive, expecting. Give me warmth, feed me hope.

Assessing the ground, the low soil that held more moisture, this that would be one of their three gardens, more space for crops and room for people to work without tripping over each other—she could argue that the feeding and the fueling in the conscious plane kept her awake yes but kept her well rested also. And if she was to think of fueling—Negan handled the restlessness so well because he was powered by things beyond simplicity, he was a glutton. Maggie often didn't let herself dwell on, didn't have seconds to spare or any force left to think about him more than she already did on autopilot. She knew the character of him, the one most people saw, the rudeness of a body unasked for, or a body demanded and presented and yet unasked for. If she could wish for him to be gone, she would be weighed by the same scale and be found lacking, and found unworthy, found guilty. 

She didn't want him gone. What she had done for five years was take him with her, and would keep doing so—lest he sank and her body remembered the anchor that kept her nose just above the tide for nearly two decades, two decades—sputtering with her angers, suffocating in her grief. Couldn't let him fall. Couldn't let him go. Couldn't stop demanding her fair share from him, and let him have his fill.

“Yes ma'am,” he would say, when she asked him to follow her.

“Yes ma'am,” when she told him to stop drinking so much, went on about her father and his alcohol.

“Yes ma'am,” when she needed him to confess. Silence, coming back with poorly washed hands and blood underneath his nails, and her learning that he tortured people for the sake of the world she decided to build because the previous one was too lonely, with her and her ghosts and her fury, and the one before that was simply dead.

"Let me," for when she bled.

It was a walker that had inhaled methane from a breach they had a week back—she'd learned the smell of it a long time ago, how it bloated them, made them heavier. They didn't shamble with the same vacantness, instead lunging, toppling. This one had come at her from a perimeter she hadn't checked when the community was clearing and barricading a small, lighter portion of the woods near the boathouse, and she'd been too slow, too slow, and it had shoved her forward until her forehead struck bark, though it was the back of her head that took the worst of it, the nape of her neck, the edge of a broken branch. She'd felt the hot stripe, the immediate wetness, and then the walker was on the ground with Negan's bat on its skull.

Maggie remembered walking away after his hands steadied her, pretending the blood wasn't there, covered by her hair. She remembered catching Luis’s eyes and giving him a tight-lipped smile, honest as it could be, don't worry about me, a nod. He wanted to, but he didn't follow.

Before the dizziness could settle, she found herself in the boathouse.

Negan had come up behind her. He made no pretense of not following, any more than she made of his presence. She heard his footsteps stop. Then his hand, rough-knuckled and smelling of soil, reached past her shoulder and set a tin down on the crate before her, a rag, too. Just how you press the capped needle of a syringe to the arm of a child about to have blood drawn.

"Let me," he'd said, and she'd let him.

She sat on a chair with her back to him. Felt his fingers first, brushing her hair to the side. Her hair was matted, tangled with sweat and the day's dust and then blood, and he worked through, gathering it over one shoulder, so the nape of her neck lay bare to him, to the dim cut by sunrays through the grand windows, to the fullness of an empty house of two, and the tide, and the violence, and the care.

There was care, in him. So much of it. He was capable of crying, of feeling, as much as he could bleed. Maggie thought that the day she realized this—the day she saw it in him, was the day she became worse, for wanting to be better. Better than him. Better for Hershel. Iridescent, stronger and more human than the man she had called a monster.

She was pretty sure she loved him, these days. Because he loved her. He made so much of her it bled into who she was. If he said she was the smartest on the island, she was. If he said she was an incredible woman, she was. If he said she was stupidly stubborn and still followed her around, then that made it both of them. All the things she refused to see were spoken by him.

Maggie made peace with it, a few years ago even. It was almost religious; love the stranger, love your enemy.

Their community was all about loving the stranger. Not so much about the enemy—Negan killed those often and more often than not, quickly.

I am a stranger and an alien residing among you; give me property among you for a burying place, so that I may bury my dead out of my sight.

She had no fondness for blood on the streets, so he made a point not to drag it around.

The rag was cold when it touched her skin. Maggie sat still, quietly in pain, and let him clean the wound, and she felt the pressure of his thumb against her spine as he held her steady, as he leaned in close enough that she could feel his warmth against the skin of her neck too.

"You don't have to walk away like a beaten pup every time you can't perform the trick so well," he informed her. "It's not a weakness."

It was not a weakness because he wouldn't let it be. He would never let her look weak, never let anyone perceive her that way, even if she was.

She had been thinking of Glenn—Glenn's hands in her hair, twisting a strand around his finger when they lay together at night, kissing the back of her neck when he thought she was sleeping, never telling him she was awake for those.

“I know.”

Her body couldn't tell the difference sometimes, between being touched with care and being touched in general. Doing a lot with scraps for so long, and being touched by Luis was just… being touched by Luis. A lover. It had been hard to remember, the searing on her skin for the purpose of loving. But then she did remember. And now it was hard to remember being touched by an enemy when she knew she was safe with Negan. Her body only knew hands, and levels of heat, and the relief of being tended to after so long of tending to everyone else.

So she leaned back.

By degrees; often rationed, portioned, weighed out—this time her body had decided that the hand was warm, and the room was cold and that was that. Her head found his palm. The weight settled into him, and his hand received it, and he stopped.

The rag suspended, Negan, who made a theater of ease, went still as though holding a wild thing that had chosen, for reasons of its own, to eat from his hand. Being a driver in the dialect of flinching, instead he sat fluent in its opposite, holding her head with a stillness for her own. Maggie had columns for him, kept behind her ribs, every deed in its place, a column for the quiet he could grant. No column for this, exactly; his thumb moving once, sluggish, along the bone at the base of her skull, nowhere near the wound, fingers spreading against the curve of her occipital bone.

Her eyes closed.

Glenn's hands weren't her first theft. Her father at the kitchen table, the bottle loving him back on schedule. Tried to keep some of that for herself before she knew any better. Didn't drink to forget, but so that the remembering went soft, dreamlike, unreal and unearthed, something to hold without the cut. This was like that. Holding Negan's hand, being under it… the cost deferred somehow, somewhere along the way here. They were two people who touched practically, pulling each other out of the way, shoving each other into cover, holding pressure where pressure was needed. Once she had taken his wrist to check the swelling and found herself counting his pulse instead. Had touched that wrist to her cheek. Had felt his lips against her temple. She knew the feeling of his palm on her back, her arm, her shoulder and her face. Knew what it was like to plaster her back to his and trust him with her body.

"Tell me if it hurts," he said, in mild, unlit voice.

"It doesn't hurt," she answered. Not the worst lie she'd ever told him.

Negan finished the dressing with a firm press, the tape smoothed down, and then—she would think about this later, would let it make decisions for her—he gathered her hair and let it fall back over the bandage, covering the evidence, returning her to the world presentable. No one would see. He'd made sure. He was good at making sure of things no one should have to see.

He was rinsing her blood out of the rag when he said it. The basin bloomed pink, and he worked the cloth between his knuckles with no rush, no desire to be working outside. "You've been grim lately.” 

She listened to the rag drip where he'd hung it over the basin's lip. "Did something happen?" The tin clicked shut. "And don't run the number on me you ran on the folks out there."

"Nothin’ happened."

Nothing happened. Nothing had happened in—

Except—

Luis was so good. That was the phrase she laid across him every morning when she watched the rise of his chest. When he touched her in the dark of their bedroom. He touched her like she was whole, like there was nothing he could do to shatter her and never would. And when she had kissed him for the first time, after the fight that defined the next years for the city, Maggie was grateful.

She had thought that was what she deserved, even—harbor after swimming just short of drowning until her lungs tasted like pennies for half her life. She’d spent all that time with her skin turned outward, salty and stiff. So when Luis was safe, and still kind, still whole and gentle and patient, asking permission with every polite shift of his weight, she had finally, finally let herself have it.

At night, that gratitude made her weep.

It wasn’t until year three that she realized the weeping had just been relief, and relief, once spent, left behind a room so quiet.

Luis looked at her across the green like the day was something she had handed him, personally. He made love to her reverently, nearly on schedule, always with an eye toward keeping things neat. He whispered sweet, sensible things into her ear; he came with a quiet gasp and then held her until his breathing leveled out. And Maggie would lie there after, staring up at the ceiling, her body a high-strung engine that had run on pure octane and impending death for so long, laying beside a man so Christian.

One day she was smiling, they were both tired from good, hard work, walking home to rest, when she'd said, “Just one more act of civic duty.” about the sex, and he frowned. And she realized it wasn't a good joke, it wasn't even her joke, but Negan's. Because he found it so funny that she played house. He had to think something of it; for the duration of a month they had left Hershel and Luis behind to go find Annie and Joshua, only to find nothing, only to go back and then leave again three months later to find nothing again for sixty days. And every time they did go, it was because of her. Maggie wanted to be part of a whole, be someone's, she didn't want to want, and thought that maybe Negan could admit to the same if she only prodded him enough. But he didn't find it inspiring, he found it amusing. 

She found it sad that he was so addicted to his own ego, his agreed ways of fueling himself. She found it cruel, until she started wishing someone would pull her hair hard enough to remind her she had to fight to keep a pulse, and realized it was cruel. It was cruel to the people around them. 

"Huh," he said, right behind her. "It offends me when you pretend you can lie to me, Pinocchio."

"I don't know what's wrong."

Maggie felt the shift of air as he came around her—leisurely when he was hunting, even if the hunt had changed its nature. She didn't open her eyes, knew the shape of him, how he occupied space. But then the movement lowered, sank, and she felt the absence of the crate as he pulled it aside, the hollow sound of tin against wood, and when she looked he was on his knees.

On his knees. His hands settled on each side of the chair's arms, not touching but framing her. Caging her in. And she felt it then—knew he could be more threatening like this, crouched below her eye level, than when he'd towered with Lucille and the smile that could end worlds. Just never to her. But to others—the strength of his shoulders, the breadth of him even folded down, the way his eyes came level with her throat, her collarbone and the absence of Glenn's ring, places where her pulse or her tears would tell the truth for her. He could reach up and snap her neck. He could reach up and hold her face. His eyes were the color of whiskey in the absence of light, of her father's bottles kept in the dark, but stained by the same green in hers. She'd looked into them a thousand times across firelight, across the distance of unburied people, in their victories and their losses.

"You know what's wrong," he told her, as though he wanted to sound mocking. "I know you do. Just have to puke it out. Right here on my very puke-worthy lap."

She raised her brows, unimpressed, “Disgusting.”

Negan grinned.

His thumbs moved, only just, against the wood of the chair arms. 

And how could she say it? That she’s been petrified in time, collecting dust, and even moving, and dancing, even smiling and kissing and fucking, the core of her was locked, trembling chains that only tugged, only tightened when she was on the edge of freeing herself, no key reaching far back enough, hard enough, to rattle her open. Words went down into the silo in her, the grain-dark place where everything she couldn't spend got stored against a winter that never relented for long. She'd kept so much there.

Why did he have to be like that? Why couldn't he find the appeal in the discipline of staying put and simple?

"Alright," he said. As if she'd answered.

Negan reached up—and she had time for two thoughts, before two fingers found the bruise at her hairline where the bark had struck first, and pressed twice. A tap. The dull ache pulsed with a grounding sting. Maggie’s eyelids fluttered, her focus snapping back to the irises inches from her own.

"I'll leave this to your doctor, then."

Your, bland as every omission he'd ever handed her, doing the whole of the work. And then: meaning, since you won't say it. Meaning, his turn. Meaning nothing. Meaning he'd seen her smile at Luis and seen Luis not follow her.

He got up. His knees cracked—they were getting old, both of them—and the crate scraped back into its place, and the tin went under his arm. At the door he didn't say anything clever, and she listened to the lack of him as he left.

The Fram wasn't a place she particularly chose to inhabit, often. Negan held on to it after everything that happened and she never found it in herself to blame him, knew he could do better than nurse it—but also knew it held pieces of him she had no right taking.

The hunting party that had gone out for the white-tailed deer herd on Staten Island had come back with meat enough to smoke through the first cold snap, and the island wanted to drink about it.

Maggie stood behind the counter because Negan had asked her to, a political little trick he insisted on, and she believed despite belief that it worked. He slid a bottle down the bar to her without looking. She caught it, poured, passed it on. Not unlike working a perimeter, each covering the other's blind side. And she watched his generosity and warmth, these nights, on loan to everyone else. At least for the three hours they agreed on. 

"You not having any?" He appeared at her elbow with an empty crate, stopping to just take her in for the first time since she arrived.

"No, I'm fine."

"Uh-huh," he set the crate down, straightened himself up, rolling his shoulders and his neck for an instant. "Solmari's talking about next month's run. We sending anyone west?"

It was an opening, unintentional, yes, and she took it anyway, because she'd been waiting nine months for one.

"We should send someone for Annie and Joshua. Or we could go. If we swing wider this time, past the river towns—"

"No."

"Negan—"

"I said no, Maggie." He set a bottle down on the counter. The man at the end of the bar startled; Negan's smile reassembled itself instantly, lazy and bright, trick or threat. "Another? There you go, champ." And when the man turned away with a full mug, the smile dropped off his face, and he looked at her. "The answer's been no since the second trip. It stays no.”

"It's been over a year since we looked."

"It's been over a year since we last wasted a month," his voice dropped, low under the noise of the room, spoken for her, and her only. "I’m not dragging you across hundreds of miles of rot on a maybe. Not again. Not ever again."

"It's your son."

"My son doesn't know me. I doubt he remembers my face," he said it plainly, again, he'd said this over and over and she couldn't be satisfied. "He's better off.” He reached for a glass on the low shelf and bent for it, and his eyes, on the way down, caught her boots.

Negan straightened slowly, glass in hand, and looked at her.

"Twenty years in the apocalypse," he said, "and you can't tie your boots properly? Or is it that you're getting soft after all?”

One lace on her left boot had worked itself loose. That's all it was. And yet.

“I'm not—”

"Stand still." He crouched before her, abandoning the glass, his fingers found the laces. Long, scarred fingers, steady as they'd been on the back of her neck recently. He threaded, pulled, crossed, drew the knot snug against the eyelets—double-looped, so it held through running. Through falling. Through being dragged.

Maggie looked down at the crown of his gray head, gray that had built her an entire world and would not, would not, try to get up off the floor of her life anymore. And she hated him, for refusing. She hated him suddenly and completely, with a purity that startled her, suffocating on the fire that kept you alive all winter.

"You're a coward," she said, also not for the first time. His hands stopped on the other knot, the one that wasn't even loose. "You ain't protecting the island. Ain't protecting me. You just can't stand it. You can't stand going out there, because if you ever found them, really found them, you'd have to—" Her breath caught. She hadn't known the sentence until it was halfway out of her mouth. "You'd have to stop being what you are. You'd have to be somethin’ else, and you've decided this—" she meant the bar, the position she put him in, his hand on her boot, "—this is the only thing you're good for, so you won't even try. To be a father. A husband.”

He finished the knot. He finished it slowly before staying crouched at her feet a moment longer. Then he stood up into her space, close, and closer than before, and looked down at her with an expression she'd only seen on him a handful of times when their eyes connected. 

"Is that what this is about?" he asked, almost gently, which was how she knew it would cut. "Are we still talking about me here?”

“Yes. You. You and your gigantic ego,” she pressed her teeth, held his stare, refusing to yield the two inches of floor between their boots when the bar around them felt very far away—the heavy glasses, the rowdy laughter drunk on fresh venison, all of it muffled as though buried under six feet of Hudson silt.

Negan didn’t give room to the smirk he used to deflect the rest of the world so often. He looked at her with eyes steady, unsparing, peeling down the leader, the mother, the partner, right down to the cold, twitching nerve under her skin.

“I tried being a father, Maggie,” he whispered. “And a husband before that. Twice. And between us? It was good for no one.”

Planting his hip against the edge of the bar, leaning down, his forearm on the counter touched her own.

“You're a good mom, and I get it, you didn't get the chance to be a wife for long, yeah?”

It felt like being slapped awake. The breath left her in an involuntary hitch. Her hands tightened into fists, nails digging into her palms, but she couldn't pull back when he had her pinned without laying a finger on her. 

It didn't matter. He straightened up then, the towering breadth and his shadow getting distant from her boots—the boots he had just double-knotted so she wouldn’t trip.

“But what you want, Margaret, when it comes to this, and what I want… they are very different things.”

She wasn't getting soft; she told herself. Not the way he meant. She wasn't getting used to the quiet.

But during the course of the following days, Negan started standing closer to her.

Where he used to stop at three feet, a conversational distance, a lieutenant's distance, he now stopped at two. At one. He would appear at her shoulder while she reviewed the grain tallies, not saying anything, his shadow falling across her columns of numbers. He took over the perimeter check she had walked every morning since the first year, and walked it with her, half a step behind, close enough that she could hear the rasp of his breathing and the creak of his leather gloves, close enough that when she stopped to study the barricades he stopped too, and she could feel him studying the back of her neck instead.

He became present as he usually did when he assumed she was vulnerable. It hadn't happened in years, outside of fights. He held doors. He carried things she hadn't asked him to carry—water jugs, survey stakes, the crate of seed packets she'd had a handle on just fine. He intercepted the scouts before they reached her, took their reports standing, his arms crossed, then relayed them to her secondhand, stripped of urgency, everything pre-chewed. 

Nobody else would have called it hovering. For them, it could be natural, if not all deniable, all of it, every gesture stamped with plausible duty. Negan was the island's second hand, head of security, its executioner, its grinning load-bearing wall. There was nothing she could really say, because he hadn't done anything wrong. He hadn't said anything. Was tender about her own silence. So careful not to mention it that the not-mentioning made her worse. Because the thing was, his presence always made her safer, a fraction more unseeking. She had been scanning for him for years, mid-clipboard, mid-survey, mid-argument at the council table, scanning for him—locating the gray in the crowd, the broad back by the door, the shape of her own safety—theirs was a world where death got to her only by going through him first, and some childish part of her curled into that world like an animal into straw.

But that's not what she needed right now. That was the last thing.

She started going the long way around the buildings so she wouldn't pass the bar or the security station. She assigned herself the drainage inspections, the dullest work on the island, waist-deep in the cold runoff, because down there no one hovered, no one could. She took her meals late, after the hall emptied, and if Negan waited for her at the end of the cleared tables with his hands folded, she ate standing at the counter talking to the cooks and left her dish in the rack and said goodnight to the room instead of to him.

It was cruel. He had never once, in five years, given her a reason. They fought rarely and shortly, and in return she was rationing him, portioning him, doling out her presence in scraps as if he were the one who'd solely frustrated and insulted her and refused to allow her the whim of satisfaction.

Maggie wanted friction without admitting to it. It didn't mean she wanted it from him; she just wanted it.

So she made up a mission; told herself it would be her last cruelty about this matter. Told Solmari it was a scouting question. Distance, numbers, threat assessment. She told Negan nothing. She rode out with three others before dawn and for three days her perimeter was her own, her risks her own, her blood her own, and it was glorious. She cleared a farmhouse with her own knife and her own luck and came out the other side of it vibrating like a plucked wire, present, every nerve open and burning and entirely her own.

She came home with a human bite on her forearm and a body count, and the first thing she saw was Negan's face going white.

Four days of clean air home tasted regressive in her mouth.

The crime was relatively simple; a scout from the lower docks, a boy named Callum, had been caught stealing methane from the nursery pipes to trade for a crate of liquor behind the subway station. Protocol was to call the council, to let the boy stammer through his excuses, assign him sixty days on the drainage ditches, minimum. 

Negan hadn’t waited for her. 

He’d dragged Callum into the square before breakfast, laid the boy’s right hand flat across the blacksmith’s anvil, and brought the flat of a crowbar down on three fingers with the crack of snapping twigs, only enough to break. “Winter’s coming, kid,” he’d told the screaming boy, voice carrying clearly into the open windows of the dining hall where Maggie was. “Nobody freezes because your dick wanted a drink.”

When she stormed out, from all the things she could find, his stare was first. And she knew, instantly, that the punishment wasn't only for the boy.

Maggie had gone out that one week ago intending to find any clue on the settlement of cannibals whose four members had been washed to their shore. And because she never told Negan, when she returned—he was mad, when he saw her, furious at her latest trick, the last cruelty she promised herself but suddenly felt like it could not be the last. He'd paled when he saw the bite. The madness in his eyes didn't ease after she explained it wasn't from the dead, or where she'd been. It didn't ease for days. He tried to—and it was funny to even think of it—give her the silent treatment. And when that didn't work, didn’t make her any more remorseful for making sure he stayed in the community when they needed him, instead of coddling her at the edges of the world because he didn't want to be a father, he started with these little shows to truly get under her nerves, now purposely insult her, frustrate her. Except Maggie was high from her haul outside the Hudson, and none of it actually got to her.

It was in his eyes—expecting the explosion, the righteous, fiery flare of her that always set his teeth on edge and kept him centered.

Maggie didn't scream. She didn't even clench her jaw. 

She looked at Callum, called for a medic, and then turned her gaze right through the middle of Negan’s chest, as if he were nothing more than a trick of the early morning light. A smudge on the windowpane. 

For the next ninety-six hours, she gave him nothing. The same silence he offered her. Knowing his breaking point, knowing hers.

She didn’t report anything to him directly, speaking over his head during morning roll call as if the chair he occupied were empty. When he brought in a deer without being asked, with it being a far call from his actual role in the community, dumping the heavy carcass on the butcher’s block with a thud, she had nodded to the butcher, inspected the haunch, and walked past Negan close enough for her sleeve to brush his coat without a flicker of her eyelashes. 

At night, Luis would draw her into his chest, whispering about the recoveries of the day while his hands stroked her hips rhythmically, dully. “You’re giving it too much thought,” murmured against the crook of her shoulder by mild lips. She hadn't. She wasn't.

With eyes closed, she stared into the blackness behind her lids, and felt the creeping paralysis of a woman buried alive in down feathers.

Negan was a creature constructed entirely out of noise and reaction; to deny him was to cut off his oxygen. By the fifth afternoon after Callum, there was an approaching squall, the wind whipping off the river and kissing the windows of the third storage building. Maggie was inside, alone, counting crates of rice with her stub of graphite when the heavy door didn’t much creak when it opened; it did though, slam shut. 

