Andrew Kirke (tuned_in) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-08-15 20:25:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ^ week 19, analise gordan, andrew kirke, | ana and drew |
Week 19: Wednesday Morning
Characters: Analise Gordan and Andrew Kirke
Location: The living room / Farmhouse
Summary: Ana is tired of arguing and sleeping alone. Drew is mostly just tired, given it's 4:30 in the morning when she makes this realization.
Rating: PG
Six. That’s how many nights Ana had lain in bed without Drew. Not in any of their previous fights had they taken so long to make up. Ana would banish him to the couch and then give up halfway through the night to go crawl on top of him, whispering in the dark how sorry she was and that whatever she said, she hadn’t meant it. Or even if she didn’t, they’d still never gone more than a day or two before apologizing.
Six nights was an eternity.
It wasn’t that Drew didn’t deserve to have her angry at him. He did. Suggesting that she would rather be with Mason and giving her an ultimatum was unbelievable. He was supposed to realize his mistake after Bridget spoke to him. Once Drew admitted he’d been wrong they could have moved past this. But it had been six nights and still no apology. Still no Drew.
After an hour tossing and turning in the bed that still felt to empty without him, Ana gave up. She was going to give him a piece of her mind for not making up with her. Barefoot, Ana padded down the cold floorboards to the Drew-shaped lump on the sofa in the living room. She poked him. Hard.
“You’re a jerk, you know that? Why haven’t you come apologize yet?”
The lump grunted and rolled away from from the offense, pressing its face into the sofa. He made a muffled half-formed protest, something about time and sleeping, but still being half-asleep it wasn’t very comprehensible.
Unsympathetically, Ana poked him again. “You’re supposed to say you’re sorry so you can come back to bed with me where you belong, ‘stead of makin’ me sleep alone without you.”
“M’tryin’a sleep,” came the somewhat irritable reply, “do we gotta do this now?”
Ana tossed her head and rolled her eyes. “Yes. I’ll poke you again if I have to.”
Drew groaned in full force of his agitation, rolling onto his back and looking up at her through squinting eyes and a deep-set frown. What time was it? A quick glance at his watch showed 4:30. He groaned again.
“I’m not sorry,” he said in a gravelly voice, though it lacked any malice.
“Yes, you are,” Ana disagreed. “You’re real sorry you said all those things about me wantin’ anyone but you. How am I supposed to make up with you if you ain’t sorry?”
His eyes moved away from her face, up toward the ceiling. He couldn’t look at her with the emotions slowly creeping up through his chest. “Didn’t sound like it. Sounded like I was your second choice. That you had a better life and I just had to ruin it by bein’ alive when you found me.”
Ana’s expression softened in the darkness and she crouched down to kneel beside the couch. “Baby, I didn’t come lookin’ for you because you were my second choice. I came lookin’ for you because that was the only choice I had. Just took me a little while to figure that out, is all.”
Drew remained silent, blinking rapidly and swallowing around a dry tongue. He hated feeling like this; paranoid and scared that he’d lose everything at any moment. It didn’t matter that she’d come back when there was always that risk of something going wrong or her deciding it wasn’t worth the effort. Before the virus, he had always been in awe that she’d chosen him, out of all her many admirers. This man seemed like twice the man Drew was, and that made him worry all the more. He didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t want to have her be unhappy either.
“I was so alone,” he finally said, still not looking at her. “Everything in the city was dead and gone. I left my camp three days after people started dyin’, and I just...” he pulled a hand out from beneath his thick quilt, rubbing futilely at his eyes. “I shouldda stayed. Someone else might’a lived that wouldda came back with me. Or, I dunno, but I just...”
Ana wished for him that he’d had the same opportunity that she’d had. If only Drew had found a group so he wouldn’t have spent so many lonely weeks waiting for her. In one sense, she’d been lucky. In another, his pain was partially her fault. “Or you could have gotten sick and died. You can’t think like that.”
“Shouldda couldda wouldda, right?” he replied, giving a weak sort of laugh and a sniff. He sighed, wiping his eyes again and looking over at her. He could just barely make out the details of her face in the darkness, and reached out to touch her cheek.
Ana leaned into his touch, covering his hand with her own. The sense of just how much she’d missed him in the past six nights crashed down on her. “Baby, can we just be made up now?”
“C’mere,” he said instantly at hearing the sound of tears in her voice, shifting so he could pull her onto the narrow ledge of the couch with him.
Wordlessly, Ana climbed onto the couch, pressing tight against the familiar warmth of Drew’s chest. It was a tight squeeze, but Drew hardly cared, his arms shifting and circling around her in a firm embrace. He’d missed her just as much those past few nights, if not more, but he’d been patient. He knew that she would eventually seek him out; he just hadn’t expected it to be at 4:30 in the morning.