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The nightmare fades from the edges of her mind, taking far longer to leave her than it did to arrive in the first place. In a few hours she’ll be left with the primal fear of a mammal at night, but in the moment there is blood and gunfire and the light leaving Roberto’s eyes. Impossible stars and colors she’s never seen, and woody vines twice as thick as her. The cloying scent of flowers, so thick as to choke her.
A whine leaves her throat and that’s what finally wakes Wolfwood.
“Stryfe?”
His voice is thick from the back seat, whites of his eyes luminescent thanks to the full moons. Everything glows, at night, in an eerie way that reminds her too much of sterile, cold labs and the smell of Plant fluid. It had taken hours of frantic scrubbing to get the smell off her— Wolfwood had had to gently pry the sharp-bristled brush from her hands and only then did she see how badly she was making herself bleed.
“It’s nothing,” she curls her legs up onto the seat, pinches the bridge of her nose. “A nightmare.”
A snort.
“Sure doesn’t sound like ‘nothin’.” She can hear him rather than see him as he sits up, coat falling away into the dark space of the foot well where her pens go to die. “Talk to me.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Didn’t ask if it was stupid, I said ‘talk’,” comes the gruff response. His voice is not unkind, just thick with sleep as he scrubs a hand over his face. “If it’ll make you feel better—“
“JuLai.” Even the name of the place chokes her. “I keep dreaming about JuLai.”
Wolfwood goes quiet, the only sound his breathing layered with hers.
“I see it over and over, and there’s nothing I can do to make it different even in my dream. With all the power of my mind, I can’t change anything,” she turns to him, careful not to hit the gearshift with her knee. “But you’re there, and you save me every time, no matter how things play out.”
He arrives just in time to save her from falling, time and time again.
Wolfwood is always there to grab her hand on the roof, to pull her out of harm’s way the same way Roberto did. He’s there and he’s here, more importantly. Meryl had expected him to slip into the night the second the first survivors reached them on the ridge but he’d stayed.
And he was still here, with her.
She slips into the back seat as he sits up, arms extended and ready to pull her into his lap. It’s a familiar dance by now, down to the words they exchange.
“You sure?” Wolfwood is always so careful when he pushes her jacket off her shoulders, trails his fingers up her arms so lightly as to raise goose flesh in their wake and have her anticipating more, always more.
He is not asking if she’s sure about wanting him, wanting to be close to another person for a few precious moments, as close as two people can be— no, he’s asking if she’s sure about him.
‘I’m not a good person,’ he’d said the first time she’d kissed him. ‘This is my fault, I’m not worth it.’
But you’re here, she’d thought at the time when she pulled him to her and kissed him until they were both breathless and desperate. You’re here and you’re with me.
She’d never dared call him ‘mine’.
“I don’t care,” she turns her face into the join of his shoulder, hiding the tears. “Please, I don’t care.”
He knows what she means. He always has.
Wolfwood, at the end of the day, is as guilty as the rest of them by her measure. She and Roberto had driven Vash on, Wolfwood was not solely to blame for being a shepherd of death.
“We weren’t blameless either,” she works her hands under his shirt once she’s gotten it free of the waistband, palms running up his sides to count his ribs and feel his heartbeat. “None of us are.”
“Sound a lot like a church sermon,” he grumbles, leaning back just enough so Meryl can work at his buttons. “Maybe you shoulda been the preacher, Stryfe.”
She laughs and it so sudden that it startles. Wolfwood stills beneath her, raising a brow. “I think…I think that’s the first time I’ve laughed since that night.”
“Well,” his hands return to her hips, grounding but gentle. “We’ll set that to rights easily enough.”
His lips kiss over the curve of her breasts, his hands work open the button and zip of her shorts as hers do the same. It’s practiced, it’s messy. She loves the moment they’re pressed skin to skin, the breaths when they’re simply Wolfwood and Meryl before the become wolfwoodandmeryl.
This is a mistake.
The voice echoes in her head and it sounds like him, the smell of cigarettes still lingering in the truck— it’ll never fade if Wolfwood stick around, and Meryl’s head falls back to stare at the ripped headliner when he enters her with a sigh. Selfishly, she hopes it never fades.
If this is a mistake, let it last.
Wolfwood’s skin is glistening with sweat; she imagines she looks the same and marvels at the size difference between their hands when he kisses her knuckles and laces their fingers together. “Alright, darlin’?”
“More than alright,” she shifts her hips just to hear him groan as she slowly rides him, luxuriating in the feeling of being alive an entangled.
Don’t take him from me, she pleads to the stars, kissing along the curve of his zygomatic arch to the damp hair at his temple. I’ll do anything, don’t take him from me.
They way they move together is practiced— this is not the first time they’ve made this mistake and it won’t be the last. If Wolfwood won’t let her share the load of a sinner then she’ll become one.
Maybe, in time, she’ll even say his name without that sinking feeling in her heart.
Maybe, someday, she’ll say ‘Nicholas’ instead of ‘Wolfwood’ at the height of her pleasure. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll say ‘I love you’ and mean it.
And maybe, just maybe, he’ll say it back.