Not turning around, she kept the pencil moving. Twelve bags.

"You're running out of paper, boss," Negan’s voice came from the shadows by the door.

She marked another line. Thirteen.

Footsteps resounded, heavy boots on loose planking, moving down the central aisle between the stacked beams. He stopped three feet behind her. She could smell the iron on him, the sap, the stale tobacco he refused to surrender. Everything, everywhere, thick with him.

"I asked Solmari the script for this week's council meeting," Negan said, starting that singsong drawl that usually meant someone was about to want to stand tall. "Imagine my surprise when I found that you not only changed the date, but already executed it, without me. Is that how things are working here now? You leave without my knowledge, you endanger yourself, punish me for your own stupidity, and start running the show without me completely when I dare pay in kind?"

She turned a page on the clipboard. Didn’t blink. 

A hand—broad, calloused and scarred across the knuckles—shot over her shoulder and tore the clipboard from her grip, sending it clattering across the floorboards into the dark.

Maggie’s jaw tightened, but she kept her eyes fixed on the empty space where the wood had been. She took a slow, even breath through her nose, smoothed the front of her canvas jacket, and moved to step around him.

Negan shifted, his shoulder cutting off her path. 

"Look at me," he snapped.

She turned to the left. He mirrored her, planting both feet, towering over her with his chest heaving, the collar of his coat damp from the mist outside. There was no performative smirk on his face now. His eyes were wide, bloodshot at the rims, nose twitching with the frantic energy of a dog that had been kicked into a dark room and left there.

"Stop with the fucking game already," he growled, stepping into her personal space until the heat radiating off him brushed her chin. "It was three broken fingers! He'll be fine. You came back barely conscious, goddammit!"

"Get out of my way, Negan," she said, cold, and entirely devoid of inflection. 

"No," he snarled. He reached out, his fingers digging hard into the meat of her upper arm, his grip bruising through the canvas while all she did was look at it. "No, you don't get to do that. Whatever is wrong with you, whatever the fuck has been wrong with you, I've been nice about it, Maggie, I've been a fucking gentleman about it. I never asked twice. And then you punished me for noticing, I know that's what this is, breaking my trust, lying to me, you told doc you were off to Suicideville and hid it from me. Mr. Couldn't Spot Cannibals If They Bit Him In The Face let you go and somehow I'm the asshole here?”

Maggie’s head snapped up.

“Yes! Because he trusts me to handle my own!” she hissed.

"He trusts you to handle your own? Of course that damsel in distress trusts your big balls. You think I don't?" Negan fired back, leaning down until his teeth were inches from her nose, a cruel, triumphant grin splitting his face now that the fire was lit. "I don't have to wait around for you to get shit done, Maggie. Is that a problem now? Dolly and her teacups got you that soft in the head, huh? I bet that's what you've been sulking about, having to wear your big girl pants even in bed, honey. I give it to you, it's gotta be fucking exhausting."

The crack of her open palm across his cheek was loud enough to echo in the new storage.

It turned his head to the side, snapping his neck back, the red imprint of her hand blooming instantly across his stubbled jaw. 

For a fraction of a second, the room went dead, stiller than the things outside, stiller than night.

Then Negan laughed—short, hoarse and breathless—and lunged.

He drove his shoulder into her sternum, slamming her backward into a towering stack of timber. The wood rattled as the breath exploded out of Maggie’s lungs in a harsh gasp, but the instant the pain registered—bright, hot, shocking her spine awake—something inside her cage snapped cleanly in half.

It flooded her bloodstream. Her vision narrowed to the stubble on his jaw, the wildness in his hazel eyes, the smell of rain and violence. 

She brought her knee up fast between his legs. Negan grunted, twisting his hips just enough to catch the blow on his thigh, but the shift gave her space. Maggie drove both palms into his throat, shoving him back, and followed it with a vicious right cross that caught him square on the bridge of his nose.

Cartilage gave a wet crunch. Blood welled immediately, dripping dark down over his mouth as he stumbled.

Negan shook his head like a bear shaking off water, and roared.

He grabbed her by the lapels of her jacket, lifting her clear off her feet, and slammed her sideways against the heavy workbench. Tools scattered—screws, rasps, iron plane clattering to the floor. Maggie didn't cry out, snarling instead, her fingers clawing at his face, finding the fresh blood on his nose and dragging her nails down his cheek until she hit bone. 

"Son of a bitch," she breathed, her forehead striking his brow in the same second. 

Stars burst behind her eyes. It was sick and relieving and nauseating. Negan groaned, his grip slipping from her jacket down to her waist, large hands bruising her ribs as he shoved her flat back against the workbench, leaning all his heavy weight over her to pin her down. She bucked beneath him, frantic, her thighs tangling with his, her boots scraping against the wood as she tried to get leverage.

"You can fight harder, little house pet," he panted against her ear, thick with the blood and the spit, chest crushing hers so hard she could barely draw the air to scream. “So soft, so tame. C'mon. Tear my fucking throat out, Maggie. Show me how clean you are."

"I hate you," she choked out, hands coming up to wrap around the back of his neck, dragging him down, digging her fingers into the coarse hair at his nape until her own knuckles hurt. "I hate you, I hate you—"

"I know you do," he growled, mouth open against the damp, throbbing skin of her neck, right below the jaw where her pulse was hammering so viciously she felt it in her ears "I know you do, baby. Keep going."

He grabbed both her wrists, hauling them up and pinning them against the surface above her head in a single grip. 

Maggie froze like that, arched beneath him, trapped between the scarred wood of the table and the familiar weight of her executioner between her hips. Her chest rose and fell in rough heaves, ache on her ribs, her forehead bleeding, the skin of her neck burning as Negan lifted his head to look down at her with a broken nose, blood smearing into his graying beard and dripping on her, eyes dark with pupils swallowed by the rush. 

So much about all of this disgusted her, deep down, them hurting each other like this. But mainly, surely, what she despised most, and ignored fervently—was that twenty seconds of bloodsport had left her throbbing.

"There you are," Negan whispered, his thumb pressing into the bruise forming on her wrist, slow and heavy. "Look at you. Right here."

Maggie glared up at him, her lips parted, tasting his blood and salt on her own tongue, wetting her lips with it, her entire body trembling with that same desire for relief she hadn't known would never leave. 

This was a talent of his, making her want to hurt him so that she could keep asking where he hurt.

Negan’s body had always been a weapon first, a shelter second. There had been a time when finding him hurt would have satisfied something in her. Not healed it. She knew that now, knew how little satisfaction had to do with healing, how readily you could feed one and starve the other.

It wasn't satisfying now. It was not nearly enough to have him bleed for her, on her.

She twisted her hips, hooking one boot behind his ankle, and wrenched her weight hard to the left. Negan’s balance slipped on the sawdust-slick planks. The split second his center shifted, Maggie tore her right hand free, brought her forearm across his throat with all the leverage her core could muster, and shoved.

They went off the edge of the workbench together, hitting the floor with a crash that rattled the jars on the lowest shelf. Negan’s back struck the boards with a breathless grunt, but before he could roll, Maggie was over him. She drove both knees down into the hollow of his hips, pinning his thighs, and slammed her open palms against his shoulders to anchor him to the floor. 

The awful things was—he didn’t try to buck her off. He lay under her with his chest heaving like a bellows, blood from his shattered nose pooling in the cleft of his upper lip, beard stained dark and darker, but his eyes were wide and steady in the meager light of the room, clear while Maggie sat on his waist, trembling from the nape of her neck down to her boots, every muscle in her body strung to the point of snapping. Her hair hung around their faces, shutting out the rest of the room, shutting out the community, the island, the tidy garden rows, framing what burned hot and raw behind her ribs. From the split skin at her hairline, a single drop of blood gathered, trembled. Then it fell, striking his cheekbone and running down into his stubble to mix with his own.

Inches apart. His breath was hot, washing over her parted lips. She wanted to hit him again. She wanted to wrap both hands around his neck and squeeze until the mocking light in his eyes went out for good, until the world was finally as quiet as the bedroom Luis kept for her and she drowned in the stillness of every night she sought in every day she rushed through. 

"Go on," he whispered, rough as gravel beneath her knees. "Say what you must."

“You don’t get to decide how much I can take. You don’t get to talk about my bed. You don’t get to talk about him. You don’t get to—”

“I get to,” he said, close enough that she could taste the blood on his mouth, “because you still haven’t told me to stop. Because you still haven’t told me to leave. Because you still haven’t told me you don’t want me here, and we both know you won’t, because the second I walk off this island you start losing it and you know it. You know it, Maggie.”

She stared down at him, her chest heaving so violently her ribs wanted to curl under the strain, looking for a monster, looking for the enemy, looking for anything that would justify the current traveling through her. But there was only the ruined face of an old man who had killed for her, who had bled for her, who knew the exact depth of the darkness she carried because he had dug the grave for it himself. 

The adrenaline peaked, flared white-hot, and then—like a fire starved of oxygen—gutted itself in an instant.

This was a man she loved.

She was punishing him for nothing he had done.

The heat drained out of her limbs, leaving behind a cold ache so vast it made her bones feel paper-thin. Maggie’s jaw began to tremble, and her shoulders caved. Her strength simply gave out, her torso collapsing forward against his chest, she buried her face hard into the damp crook of his neck.

The sound that broke from her was a choked gasp, strange and ugly. And then came the sob, rattling her as she clutched to his coat, her fingers knotting into the fabric so tightly she felt it in her elbows, her forehead pressing into the warm, bloody skin below his ear. The tears came fast after, washing through the red smeared across her cheeks, soaking into his collar, world spilling in waves against his throat.

Negan didn't move for a heartbeat. He let her break against him, let her tears and her blood pour into him without a reaction. 

Then his hands came up.

One large palm flattened across the middle of her back, pressing her down against him until there wasn't an inch of air, no daylight left between their chests, while his other hand came up behind her head, long fingers tangling into her hair, anchoring her skull firmly to his pulse.

"I got you," he muttered into her temple, his voice deep as though it lived inside her. "I got you, Maggie. Stop."

She wept harder, her fingers clawing at dark wool, trying to push away and pull him close, suffocating on the smell, the sweat of a man who adored her.

"I can't," she choked out against his skin. "I don't wanna be like this."

"You don't have to," Negan countered, his grip tightening, his thumb rubbing small, hard circles into the base of her skull, right on the ache. "You hear me? You don't have to be anything, or carry a goddamn thing in here. Give it to me. All of it.”

The rain had thinned back by the time the light through the windows honeyed. The community had finished its dinner bell an hour ago; Maggie had heard it distantly, had let it ring and die against the walls outside. No one had come looking. She'd told Hershel she would be counting after hours. 

Negan was still on the floor.

He lay on his back where they’d landed, knees bent, hands resting loose across his stomach, and watched the ceiling while the bleeding from his nose slowed down. His face was a mess—eye bruising, the bridge swollen crooked, her nail marks carved in three clean lines down his left cheek. She'd done that. She kept her attention on it from where she sat beside him on the floorboards, one knee pulled up to her chest, jacket discarded nearby. 

Near them sat a shallow metal pan of a mix of water and alcohol she'd spun, a torn strip of clean cotton she’d ripped from an apron hanging by the workbench. 

Maggie turned to him, shifting her weight onto both knees until she hovered over his chest, thigh beside his ribs. 

Negan’s eyes tracked the movement. Hazel irises clear still, but the pupils shrunk back from the fight, centered and unblinking as she leaned down into his space. The bridge of his nose was pushed to the right, dried dark ribbons of red crusting down through his mustache and into the salt-and-pepper of his beard. She'd never seen so much blood on his face, as if he'd gorged himself on what was now a carcass, licked the raw meat from the bone.

"You're gonna want to hold still," Maggie warned him. 

"Oh, sure," he mumbled, the corners of his mouth twitching into a smirk that split wrong on the swelling. "Because you've been so gentle with me so far today."

She didn't rise to the bait, laying the flat of her left palm against his cheek, her fingers splaying back toward his ear to anchor his skull against the floorboards. His skin was rough, hot beneath her cold fingers. With her right hand, she found the crooked bridge of his nose, resting the pads of both thumbs against the displaced cartilage. 

Negan watched her face, his gaze tracing the split skin at her hairline, the bruise probably rising beneath her cheekbone, the red rimming her eyes.

"On three," she murmured, her thumbs finding purchase.

"One," she said.

On two, she shoved.

The cartilage ground back into place with a wet click. 

Negan let out a choked hiss through his teeth, his entire body arching off the floorboards in an involuntary spasm of agony. His hand shot out, fingers clamping around Maggie’s thigh, digging deep into the muscle right through the denim to anchor himself against the shock. 

Maggie kept her palm pressed firmly to his cheek, holding him through the shudder, feeling the heat radiate off his throat, feeling the grip on her thigh that never once tipped into violence.

"Son of a... goddamn bitch," he panted, a hoarse wheeze, his chest heaving under her sight. His eyes watered, two clean tracks cutting through the grime on his temples, but he held her gaze, blinking rapidly through the pain until his breathing slowed. "You... you always were a lying little terror, Maggie Rhee."

"You started it."

"You know damn well I did not." His hand remained on her thigh, though the grip relaxed, softening until his palm just rested there, heavy and warm and unquestionable.

Maggie dipped the rag into the cold pan, wrung it out, the steady drip-drip-drip like the rain of before, and brought it to his face.

Started with his forehead, and went down from there, wiping away the smear where her own blood had fallen into his stubble, wiping away the sawdust, the sweat that had chilled against his skin, and Negan closed his eyes as the coolness dragged over his brow, leaning his head just a fraction into the pressure of her hand.

"Callum," she began, barely louder than the outside had been a moment ago, "wasn't worth it."

"Callum," Negan answered, eyes still shut, "was trying us. Kid wanted to see how far the fence could bend before someone knocked his teeth in. Better a crowbar to the knuckles now than a butcher's knife when the cold hits." He paused, lips parting in a dry breath. "Besides. I had a point to make."

"To him?"

"To you."

Maggie pressed the cloth against the side of his nose, dabbing at the fresh welling of blood where the skin had torn. He flinched slightly, but didn't pull away. 

"You can't bring us into your job here, your responsibility," she whispered, hypocritical, her thumb brushing the high curve of his cheekbone, lifting a smear of black grease from his skin. "You know what leadership costs."

"I know what you cost," Negan murmured, opening his eyes. They were heavy, looking up at her. "I've been paying on the tab for this long. I know every cent. And it was worth it."

Her fingers paused against his jaw. 

Maggie dipped the cloth again, rinsing it until the water was dark, and brought it back down to his mouth. She cleaned the split on his lip, pressing firmly enough that he tasted the cold alcohol, her fingers grazing his mustache, the coarse gray hair of his beard. 

“Don't let me pick up fights with you,” she told him, a whisper in the request.

“Why not, if it's what you need?”

Without answering right away, after wiping the blood from his chin, pressing against the base of his throat where his pulse beat, she pulled back, satisfied enough with the cleansing, intending to go pick up her jacket to make him more comfortable until the blood stopped threatening to spill. 

Negan didn't let her go farther than that, lifting his hand from her thigh, knuckles reaching up. His fingers brushed against the hem of her sleeve, catching the edge, grounding her there while she rolled the fabric of her jacket into a compact cushioning, lifting his head to place it underneath.

“That ain't what I need,” she murmured eventually.

“Then what is?” Negan asked.

Maggie kept her eyes lowered, watching the dirty pink swirl in the shallow pan with the rag. She plugged both hands into the cold water. She twisted the cloth between her fingers, wringing it out until the fibers groaned.

Despite her lack of words, or perhaps because of it, he reached out again, fingers brushing the knuckles of her right hand, and took the rag from her grip.

“Your turn,” he said, and she frowned, moving to catch the cloth before he lifted it.

“You need to keep your head down. Keep still or you’ll start the bleedin’ all over again.”

Negan didn’t shift his head from the rolled jacket. His eyes remained fixed on her face.

“You come here, then.”

Maggie let out a slow breath through her teeth, rolling her eyes with a faint, tired twitch of her jaw—reflex, if anything, the performance of resistance they both knew was already spent. If she didn't go down, he'd come up. They'd push and pull forever.

So she shifted her knees against the boards, leaned forward, and planted her right hand flat against the floor beside his shoulder, bracing her weight over him so she hovered only inches above his battered face.

His left hand rose immediately. Negan’s fingers slid under the curtain of her hair, settling against the nape of her neck, thumb finding the hollow at the base of her skull and pressing just enough to anchor them to each other. It was neither gentle nor violent; the tether.

With his right hand, he brought the damp cloth to her forehead.

The cold pressed against the split at her hairline, and Maggie’s breath hitched in her throat, her eyelids fluttering shut. 

"Hold still," he echoed her. And there was, again, no rush, as he dragged the cloth in slow strokes across her brow, lifting the dried red that had spilled. He worked down to her temple, over her cheekbone, down into the hollow where her tears had carved tracks through the grime, ridding her of their blood.

Every touch stung, burning away some of the fog that had gathered in her skin.

"Tell me what's happening," he demanded, calmly so.

Maggie opened her eyes. 

She looked down into the mess of his face—every wound she gave him—while he held her by the throat and the spine, his thumb stroking the tendon behind her ear, grounding the pulse that couldn't learn how to rest.

Luis loved to love her. With him she felt weightless, ungrounded, she laughed as he spun her, the sound tumbling from her lips with an effervescent sensation, bubbling up through the hollows of her chest. And she would never trade it.

"Tell me what this is all about," Negan whispered, wiping the cold cloth across her bottom lip. His gaze dropped there, then rose back to her eyes, dark with his understanding of her, and that he had his guesses. 

Her jaw tightened under his palm. She wanted to shove his hand away, wanted to take the crowbar from the forge and bury it in the floorboards between his legs, wanted to heal every wound she made so no one would ask or worry. Wanted to discard this day, this week, this month.

Instead, she remained suspended above him, her fingers digging into the wood, her heartbeat mingling with his in the quiet.

"I think… I miss havin’ sex when it was dangerous," she breathed.

Negan’s lips twitched, but the grip at the back of her neck didn’t yield an inch, remaining tangled in the strands of her hair, his thumb tracing the seam of her ear. Maggie watched the thought move across his face—first surprise, then recognition, then the delight of having found the loose thread in her. His pupils widened. The corner of his mouth pulled harder, the split there opening and darkening with fresh blood. Then a short, low sound rose in the back of his throat—half-groan, half-scoff.

“Goddammit,” he muttered. “I knew you were wound tight.”

Maggie felt the heat rise up her throat, stinging hotter than the bruised skin over her cheekbone. She tried to shift her weight back onto her heels, to put an inch of clean daylight between them, but the grip behind her head tightened to keep her tethered where she was.

“It's just time, right?” she said, words toppling out defensively. She felt like a little girl again, thoughts unspooling before she could catch them. “We've been together for some time. I just don't remember it being so plain, with Glenn—” She swallowed hard, her lips parting right after. Negan's hand holding the damp cloth came down, depositing it back on the pan, placing his empty palm on his own stomach. “It's good sex. I haven't had it in so long. But it is—”

“Simple?” Negan supplied. His eyes resting on hers, without mockery, without circus. “I don't like simple either.”

“I know,” she whispered, fingers digging into the planks beside his shoulder. “I don't wanna be like you.”

“You are, though,” he said, so sure. Hand at the back of her neck, thumb still dragging firmly across the tendon. “What changed? You've been having vanilla sex for what, three years now? Why is it bothering you all of the sudden?”

Maggie looked down at the three parallel scratches she’d carved into his cheek.

“When I feel safe for too long…” Her voice dipped as she forced the words through the narrowing in her throat. “I panic. I never realized what it was.”

Negan watched her, unmoving as he sometimes became to not spook her, as if he could.

“The adrenaline helps remind me what this world really is,” she whispered, staring into the hollow of his collarbone. “I don't want us to be violent, but I know now—”

“We have to be,” he finished for her. 

It wasn't an argument. They had settled on that years ago, after losing Renata, after Dillard— this agreement, this foundation. It's how they worked, it's how they survived. How they stayed together. She used to think that’s how he justified every awful thing he decided he needed, but what he needed—he needed to protect them.

Maggie’s gaze dropped to his mouth. “You told me it's dangerous to forget.”

A spark caught in the corner of Negan’s eye, the swelling around his nose pulling as his mouth widened into that awful slant of his after he licked his teeth.

“So you can't cum because I told you so?”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed, her jaw tightening with an instant, reflexive spike. “I can cum.”

Negan’s grin deepened, showing white against the dark red staining his mustache, his thumb giving the base of her skull one lazy, aching press.

“Just not hard enough.” 

Maggie rolled her eyes, and pushed up off her palm, shifting her weight back off her hip, making to rise up off the floorboards.

Negan, again, forbade her. His hand slid from the back of her neck to close around her wrist. "No, no, no," his grip covered the joint entirely, the skin torn across two knuckles where she had driven him into the floor. "Stay right here."

"I have crates to finish."

"Crates'll keep," his thumb pressed once into the thin skin over her pulse point, checking the rate of her, and she could feel his heartbeat through his fingertips—or hers, reflected back. There was so little difference when they touched after violence. "Lay down."

She took a moment just to look at him again—her handiwork, the borrowed pillow of her own jacket under his skull, the patience he only ever spent on her these days—and then, because arguing would have taken more out of her than complying, she lay down.

The floor was hard through her shirt, cold where the boards hadn't caught any of the day's heat. Negan shifted his arm and extended it flat across the planks. Maggie settled into the crook of it, her head finding the place just above his elbow, her knees drawing up the same slow degree his had, so that they lay like two commas on the floor, turned up to the ceiling.

"Tell me what they did to you in the farmhouse," he requested.

Maggie stared at the underside of the workbench beside them, at the pale wood grain and the drip line of old varnish, and found that she didn't have to search for the words. They'd been sitting in her for days.

