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His hands are reaching for her the second he feels the bed dip next to him. Despite the grogginess and the sand-like feeling in his eyes as he wakes, pushing through the fogginess of sleep just to hold her.
She's been on patrol all night. Without him.
Ever since Joel had dislocated his shoulder a few weeks ago, Tommy and Maria have seen fit to keeping him on a leash. And while he'd hoped maybe Tess would step back in solidarity until he was healed, there was no talking his wife out of wielding her gun and running the land.
"I'd go crazy, Texas," she told him when they got back from Salt Lake City and decided to settle in Jackson. Maria had dared to suggest she could work the gardens or stables if she wanted. "If they kept me contained in their pretty little Rockwell painting, tried to domesticate me, I'd lose my shit."
Joel knows his about her.
Joel loves his about her.
In the hazy blue light of early morning, she melts into him, into his touch. His palm runs down her rib cage, enjoying the way her frame has filled out in the year they've lived here. For twenty years, she'd been so small beneath his touch, he could feel her bones. Now she's warm and soft, and it's enough to comfort him when the nightmares jolt him awake.
When she's running her fingers through his hair and whispering to him, assuring him that he's okay. She is okay. Ellie is okay.
On mornings like this, when he's barely slept, worried sick about her all night, her presence is grounding. The feel of her body pressed to his an assurance that they're both still alive.
As his hands begin to wander, palms warming her, they find purchase beneath the cotton of her loose tank top. She sighs at his touch as skin finds skin and lets him feel.
His fingers trace patterns across her abdomen, drifting south to the long horizontal ridge just below her belly button.
Tess doesn't speak to him about her family. The one she lost before. Of the son who was so young, who deserved more than to turn into a monster. She doesn't even reminisce on the good few years she had with him before the world went to hell, has only uttered his name to Joel once. This scar is all she has left as proof he existed.
Much like the scar on Joel's temple is part of what little proof he has left that Sarah existed.
He doesn't realize he's begun tracing along the scar until he feels Tess go rigged in his arms, and she whispers, "Joel…"
His touch drifts away, moving north.
Her skin is like silk beneath his fingertips as they travel along her side. Just beneath her breast, he finds that rough, puckered spot where she'd once been sliced by one of Robert's cronies.
Lucky for them, the dumbass brought a knife to a gunfight. Not so lucky for Tess, the wound had become infected because, despite Joel's care in stitching her up with a kit he'd lifted from a FEDRA ground crew, antibiotics were in short supply. And there was no way in hell they were going to explain to FEDRA physicians where they were and why knives were involved.
In the days it took for Joel and Tommy to scour the QZ for medicine, he'd sincerely believed he might lose her.
The thought has him holding her a little tighter, nuzzling his nose into the crook of her neck. She smells of honey and lavender. Of the patrols he gave up to work the gardens or the extra contracting hours he put in so that he could trade for the ingredients he needed to make her new favorite soap. They're stocked for a month at least, and he has seasonal plans to make more.
She must sense that his mind is whirring, because she rolls over to face him, resting a palm on his beard.
"I'm here," she whispers.
The dim light is enough to let him see the shiny strip of white just above her lip. A punch to mouth she'd sustained when some green as hell minion from one of the other smuggling rings in the QZ decide to open his big fat mouth.
"So, you're his whore, huh?" he'd asked, nodding toward Joel.
The man left with a broken nose and far more blood gushing from his own face. All Tess's doing. But the guy's girlfriend got one good punch in before Tess knocked her out, practically bored as they walked out with their cargo.
A bushel of fucking apples.
They were both lucky she hadn't just pulled her gun on them, but goddamn apples weren't worth it. Idiots.
Joel's fingers trace a scar on her eyebrow, from a cut that accompanied a shiner he'd nursed for her.
The day they'd met Ellie.
The day they'd taken off from the QZ forever. The day he swore he would never fail her again, that he would never fail anyone again.
His touch follows a path, palm cupping her cheek on its way down, until his fingertips ghost across her neck. He delights in her shiver, in the goosebumps that erupt across her freckled skin. At least until he reaches the rough white patch on her shoulder.
That scar. He put that one there.
The museum in the heart of Boston's ruins had been overrun with infected. As soon as he'd rounded the corner to find that Clicker jumping her, he sprang into action. It had been a risk, aiming so close, but he'd saved her goddamn life at the cost of a deep graze.
"I'm here," she repeats as he presses a kiss to the delicate skin there. "I'm real."
Joel hovers over her then, his lips inches from hers. To his surprise, she captures them with her own first. Assurance in the wake of her absence, in the wake of reliving the memories of the times she very well could have been no more. No longer his to hold.
Her hands find his t-shirt, urging it off of him, and he takes that as an invitation to reciprocate. Soon, they're both naked from the waist up, and his lips descend upon her collarbone. In the heat of summer, he's noticed how much darker her dusting of freckles has become.
His lips follow them in a pattern, kissing little constellations with the darkest of the marks. The freckles are tiny stars, each scar a galaxy as he moves down her body, an entire universe in itself.
Joel Miller sure as hell doesn't believe in God, but suddenly the idea of the two of them taking off into the sky, into some otherworldly place instead of the fire and brimstone he's certain they both deserve, blooms in his chest. Maybe, just maybe, there is a future beyond this miserable life. Maybe they've found the closest thing to it.
As they shed the rest of their clothing and he joins with her, he lets himself believe. He takes each sigh, each pleasured breath as a sign that maybe she feels the same.
He lets her take him to the stars, scars and all.