“I suppose I might be willing to give chase for my favorite rabbit,” Miah answered, amused by the idea of chasing after Ellie at all. “Although you can’t run off right now, not with your arm through mine like that.” This was said with a teasing smile, as if he had already caught her.
On nights like this it was easy to forget they were living in a place surrounded by zombies. Easy, but not impossible. Life had its moments of serenity in this place, those moments when it felt like it had before. Maybe people were just adjusting to life as it was now, adjusting to the fact they had thick walls of stone and carrying around a weapon was the norm. But then one little thing would crop up and remind him that this wasn’t normal – that there was a whole horde of the infected just waiting for someone to slip up and wandered out there and straight into biting distance.
Ellie was beyond gone, Miah knew this as well as he knew that he wasn’t nearly as drunk as she was. The evidence was in the fact that he was still forming thoughts and sentences that made sense to himself. Would she remember any of this conversation tomorrow? Probably not. You need to drink more. that little voice chirped. After all if she wasn’t going to remember, he didn’t want to either.
A wave of relief washed over him when Ellie accepted his slip for what it was, when she seemed none the wiser to the fact that it wasn’t the same as before. That his love for her now was clouded with feelings that he hadn’t expected to form. “You’ve always been the easiest person to love, Lo,” he saw no point in dancing around that word now. Granted his thought process was derailed when she began repeat the word over and over, and he found himself joining in the singing – all thought of the conversation before was long gone.
With a grin of his own Miah took his glass back from Ellie and downed half of it, hoping for the fuzziness and that pleasant feeling to deepen, to wipe out the overthinking his brain seemed prone to doing still.
“Scandalous, I know,” he remarked with a sly grin. “What would people say?”
Nobody quite understood their friendship, their relationship as much as they did. There wasn’t any awkwardness involved in the way things had started, they didn’t pretend as if it had never happened. Neither one of them were really the type, it was just a fact – the truth. It hadn’t been uncommon for Miah to wake up next to a girl he barely remembered; actually it had been sort of a habit. No, the interesting part of their history was that a friendship had formed from it – that in a long string of girls, Ellie had turned into the single most important person in his world.
As Ellie looked at him, he wondered if it was obvious to her, if she could pick up on the shift in his feelings. Miah hoped not, and quickly he raised his glass to her, urged on by her simple ‘Come on’ spoke in French. “Shot for shot.” And with that he tipped his glass back and drained the rest of the contents.