"There were six of them left when we found it," she told him. "Not the cannibals. Just people. The ones that came here—they were scouts, and the home base didn't know their scouts were dead yet." Let herself nurse on his total attention, purposeful without the need no nudge, or loop him into it, though she didn't look at him to receive it properly. "They'd built somethin’ almost decent. Rain barrels. A smokehouse. If it had been me and Hershel on the road back when he was little I might have wanted to trade with them instead of—"

Her boot knocked once against his in an involuntary twitch of her body. His breathing made the arm under her head rise and fall, rise and fall.

"Instead of," Negan repeated.

"Instead of doin’ what I did." Her eyes tracked a knot in the wood, following its whorl. "The farmhouse was two miles past the treeline. We weren't sure, then, just suspicious. There was a woman at the fence, she had a kid with her—a boy, maybe ten, thin as a rake, and he wasn't scared of me, Negan. That's the thing I keep— ten-year-olds are scared of strangers. This one looked at me like I was the truck comin’ down the road. Like he'd been waitin’.”

Maggie heard him sigh, felt it against her cheek, and then met his eyes. "We split, but I was the one to approach first. When I heard the gunshots, the woman was already reachin’ for me, and I saw her hands—her nails, they'd been chewed down to nothin’, down to blood—and I understood I'd found what I was lookin’ for in about a second and a half.”

She turned her head against his arm, could've sufficed with just her eyes turned to him, but didn't. “The six people were in the barn, breathin’, tied up and dressed in gauze. They were keepin’ them—" she inhaled, quickly and unwittingly. "For later. Like stores. They had a ledger. Weighed them. They were… healthy people, same height, same body type between men and women. Their skin was purple from what we later found out was them being bathed in wine.” 

They'd had the farmhouse for four hours. Or it had them. It was easy to start. Cannibals didn't keep guards the way normal people did, because cannibals didn't think like prey, and she had to think like both before, during, and after being taken.

"When the cannibals realized we had the perimeter," she said, "they managed to take a bite out of all the six.”

Negan waited for more, she felt him doing the math she had done on the timeline of it, how fast people would have to move to get teeth into six bodies before the shooting began.

"Hell of a last meal," he said eventually, when nothing else came from her mouth. And then, "Okay." A pause. The arm under her head shifted, settling her closer by an inch, casual as adjusting a pillow. "And what did they do to you?"

"That's unimportant.”

Negan turned onto his side, floorboards creaking under his weight. The movement pulled a wince out of him that he didn't bother hiding—his nose, the ribs she'd likely bruised somewhere in the fall off the workbench—but he didn't stop until he was facing her fully, close enough now that she had to tip her chin on his arm to keep his eyes instead of his throat.

"That's the most important part," he said.

Maggie turned her body fully toward him, too. Reflex. Instinct. Decades of them arranging themselves into opposition. 

"Why?" she asked. "So you can be angry on my behalf? They're already dead.”

"So I can be angrier at you." His voice dropped out of its performance register entirely, no drawl left in it, just the low grind underneath that he used maybe four times a year and never in front of anyone else. "Who do you think you are, risking everything that I have?”

She wanted to ask him, as if she didn't already know better, if he meant the community. The grain stores, the wall, the power, this thing they'd built together. But his eyes weren't coursing through the cost of a settlement's loss. They were doing a smaller, more specific run, settling in an alley at the back of his mind she'd watched him inhabit a hundred times before—the counting of her, present tense, verified, accounted for.

It should have offended her, to be considered a danger to herself and to his love for her. His love for her itself would have offended her one day. There was a version of her—younger, the one who'd wanted to spit at his feet in a clearing—that it would have offended. Instead she felt the immense gratitude of being a man's entire concern. The hypocrite that she was. The liar. He knew. It meant he stayed, it meant he wouldn't go out there and get himself killed over nothing but ego because there was no one but himself he trusted to keep her safe.

Maggie knew that the only thing that scared Negan more than his ego was her. And that the only thing that made her more fearless than need was him.

"That's not what I want," she said.

"What do you want?"

She carried the answer up from the silo where everything unspent got stored. It had been down there a while, but he had lowered himself enough to meet her there.

"A higher cost to my pleasure.”

Maggie wanted it to hurt a little so everything else stopped hurting a lot. She wanted to be dragged into release, wanted it to feel bigger than gratitude and worse than the mere act of loving. She loved Glenn, he was taken from her, their days and their nights turned into bars curled around her body, no matter how far inside Luis reached… never far enough to make her burst free from the longing for being reckless.

The doorknob turned while she was still looking at Negan.

She should've locked it that morning, before the clipboard went across the room. The thought occupied her completely for a second.

Then Hershel pushed it open.

“Mom?”

With Negan’s arm beneath her head, she lifted herself quickly and had to plant a hand against his chest when the floor seemed to tilt, his fingers catching her elbow. 

Hershel stood with one hand on the door, a plate balanced on the other, having come from the dining hall. She watched him take in the room without moving his head much. Her split hairline to Negan's nose to the three raked lines on his cheek, the workbench, the mess around them, things toppled and scattered, and his face translated annoyance first—this again, still, always—before settling into the blankness he'd learned, she suspected, from watching her do it first.

“Get up,” he said.

Maggie drew her knees beneath her. “We’re—”

“I’m talking to him.”

Negan’s hand left her elbow.

It was a small withdrawal, sensible under the circumstances, and she resented how immediately she felt it. She wanted to have been the one to move away completely.

“Easy,” Negan said.

Hershel set the plate on a crate. Carefully, with both hands now. The fork slipped free and struck the floor.

“Shut up.”

Negan looked at him for another moment before moving. Getting up was worse than she expected. He pushed himself to one knee, stopped, breathed through his mouth. Maggie’s hand started toward his back.

Hershel tracked it. She put it against the floor instead.

At twenty-three, her son had Glenn’s height without his slightness. Work had broadened him through the chest, and he wore his sleeves rolled unevenly because he pushed them up rather than folding them as Luis did. There was a pale scar near his thumb from a hinge pin last winter. She remembered washing it while he complained that he could wash his own damn hand.

He had let her, eventually.

Now he was watching her as though permission were something he regretted having given her so freely.

“What the fuck is wrong with the two of you?”

Maggie stood. Her ribs pulled sharply on the right, enough to make her pause with her weight against the workbench.

“We had a fight.”

Hershel’s eyes moved to the timber stacked behind her. One of the upper lengths had slipped loose and rested at an angle against the wall.

“I can see that.”

“It got out of hand.”

Negan had reached his feet. He stayed beside the bench, too, one hand resting on its edge, leaving the aisle open between Maggie and the door. She noticed the consideration, and there was something humiliating about finding reasons to be grateful to him while her son studied the bruises he had made. She felt insane, all of the sudden. Like she was just realizing what they'd done.

Hershel came closer. She held still for him. That seemed important until he stopped just beyond reach, and she understood he hadn’t been coming to touch her. He wanted a better look.

His gaze settled on her upper arm.

Four darkening marks interrupted the ordinary color of her skin.

“Did he do that?”

“Yes.”

Hershel glanced at Negan.

“And his face?”

“I did that.”

“With what?”

“My hands.”

He looked down at them.

Maggie resisted the urge to turn her palms inward. Her knuckles were swollen. There was blood beneath one nail she had missed in the pan, a narrow black crescent. She had spent years looking at Negan’s hands and knowing things about his day.

“Hershel,” she began.

“Were you trying to get away from him?”

Negan’s fingers tightened on the edge of the bench.

She could say no and know exactly what that answer would buy. Hershel would remain angry. She could explain the slap, the things she had said, the things she hadn’t said. Arrange the afternoon until its conclusion seemed to follow reasonably from the beginning.

“I told him to get out of my way,” she said.

Beside her, Negan looked down.

“And then?” her son prompted.

“He didn’t.”

Hershel turned toward him fully. Maggie knew the change in Negan’s face, the almost imperceptible setting of his mouth. Hershel knew it too. And yet, she continued; “It wasn't his fault.”

Negan looked at her. For a moment she was back at the council table, making a decision he disliked and waiting for him to let the others believe it had been theirs together. 

“I think we're equally at fault here,” he settled on instead, shifting his weight, testing his left knee against the planks, and immediately she felt for both men, she regretted it belatedly; he and her son hadn't been at odds since before they made a home here.

Hershel’s jaw twitched. The skin around his mouth went paper-white, slow to light, impossible to douse once the spark caught. 

“You're twice her size, you fucking asshole.”

“Hi, name's Negan,” he said, spreading one palm in a lazy, mocking half-circle before dropping it back against his hip. “Did we meet just now, sparky? You seriously think I'd ever hurt your mother for real?”

“You just did! Look at her!”

“C'mon,” Negan rasped, a broken-nosed grin splitting the dark wire of his beard. “That was foreplay.”

Goddamn—

Hershel lunged. 

He didn’t drop his center, didn’t mind the distance; he just surged forward blindly, boots sliding through the wood shavings to get both hands on the older man’s chest.

Likewise, Maggie didn’t think. Her body moved on the animal wiring that had kept her alive through the smoke of Georgia, Virginia and Ohio, and the concrete canyons of New York. She threw herself into the gap, planting her boots wide and slamming the flat of her palm hard into the center of Hershel’s chest. 

The impact jarred straight through her bruised collarbone. Hershel stumbled back half a pace, his breath catching in a hitch, but Maggie held the line in rigid spine, her back firmly closing Negan off from view. 

“Jesus—” she snapped her head around, her teeth bared as she hissed over her shoulder, “Stop it.”

Negan’s hazel eyes remained wide, amused, perfectly unrepentant beneath dry blood, though he stepped back half an inch toward the workbench in immediate acquiesce, compliance.

Maggie turned back to her son. 

“Hershel, leave it,” she breathed, attempting for the same register that brooked no negotiation across a council table. “I don't want your pride, and I don't need your protection right now.”

Hershel stared at the hand she kept flat against his sternum. He was breathing through his teeth, the tendon in his neck pulled taut. 

“This is between us,” she stated.

“Between you,” Hershel echoed. His eyes flicked from her bruised temple to the crimson on her collar, then past her shoulder. “How are you gonna explain that to Luis?” 

“This isn't—”

“You gonna lie to him?” he stepped back, pulling himself cleanly away from her palm. The absence of his weight left her hand hanging cold in the draft between them. “Because if he knows the truth, he ain't gonna like it, mom.”

Before Maggie could find the breath to answer, a grunt cut through her string of thoughts. She felt the abrupt displacement of air and weight behind her before she heard the thud—the scrape of a boot heel losing traction on wood.

“Goddammit.”

Maggie turned to see Negan had folded in on himself. He was hunched over the edge of the workbench, one elbow braced hard against the surface, the other arm hooked tight across his midsection, his fingers bunched into his shirt, eyes were clamped shut, the skin around his bruised nose gone an ash-gray. He swayed once, heavily, as though the room had pitched sideways beneath his boots.

Maggie crossed the two feet between them, her palm finding the expanse between his shoulder blades. Through the wool, she could feel the hard, rapid flutter of his ribs, could see the cold sweat breaking along his temple. 

"Did you eat anythin’ today?"

Negan didn’t open his eyes, moved by another shudder. “Sawdust.”

“Sit before you take the table down with you,” she gripped him by the meat of his bicep, using her shoulder to guide his center until he slumped onto the low packing crate by the vise. The wood groaned under him, but held. 

Maggie turned, snatched the tin plate Hershel had brought from the crate by the door, and bent to retrieve the iron fork from the shavings. She wiped the tines clean against the hem of her shirt with two sharp, irritated jerks, set the plate roughly onto Negan’s lap, and shoved the fork into his limp fingers.

Hershel stood by the open door. His eyes drifted from the food in the older man’s hands to the dirt on his mother’s knuckles, then rolled toward the darkened ceiling. “Jesus Christ.”

Didn’t wait for her to speak, turning on his heel, catching the edge of the door, and pulling it shut behind him. 

Silence walked right back to them.

Negan looked down at the cold mound of beans and salted meat on his knees. He didn’t move the fork, knuckles gray where he gripped the iron, his head hanging low enough that the hair at his crown spiked forward.

Maggie remained standing above him, her hand slowly slipping away from the wool of his shoulder. 

“Your son doesn't like kinky shit,” he pushed the fork into the beans, turning the starch over once before letting the metal scrape the tin.

“Don't make me break your nose again.” 

He huffed. It turned into a wince halfway through, and he set the plate on the bench beside him to rub both palms over his face, smearing the last of the dried blood, stopping with his hands covering his mouth.

"I'm sorry," he said, rusted, not being a man who spent them often. He let his hands fall. "Does it hurt?"

It took her a second to understand he meant her. He was looking at her ribs, how she was standing with her weight favoring one side, the place on her arm where his own fingers had left bruises.

"No," she said.

The crate put his head at the height of her sternum, and she scanned him again, again—nose reset by her own hands, cheek split by her nails, his gray shot through with the dark of blood she'd spilled nevermind her work with the rag—and she asked it back at him, question for question, wound for wound.

"Does it hurt?”

"Like hell," and smiled at her with it.

The noon bell found her back at the third storage building redoing the count she'd abandoned the night before, ribs strapped tight under her shirt, when the runner didn't knock so much as caught himself against the frame, out of breath.

"Miss Rhee. The doctor— he took Mr. Smith. Just now. They're at the security station."

Her pencil stopped. The mark it left was a small black period at the end of twenty three.

"Took him? For what?"

The boy looked at her—to be more exact, at the bruises scattered across her. She watched him decide, and decide wrong.

"I don't know, ma'am."

She set the clipboard down flat. "Yes, you do know."

He didn't answer, pressing himself against the doorframe as she passed him on her way out, though Maggie kept her pace even. Her ribs only objected on the second flight of the security station steps and why would she complain; pain was information, and she'd never once shot the messenger.

Luis was standing outside the cell with the key still in the lock, big iron jailer's keys, anachronistic, and Negan was inside, sitting on the bench bolted to the concrete wall, long legs out, spine bent. 

The face she had made herself, and it was in front of God and everyone now. Purple bridge, split lip, the scratches. When his eyes came up and found her, there was no performance to be assembled. He did though, look a little annoyed.

Maggie came to a halt two paces behind Luis, dampening her lips before speaking, "What happened?" 

He turned, the keys chiming once against his thigh as he pulled it from the lock. And she knew just from looking in his eyes that he had stayed awake all night watching the woman beside him pretend to sleep. His gaze drifted to the split skin at her hairline that she'd blamed on supplies collapsing on top of her, then down to the high collar hiding the redness on her neck. 

"Physical assault."

"Against who?"

"You, Maggie."

She knew it was coming, knew from the moment the boy rushed to find her. And still. Her lips hesitated with words she couldn't form, thoughts she couldn't align quick enough.

"What are you talkin’ about?"

"You think I'm blind?" His voice stayed level. That voice he used on frightened newcomers, that made people feel heard right up until they realized they'd told him everything. "I'm not stupid. I can connect dots."

"So you're lockin’ him up," Maggie said, carefully, considering her hand of lies and omissions, "based on an assumption?"

"He admitted it," Luis gestured flatly toward the bench.

Maggie snapped her gaze to the cell, now annoyed herself. Negan didn’t meet her eyes again, sat with his jaw tight, hands motionless between his knees. Taking it. Offering himself up to keep the peace she risked.

“Then you have to lock me up too,” Maggie stepped into Luis’s space, her chest heaving, the shadow of her frame falling over his shoulder. “I started it.”

There was not a movement from his side. He didn't do any of the small tidyings he did when he was buying time. He just looked at her, and the steadiness was its own answer, and a heavy sensation in her chest began to climb.

"Did you hear me? I slapped him first. I broke his nose. I carved up his face—"

"No," Luis said. "I'm not hearing you. The council will."

A small panic flared in Maggie’s ribs.

"This is not good for morale. He's the head of security," she hissed, her fingers twitching against her thighs.

"He's a clown." Luis’s voice didn’t rise, instead tightening, strained to the breaking point by his own suffocating squareness. 

Before the word had fully left his mouth, Maggie moved.

She grabbed his wrist with one hand, twisting it sharply to the outside, and ripped the heavy ring of keys straight out of his grip. 

“Maggie!”

Ignoring him, she shoved past his shoulder with her forearm, driving the iron skeleton into the padlock of the cell door. The metal screeched as she wrenched it to the left, throwing the heavy grate open until it slammed with a clang that echoed up into the floorboards above.

“Get out,” she ordered, staring at the man on the bench. “Now.”

Negan didn't stand. He looked up at her with that stillness, the stillness of a man holding a wild thing that had chosen, for reasons of its own, to eat from his hand—and then past her, at Luis.

"He's right," Negan said.

Maggie stepped inside the threshold, closing the distance between them until the tips of her boots touched his, her hands trembling where they curled into tight fists.

“I'm not playin’ with you,” she snarled, raw from the very bottom of her lungs. “Out, Negan.”

He got up off the bunk slowly, knees cracking, one hand trailing the wall. The height put him close enough that she could smell the alcohol on his lips, or his cuts, knowing him—he washed his whole damn face with it.

"I can do a few nights," he said, brows pulled up, solicitous, "Builds character. I've got a face for bars."

"Say one more word."

He didn't. He stood in her shadow, four inches behind her right shoulder when she turned, and said nothing, and did not leave either.

Luis looked at them.

Not from one to the other but at them together, the unity of them as they have always been, as though seeing something beyond. How could this be any different? How could this not be expected? How could this happen?

Her lover's expression emptied. His hand was still half-raised from where she'd twisted his wrist. He let it fall.

“What was I supposed to do?”

Maggie could have had a hundred answers organized and ready, sensible things about jurisdiction, council procedure, the danger of acting on appearances, all her usual hypocrisy that somehow never risked the place if it was used to strengthen her and Negan. She could tell him he should have asked her. Could tell him he should have trusted her, though he had.

She could not tell him he should have known.

The keys bit into her palm. Maggie set them down on the desk as carefully as she could and left the security station.

Knowing Negan would follow, and follow her he did.

Sunlight struck the stone hard enough to make her eyes water, offensively intact. No one looked toward the security station for longer than politeness allowed. Or Negan himself. She took the steps fast, and he kept the same pace effortlessly.

“Why did you admit it?” She didn’t stop walking. Didn’t look at him to ask.

“I’m not a liar.”

She almost laughed, a breath through her nose, nothing more. Of all the sentences in the world. He really wasn't, if omission didn't count.

“They’ll get over it, Maggie.”

She cut across the square toward the narrow passage between the old courthouse and a row of converted offices. 

“We shouldn’t have bruised each other like this,” she regretted. “It’s not just about us, if it hurts the people we love.”

“I don’t love Luis,” he said simply.

Maggie stopped near the corner.

Negan nearly walked into her. She turned before he could step back, forcing him into the wedge of sunlight that fell between the buildings.

His face looked worse outside.

The bruising had deepened overnight, purple flooding beneath both eyes. His nose sat straight enough because she had made it so, but the bridge was swollen still, and the three marks down his cheek had scabbed into dark, clean tracks. The split in his lower lip had opened again. Probably because he couldn't keep his goddamn mouth shut.

“They’ll get over it,” he assured her.

Her hand rose before she decided to lift it, fingers opening toward his cheek. 

She stopped short of touching him.

There was dirt caught in the lines of her own split knuckles. She could see her hand suspended beside his face and felt abruptly sick at the thought of placing it there tenderly, the same hand that had broken him open. Sick at wanting to. Sick at the patience in his eyes while he waited to find out whether she would.

She let her arm fall.

Knew her eyes looked as distraught as she felt. There was no arranging them before him. He had already seen her on the floor with her face buried against his throat.

“Jesus...”

“Don’t feel guilty, hey,” Negan shifted closer, putting his body between her and the square. The sunlight left her face and settled across his shoulders instead. “It happened. I'd take a million more punches, I don’t mind,” he tipped his head, trying to catch her eyes when she looked away. “Did I hurt you for real?”

“No.”

He watched her a moment longer, gaze moving over her brow, her mouth.

“Then let it go, sweetheart.” His voice lowered. “Or lock me up.”

Their eyes connected.

“You think that’s funny?”

“No.”

“You were smilin’.”

“What can I say, you make me happy.” He turned his body, leaned one shoulder against the brick beside her, careful with his ribs.

Careful with his ribs.

From the inside pocket of his coat, Negan produced a crushed pack of cigarettes. He worried one free with his teeth, considered its bent middle, then rolled it between his fingers until it was right. The match took twice in the wind. On the third strike, he cupped the flame against his chest, head bowed, and the cigarette caught with a dry crackle.

Maggie watched the first drag pull his cheeks hollow.

He held the smoke a moment, eyes narrowed past her shoulder, then let it go above her head. The wind took it apart before it reached the brick.

“How does this affect your missionary relief work?” he asked her. She looked at him. And yet he tried again, “Conjugal community service?”

Maggie just glared.

Negan smiled. It made the split in his lip shine wetly. He took another pull, slower this time, satisfaction settling into the lines around his eyes because he had gotten exactly what he wanted from her, even if what he wanted was only the promise of violence.

Then he held the cigarette out.

She hadn’t smoked in years. There had been evenings at the Fram when somebody passed something around after closing, and she had accepted once or twice. She remembered the tobacco on her step brother's clothes more than she remembered him smoking. The stale sweetness of it mixed with earth, the medicinal sharpness of the liniment he rubbed into his hands after working.

Negan waited until Maggie took it from him, and their fingers brushed when she did.

She brought the cigarette to her mouth and drew too hard. Smoke struck the back of her throat with a bitter heat, making her eyes water, but she kept it in until her lungs began to object. The release came out unsteady.

“Still terrible,” she said.

“Yeah, you really sold that.”

He plucked it from between her fingers. His mouth closed around the place hers had been, and he winked, smiling through the pull.

Luis would no longer be at the security station if she wanted to talk. She'd have to catch him on his shift at the hospital. Or at home.

“What do I tell him?” 

Negan’s amusement thinned. He tapped ash toward the wall, away from her boots.

“The truth would be exciting.”

“You ain't funny.” Maggie folded her arms, regretted it when the movement pulled at her ribs, and unfolded them again. Negan’s eyes followed the adjustment. His mouth tightened around the cigarette, but he didn’t ask. She had answered him already. No. You didn’t hurt me for real. As if there were a very clean border between one kind of hurt and another. As if bruises respected intention.

The cigarette ember brightened between his fingers. 

He took one last pull, dropped it, and ground it beneath his heel. His boot stayed there after the ember went dark.

“I’ll take Hershel out to make sure the settlement you found was the only one that moved nearby.” His tone changed with the subject, became practical, neatly bored. “I’ll apologize to him.”

Maggie looked over sharply, suspicious of the lack of mockery.

"You'll apologize to him?"

“I have done it before.”

“Not very well, you haven't.”

“Practice makes perfect. Besides, like I said, he'll get over it anyways. He likes me too much.”

“Not right now.”

“No,” Negan rubbed his thumb over the blood drying at the corner of his mouth. “He likes it less that you love me.”

Funny, that there was no shame in that word. As if it had ever been said before between them.

It had not. Never said or implied, except by outsiders, threats, people who held one hostage as leverage against the other—give me what I want, or I'll take everything you have. Panic never clouded them for too long, a sense of how it would end overtaking them as soon as they looked into each other's eyes.

Maggie stared down at the cigarette flattened beneath his boot. Tobacco had spilled through the split paper, little brown shreds caught in the irregularities of the sidewalk.

“You’ll be fine here?” he asked, and she nodded. Negan nodded too, pushing off the wall. “Good. If you change your mind about it, let me know.”

She knew he wouldn't really scout anything. He had no strength for it right now, and wouldn't risk her son. He'd use the boy’s pride to lure him out, and maybe she should object. But maybe she shouldn't. 

“I don't want him back missin’ a strand of hair, Negan.”

He began walking backward toward the square, face arranged into injured dignity. “You wound me.”

“I did.”

That stopped him.

Only for half a beat, one boot behind the other, sunlight cutting across his battered face. Then his expression softened in a way she disliked more than any grin. 

Maggie held her ground as he crossed the few steps he'd put between them, expecting a joke, some last unbearable turn of the knife. He stopped way after their shadows merged, and then his hand found the side of her neck, thumb at her jaw, and the other came around her shoulders, catching both of them at once and pulling her against his front.

His cheek settled against the crown of her head, beard catching lightly in her hair, near the wound. He held her in full daylight, as Maggie, stupidly, let him.

Up close, against her skin, the smell of him closed over her like a hand over a candle flame, holding the flicker still. The tobacco and alcohol and warm wool and the iron they'd spilled on each other. His exhale moved her with him.

Maggie's hands hung at her sides. Her forehead rested against the curve of his shoulder, and she could feel his heartbeat through three layers of fabric—what she spent years trying to outrun and had only ever managed to sync with.

“I love you back,” he said.

Into her hair, not into the light. Not funny. Not clever. God, it could never have been a joke. He wouldn't dare. 

Maggie's eyes closed.

Wanted to go after his family again. So they could have this. So they could have him.

There was a hole in her chest at the thought of losing him. It widened every day.

Negan drew away an inch, only an inch, keeping his arm locked around her shoulders, and looking down at her. His mouth stayed mostly still, but his gaze went warm at the corners, creased with it, the whiskey-dark settling on her upturned face like sunlight through the boathouse windows, and he smiled with his eyes.

Maggie, looking up at him, locked against his body, his arm a bar across her shoulders, her whole sternum pressed to his ribs, could feel the corner of her mouth twitch—could feel herself starting to give him the thing, the surrender, the correspondence—and she caught it.

Then she rolled her eyes.

“Get out of my sight.”

It came out flat. It came out dry. It came out, if she was honest, with absolutely nothing behind it but exhaustion and the comfort of being held by a body she trusted, and they both knew it, because Negan looked at her for one more beat with those warm eyes and the messy smile, reading her, and found her, as ever, lacking. In the lying. In the wanting him gone.

His grin came back in full, delighted with her, split lip be damned, and he let go. Took his arm off her shoulders by increments, an inch at a time, his fingers dragging off her sleeve last of all.

“Yes, ma’am.”

One step, two, out into the light.

Maggie stayed where she was until she could no longer separate him from the movement of the community. She found him again anyway—the gray, the long stride made uneven, his hand lifting when someone called his name from across the square.

Scanning for him without deciding to.

Locating him.

Present tense, verified, accounted for.

Only then did she turn back.

Maggie had always liked it here, the Hospital. It was the one building on the island that made so much sense to her, where things began and ended—the triage, pain, how it brought things to light despite weather.

She found him near open beds of the emergency department, stitching a gash above a fisherman's brow, tying off the last suture, murmuring to the man about keeping it dry, before he let his eyes come to the doorway where she stood.

"Hey," she said.

"Sami will discharge you, yeah?" Luis said to the man, a clap to his back before he followed her.

Maggie waited for him to swing the door at trauma room 1 after they walked inside alone. Through the window she could see the ward beyond—the beds, charts hung in their neat row. So tidy. 

She looked at the small pendant of Joseph holding Jesus hanging from his neck, then forced her eyes up to his.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?" He turned to calculate the distance before leaning his weight back against the cot's frame, arms folding. "You're sorry that I found out?"

"He didn't hurt me, Luis. Negan would never hurt me."

"I know that." And she knew that he knew. He didn't doubt Negan's devotion. Never had. "And I know that he would do anything for you. Which tells me this is something you wanted. And I can't understand why, Maggie. The power he has over you, and you have over him—" his breath left him through his nose, his eyes drifting over every bruise she didn't let him treat. "It's dangerous."

"I've known him for twenty-three years," it was insistent, on her part, stating with burning eyes, furrowed brows. "That's half of my life.”

“Maggie—”

“It's just as dangerous as livin’ in this world can be,” she pressed, holding his stare. “You can't doubt my judgment of him, no one can.”

Luis didn’t blink, though his expression softened, though it wasn’t surrender; it was pity. Pity, of all things. Pity, somehow, had made bed in their home. After all this time. After everything—

“You don't need him,” he said gently. “You have us.”

"I have you because of him, Luis.” Maggie said, her hands coming out of her pockets, gesturing into the space between them, keeping her footing. “Everythin’ he's done for this community—"

"You can't keep tallying this." For the first time, his voice lifted, finally hardening. "The times he's saved you, or us. How many lives have I saved? How many times have I saved you?"

“Twice,” she said instantly.

Luis stared at her, his brows pulling together in disbelief. 

"Really?" He whispered, and she watched him replay just how fast the number had come. "You're measuring."

Maggie felt the heat rise up her throat, stinging behind her ears. “I'm not. I'm just sayin’. If I can't trust him, I can't trust myself.”

"You're two different people."

"It doesn't feel like that sometimes." 

Silence walked toward them in tow of how those words echoed inside her brain. Maggie rarely didn't think things through, words and actions alike. This, this—it bled from her. And she stood with the sticky copper of what was inside of her, what was inside of Negan, covering her palms. Watched Luis see the bright red of it in the light so nakedly it ashamed her for the first time in years. 

"So I'm in a relationship with him too?"

"We've been together for three years." She kept her voice level, kept it on the high ground despite herself. "When have I ever taken Negan home?"

Luis shook his head slowly. "So you lie to yourself too." 

“No—”

"You take him home every day. You always have,” he nodded once, giving just one step closer, stopping himself, but forcing her to look at what he thought she had brought into their bed night after night. “I know it's him you're thinking of when things are quiet."

"That's not true."

"And it's him you think of when things get tough."

Maggie opened her mouth to argue, to deny it, but all and nothing caught inside of her. Her ribs pulled with it, and behind her eyes flashed the memory of the storage floor—the smell of rain, copper on her tongue, the heaviness of a man above and under and around her body who didn’t ask for her permission because he was already woven through the marrow of her bones and he knew.

"He's—" she stopped. The room was very bright. She became aware of her own heartbeat as she only ever was after battle, the adrenaline making her head light, searching for the closing of the circuit. “I don't know how to do this without him."

Luis looked at her for a long while. Maggie didn't remember his hurt flaring into anger in recent weeks, it's been some time since he had to fight for something, and it was exactly that fact that terrified her. 

"He'll die one day, Maggie. Just like the rest of us." His voice dropped as he stated, and perhaps he was equally terrified. "Who will you be then? Will you follow him to the ground, too? In the hopes there's another life where you can continue this endless madness of a relationship?"

She thought about the clearing.

Tried not to. But Luis asked, so she took it down.

Negan towering over them in the gravel with the bat over his shoulders and she had hated him with a purity, a righteous cleanliness that suffocated her. Suffocated her on a fire that today she believed, sincerely, would either have consumed him or consumed her, and she had not much cared which. She had built burning cities out of that hate. She had fed Hershel on it some nights, salting him with her tears unconsciously. And she understood in Manhattan that this was the first thing they ever truly shared, the weight. Both of them holding the worst night of her life on opposite ends, neither allowed to set it down.

Will you follow him to the ground?

Maggie used to think that the shift happened after Ginny, the mornings that came after, on a grave Negan resented her for digging only because he resented himself. But standing with Luis's pity drying on her skin, she knew it had happened much earlier and much more quietly. The hate stayed, but it changed temperature. She had stopped wanting him dead and started wanting him there—and by the time she noticed the difference, the want had calcified into something she had no tools to excavate.

He had killed Glenn. He had killed the father of her son, the hands in her hair, the kissing of the back of her neck. And then he had spent years of his life standing in front of everything else the world wanted to take from her.

She had asked herself whether gratitude could hollow a person out the way rot hollows a tree—still standing, still strong, hollow. She had asked it again on the floor of the third storage building with her tears soaking into his collar. She was still asking it now. 

Who will you be when he's gone?

Maggie wanted to say she'd be herself, she'd keep surviving. But she didn't know how she would do those days. If she'd be smothered by her anger again, if she'd feel the water rising above her knees. The grief, the size of that grief, grief above layers of grief, it despaired her. If she would grieve Negan, and she would grieve all the parts of herself only he knew, and she would grieve the terrible human she could be under his hands, in a terrible world, she would grieve the protection and the care and the patience and the unmeasuring of efforts, she would grieve the brutality and the security and she would grieve Glenn again. She might grieve her son and ask if she would never have to if she never had to grieve Negan.

Give it to me. All of it.

"I wanted to apologize to you," her throat had narrowed to a thread. "I didn't come here to fight."

Luis scanned her face.

Then he reached out, smoothed the collar of her jacket, his fingers brushing the fabric.

“You could've apologized at home,” he said softly, letting his hand drop. “You wanted me busy.”

He stepped around her, his shoulder brushing hers as he moved toward the door. 

“I don't wanna fight you either,” he murmured, his hand finding the knob. “We'll talk later.”

They came back at dusk, two days later than planned, and Maggie was at the gate before the bell finished the second ring.

Protocol. Riders coming in late meant a changed count, a shifted perimeter, a report due before the council convened. It was not because the house had been quiet, or because Luis had taken the second shift at the hospital three nights running, or because she'd stood at the kitchen window watching the far bank of the river turn black and wishing she'd gone with them.

The gate groaned and Hershel came through first, and the thing that struck her—the thing that always struck her—was how much of the boy was still in him when he was pleased. His whole body broadcast it. With mud dried in flaking plates up both forearms, and a scratch along his jaw. His eyes were glistening as they did after he saved a life at the hospital.

"You're not gonna believe what we found!"

Maggie felt her face loosening, the unguarding. She couldn't believe, couldn't accept his age sometimes. Glenn's age when they met.

"What?"

"Astronaut food, mom!" He was already waving Solmari over, shifting his backpack to his chest, unzipping it. "We found a bunker with all kinds of stuff. Crazy old oil paint, some—" he looked inside his haul. "—WW2 tapes.”

Like a kid again. Maggie loved seeing it. She loved how overwhelming it was, so much sunlight it burned her eyes, her heart—gratuitously, helplessly, knowing that it was moving across the floor and would be gone by afternoon.

Solmari was already interrogating him about weight, volume, whether the bunker was worth a second trip. Hershel fell into it, gesturing back toward the treeline, describing a stairwell, a bulkhead. Maggie let him go, let Solmari take him, watched her son walk away arguing happily about things they had no practical use for, and held onto the image for one more second before she let it go too.

Then she turned, and Negan was still there.

He'd hung back, one shoulder against the gatepost, watching her watch her son. His face was healing. He looked better. The bruising had gone the full spectrum, yellow at the edges of purple, the scratches on his cheek dark and clean. But he was moving like himself again, that loose prowl that made people get out of his way.

He approached slowly, meandering, a man with nowhere to be, although he did have places to be—hands in his coat pockets, boots unhurried on the street, and when he stopped in front of her it was still at two feet. It bothered her less. She wondered if in five more years he intended to merge with her altogether.

"All very useful stuff,” he murmured conspiratorially, at the diversity of needless trinkets he'd found for her son. The corner of his mouth made its little flag of a pull.

"Hmm. How did your apology go?"

"Very well." He said it without a flicker. Then, with the faintest tilt of his chin, "How did it go with Dr. Feelgood?"

"He said it's fine."

"Hm. That's it?"

She nodded. Couldn't give him the full extent of it anyways, right here, right now. Negan studied her for a beat, and in exchange she studied him back, and the openness on his face, a warmth that seemed not to have left since he fed her four distasteful letters that she swallowed without chewing in plain sunlight, with no fear of wrath.

"Can you come to the Fram tonight?" He asked her.

"Why?"

"I missed you."

Maggie looked at him flatly.

"I'm serious. Why?"

"You're even more tense than when I left." His eyes moved over her face once more. "Before you decide to expose yourself to the perils of the night again—" he tsked, "—I think I have something that can help you."

Maggie exhaled through her nose. The gate crew was a few yards off. 

"So instead I'll expose myself to one peril of the night."

Negan smirked. The split in his lip had healed enough that it didn't reopen anymore, no matter how hard she expected it to.

"Maybe two or five."

Two or five.

“It's Friday, you know. You'll be bartendering?”

“You and I.”

"Hm," she said. “Give me an hour.”

"Take your time." 

Maggie watched as he gave her a nod of dismissal, walked toward the apartment complexes, one hand lifting to clap Hershel on the shoulder as he passed him mid-negotiation with Solmari, her son half-turning and allowing it.

The Fram at eight o'clock was a different hole than the Fram at noon. It only opened weekends—that had been her rule, years ago, some half-hearted attempt at public health that Negan had obeyed with serenity, would never mind the mystique—and tonight the island had answered the summons with its whole chest. Hunters from a run crowded the tables with dock crews gray with river water. Younger members of the community played cards and the dartboard had a queue while the corner stage was being heatedly discussed for a karaoke session. The whole long room was amber, noisy, with about thirty people pressed shoulder to shoulder in the warm dark of it.

Maggie took one look at the press of bodies, the line at the counter three deep, and went in, folding her sleeves up her forearms, pulling bottles in this hustle of hers. It was fun; she'd never admit it.

Negan saw her, of course, but she had seen him first, so she felt it happen while she was working, felt the exact second his attention moved across the room and wedged between her shoulder blades as she leaned over. But he didn't come to her end. He worked down by the stage, slinging bottles and leaning into people, and for nearly an hour they ran the bar on opposite flanks once more, communicating in nothing but the economy of it; a bottle slid down the wood, caught without looking; a crowd surge toward the stage, and his body quietly repositioning to take the pressure off the left of the counter; her reaching the top-shelf rye for him before his hand had finished lifting toward it.

The karaoke really started at nine that night. The first soul was a trapper named Okafor, built like a wardrobe, one of the first who had gotten to the community all those years ago, and Maggie knew him enough to know that when he chose a song old and slow and sang with his eyes closed and his cap in his hands, it was not at all out of character, engulfed by the room gathered around the corner stage that way, a collective willingness to stop everything and watch one man be vulnerable at a microphone. 

With it, the bar emptied from her side in degrees, leaving her with nothing to do but watch, too, hands in rest on the counter considering the melody—until Negan was behind her.

That same displacement of air, a new temperature at her back, earth and smoke around her, and perhaps she did miss him after all, or missed the feeling of a thing right above her shoulder.

"You have somethin’ for me?" she asked without turning around.

"Hmm, yeah, I do," he spoke near the hair at her temple, so she could hear him in a layer under the noise without the effort of raising his voice. “How was your day?”

“My day?” 

“Your day.”

“Fine. What do you have for me?” 

Negan chuckled. Maggie wanted to sway on her feet, displace herself a few inches away so his chest wasn't so close to touching her back, though what really happened was quite the opposite when her head turned so she could give him an once over behind her shoulder. “What's so funny?”

“You're anxious. You don't have to be.” he told her. "I'm not gonna wait for you to resolve this by yourself. So I'll give you two options."

His arm came around her carefully, all the time in the world for her to move, which she didn't—and set a pair of leather hand wraps down on the counter in front of her. 

"We carve out everything you're feeling, every time you feel it," he said. "Just you, me, and the floor."

Maggie inhaled, looking at the wraps. Broken-in leather, thumb loops, the lacing wrapped neat and tight—he must've found them in the bunker. She tried to picture him finding them. In truth, her hand beside it twitched to touch, despite the picture, the guilt, a repeat performance of that day; them, on the floor, them, around and under and above each other.

"I'm not gonna hurt you," she said. "That's not gonna make me feel better."

"You wouldn't hurt me," Negan assured, still warm, still at her ear. "It would be just sparring. With rules—that you got the hots for so much."

She looked back at him over her shoulder. Found his face close, eyes certain and bright though he was unsmiling. 

"Nobody leaves hurt," he continued. "Nobody leaves mad. You say the word, and we stop."

"We can still get hurt."

"Kiddie pool," he shrugged, one shoulder moving against the air near hers. "Unless you don't think it's enough?" Okafor in the corner made the men howl, and the noise washed up against them and broke, and the quiet from her tongue didn't. "You want me to push you over the edge?" Negan asked, making whatever of her silence, her eyes on his, the rise and fall of her chest. "We got option two."

Sensing the shift always happened too late, for her, with him. And she didn't know why. She knew him well. And yet. Maggie found shelter in blinding herself, eyes closed under the earth while the hands travelling through her body dug her out. Felt herself be overtaken by how exactly she was placed in a split second, at the sound of his voice saying option, almost pressed against the bar, and caged by him. Back in the woods, muddy hands from the riverbank, running for her life—heightened heartbeat, lungs of tin.

"Let me take care of you."

Maggie scoffed—one short, disbelieving breath through her nose—and turned her face forward again, toward the stage, toward a mournful glory, her hands fisting on the counter where they rested.

"I'm not a cheater," she said. "And I'm not attracted to you."

"You don't have to be," the words arrived pre-armored, as though he'd thought about it plenty before, which shook her. "I know what attracts you. And I'm not scared to do it.”

Her breath was coming fast. She tried to rule it—drew it in slow through her nose, set her jaw, counted the string lights hanging over the stage—and when she trusted herself again she turned her head, all the way this time, and looked into his eyes. 

Maggie said it mildly, how you'd correct your name on someone else's mouth, "You killed the love of my life."

"I saved the next best thing for you." Still no flinch from him. If anything his gaze went steadier, just like his voice got hoarser. "I brought him still breathing right to the foot of your bed."

Her throat contracted. 

You don't need him. You have us.

I have you because of him, Luis.

The stories she told herself, the fear and the tension and the adrenaline—they made her dizzy.

"What do you want me to say," Maggie asked, "good boy?"

"Say yes." Negan inched closer. "I have a couple good years left. What are you gonna have then but your girl scout badges?"

So this was not asking her to want him like that. He was asking her to let him be spent in every aspect. To take his life and burn it on her in all the ways that kept her going out there to try to find his family for. So she wouldn't want to. So she wouldn't have to.

"Ah." She let herself smile at that, bitter and mean and frustrated, because it was that or else. "You want me to carry this guilt we share to my grave. That's your love letter?"

"I haven't felt guilt in years, Maggie." As though the feeling was such a particular place he'd visited once, found dull. And she believed it that way. "You gave me everything I wanted. Then I felt gratitude, but that was pretty boring pretty quickly, Miss Rhee."

The drawl came back on her name, a finger laid across the seam of the things he was implying. The awfulness of it.

"Free trial, c'mon." Negan shifted, though not closer again, just settling in to take her answer. "I'll be off of you in a second. You just have to say the word."

Maggie averted her eyes from him to the wraps on the counter. To the room beyond, the crowd—her people, never once glancing back at the bar where their leader stood between a hard place and her executioner.

Why would they?

There were so many words, running about in her head. And she could never, ever say yes. Like once upon a time she couldn't ask him to kill the Dama, like she would never have asked him to kill Fabian. Her heart was going like she'd cleared the farmhouse again. Her mouth was dry.

When Maggie finally did speak, what came out was simple.

“I'm not gonna do that to him.”

And she expected a sigh, perhaps some more prodding. Just because Negan was insufferable. He had the worst timing for quitting. He had no sense. He was a brute. He broke her heart.

But he nodded once instead, “Alright,” and complied. “So you're choosing option A?”

“I'm not choosin’ anythin’,” she looked down at the wraps, kept her eyes on them. “I need to go.”

But didn't move. Her knuckles remained resting against the edge, wood digging at the joints, and her feet stayed under her in her prettily tied boots.

“Mm,” Negan hummed, looking down over her shoulder at her nails near the leather. “Okay. Make me a drink before you go?”

Maggie closed her eyes. Opened them a few seconds later.

“What do you want?”

“Savannah Snowstorm.”

Right. Of course.

Whatever locked her body in place, locked it for an amount of seconds longer, half a minute or so while she felt him by her elbows.

Half a minute, before she reached the shelf beneath the counter by going down on one knee, crouching into the dark under the bar. Could feel Negan standing above her, unmoving, occupying the narrow space she would have to rise into while she pulled the peach schnapps, the cream, the bottle of whiskey she needed for the rinse, and her hands—

When she stood, set the bottles up, the shaker, her hands were trembling. He gave her exactly one inch; warm wool behind her, the buckle of his belt near the base of her spine.

Maggie steadied the liqueur against her palm and poured with Negan's breath behind her ear, every single nerve in her wanting to tell him to fuck off and back away, holding back while her nose twitched, anger crawling from her toes to her belly. She came here so he could help her, not—

If he wasn't aware of the quivering in her, he was made aware when she reached for the whiskey bottle and her fingers clipped the neck and it went over on its side with a heavy glass knock, amber sliding in gulps across the wood.

“Shit—”

The sweetness climbing into her nose, mixing with smoke and sweat and the heat of thirty people who had no idea what was taking place ten feet behind them, or knew perfectly well, and she was grabbing the cloth from the hook, dabbing at the pool racing toward the edge, bracing one hand flat against the surface to sop up the spill before it dripped onto her boots.

In the second she leaned, Negan closed the distance.

And she had time, she had time, the whole length of a song ago, a whole bar ago, she had all the time in the world to step out of the edge of him before his left arm came around her waist, locking over her belly with a firm hand, hauling her into him until her spine was pressed flush against his chest, before she could draw breath to bite, his right hand already moving too—sliding down past the waistband of her jeans, coarse knuckles grazing the dip of her hip bone, calloused fingers slipping past the cotton of her underwear.

There was no seam, no boundary between the memory of his thumbs pressing into her neck at the boathouse and this, his hand gripping her thigh and this, his palm on her hair and this. His voice saying I love you back right in the middle of the world.

Maggie froze when she first felt the touch, the skin on skin, something she was never supposed to know, a cold-hot shock she would torture herself with for the days to come, and her breath hitched past her lips, a rattle for her lungs. 

“Shhhh,” against her ear. His fingers moved and she stopped breathing—kept moving, parting her, harsh digits on soft sensitive flesh, kneading, finding, dragging the wetness of her folds up and down, agonizingly, disgustingly lazy, considering his own hand's findings until she realized she couldn't force her parted lips closed, until she felt the electricity curling in her toes. She wanted to kill him. “I have to say, though… you're drooling pretty nicely for someone who's not attracted to me.”

She would kill him.

She would—

A dockhand drifted toward the bar right at that moment, half-lidded with an empty glass in hand. Maggie tried to shift forward, to clamp her thighs together, but Negan didn't pull his hand out. He drove his hip hard into the curve of her backside, pinning her flush to the bar, and casually leaned his upper body over hers, head coming up over her shoulder. He stared the man down from there—an expression of such annihilating boredom, two seconds of flat hazel warning that when the man caught, blanched him, and immediately rerouted him to the right, melting back into the laughing circle near the stage. 

Maggie’s fingers dug into the wet cloth, her eyes fluttering shut as heat crawled straight up her spine. The absolute filth of it—standing behind a counter in front of people she governed, people who looked to her for grain, for safety, for law, while—

“I'm gonna kill you.”

Her blood was boiling. It was sickening. It was anguishing. She wanted to cry; this was never where they should be. It overwhelmed her. It made her hips twitch against his palm.

“I was hoping you would.” Negan rumbled, his chest vibrating against her shoulder blades as he dragged two fingers up through the heat, circling the knot of her clitoris with just enough pressure to make her thighs shudder, her footing change, her fever grow. She was sweating, red and bright. She wanted to clench and unclench and clench again. She wanted this to be a product of her sleep so she could. So she could grind against a hand outstretched. So she could come to it with a muddled mind and barely remember in daylight. "I could feel you throbbing on my cock last week, by the way." 

“Fuck off—” she choked out. 

Please stop. Please stop.

“Through denim, Maggie,” he murmured, his thumb joining in, rolling over the nerve until a harsh, stuttering breath caught in the back of her throat. She was tight everywhere, tense, strung as though tied up to a tree and left there as living bait. Her boot heels dug into the floor, squirming without squirming, causing friction unpermitted, stupidly, fucking terribly—

“I've rarely seen you without those two belts of yours,” his index finger nudged just past her entrance, teasing the rim without pushing in. “It's almost like this is exactly what you had in mind tonight.”

Maggie forced her eyes open, glaring at their blurred reflection in the mirror across the room from them—her flushed face beneath the purple on her cheekbone, his jaw against her ear, rubbing his beard against her skin.

“What a predatory thought,” she hissed.

“Said my willing prey.” 

He slid one long finger inside of her.

Maggie choked on the air in her throat, her spine locking with the feeling, her back crushing his chest as the roughness of his split skin filled her possessively and her body felt the urge to take, to expand, to be caught by a corresponding edge.

And then a second finger. And there she was beyond breathing, she was beyond normally doing so, normally behaving, gravel and fog and a darkness so bright muffling her brain that her hips twitched around his hand. She hated him. She hated him so intensely it felt like fire behind her eyelids. Two fingers slowly driven inside her, curling upward as he dragged the heel of his hand hard against her mound, a broad, friction-heavy grind making her weak, making her want to fight, making her tremble with the sorrow she felt, the pulsing that tightened inside and was just adrenaline. Just adrenaline. “Good, yeah?”

No.

No. No.

Maggie’s breath came in shallow, broken gasps through her nose. She stared at the puddle of whiskey on the wood, watching it tremble with her bracing body as Negan somehow gorged himself on the unforgivable act of fucking her.

“You don't mind that this is the hand I use to kill for you, right?” Fucking asshole— “Or that everyone can see, but if they dare look—” He pumped his fingers slow and heavy, deeply dragging the seam of her inside out, scraping against an ache she'd let him know about. Had invited him to. Her belly tightening, her legs quivering. “Is that what's making you so wet, boss? Or perhaps you are attracted to me after all.”

Maggie bared her teeth, tears of overstimulated friction pricking the corners of her eyes as she tried to claw back some scrap of ground as he hooked his fingers, touched her where she needed to be touched unprompted, with nails and a want to scratch at the walls.

“You're too old for me,” she gasped, failing as she trembled, overwhelmed by a pleasure that led her right hand to flee from the counter and reach down, locking around his wrist, unsure if to rip him out of her or pull him deeper, digging into the hard sinew of his forearm, feeling the tendons jump and cord under her grip with every thrust of his fingers as her forehead dropped down until it rested against the wet counter, lips parted, hot breath on the surface warming her face.

Negan let out a gravelled laugh into her hair, the wire of his beard scratching along her jawline. 

“I think that's the least of our problems, Miss Margaret,” he pumped deeper, faster, more of her slickness covering the palm he was grinding harder against her clit with, heavily, constantly. “You just never considered it, did you? To look at me like that. I understand. You don't work that way.”

She shook her head frantically. The room seemed to tilt toward the bar as her core tightened around his hand in ripples. Maggie felt every light above them, every voice, every careless scrape of a chair. She felt the audience without anyone watching, the danger without any threat. Felt herself framed in the mirror by his body, protected and exposed by the same pair of arms.

“This ain't right.”

“It isn't. And I have bad, bad news for you,” He drove into her, over and over, catching her on the upstroke, dragging her higher, higher, until the pulse between her legs was all there was, on her ears, her cheeks, her throat, her breasts. “You made me want to put that thought in your head. I would've never done it. But if you need me to be the bad guy, honey—”

“Negan—” she gasped, head pushing and twisting against the hard wood as though in agony, unable to bear the open room, unable to bear the mirror, clenching around his fingers, deciding in a moment and lifting her neck, turning her head sideways, burying her nose and open mouth directly into the coarse wool of his bicep. She dragged in air through his sleeve—smelling his sweat, the cold metal of his sidearm—panting voraciously against the muscle to muffle the breathy sounds leaking from her lips, her hips rocking onto his hand without her permission, seeking the friction, starving for it.

“That's it, honey,” he growled in her ear, his thumb working fast, striking the nerve that pulled all the blood from her extremities straight into her belly, blurring the edges of her mind until the hate and the grief and the adrenaline fused into a single color behind her eyelids, her rolling eyes. “Come on. Cum on my hand, Maggie. See if it's good enough for you.”

The world was another, spinning as it was while she was rooted heavy to that ground. The heat inside her coiled tighter, tighter. She was suffocating on the smell of his coat, the whiskey, her own arousal, dragged up to a ledge so high the air was thin. She was right there, sounds rising from her tongue in a breathy string of “ah- ah—”, Negan’s breath hitching in satisfaction against her ear, his palm on her belly tightening, clawing, keeping her—

The cold draft of the outside sliced right through the warmth of the Fram as the door swung with the chime of the iron bell, found the sweat on her skin.

Maggie’s eyes snapped open. 

Standing in the doorway, the blue hospital cardigan still draped over his arm, his dark eyes adjusting to the dimness of the room as he searched the bar for her, was Luis.

In a trigger of her heart, Maggie shoved Negan clean off, moving on fear and fear alone, both palms shooting back and slamming flat into his stomach, shoving with everything the last ninety seconds had wound into her muscles, hard enough that he struck the shelves behind him, bottles knocking together startledly. His hand vanished from her body, his fingers sliding free of her denim with a wet, dragging resistance, catching slick on the waistband before leaving cold in its place—cold and the stinging throbbing of her blood, still rushing where it had been summoned.

"Fuck—" she hissed at the air, yanked her shirt down, dragged a shaking hand through her hair, and found that she was still panting. Open-mouthed. Her eyes were wide, she could feel how wide, and she couldn't narrow them. They stayed on Luis.

Negan followed her stare.

For one second, neither of them moved. She could hear herself breathing. Could hear him breathing behind her. Separate sounds, incriminating in their difference.

Luis started toward them.

People opened a path, a shoulder shifted, a chair drew in. Okafor reached the final line of another song and the room applauded, giving Luis’s approach the ceremony of an entrance.

Maggie straightened. Quickly, the room dipped and righted itself. She dragged the cloth across the counter, collecting whiskey she could no longer see properly, every movement honed by the need to appear ordinary. Her face burned. Her clothes felt incorrectly arranged, though nothing showed. Everything showed.

Beside her, Negan recovered with less effort, leaning one hip against the back counter, loose-limbed, his face tilted toward the stage as if he had been listening all along. Only the pulse moving hard in his throat betrayed him, and even that could have belonged to the room, the heat, the work.

Luis reached the bar stopping two feet from the counter, knuckles resting lightly against the rounded edge. His gaze went first to Maggie’s face, her eyes, then to the cloth trapped beneath her knuckles, taking in the hand wraps, the dark, dampness on the wood, her collarbones lifting. He looked at Negan last.

The air behind the bar was so thick with the smell of them—skin, alcohol, the sweat and arousal—that Maggie was sure if he could feel it, it would choke him. It made her breath worse, the trembling, the dryness in her mouth leveling up.

Luis frowned, blinking as he looked between the two of them.

“Everything good here?”

Maggie opened her mouth.

“Peachy,” Negan said.

The word hovered between the three of them, and Maggie felt her skin tighten because she knew—she knew—what was coming next, had maybe half a second of foreknowledge, the way you see the walker behind the glass a blink before it strikes.

Negan lifted his right hand, the one that had been inside her, the one with the split knuckles and the tattooed middle finger and her slickness still shining on it in the low light, and put the two fingers in his mouth. He drew them slowly past his lips, tongue working the pad of his ring finger once, brazen, with his eyes on Luis the entire time. Flat. Interested. A kind pity he had no right to show.

With the same hand, he reached past her for the waiting glass of liqueur—his chest brushing her shoulder, and she felt the drag of wool and Maggie twitched before she could disguise it, under his stare, heavy lidded, no mocking light, steady and pitiless as he tracked the rise and fall of her ribs. 

He wrapped his hand around it, swirled it once, and drank, watching Luis over the rim.

Luis looked at the glass. Then at Negan's mouth. Then at Maggie.

And Maggie—Maggie standing with the rag in her fist and the unspent heat coiled in her belly and felt, rising back up through all of it, through the panic and the shame and the adrenaline that hadn't found its exit and the strange grief of a pleasure stolen—felt anger. 

She would kill Negan. She would kill him for this. 

She threw the cloth aside.

"I'm gonna go home.”

Luis looked down. The dampness cleansed by dampness, clinging like dew on the surface.

“Mine or yours?”

“Mine.”

“We need to talk, though,” he said.

The hospital cardigan remained folded over his arm. Maggie fixed on that—the straight seam, the dark cuff tucked carefully inward. He had come directly from work, expecting to find her, perhaps take her home.

Negan set down his glass.

Luis’s eyes shifted to him. “Could you give us a minute?”

“No,” Maggie said.

Both men looked at her.

The answer had come hauled up by the same instinct that made her reach for a knife when a branch snapped in the dark. Negan’s expression did not change, but she felt his attention settle on her fully.

She corrected herself. “Not here.”

Luis studied her, so much patience remained in his face. It was not innocence, nor was it stupidity. 

“Then when?”

“Not tonight.”

Negan picked up the leather wraps and drew them off the counter, folding one over the other quietly, thumb running along the worn leather.

The song on the stage became faster, a jaunty fiddle tune that had boots stomping the floorboards across the room. Luis kept his attention on her.

“Are you going home because you're running from me,” he asked, voice kept strictly beneath the music, “or from him?”

Negan didn’t even pause the rolling of the leather wraps between his thumbs. He tilted his head back, eyes catching the amber overheads. 

“Why would she want to run from me?”

Luis’s gaze cut to him. “Would a list satisfy you?”

“Yeah.” Negan smirked, a cruel little quirk of his lip that showed teeth. “Try me.”

“No,” Maggie planted both palms hard against the sticky wood of the counter, leaning into the space between them. “Stop it, right now.”

Negan lowered his chin in an exaggerated nod, voice dropping into purring deference. “Yes ma'am.”

The title sharpened Luis’s face. Not visibly enough for anybody who didn’t know him—but she knew the minute changes. The small whitening around his mouth. His eyes darting between Negan’s laid back posture and the rigidity in Maggie’s shoulders. 

“What's happening here?” he asked.

Maggie swallowed the bile pooling down her throat, trying to pull the coolness back into her face. “What do you mean?”

“Five years, Maggie,” Luis said, like a breath he'd been holding for as long as she'd been holding the ungratefulness inside her. “And you never told me about the way he killed your husband. All this time I was made believe that Hershel's father died because of him, not by his hands, not out of cruelty.”

A cold grip snaked itself around the center of her chest, freezing out the residual thrum of another man’s touch, whose thumb stopped against the edge of the wrap. The denim covering her legs felt hot and sodden, clinging to her skin.

Maggie looked at Luis’s cardigan still. Not his face. A faint rust-colored mark near the cuff, iodine or old blood, and one of the wooden buttons hung by only half its thread.

“Luis, not here,” she shook her head.

“And how did you find out?” Negan asked, unbothered and unconcerned with how they met each other being a previously unknown story to her partner.

“Armstrong let it slip,” Luis said, staring straight at Maggie, pleading and frustrated. “I don't understand.”

“It's not yours to understand,” Her voice bruised itself against the words. She tried again, lower. “It’s mine.”

Luis stared at her as if she had spoken in another language and he could almost, almost make sense of it.

“But if this is some kind of—” He looked behind her. Not at Negan’s face this time, but his hands. “If you need help—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Spare me,” Negan muttered, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling with an exhausted, theatrical sigh.

“Luis,” Maggie pressed, feeling the eyes of her community just over his shoulder, feeling the phantom weight of Negan’s belt buckle still pressed against the small of her back. The absolute madness of the moment wanting to split her skull open. “You know me. You know us.”

“I thought I did,” he looked at her flushed throat, the rapid pulse fluttering beneath the bruised angle of her jaw, the way her weight was shifted away from the man behind her yet completely anchored to him, and his gaze darkened, the confidence love had lent him going out of it. The belief that when he reached for her he knew where she would be. “Now I'm wondering how many of those bruises and scars are his.”

Negan let out a low, dry chuckle from deep in his chest, leaning himself against the back shelf.

“Only the one on her womb. The scar, I mean,” Negan said smoothly, tilting his head toward Luis with a dead, level stare. “I have a far more thrilling collection, if you're interested in defending my honor too, doc. Our girl is feisty, if you have also not known that by now."

The glass left Maggie’s hand before she knew she had picked it up.

It missed Negan’s head by less than an inch and shattered against the shelving. He didn’t duck, and the fracture exploded across the bottles behind him. The room flinched as one body. Onstage, the microphone gave an empty howl.

Nobody spoke.

Negan wiped a shard from his shoulder.

Maggie found herself breathing through her teeth. “Back room. Both of you.” Luis did not move. Neither did Negan. She pointed toward the door behind the bar. “Now.”

Negan went first. Not because he feared her. Because he understood which version of disobedience would hurt worst and, tonight, had apparently decided there were limits to what he would take. He lifted the counter gate for her, and with no other choice she passed through before he let it fall and the wood strike permeated the bar. 

Luis followed after a second. 

The office was hardly an office, the cramped square with a desk Negan never used, invoices speared onto a nail, two mismatched chairs, ammunition stacked beneath a calendar still showing August. The single lamp made the walls look nicotine-stained, though no one was allowed to smoke inside, though he sure as shit did. Negan leaned against the filing cabinet. Luis stayed near the door.

Maggie stood between them because there was nowhere else to stand.

From the other side of the wall came a muffled voice announcing the next singer. The room at large had already begun the strenuous work of pretending nothing had happened.

“You don't talk for me,” Maggie told Negan.

He studied the leather in his hands. “Yes ma'am.”

Her anger stumbled. She had expected a fight and had already thrown the first thing within reach.

“Yes?” she repeated.

“Yes.” He rubbed his thumb across one of the laces. “I'm sorry.”

Luis made a sound that was almost a laugh and contained nothing resembling humor. “You're sorry?”

Negan looked up. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You’ve done enough talking to her.”

Maggie stepped toward Luis. “You don't talk for me either.”

His eyes flashed to hers. “So you do the talking, Maggie. Talk. Because I’m trying very hard to understand what's been going on this last month and the only person who seems willing to explain it is the man who killed your husband.”

Negan’s mouth drew flat, Maggie saw it because her head turned, chin down to watch him react, to guard his reaction.

When she looked back at Luis, she shook her head, “You think I forgot?”

“No.”

“You think I need remindin'?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I think you’ve been standing next to the person who did it every day for years, and I didn’t know.” Luis pressed his lips together. He looked exhausted suddenly. “I think I came in here and saw you frightened.”

“I wasn’t frightened.”

Luis watched them, and she saw the recalculation in his face. Every dinner interrupted by a knock at the door. Every late patrol. Every argument in which Maggie had anticipated Negan’s answer before he gave it. Every time one of them had looked across a crowded room and found the other already watching.

Five years of harmless intimacy becoming something that probably should never have existed.

“Did he touch you?”

Maggie could have lied. The lie sat ready, simple and almost tender. No. A single syllable to put Luis back into the world he had occupied an hour ago.

Her body would not give it to him.

Negan straightened away from the cabinet. “I didn't hurt her, no.”

Luis scoffed, “You don’t speak for her, remember?”

“No,” Negan said. “I make a point not to. It gets me glassware thrown at my head.”

Maggie’s stomach turned with a vicious, exhausted heat. “Everythin's so bright to you, isn't it?”

“I know that's a rhetorical question,” he said it without ornament, and she rolled her eyes.

Luis took a step toward him. “If you put your hands on her—”

“What?” Negan asked softly.

The softness stopped Luis more effectively than a threat.

Negan set the wraps on the desk. One, then the other, aligned carefully. “You’re gonna break my fingers? Cut my throat? Tell me what a monster I am?” He leaned forward, fist braced on the desktop. “Get in line. Soon as you gather your balls.”

“Enough,” Maggie said.

Neither listened.

“She doesn't need a doctor, Dr. Doc. She doesn’t need you diagnosing every crooked thing she does and deciding it needs to be set straight.”

Luis’s face tightened. “You don’t know the first thing about what she needs.”

Negan looked at Maggie.

That was all. A glance, no longer than a blink.

“Alright,” he pushed off the desk, ghastly civic, containing himself. “I’m going.”

She caught his sleeve. Her hand closed before thought, fingers knotting into wool. Negan stopped with one foot turned toward the door. His eyes lowered to her grip and then rose to her face. For a second the bar, Luis, the years between all of them—everything dropped away, and Maggie was looking at the man who knew exactly which graves she visited and never asked what she said there. The man who could tell whether she had slept by the way she tied her hair. The man she hated in ways that had grown roots through all the other names for him. And both realized at the same time that she never meant to hold him back, that her mind did not veto her hand reaching out and that she didn't know why she was gripping to him. 

Until she did know.

She wanted him to fix this too.

Negan looked down at her fingers where they were twisted into his sleeve. Then he reached down with his left hand—and laid it flat over her knuckles. He didn’t pry. He just pressed down until the tension in her tendons eased by a fraction, coaxing the grip out of her.

"Talk to him," he said.  

"Negan—" she started, his name catching on the grit in her throat.

"I'll see you outside." he murmured, his thumb brushing once across the red crease her own nails had left in her palm before he let her hand drop.

Not looking back at Luis, unlatching the door with a flick of his wrist, he slipped through the opening. When the door swung shut behind him, it cut off the immediate light and left them with the desk lamp.

Maggie stayed facing the door, pulse still hammering in the hollow beneath her ears.

Behind her, Luis exhaled—a long, regulated drag through his nose.

"You good?" he asked.

She drew in a breath, forcing her shoulder blades down, willing the tension out of her spine until she felt okay enough to pivot. 

“I'm good.”

Luis hadn't moved from his spot, standing with his arms hanging loose at his sides, cardigan draped over one forearm. In the flat, unflattering lamp light, the dark smudges under his eyes were prominent. 

"Hershel told me once," he began, in mild, conversational tone, now that the room was only theirs. "that Negan was the reason he was brought into the city by the Croat."

"He was," she agreed flatly.

"And Glenn?"

Glenn. Maggie’s jaw tightened until her molars ground together. 

"Glenn died a lifetime ago, Luis."

"That wasn't my question." He stepped forward, just one pace, stopping short of her personal space as he always did—polite, considerate, leaving her room to retreat. "Did he do it how Armstrong said? Did he put you on your knees? Did he—"

"Yes."

Luis closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, the disbelief hadn't cleared, though it looked duller. "Why? I mean, how—"

"I needed him," Maggie said, hard and defensive and wavy before any lie she could want to tell. "You don't know what it took—" Her eyes watered, and she despised it, despised it— “I can't let him go.”

"I’m here," he said, gently so. Always so gentle with her. "I've been here for so long, Maggie. In your bed. At your table. And every time I look at you, I see so much weight. And I have it too, but you know what it is, you can touch it, and I can let go of it because you can." He gestured toward the shut door with a faint lift of his chin. "I never really understood, you know, that you kept the man who caused the death of someone you loved so much. I thought it was for the same reason I kept my brother walking after he was already gone. And that's why you only treat him like a loyal knight. But this, Maggie—"

"I can't make you understand, I'm sorry. I don't know what you want to hear."

"You're too close to him." His voice cracked slightly, composure fraying. "You're too close and you need to understand—the blood, the bruises, the tension… this is not good."

Looking down at the worn floorboards between their boots, the leather wraps Negan had left sat on the corner of the desk, pale and coiled like a shed skin, she felt the ache in her ribs return to her.

"I don't know how to be the person you want me to be," it was a lie. It had to be. "I try. God, Luis, I try every day. But some days it feels like— I need to feel unsafe so I can earn the safety, so everyone can be safe, I need to justify everythin'—"

Luis watched her, the pity returning to his eyes, and yet there remained a stubborn warmth. 

"You earned the comfort of your home.”

He stepped across the remaining distance between them. His hands came up, hovering for a fraction of a second before settling gently onto the sides of her neck. 

His palms were tender and dry, smelling faintly of carbolic soap and the lavender balm he used on surgical scrub burns. Cool skin against her burning neck. Designed not to bruise, designed to soothe. 

Maggie leaned into it slightly, wanting to want the cool, wanting desperately to believe that this was it, this was it forever. Forever she would have a lover, and a child, forever she would be good to herself.

"I love you, Maggie," he whispered, searching her eyes. "We can fix this. You don't need these war grounds. Let him have the bar, let him have the walls, but don't let him have you."

"Luis..."

He didn't wait for her to find an objection. He leaned down and pressed his mouth to hers.

Soft and familiar and tasting of mint and the clean air of the hospital. It was the harbor she had promised herself she deserved, and her eyes closed to it, hands rising up to grip the front of his shirt, pulling him closer, throwing herself into the motion with a sudden urgency. 

She kissed him back hard, parting her lips, trying to lose herself, find herself, trying to scrub a previous taste. She wanted the harbor. She wanted the quiet. She wanted to prove to him—to prove to herself—

Luis made a low, surprised sound in his throat, encouraged by her response. His hands slid down from her neck, fingers tracing the line of her collarbone, smoothing over her jacket before dropping to her waist. 

He pulled her against him, and Maggie went, her fingers digging into his back, seeking deep, needing it to ground her, her racing mind, tracking the sounds of the bar outside as the kiss grew heavier, deeper. His right hand left her waist, drifted over the curve of her hip, fingers sliding down the outer seam of her denim, searching before moving deliberately toward the front of her jeans. 

His knuckles brushed against the button of her fly, intending to slip underneath the waistband, to pull her flush against him and touch her properly.

Panic hit Maggie in about a second of realizing.

Her breath froze in her chest. 

If he touches me—

If Luis’s hand moved another two inches, if his fingers slipped past the cotton, he would feel how soaked she was. He would feel the swollen pulse of a body that had been driven to the very brink of coming seconds before he walked into the room. 

He would know—the time it took for a woman’s body to reach that point, would know instantly that much slick hadn't come from a two-minute conversation about grief. He would know she hadn't just been physically assaulted; she had been participating. He would know the wetness on her skin belonged to another man’s hand.

No.

Maggie pulled back so fast her shoulder blades hit the wall behind her.

Luis's hand stayed where it was, suspended at her hip, fingers half-curled around nothing. His mouth was still parted, still shaped around the kiss she'd just taken from him and then abandoned mid-breath, and she watched the warmth drain out of his eyes in real time.

"No," she said, one hand clamped over her lower abdomen, fingers pressing hard through her jeans. She tried again, softer, her hands coming up to rest flat against his sternum. "Luis. No. Not— not right now."

He looked at her with his brows creased, already beginning the work of translation—what did that flinch mean, what did the hand on his chest mean.

"Okay," he said, nevertheless. One breath. Two. "Okay."

And he was prompt to step back, bend down, pick up his cardigan from the floor where it had slipped, shake it out with a single, neat snap of his wrists. Folded carefully over his arm once more.

"I'm sorry," she told him. "I just— I can't. Tonight. My head's—" she gestured vaguely at her own skull, a meaningless loop of the hand. "I'll see you tomorrow.”

Luis nodded slowly. She watched him decide not to ask tomorrow when, tomorrow where, tomorrow what—watched the questions line up behind his teeth and never come through.

"Tomorrow," he agreed, meekly, to the space between them.

In the morning, she checked Negan’s apartment first.

The place was cool, bed empty of him with the blanket tossed aside. A pair of worn boot socks lay near the fireplace, but his coat was gone and so was his knife belt. So she went to the security station next. 

The morning shift was already sorting requisition slips by the front windows. Armstrong nodded to her as she walked through. She stopped to ask, went around and above and below. No sight of him.

Maggie left the main square, taking the alley behind their trade center. The back door of the Fram was set into an old delivery slip below street level, sunken and dark by brick and an abandoned fire escape. The padlock hung open on its hasp. She pulled the heavy wood inward, and stepped into the stale hush of the cellar.

When the bar faced her, it smelled of yesterday. Stale beer gone sour on the floorboards, the citrus of dried rind, spilt whiskey. Single shafts of gray daylight passing through corners of the matte windows. She found him in the middle of the room.

He was on his back on the bare planks, legs splayed loose, knees bent up so the soles of his heavy boots rested flat against the wood. No coat. His dark work shirt was open by the three top buttons, and it had ridden up three inches from his waistline, bunching under his ribs to expose the pale, scarred slab of his belly, gray hairs thinning around his navel, and the dark, coarse sliver of his happy trail disappearing down into the denim of his waistband. His left arm was thrown across his forehead, shielding his eyes from the light, while his right hand rested limp on his gut, curled around the neck of an empty bottle.

Maggie stopped at the corner of the stage, looking down at the sprawling length of him. 

“What the hell are you doin’ on the floor?”

Negan didn't take his arm off his face. His throat worked once in a dry click as he swallowed air. 

“I’m drunk.”

“I can see that, head of security.”

He grunted. A miserable rattle deep in his chest that pulled at his nose and made him suck a short breath through his teeth. 

Maggie walked the length of the counter. She pulled his apartment keys from her pocket, set them down flat on the surface. Negan’s hand slid from his forehead, knuckles dragging heavily through his hair until his arm fell limp against the floorboards beside his ear. His eyes were bloodshot to the rims, squinting up toward the ceiling. Chest rising and falling, rising and falling.

“I was selfish, yesterday,” he rasped, apropos of nothing. “When I asked you to let me handle it.”

Maggie stopped as her shadow stretched long across the floor, falling across his chest, across the curve of his jaw.

“I don't wanna be the reason why you lose someone else,” he continued, staring fixedly at a water stain near the light fixture. “I just wanted—” 

His jaw locked, teeth grinding audibly until the tendon in his neck twitched. He let out a trembling exhale, eyes watering further.

“God, Margaret. I love you so much, it's insufferable. You—” His fingers dug into his gut, shirt bunching in his fist beneath the bottle. “You make me wanna stay.”

The bar was so calm, so calm for this, so calm for them.

“I thought it was the place we built,” he whispered, “That New York was what made me want to build something grand.”

He blinked rapidly against the light. Maggie's teeth scraped against her lower lip, watching him.

“But it's you.” He swallowed again. “It terrifies me, the thought of losing you,” and then he finally looked at her. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Maggie stood over him, perfectly still, looking down at his face, the gray at his temples and his eyes closing slowly like he couldn't bear the sight of her for long. 

"You shouldn't have touched me like that."

Negan didn't open his eyes. “I know.”

She stared at him for three long seconds. Then, unhurriedly, her jacket creaking as she moved, she lowered herself to the floorboards, sat near his right shoulder, her knees pulled up, one boot tucked under the other, settling into the cold beside him.

“That's why you did it?” she asked, looking down at his profile. “Because you were scared of losin’ me?”

Negan’s eyelids flickered open, heavy and glazed, turning his head half an inch to look up at her where she hovered.

She held his gaze, her voice lowering between them as she continued, “I thought it was for you,” she told him. “So I would stop askin’ for us to go out there and find your family. If I used you like that—”

When she stopped, Negan didn't fill the silence. He didn't ask her what she meant, didn't demand the rest of the thought, knowing every ugly, transactional corner of her mind already.

Maggie looked at the rising and falling of his shirt, at the gray hair over his chest, and reached out. 

She laid her open palm flat against the center of his sternum. 

Under muscle tattooed and scarred, and the bone, she felt—hard and even and so alive, the heaviness of his heart knocking against the inside of her hand. She let her palm rest, anchoring him to the floor like she would want to be, like she would like to have a reason, a purpose for keeping still, feeling the heat of his skin until her own fingers warmed.

She patted his chest twice. 

“You need to sober up.”

Negan exhaled through his nose. His fingers moved on the boards, brushing against the leather of her boot before coming to rest.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured.

Maggie pulled her hand back, curling her fingers into her lap, watching his chest settle.

“I know.”

She should have known; it's what she would think, later. She should have seen it coming.

That morning she had stopped to see the frost crisping the edges of the wild blackberry runners that had crept into the south garden plot before the fence could stop them. Maggie was down on both knees in the mulch, working the roots loose with a rusted hand trowel, her pants caked in silt. Her knees ached into the dirt, and it all kept the noise in her head down as she picked through the thorny tangle, ignoring the occasional shallow red scratches across her knuckles, searching out the ones the birds hadn’t ruined yet. 

Plucking one, she rolled the beaded skin against her thumb, and pressed it between her teeth. It burst sweet and sour, and tasted coppery, dusty and rainy. 

She plucked another, and held it out behind her without turning her head. Had heard him coming. His shadow broke the sunlight when his hand reached down and took the berry from her palm.

He didn’t eat it. He just held it between his thumb and forefinger, rolling until the juice stained his callus.

“I need to talk to you,” Negan said.

Maggie planted the trowel upright in the churned soil, wiped her damp hands flat against the thighs of her jeans, and pushed herself up from the ground. Her lower back gave a pop as she straightened, the wind caught a loose strand of hair across her mouth; she tucked it behind her ear and looked at him.

Negan stood two paces off. He wore his leather jacket zipped to the throat against the chill, a black scarf around his neck, the little berry held unconsumed in his palm.

He looked past her shoulder toward the green expanse of the park, jaw working slowly. 

“I… I decided to go look for them,” he said.

The wind took a handful of dry leaves across the soil between their boots. Maggie’s hand lingered near her hip, fingers curling slightly against her belt.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

She let out a short breath, her mind instantly pivoting to the map in the back office, the routes they’d abandoned sixteen months ago, already calculating the logistics, supplies, perimeters. The relief was instantaneous, automatic—a purpose, friction, miles of cold road to burn through where nobody could look at her bruises. 

“Okay, well— I just have to leave some things with Solmari so she can adjust—”

“No, Maggie.”

His voice cut in weightless, without severity or heat or anything at all, so dull, so flat. He dropped his gaze from the tree line and looked straight at her.

“I'm going alone.”

She stared at him. “No.”

“There's no need for you to come,” Negan said, his tone even, reasonable, and it gave her gooseflesh instantly. “You need to stay.”

“No,” she repeated, her voice dropping a level. “You ain't goin’ out there alone.”

His lips pressed into a tight line. He tossed the crushed berry into the weeds at his feet, wiping the purple smear off his thumb onto the seam of his trousers. 

“This is what you wanted,” he said, looking at her with eyes that offered no passage through, no s.o.s she could spot and use to drag him from the island of his own self hatred. “You wanted me to grow up and find them.”

“I don't know when you're gonna come back,” she said, her chest rising fast against the fabric of her shirt, words tumbling out before she could smooth them into a leader’s posture. “People here—”

“We never knew when we were gonna come back,” Negan countered quietly. 

Every time. The month in Ohio. The three weeks combing through the burnt-out hollows of Delaware. All those months they had spent disappearing across the river, chasing cold trails and empty basements, leaving Hershel, leaving Luis, leaving the walls behind because the only thing either of them knew how to do was keep moving until they were exhausted enough to sleep.

Maggie kept her eyes on him, searching his face, the hazel that refused to give her a smirk or a wink or an inch of room to fight. 

She took half a step forward, the distance between them shrinking, blood rushing to her ears.

“Why?” she demanded, catching herself on a promise that she would not beg, and begging. “Why? Let me go with you. If we don't find anythin’—” She stopped when he tsked, the true notion of what was happening clawing its way up her throat. “You're punishin’ me.”

Negan looked at her unblinking. Looked at her, and lied to her, his brow pulling down in a weary furrow, looking at the high color in her cheeks, the mouth that had governed his life for so long. 

“No.”

“You are.”

“I just think—” He stopped, dragging a hand down his face, the gray hair at his temples. When he lowered his hand, there was nothing in his expression for her to hold on to. “You're gonna be alright.”

Maggie felt the blood drain from her face, leaving behind a stinging clarity that made her vision sharpen to a pinprick, a bitter, voracious heat burning behind her eyelids. She looked at his pack leaning against the post ten yards back, at the way his boots were tied tight, at the distance he was keeping from her skin.

Tomorrow.

Liar.

Fucking liar.

“You're not even gonna look for them, are you?” she hissed, the words spitting from her mouth, leaking from her tight chest. “You're just leavin’. After all this time—” 

Her voice fractured, but she forced her chin up, forced the disgust into her eyes, that's all there was; disgust, glaring into the whiskey-dark of his irises with every ounce of pride, every spoiled drop of rage, watching him give her nothing but indifference, nothing to fight with, nothing to fight for.

Maggie hated Negan. She hated him so much, so much it made her breathless. So much it made her nauseous. So much it made her dizzy and full and hungry and unreasonable, it made her young and old and tired and vibrating. She hated him so much, so much it felt like she was being buried alive.

“Coward,” she breathed, and he didn't move. He took the word right in the center of his chest, his jaw tightening, without offering an excuse, didn't throw back a line, didn't raise his hands to stop her. He just stood there and took it, the way he had taken her again and again and again and again. “What did I expect?”

She would not beg. She would not ask him how to make him stay. She had spent five years keeping him at the foot of her life, had dragged him into the light, had given herself over to the sick, unnamable want of having him near her—and this was how he rewarded her. Running. Slipping out the back door like a dog that had broken the rules and didn't want to see the mess it made.

Maggie didn't wait for him to speak. If he would.

She walked past him, keeping her eyes fixed on his, staring directly into the pit he was offering her until she cleared his space, until she drove her shoulder hard into his upper arm, hoping the collision would hurt, would scar him.

Would make him stay.

Negan rocked back half an inch from the impact, his boots shifting in the loose dirt.

But he didn't say a word. 

And Maggie kept walking.

She didn't care. She didn't give a shit.

Didn't care when after one week she would reach behind her at the council table to pass a requisition slip and her hand would hang suspended in two feet of empty air before she remembered she was holding paper for a man who'd left. Maggie didn't give a fuck.

She took over security rotas by Tuesday noon. Didn’t ask the council, drawing a line through Solmari’s neat script on the chalkboard, wiped Negan’s name off the perimeter rosters with the heel of her hand until the chalk dust turned her palm pale, and assigned the night watches to herself. 

Everything was normal. Everything. The whole island. She told them Negan went looking for his family. And nothing changed at all.

Nothing changed, but Luis returned to her bed. When she came home he would already be under the quilt, lying straight on his side of the mattress, the lamp turned low beside a medical journal on trench foot. He would stir, murmur her name into the pillow, his hand reaching out across the sheets to find the crook of her knee. Maggie would let his fingers rest there until his breathing deepened back into sleep. 

Nothing changed, and she would stare at the plaster ceiling, her pulse sitting hard and hot behind her ears like a second set of teeth, and she would remember again how much anger there was inside of her always, how hard it had been to turn her skin back to what it was before she was this. She stared at the ceiling and then stared at the pale curve of Luis's palm in the morning light. 

By the first month, she thought of numbers all the time. 

A man on foot, even an old man with bad knees who favored his left hip when the humidity rose off the Hudson, could clear twenty-five miles a day if he wasn't carrying much. In thirty days, that was seven hundred and fifty miles. That was Ohio. That was the hollows of Virginia. That was the whole damn eastern seaboard where Annie might be dead in a ditch or Joshua might be eight or nine and well.

In thirty days they had once combed through four counties in Pennsylvania, sleeping in culverts with their backs pressed together against the freezing dirt, trading sips of sour canteen water and arguing about whether a broken fence rail meant living people or just a herd moving through. Thirty days was a reasonable search. Thirty days was a scout doing his job.

Maggie stopped looking at the gate at dusk at that mark.

Instead, she started looking at people’s hands. When the dock hands brought in the barge of scrap from Brooklyn, she inspected the mooring lines herself. And on day thirty-two, inspecting hands, she caught Callum lingering near the smokehouse with a handful of salt pork tucked into his coat. 

There was not much she recalled from that moment besides slamming the boy against the split-rail fence with a forearm under his chin until his eyes rolled back white, his boots kicking uselessly in the dirt.

"You think because he ain't here to break your hands, nobody will? You think I can't set you straight myself?"

"Miss Maggie—Miss Maggie, please, I was just—"

She threw him into the weeds so hard his collar tore.

The second month—

Maggie wanted to be wrong.

Sixty days was the limit, the second time. They stayed out in the muck before the mood of her began to itch behind his ribs and he turned them around, grumbling about his back and the quality of the moonshine in Pennsylvania. Sixty days meant he should have been at the tree line. It meant he should have been leaning against the south post with that bent cigarette between his teeth, smirking at her boots.

He wasn’t there.

If he was scouting, he would have needed salt. He would have needed matches. He would have needed someone to watch his blind side while he slept, because his left knee gave out when the rain came and his back seized up if he lay on cold stone for more than four hours. 

Negan wasn't scouting. He had walked off the edge of the world just to prove he could leave her behind on the clean side of the dirt, and the thought made her so dizzy with hatred that she couldn't breathe through her nose. She walked until her socks wore through at the heels. She snapped at Hershel over a broken medicine cabinet until her son simply turned his back on her, picked up his tools, and walked away without saying a single word. 

The weather broke into freezing rain and the mud in Central Park turned to black grease that sucked the soles off work boots. On the sixty-fourth day, a breach opened near the old pump station by the 79th Street boat basin.

It wasn't a herd. Just five of them, bloated and gray bellies sloshing with putrid river water as they dragged themselves through a gap in the rusted chain-link. 

The patrol called to warn, but Maggie was already there. She had been down checking a methane pipe that had begun to hiss. She had a three-foot iron crowbar in her grip, using the beveled edge to scrape away the sod, her knuckles raw and bleeding from the cold under her gloves.

One, two, three—

She could only see three when she came up, stepping into the street.

Maggie lifted the crowbar with both hands, and took the first walker across the jaw. 

The sound of shattering teeth and rotted bone was a dull thwack. It just wasn't enough. It didn't overtake the ringing in her ears. It didn't push back against the weight on her chest.

The second was the very same. And the third lunged in succession, gray fingers catching the lapel of her jacket. She drove the flat edge of the bar straight into its throat, taking it down beneath her knees. It rolled, bloated inside clothes, smelling of sulfur and stagnant marsh. It scrambled to its knees with a wet hiss, jaw unhinged, reaching for her shins.

Maggie drove the pointed tip of the crowbar straight down into its face. Bone gave way, eye socket collapsed. 

She pulled it back up. Drove it down again. Felt it in her elbows, her shoulders, felt it in her teeth.

And again. The bar struck the forehead, punching a clean hole through the skull. She wrenched the iron free, the spray of black rot catching her across the chin, the cheek, the hair, and brought it down a fourth time. And a fifth. Again. Again and again as sound tore out of her—an enraged animal screaming while her arms kept rising, her shoulders knotting, until her boots slipped, her knees slamming into the rocks, the spray of dead blood and splintered bone hitting everywhere, soaking her. And then some more. She was screaming so hard her vision turned into a tunnel of pulsing red, her shoulders heaving, the iron vibrating in her palms until her wrists numbed.

"Maggie! Maggie, stop!"

Hands grabbed her shoulders, hauling her backward. 

Maggie swung blindly, the crowbar whistling through the air, barely missing Solmari's head before she caught her forearms, boots digging into the mud as the woman wrestled her down.

"It's dead! It's dead, look at it, it's done!"

Maggie stopped. Her chest was heaving like a broken engine, her breath tearing through her chapped lips. She looked down.

There was nothing left of the head. Just a black, glistening crater in the street, fragments of jawbone floating in a pool of gray sludge. Her hands were trembling so violently that the crowbar slipped from her grip, clattering against the stones. 

She looked up. Solmari was staring at her with wide eyes, hands still locked around her sleeves.

Maggie couldn't speak. Her tongue felt thick, coated in bile and copper. She pulled her arms out of the grip, wiped a smear of black rot from her cheek with the back of a filthy hand, and walked away.

The Fram stayed locked. The council had talked about reopening it—assigning someone to run the stills, keep the men from getting restless during the long freezes—but Maggie had kept the keys in her desk drawer and never brought it to a vote. 

She stopped expecting. Stopped carrying the extra pair of wool socks in her pack when she went outside the island. She stopped leaving the second lamp burning by the council door after curfew. 

Four and five and then seven months. 

Occasionally, she stared at the dark dirt where his boots had left prints in the south garden, the last time she had seen him, now smoothed over by rain and weed-growth, completely erased. 

Realized she couldn't remember the sound of Glenn's laugh anymore. When she tried to reach for it, all she heard was the wet crunch of the cartilage when she’d shoved Negan’s nose back into place, or the low grind of his voice against her ear; I love you back.

The coarse wool of his sleeve against her mouth, the taste of his blood on her tongue, the thumb pressing hard into the base of her skull.

The men she loved would never walk away. So Maggie decided herself incapable of loving such a man.

Wished she would have decided that before, years ago, and not over this but all the rest. Felt stupid and immature and disgusted and silly and weak.

She didn't miss him. She was glad he was gone.

Maggie walked down the delivery slip behind the trade stalls. The padlock on the back door of The Fram was stiff with rust. She worked the key into the tumbler, forced it with the heel of her palm until the mechanism gave, and shoved the door inward.

The smell was the same goddamn smell. It hadn't changed, despite the dust all over the tables in a uniform velvet gray, the room was of course exactly as they had left it.

She walked behind the counter.

Shards of the glass she'd thrown were still scattered across the lower shelves, twinkling under the layer of grime. The leather hand wraps surely on the corner of the desk in the back office, exactly where he had laid them out.

The community was alright. They were fine. And she was wrong. Their reputation, their numbers, kept it fine. And she could only taste the anticipation for the day they would need him, so she could hate him harder, hate him righteously, blame him for it.

Maggie took off her jacket, tossed it over the stool by the stage and rolled her sleeves up past her elbows. 

She found a broom, a bucket of water, and a handful of soap. She swept the broken glass into a dustpan and dumped it into the scrap bin. She scrubbed the dried, sticky whiskey from the counter. She checked stock, hauling the crates up from the cellar until her ribs pulled.

At seven o'clock on that Friday, she unlocked the front doors and hooked them wide open to the evening.

The first people through the door were hesitant, blinking into the amber, unsure if they were trespassing.

"We open?" one of them asked, hovering on the threshold with his cap in his hands.

Maggie stood behind the long bar, a rag in her right hand. She looked out over the empty tables, the stage, the mirror reflecting her own face and the empty two feet of air behind her left shoulder.

"We're open," she nodded.

Slid a bottle down the wood. It hit the edge of the counter with a hollow knock, right where a hand used to wait to catch it.

Solmari found her in the south garden after the bell at the north gate rang twice, paused, then rang twice again, two-and-two was people with a changed count, wounded or new.

"Gate," the woman said, one hand on the fence post, catching her breath. "He's back."

Maggie was kneeling in the mulch. 

"Who," she said, kept her trowel moving.

Solmari looked at her. "Negan. And—" a pause, recalibrating how much weight her answer could have. "He's got a boy with him."

The trowel went into the soil. Maggie looked down at her hands—dirt in the knuckle creases, and thought, frustrated and nauseated; of course he did. Of course he walked back with the one thing that would justify his cowardice. That would make the last nine months feel like she was just messed up for resenting him.

"Still at the gate?

"Still at the gate. We never saw them crossing the river. He's—" Solmari hesitated again. "He's limping. The boy looks okay. Thin. Gate crew's holding them for intake."

Intake. Newcomers got intake. Maggie stood, brushing her palms on her jeans, leaving two dark handprints on the denim.

"Send a doctor down," she said. “Hershel's on shift, isn't he?" She was already walking, not toward the gate, and she felt Solmari notice the direction, though without a say about it. "Full intake.”

She took the steps of the security station two at a time and was annoyed at herself for it.

It wasn't a vantage point anyone used; but from up there she could see the whole of the west approach—the gate, the barricade line, and no one ever looked up. 

She pressed herself flat along the window in her filthy jeans with her temple against the frame, and she looked down at him.

Two hundred yards, maybe. Less.

He was thinner. That was the first thing, and it went through her—she had pictured him dead so many times, in so many configurations, that the simple fact of him standing there with his weight hitched off his left leg, made her chest so tight. The leather jacket was gone. He wore a canvas coat she'd never seen, sun-bleached at the shoulders, and a gray knit cap despite the warmth, and he had both hands visible and empty, which she understood was deliberate, a man presenting himself to his own gate.

The boy stood at his right side. Nine years old, and skinny for it. He had a backpack on that was nearly as big as his torso, and he was holding the strap with both hands the way Maggie had once seen Hershel hold a strap at that age, on the road, on the worst year. She couldn't see his eyes well from two hundred yards and found that she was straining to.

Then Hershel came into the frame, crossing the square at a run with his bag over one shoulder, running like a boy to a fire, and Maggie watched her son cover the last thirty yards to the gate and watched the gate crew part for him, and she pressed her forehead into the frame and then made herself look.

She couldn't hear anything, it like a silent film, like the mirror across the Fram all over again; Hershel slowing as he reached them, Hershel setting his bag down, Hershel's hand going out to the boy first, checking the eyes, the collar, the two-finger sweep along a jawline looking for fever—and then, only then, turning to Negan.

Negan said something. Hershel said something. 

And then Hershel stepped in and hugged him.

It wasn't long. Instead brief, almost brisk. Hershel's arms went around the older man's shoulders, and his head went down, and for one second—Maggie counted it, one full second, she would count it for years—Hershel's face rested against Negan's shoulder.

Negan's hand came up and settled on the back of her son's head. She could see even from her watching place how careful it was. How much of himself he kept out of it.

Maggie's eyes burned and she did not blink. She had not cried in months, and she was not going to do it here like a sniper, like a lookout, like some heartbroken animal. She stood there and let it burn and watched her son let go first, watched Hershel step back and pick up his bag and shepherd the boy toward the hospital wing with a hand on the small grubby shoulder, watched the gate crew move in on Negan then, clapping him on the back, somebody taking the pack off him, the whole easy tide of it, the community reabsorbing its load-bearing wall like he'd been out for a smoke.

Negan. Joshua. No Annie.

He was looking around. 

Negan's eyes were searching the streets. He opened his mouth to talk to Solmari beside him, and the woman shrugged.

Maggie stood at the window and refused it, sternly, the way she'd refuse a fever, work to be done. He came back.

He did not come back for her, though. In fact, Maggie refused to believe she was wrong; he had left, and not to find his son. He had left just to leave. Whatever happened—that didn't change.

Where else was he going to go? He had come back because he had nowhere else to lay the boy down. 

Her resentment kept. She'd half-expected—feared—that seeing him would do something, burn it off, leave her relieved or weeping or running toward him, and instead it sat in her exactly where it had been, a low banked coal, and it occurred to her that she'd been nursing it like every other injury you needed to stay injured, because the day it healed was the day she'd have to feel the other thing, the thing underneath, and the other thing was the size of the Hudson and she didn't know half of it.

He left. He got to leave. He walked away and came back with his son and a bowed head and thinner shoulders and expected—what, exactly? To be received? To be hers again, adjacent to her, two feet behind her shoulder, like nothing happened?

She remembered that last conversation every day. She knew exactly what he meant. She knew exactly what she felt.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Never did go to the intake, that day.

Didn’t go to the hospital wing to see the boy cleared, didn’t walk past the third complex when they gave Negan back his apartment keys. She kept her distance in rods and chains, putting four buildings or three garden plots or the entire width of the central square between her boots and whatever corner of the island he happened to be occupying. 

Maggie wouldn't, but you could run a whole community by courier if your handwriting was clear and you didn’t mind people looking at you sideways. She delegated what could be done that way, and she watched him.

Watched from the second-story window of one of the buildings they had cleared near the river for the exact purpose of watching out. He was teaching Joshua how to clean a trout. And she wondered again if the boy was nine, or ten, with his skinny wrists, wearing a cut-down flannel that swallow-tailed nearly past his knees. Negan sat beside him on the edge of the weathered dock, one hand bracing the boy’s elbow, guiding the dull edge of a boning knife along the belly seam. Gone was the showman. His mouth moved, explaining, murmuring, shoulders rounded inward to shield the kid from the river wind. He didn't have patience for anyone in the world except people he had no business loving,

Negan didn't tell the council how he found his son, and why he didn't find the boy's mother. And Maggie knew who he was saving that information for, who he wanted to tell that to. She knew he would try to talk to her one day, had to, right? He would come, and he would explain, and he would ask for no forgiveness, and she would feel like a child for wanting to hook an apology from his mouth anyways, as she once did across a fire, before he told her he would've killed the whole line-up in the clearing if he could go back and do so.

Maggie watched him tap the boy’s chin with the flat of two fingers—a momentary, grounding touch she recognized so awfully it made the scar on the nape of her neck itch beneath her collar. Joshua looked up and smiled, showing a missing tooth. Negan smiled back, tired and gray and looking like every exhausted father who she had known, including her own. Finally a father. Finally trying; which is what she wanted for him.

There was an incessant pulse beating on her temples, a dull twitch of nerves that got her pressing her forehead against the cool glass until her breath fogged the view.

Very funny, that the thing she’d used against him—coward, you won’t even try—was standing down there with fish blood on its knuckles, trying so hard it made his limp worse. 

When the weekend came, she went to the Fram anyway. 

It was hers now, technically. After she and Luis decided to give time, no one asked why she spent her Friday nights pouring cheap moonshine for dockhands by herself, and she didn't ask herself why she did it instead of sitting at the kitchen table while he read to her from journals three decades out of date. 

Negan showed up at eight, wearing his old black wool coat with the torn lining near the left armpit that she had mended twice with waxed thread He didn’t walk up to the bar, taking a small table near the drafty corner by the emergency exit, bad leg stretched out straight, a chipped mug of coffee sitting untouched before him. 

And he sat there. People watching. 

Maggie slammed bottles onto the counter, made change, passed mugs, swept foam off the rim. Every time she turned, every time she bent to haul a crate from under the shelf, she felt him. A drag across her spine, sunburn on the back of her neck. Two feet, ten feet, twenty feet—it didn't matter. The air in the room was warped around him. Every time she reached for a top-shelf bottle, she knew his eyes were tracking the line of her ribs, the hitch of her waist, the way she had her hair tied back with a piece of dirty twine so it wouldn't fall into the glasses. He didn't speak to her once. He watched her constantly. A pressure, a held charge—and every glance she refused to return circled in her chest.

She never looked him in the eye. 

He came back the next Friday. And the one after that. Always the corner table. Always the coffee. Never a drink, never a word. He’d stay until she would close at eleven, then push himself up with a low grunt, favoring that left hip, and limp out into the dark before she walked home. 

It was a siege. He was starving her out, waiting for her to break the perimeter, and every drop of pride she’d dragged out of Georgia told her she’d die in the weeds before she handed him a single syllable.

On the fourth week, a man named Miller, thick-necked and already three mugs deep into the apple mash, slammed his glass down onto the table and grabbed a dockhand by the scruff of his collar.

"I told you, you owe me three tins of lard for that haul!"

"You didn't haul shit, you old dog!"

The shove sent a bench skidding across the floorboards. Men began to shout, circling up, the easy, bored violence of men who had worked too hard in the cold and had too much blood left over.

"Take it outside!" yelled from the door, but nobody moved.

"Hey!" Miller turned his red, sweating face toward where Negan sat with his hands resting loose on his knees. "Negan! Clear the middle! You ref, so we don't gotta wake doc up when I knock his teeth into his throat!"

"Let us all! We're freezin' our nuts off here. Clear some space! Let us run a round before curfew!" Another hollered. 

A chorus of drunken shouts backed him up. 

A bunch of menchild who liked to wrestle each other into the ground; it happened so often in the first year and so merrily that her objections eventually lost fundamentals. As long as he supervised, no one carried the fights outside; it somehow kept them all safer, giving men an escape valve, a moment to be boys. And boys they were.

Negan didn't move for three beats. His hazel eyes flickered toward Maggie, who was cleaning a glass and kept her gaze solely on it, refusing to look. 

"Rules," he called out, raspy through the din. "First blood or first tap. No boots to the throat, no iron. You break a nose, you bring in next month's stock."

This was not his bar anymore; she wanted to tell him. None of this was his to command. Didn't he know? Didn't they know?

No, they did not know. She never told them he wouldn't be back. On the contrary. How would they behave then?

How would they behave now if she stopped him?

A cheer went up. Within three minutes the center of the bar was dragged clear, tables shoved back against the wall, chairs stacked haphazardly. A makeshift ring.

Maggie stayed behind the counter, setting the glass down, arms folding over her chest, digging her fingernails into the denim of her sleeves as the fiddle started to play. 

The first bout was sloppy—Miller and Cruz wrestling each other into the floor, grunting like pigs, throwing heavy, telegraphed haymakers until Cruz caught a knee to the groin and tapped out for a round of chuckles. So easy. So… stupidly satisfied. Negan stood at the perimeter, leaning his shoulder against a post, one hand in his pocket, calling the fouls with a bored flick of his fingers. 

Then a scout named Sarah stepped into the circle, rolling her sleeves past her tattoos, her teeth bared in a grin. "Who's next?”

A boy from the lower gardens hopped in, laughing—until Sarah caught him in a headlock, tripped his back leg, and drove him face-first into the pine. The room lost its mind. Men banged empty flagons on the tabletops, screaming and cheering as another woman took the floor, throwing elbows and catching collars. Okafor stepped in, grinning, twice her size, holding his hands up flat. She didn't give him the courtesy of a stance—she dropped low, swept his bad ankle, and when he stumbled, drove a vicious open-palm strike straight under his chin that snapped his teeth together like a bear trap. The giant went down on his knees with a thud that shook the shelves behind Maggie. 

And came the howling. Noise so loud the tin lamps rattled overhead, spilling foam, laughing until their faces went purple. 

The bloodsport woke the room up. It woke the whole damn island up. Maggie felt it crawling under her skin—that sick, familiar static, the heat, people were alive, bleeding, hitting each other to prove they weren't ghosts yet, that they didn't need to kill each other over nothing, that a line could be drawn.

She almost smiled. Almost enjoyed it as she did that first year, hidden behind her frown, her high ground, her maturity, back when she watched Negan move through the circle—dragging men up by their collars, slapping backs, laughing with that wide, crooked grin. He was in his element. The grinning butcher. The ringmaster. 

After forty minutes the floor was slick with spit and spilled cider, the fighters panting against the walls, bruised, laughing, spent. The air, indeed, finally warmed.

The room began to quiet down, the men wiping their brows with their sleeves, reaching for their drinks. 

Then Negan pushed off the post. 

He didn't limp, stepping into the center of the room. The crowd hushed, watching him. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the worn leather hand wraps—the ones with the thumb loops, the ones he'd left on the office desk nine months ago—and held them up in one large, scarred palm. 

He was turned straight in her direction, as was his attention, his gaze, his intention.

There was no way she couldn't meet his eyes.

And it was the first time, in weeks, in months, that she met his eyes.

"Miss Margaret," he drawled, and it wounded her. 

It was as though the whole island knew, then. And they did know the history without knowing the truth; they knew the bodies they were, and they knew the bloody silence that had sat between them since the morning the gates opened and he walked in with a child.

Maggie didn't move. Her heart hammered once, hard, against the cage of her ribs. 

Negan lifted the wraps an inch higher, his eyes fixed on hers, steady and challenging and here again. 

So she unlatched the counter gate, let it swing open with a wooden clack, and stepped down into the room. 

The crowd parted instantly, shuffling back, chairs scraping against the floorboards as people flattened themselves against the walls. 

Maggie walked straight into the ring. 

She stopped three feet from Negan. And could see the new lines carved into the skin around his eyes, the hollow under his cheekbones from months of a poor diet after years of guaranteed dinner, the gray that had taken over his beard completely. 

He was sixty two years old. And she was forty six, now. She was twenty three in that clearing. 

Negan held the leather out to her, fingers open. An invitation. The same leash she refused before he left. His chin dipped, eyes heavy-lidded. "Wrap up."

Maggie looked at the wraps. Then she looked up into his hazel eyes, reached out, her fingers closing around the goddamn thing. 

She held them for half a second. 

Then, without breaking his stare, she opened her hand and let them drop between their boots. The wraps hit the dirty floorboards with a dull slap. 

"Oooooh," the room hissed as one body, air sucked through teeth, the crowd shrinking back another six inches. 

Negan’s eyebrows twitched up. The corner of his mouth gave a tiny, microscopic tug—a man who loved a mess. 

"Bare knuckle, then," he murmured, his voice only for her. "Suit yourself."

They didn't wait for a signal.

Maggie threw the first punch before the word was entirely out of his mouth, driving her right fist straight at his jaw with everything she had in her legs. 

Negan didn't counter. He slipped the punch by half an inch, leaning his head back just far enough that her knuckles grazed the coarse wire of his beard, catching her wrist with his left hand to redirect the force. He spun her off him gently, giving her room to reset. 

Maggie stumbled, boots catching in the floorboards, and whipped around, teeth bared. 

She came in again—a jab to the ribs, a hard right hook aimed straight for his ear. Negan ducked under it, his shoulder rolling with the movement, his boots sliding back an inch. She didn't reset; she drove her left elbow straight down into his trap, using the momentum to spin and bring her heel sweeping across the floorboards to take his bad leg.

He caught the blow on his thigh, grunting, his forearm coming up to block her next strike—a straight jab that cracked hard against the meat of his arm. 

Didn't strike back. He just parried, deflecting her wrists, stepping into her space and then yielding it, keeping his chin tucked, keeping his hands soft, his eyes wide and clear, watching her face, his mouth pressed tight, refusing to strike. Coddling her. Protecting her from himself.

It made that old fury burst in her veins. Being treated like a child. Fragile. In need of escape.

Maggie didn't want to escape Negan, she wanted to drive him to the ground; she wanted to be the one who buried him. She wanted to eat him up like the dead, gorge herself on his blood, hit the marrow to retrieve every piece of her he'd stolen, blame him for it the way she hadn't in years, punish him, imprison him.

She lunged forward, abandoning form, abandoning the clean lines of sparring, and drove her forehead straight into his face.

Negan’s head snapped back, his boot heel catching on the edge of an overturned stool as he stumbled. A thin thread of dark crimson immediately welled from his upper lip, splitting where her own forehead had struck

He blinked hard, the haze in his hazel eyes clearing sharper, darker—the animal waking up behind the gray beard, the man who had dragged wood across concrete to break the world into pieces. Realizing she had broken the explicit. Everyone watching their leader seek for blood from her executioner. Did he not think she would go there again? Did he imagine for a moment that this was a little mercy trick that would set her spine back in place after a little contact, a harmless collision?

Whatever he did think, this time he reached out with both hands, grabbed the front of her canvas jacket, and hauled her into him effortlessly. Maggie slammed against his chest, the breath knocked from her throat in a sharp hiss, but she didn't try to pull away. She grabbed his jaw, her nails digging into the skin behind his lobes, and drove her knee up between his thighs. 

Negan twisted his hips just enough to catch the strike on the hard bone of his pelvis, a hoarse roar tearing out of his throat as he picked her clean off the floorboards and drove them both sideways.

They hit the center table with a crash that shattered the wooden legs. 

Mugs, tin plates, and half-empty bottles exploded into the dark. Maggie’s back took the brunt of the oak edge, the white-hot agony shooting straight up her spine, but the pain only made her teeth bare, lock her legs around his waist, using the weight of him to drag them both down into the ground.

They rolled. Floorboards groaned beneath them. Negan ended up half-over her, his hand clamping hard over her throat, holding her down. His face inches from hers, sweat dripping from his brow onto her cheek, his breath hot, humid.

"Maggie," he gasped, the first and only word he’d made, a broken whisper.

She didn't answer in kind. 

She brought her free hand down to her right boot.

Her fingers found the hilt of the hunting knife strapped to her calf. The steel cleared the leather sheath with a snick.

In one twisting heave, Maggie wrenched her hips to the left, hooking her heel behind his knee. Negan’s balance gave out. He went down onto his back with a heavy thud.

Before he could throw his hands up, Maggie was over him.

She drove both knees hard beside his hips, straddling his waist, her entire weight pinning him to the planks. Her left hand shot forward, fingers tangling into his graying beard, wrenching his head back until the tendon in his throat was stretched taut.

With her right hand, she slammed the flat of the six-inch steel blade flush against the side of his neck.

Right over the carotid. 

Right where his pulse was hammering—madly so, jumping against the cold edge.

The room went so still you could hear a swallow. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Okafor took half a step forward near the bar, hand hovering over his belt, but stopped dead.

Sat on his chest, her thighs locked around his ribs, her knuckles white around the hilt of the blade, her chest rose and fell in stuttering gasps, her jacket torn at the shoulder, her hair loose and damp, hanging down around their faces like a black shroud that cut out the bar, the people again, the island, the entire rotten world. 

Negan lay flat on his back with his arms spread out at his sides on the floorboards, completely surrendered. His chest heaved beneath her knees, lifting her with every harsh breath he drew. The dark red blood from his lip was crawling to his jaw, but his hazel eyes were painless as he looked up into hers.

He didn't reach for her wrist. He didn't tense his neck against the steel. 

The blade was pressed so hard against his skin that a single, dark bead of red rose along the edge and began to trickle slowly toward the floor.

Maggie stared down at him and the throat she could reopen with a two-inch flick of her wrist. The throat of the man who had made her a widow, who had built her a city, who had walked away into the dark and came back with his son just to show her he didn't need her.

She hated him. 

She hated him so deeply, so endlessly, that the knife in her hand felt like it had grown out of her own bones. It was through her chest like an iron spike that would never rust out, never soften, never leave her alone to sleep in a clean bed with a good man. 

Her hand began to tremble. The steel vibrated against his skin.

Negan felt it, and didn't flinch. Slowly, without breaking her stare, his chest rose on a deep, scraping inhale. His gaze didn't leave her eyes—not for the blade or for the crowd, not for the blood running down his neck. He looked at her with that unbearable stillness. Owned, guilty, would let her carve him down to the bone if it meant she had to keep her hands on him to do it.

Go on, his eyes said, without a word. Do it.

Maggie’s breath hitched in her throat, a choked, ugly rattle. 

Her fingers tightened on the hilt until the leather creaked. She pressed the steel down half a millimeter more—feeling the heat of his life jumping against the metal, demanding her to choose, demanding her to finish what started in a clearing two decades ago in the gravel.

She didn't cut.

She couldn't cut. 

And the fact that she couldn't—the fact that she would rather drown in the Hudson than watch his chest stop moving beneath her knees—was the foulest, most sickening defeat she had ever known.

Maggie pulled the knife back. 

She ripped it away from his throat, the motion jerky and violent, and shoved the blade back into her boot sheath with a force that bruised her fingers. Pushed herself up off his hips, her boots finding the floor, her jacket hanging crooked as she stood over him. Her knees were shaking, her ribs burning where they had hit the table, her whole body cold and drenched in a filthy, trembling sweat.

Negan watched her from the planks, his hand coming up slowly to press two fingers against the thin red line on his neck, chest rising and falling.

Rising and falling.

Maggie turned her back on him. 

The crowd parted before her without a sound, men pressing themselves flat against the walls to get out of her way as she walked toward the back door. 

Nobody thought she would open the doors. That was the whole reason she did it. On a whim, stubbornness. 

By eight, a few brave souls drifted in. The regular regulars.

Negan, too, was stubborn. 

He didn’t take the corner by the fire escape this time. He sat at the table in the center, a replacement to the oak they’d splintered. He sat with his bad knee straight, palms flat on the pale wood, and watched her work. 

For three hours Maggie didn’t look at him once. And yet every time she reached up for the top shelf, the wool of his coat seemed to draw the air out of the room until the back of her shirt stuck to her spine. 

By eleven, the rain had turned to sleet against the high, blurry panes. The men drifted out in twos and threes, pulling caps low, heading back to their dry berths, their wives, their clean beds. 

The iron bell over the door chimed for the last time behind Okafor. 

She threw the rag into the galvanized bucket, hands resting flat against the counter, knuckles white, head bowed so her hair fell forward over her bruised forehead. 

“We're closin’.”

Negan’s head tilted slightly.

The chair legs groaned against the planks as he pushed himself up. The drag of his boots came across the empty floor, stopping on the other side of the counter, five feet off, just outside the last light.

“I knew you would be fine,” he rasped.

Maggie’s fingers twitched against the wood. 

“You didn't know that.”

“I was hoping.” He took a step closer, the scent of him arriving before him—smoke, the river, sweat “Talk to me.”

“I have nothin’ to say to you.”

“I think you do.” A pause, his shadow falling long over her hands. “Otherwise you wouldn't be avoiding me like the plague.”

Maggie let out a breath through her teeth, her head jerking up to glare at the dark split along his upper lip from her forehead, the thin scab over his carotid where her steel had bitten him. She decided in the second and pushed herself off the counter, walked around it with the key ring in her palm, eyes on him as though he could not be trusted with her back. Went to the entrance, slid the deadbolt into place, and dropped the wooden bar across the frame. Turned in his direction, then.

“I'm not avoidin’ you. I want nothin’ to do with you, is that simple.” Her voice rose across the distance. She took a step toward him, blind with an anger that felt nine months old and five minutes fresh. “Should've stayed in whatever hole you found yourself in.”

A tiny, worn twitch at the corner of his split lip.

“You don't mean that,” he murmured softly. “Joshua needs this.”

Ah.

Already knew that; he hadn’t dragged himself back across the Hudson because he couldn't bear to leave the walls they’d stacked brick by brick out of the muck. Not the five years of breathing the same air, of running their hands through the same dirt; he had come back because he had an orphan with him.

He wouldn't have come back, she knew that much. If he hadn't found the boy—if the trail had ended in a ditch like Annie’s had—he would have kept walking until he starved or bled out under a tree. He had left to die somewhere where she couldn't reach him, and the only reason his boots were standing on her floorboards right now was because he had a starving child tied to his belt.

That's what stung; she admitted to herself. The way he left. Lying to her, pretending. Coward. Selfish fucking asshole—

Maggie closed the distance in two strides. 

She slammed both palms hard into his chest. 

“Get out,” she gasped. 

Negan didn't move. His boots stayed planted, his weight absorbing the blow with a low grunt. 

“Maggie—”

She shoved him again, harder, throwing the whole weight of her shoulders into his sternum, wanting to crack bone, wanting to feel him yield, wanting to shove him through the goddamn wall. “Get out! Get the fuck out!” 

She shoved him a third time, her breath tearing out of her lungs in hitches, her palms stinging where they struck. She raised her hands to hit him again—to claw at the pink scar on his throat, to rip the indifference off his graying face—

Negan’s hand shot up. 

His calloused fingers clamped around her right wrist, halting the strike an inch from his jaw. His thumb digging into the pulse jumping beneath her skin, locking her there, arm extended, her chest heaving against his, their faces inches apart in the dark. 

Maggie bared her teeth, choked on the bile and the fury rising in her throat, and spat right into his face. 

The spittle hit high on his cheekbone, sliding down into the gray wire of his beard.

Negan didn't blink. He didn't wipe it off. 

A dark breath dragged through his nose, his pupils blowing wide, and with an abrupt heave of his shoulders, he yanked her forward by the wrist.

Maggie gasped as the room tilted. He spun her, drove into her hard, slamming her backward until the curve of her rear cracked against the heavy table behind them. The timber groaned under the impact, mugs rattling on the floor, and before she could wrench her hand free or draw a knee up, Negan drove his entire body into hers, pinning her down, his chest crushing her flat.

He grabbed her jaw with his free hand, blunt fingers digging deep into the meat of her cheeks, wrenching her face up, and smashed his mouth down onto hers.

No gentleness, no moral of the story. It was suffocating, a collision of teeth and split lips. He kissed her like he was starving, like he was tearing that crushed blackberry straight out from behind her teeth—the one he’d rolled in his fingers nine months ago and tossed into the weeds, devouring it now, licking the coppery, sour juices from her tongue, pressing the dark color hard into her lips, smearing the heat and the blood into his own beard until Maggie couldn't tell whose split mouth was bleeding into whose, iron and salt mixing on her tongue, and the absolute filth in it made her head spin.

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe. She dug her fingernails into the wool of his shoulders, trying to push him off, trying to pull him through her skin, suffocating on the smell of him, his coarse beard scraping raw against her jaw, her hips bucking uselessly against the denim of his thighs.

Negan broke the kiss by half an inch, pupils blown wide as he stared down at her swollen, wet mouth, ragged panting burning across her wet chin. 

His right hand dropped from her jaw to the waistband of her pants. 

Metal groaned as he wrenched the brass button free. He brought two fingers to his mouth, wet them generously with his own spit and the blood from his lip, and shoved them straight past the zipper, straight down past the cotton of her underwear.

Maggie arched off the table with a frowny whimper, her head snapping back into the dark.

“Since you already hate me,” he growled against her lips.

His fingers pushed deep into her, parting the hot, sodden slickness that had already pooled between her thighs unprompted, humiliating.

“Since you're already hurting,” he murmured, his thumb grinding against the knot of her clit while he pumped his fingers deep, coarse knuckles dragging over her entrance, curling up to scrape the raw nerve inside. 

Maggie’s fingers knotted into his sleeves, her boots scrabbling against the floorboards as he drove in and out, hooked upward, ruthless and heavy, dragging her out of herself.

“Always wound so tight,” Negan rasped, his graying temple pressed hard against hers, sweat dripping from his forehead onto her cheek. “Always ready to fight. Look at you.”

“Negan—” she sobbed, brows pulled, and it was a curse, it was a plea, it was an ugly, dying rattle in the back of her throat. The wetness was disgusting, overwhelming; she was already drowning in it.

He fucked her with her own faults until her heels were drumming frantically against the legs of the table, her stuttering against his lips.

God— she was right there. With just that, just like— picking up with him from where they left, the darkness closing in, her belly tightening, the scar he left on her skin seeking the friction of his body, her toes curling hard inside her boots— 

Negan ripped his hand out.

The absence made Maggie let out a stranded wail of frustration, her hips lifting off the table, reaching blindly for what he’d stolen, her blood left pounding.

Before she could recover, before her head could stop spinning, Negan stepped back just far enough to grab the waistband of her jeans with both hands. He yanked down with violent force, stripping denim and cotton down past her thighs, over her knees, dragging her boots off the floor until the fabric bunched around her ankles.

Maggie lashed out, her heel kicking wildly, catching him across the shin. “Stop—get the fuck off me—”

Negan gathered her into his arms, hauling her kicking, thrashing weight off the table, and sank down heavily onto his knees, bringing them both crashing to the bare planks. His chest coming down, pinning her shoulders flat to the pine. His thighs wedged between her bare legs, forcing them wide, his weight crushing the fight right out of her bruised ribs, right where they had wrestled, right where she had drawn his blood.

He loomed over her in the amber, hair wild, beard soaked with her spit and his own blood, hazel eyes burning down into hers.

“My turn to hold you down, honey.”

Maggie stared up at him, tears hot on her temples. He tore at his own belt with one hand, unbuttoning, shoving his trousers down just enough to free his cock, which she couldn't look at, but felt—scorching, pulsing with the same thing that was shaking his shoulders—as he leaned over her, and dragged the swollen, weeping head rough and heavy through the soaked folds of her cunt, spreading her own slickness up over her mound. 

“I hate you,” she gasped against his lips. 

Negan positioned the head of his cock at her slit, pupils fixed on hers, so entirely devoid of remorse.

“Yeah,” he rasped.

And drove his hips forward.

He filled her in one deep, heavy stroke that drove the air straight out of Maggie’s throat. Her back arched off the floorboards, her thighs falling open to frame his hips as he filled her while she clamped around his length, stretching her, splitting the ache wide open. Her hands flew up, fingernails raking through the wool of his shoulders, finding the skin of his neck, digging in until her joints hurt. 

He didn't wait. He began to move. Slow, wounding strokes that ground his pelvis hard against her clit with every forward roll. He took her like he was trying to grind the anger out of her bones.

“There we go,” he growled into her mouth, his forehead resting against hers, his breath burning her lips. “Finally, honey,” driving in hard, dragging himself all the way out before slamming back to the root, catching that swollen nerve every single time. “Not so bad, huh?”

She shook her head against the wood, eyes shut tight, but her body had already betrayed her. Her thighs clamped around his hips, pulling him deeper because it was the only thing that stopped the ringing in her ears. 

“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice shaking with the effort, his thumb reaching down between their bodies to grind against her clit. “Look at me, Margaret.”

Maggie obeyed, somehow, glaring into the black hollows of his hazel irises, seeing her own flushed reflection in the water of his eyes. Her mirror. Her executioner. 

“That's it,” Negan breathed, his hips moving faster, harder, shaking the floorboards beneath them. “Right there. Let it go. Give it here, honey.”

The heat in her belly snapped, it started at the scar.

It was an aggression, the electric shock that ripped through her, snapping her spine taut, the choked, sobbing scream hauled from her chest as she came, her walls convulsing around him in milking spasms that dragged him into the absolute center of her fever. She wept into his mouth, shaking and digging her nails, her hips bucking up against him in twitching, shivering aftershocks.

Negan groaned harsh and guttural from his lungs—his hips driving in once, twice, driving and driving awfully deep as she clamped around him, prolonging her pleasure, chasing the brink—

Until he locked his jaw. 

With a ragged exhale, he yanked his hips back, pulling himself clean out of her before he could spill. Breathing like an animal, his forehead resting against hers, he braced his hands against the floorboards on either side of her head. 

His cock was weeping, dark and heavy and pulsing enough to make his jaw tick until the veins corded across his temples as he leaned down, lips dropping against her collarbone, and dragged the length of it—just once—rough and slick against the bare strip of skin between her hitched-up shirt and the curve of her lower belly. A grinding drag of hot friction to dull the throb of holding back, smearing her own wetness and his pre-come across the pale swell of her stomach.

He let out a shuddering hiss through his teeth, racking his shoulders before he forced his hips still. He didn't finish, laying across her, chest to chest while the room went cold around their sweat.

Maggie didn’t push him off. 

Her hands remained tangled in the wool at his neck, her knuckles tight, her ribs expanding and contracting in shallow hitches. The cold from the floor seeped into the wetness between her thighs. Her jeans were still tangled around her ankles, heavy boots anchoring her down. She stared past the gray crown of his head into the ceiling, mouth open with the taste of his blood and her own spit on her tongue.

Negan didn't move for a long time, in that setting. His beard scratched into the soft skin below her ear, his breath washing damp against her throat. 

“Goddamnit,” he breathed, before he finally shifted his weight, rolling off her onto his side with a dull groan, bad hip catching the wood, without pulling his pants up right away. He lay with one arm thrown over his eyes to block out the meager light. “I was coming back.”

Maggie lay staring at the ceiling, her body trembling with the collusion of her orgasm, and didn’t answer.

“I was coming right back to you,” he said, louder this time. “I went to my hometown, so I could see if my in-laws' house was still there.”

Maggie turned her head slowly, looking at the stubble along his jaw, his marked lips.

“So I could find a picture of Lucille,” he whispered into the crook of his elbow. “Anything that kept me going.”

He dropped his arm from his face. His eyes were bloodshot, watering from the pain and the cold, but they fixed on hers anyways.

Slowly, his hand reached inside the coat he never took off. He fumbled inside the lining, fingers pulling out a small, bent slip of paper wrapped in dirty oilcloth. He unwrapped it with one hand, his thumb careful around the creased corners, and held it out between them.

“You're not gonna believe what I found.”

Maggie didn’t move for a second. Her fingers were stiff, knuckles swollen from hitting him, but she pushed herself up on one elbow, the denim bunched at her knees dragging against the wood. 

She took the photograph from his hand.

It was faded, the glossy finish cracked with age and dirt, water-damaged at the upper right corner. But the sunlight in it was brilliant. That grueling Georgia sunlight from a lifetime ago.

In the center of the frame stood an older couple smiling at the lens, and beside them, a skinny boy with sun-bleached hair and sunburned shoulders. But their arms were slung casually over the shoulders of a family standing beside them in a wide, open field of green. 

Hershel. Her father, with his clean white brows and his preacher smile. A little girl in pigtails with gap teeth—Beth, so small she was barely up to her father’s chest, holding a mason jar of clover. And standing on the left, a sixteen-year-old girl with sun-streaked hair, cut-off denim, and future nowhere on her face. 

Behind them, painted in neat white lettering on the wooden fence post; Greene Farm.

Maggie’s breath caught around her heart. The paper trembled in her hand.

“Miss Greene,” Negan murmured from the floor, watching her face crumble.

Maggie’s fingers moved across the paper, the pad of her index finger tracing the curve of Beth’s cheek, then her father’s shoulder, the tears she’d held back finally burning hot and fast behind her eyelids. Her chest caved in on itself, vertigo pulling the ground out from under her. 

“How—” she breathed, her voice cracking into a whisper. “How—”

“I don't know,” Negan said, looking at her with his jaw tight, eyes shiny in the gloom. “A big fat coincidence.” He paused, his chest rising. “Destiny.”

“I don't remember these people,” she stammered, shaking her head frantically, staring at the older couple, trying to claw through decades of corpses and fire to find a summer afternoon on the porch. “I don't— I don't remember them.”

“That boy beside you was their godson,” Negan told her quietly, his voice deep with all the same she was feeling. “Worked on a farm in a little Georgia town for a summer. That's all I know.”

Maggie stared at the boy’s arm draped over her younger self’s shoulder. She felt like she was looking at a ghost through a telescope. It made her feel so strange. The world was too small, too filthy, too cruel—looping back on itself like a noose, tying her to the man on the floor before they’d ever drawn breath in the same state.

“When I found the photo, I turned right back around,” Negan said, pushing himself up onto one elbow, leaning closer until she could smell the iron on his breath. “It had only been a few weeks.”

He looked down at the photograph in her shaking hands.

“Shit went downhill on my way here,” he muttered. “Human traffic sort of downhill.” His eyes met her wet, wide ones. “That's when I found Josh.”

Maggie couldn't speak. Negan reached out. 

His hand was heavy, and he didn't pull her into a fight. He didn't reach for her waist. He just brought two fingers up to the side of her neck, right over the pulse point, and pressed lightly.

A grounding tap. Once. Twice.

“I was coming back, Maggie,” he whispered into the space between them. “I didn't wanna be away for a day.”

All that could leave her was a sob, her shoulders shaking as she bowed her head over the faded photograph, the tears falling onto the faces of the dead while his hand held her steady in the dirt.

The photograph shook so much between her thumb and forefinger that the cracked glaze seemed to ripple, the green of Georgia bending like real grass in a wind twenty years dead.

Negan shifted closer, inconsiderate to his hip on the floorboards. "C’mere.”

His arm came around her shoulders, hauling her sideways into the crook of his chest before she could muster the pride to slap his hand away. Maggie collapsed into it, her forehead hitting the hard bone of his clavicle, her fingers curling tight around the edge of the oilcloth so she wouldn't crush the faces inside it.

Negan’s hand came up to the back of her head, long fingers burying into her hair, his palm anchoring her skull right against the thump of his throat.

"Are we okay?" he asked, quiet into her hairline.

Maggie kept her face pressed into the wool, breathing in the sour salt of their combined sweat, the wet copper on her tongue. Her ribs throbbed where she’d hit the table, same as her wrists where he’d pinned her.

"I'm still not attracted to you," she choked out into his collar, muffled and petulant. "In fact, you're like a brother to me."

Negan’s chest hitched with a low scoff that turned into a rumble beneath her cheek.

"Kinky," he rasped, fingers tightening in her hair, dragging her head back half an inch so he could look down at her red-rimmed eyes. "You're like a brother to me too."

A watery scoff tore out of Maggie—a breathless little laugh she couldn't catch in time, her lip pulling into a smile before she could force her jaw flat again.

Negan looked at her mouth, eyes softening at the corners, warmed up.

"Pretty smile," he whispered, tender with it, thumb dragging a smear of her tears off her cheekbone. "I missed you."

I don't see you like that, she thought, staring into the lines around his eyes, the gray taking over his temples, the scab on his carotid from her own knife. I don't.

She didn't. 

I don't.

"You're a manchild," she said, her voice dropping, defensive, trying to claw back the three feet of dignity she’d lost when she let him fuck her onto the floor.

"That one I don't condone," he replied smoothly, though the corner of his lip twitched.

"I won't forgive you for any of this." Maggie glared up at him, her hand pressing against his chest to hold him an inch back. 

"I've survived that before," he murmured, his gaze dropping to her mouth, completely unbothered, completely mean. "You love me."

"You're cruel."

"You love me anyways." His palm slid down from her neck to the small of her back, his fingers digging at her hip, lifting her weight off the floor as he shifted onto his knees. "Did you miss me?"

"No."

"I was told you did." He began to stand, hauling her up with him, his bad knee groaning with him under the strain as he lifted her clear off her feet. "I was told you even cried."

"Whoever told you was a lyin’ son of a bitch—"

"That every scout that went out there was given orders to report immediately if they saw me," he gloated into her ear, his breath hot as he turned, slamming her hips back up onto the heavy table they’d been before.

The wood groaned. Maggie’s hands flew to his shoulders for balance as he spread her thighs wide, stepping directly between them. Before she could drag her jeans up or shove his chest, Negan dropped to his knees between her legs.

His hands gripped the backs of her thighs, blunt fingers digging into the flesh of her hamstrings, hauling her ass to the very edge of the timber.

"N—"

He didn't give her the syllable. He buried his face straight between her thighs.

Maggie’s head snapped back with a gasp that bounced off the ceiling of the empty bar, her hands instantly flying down to knot into his hair. The flat, scorching drag of his tongue swept straight up through the seam of her slit, lapping up the slickness and the salt and the lingering trace of his own pre-come he’d smeared across her skin.

"Solmari lied to you," she choked out, her hips bucking off the table, curling toward his face, fingernails clawing at his scalp, trying to tear him away and only managing to pull his mouth harder against her clit. "I have no feelings for you. You're lucky you're still—"

He sucked the swollen bundle of nerves so hard her back touched the table, the friction making her thighs tremble beside his shoulders.

"—alive," her eyes rolling back into the dark as his beard scraped the sensitive skin of her inner thighs raw. "You're still immature and pathetic and the people around you have to suffer because of it."

Negan hummed against her mound, vibration crawling straight up her spine, his thumbs pressing hard into the creases of her hips to keep her pinned while his tongue worked her, drinking her in like he might never again.

He won't. Ever again.

"And if you don't do better," Maggie somehow continued, hips rolling against his mouth, core tightening into coils of heat, "I'll quit you. I'll—"

He broke away for a fraction of a second, just long enough to draw a breath against her wet flesh, looking up through his lashes with heavy-lidded eyes.

"I didn't say it was Solmari," he muttered against her lips down there.

Then he drove his tongue back in, thumb finding her entrance to pump shallow and fast, coordinating the friction until the world completely disappeared behind the white burn that took over her sight.

Maggie’s scream was muffled by the back of her own hand as she came fierce, messy, squeezing on barely anything, the shuddering contractions that soaked his chin, her body bucking against his mouth until her arms shook where she raised them above her head, her back arched, her belly lifting with every panting breath. She trembled wholly, weeping while he drank down every drop of her release, tongue cleaning her until she was shivering from the draft and the overstimulation.

Negan lingered there, his forehead resting against the inside of her thigh, breathing heavily against her cooling skin.

Then, with a low, raspy chuckle, never done, never satisfied, he lifted his head, wiping the back of his hand across his glistening beard.

"I was also told that you and Prince Charming are giving some time?"

Maggie’s eyes snapped open. She brought her open palm down and shoved his face hard to the side.

"Shut up," she breathed.

Pushed herself up off the table, the heels of her boots hitting the floorboards with a dull thud. Her legs shook beneath her, but she refused to look down at him where he knelt. She reached down, grabbed the waistband of her denim, and yanked it up over her hips, ignoring the wet, sticky cling of the fabric against her skin.

Forced the button into the hole with an angry jerk, zipping the fly until the metal teeth locked.

"You done?" she asked, voice flat as it could be, back to normal. She tucked the oilcloth with the photograph safely into the inside pocket of her jacket. "Fix yourself up."

Negan stayed on his knees for a second longer, watching the line of her, the way her shoulders rose and fell, until a slow, lazy smile broke across his bruised mouth, entirely unrepentant, obedient when it amused him.

He pushed himself up with a grunt, bad knee cracking loudly, adjusted his trousers, buckled his worn leather belt with steady movements, and rolled his shoulders, before leaning one hip against the edge of the counter, crossing his arms over his chest, eyes tracking the pale curve of her neck as she adjusted her collar, covering the bruises.

"So," he started. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Maggie paused, her hand over the pocket where her family sat against her ribs. She turned her head, looking him dead in the eye—taking in every single thing she's seen a thousand times before, and the unbreakable tether that kept him anchored to the foot of her life.

"Did you?" she asked.

Negan looked at her, untroubled, beat to the pulp to find the truth.

"Yes, ma'am.”