Poker Face

Chapter 59 - Talk It Out

That led to a particularly troubling thought: what if he hadn't been there? That day was hard enough to think about but the reality of what would have happened if Negan had stepped in even sixty second later, or if he hadn't stepped in at all, hit her too suddenly and too heavily. Her attacker, a bearded biker with shaggy white hair, had only just penetrated her when Negan found them. She'd been mostly spared, but her mind was now flooding with what her fate would have been otherwise. She was suddenly too aware of her own nudity and the feeling of hands sliding down the front of her body.

She shoved her hands hard against Negan's bare chest, breaking their kiss and practically flying backwards to the other side of the tub to get away from him.

"Doll, what's wrong?" he gasped, reaching out towards her but freezing in place when he saw she was shaking, her face completely blank. "Aven, talk to me," he said almost sternly. "What's going on?" She seemed to stare through him for a long moment before her eyes softened in recognition and her body untensed against the corner of the tub. "Aven, what the fuck is going on?" Her mouth hung open and her breathing was slightly labored as she pulled her knees up to her chest to cover herself.

"Can, um, can you hand me a towel?" she asked quietly, unable to look him in the eye. He stared at her, utterly confused, but complied, standing with her as she took the towel and quickly wrapped it around herself. She carefully stepped out of the tub, still dizzy although the warm bath water had initially alleviated her aggravated symptoms. Negan watched dumbfounded as she rushed out of the bathroom, and he heard drawers opening and shutting as he got out of the tub himself and wrapped a towel around his waist. He stepped out of the bathroom and went over to sit at the foot the bed as Aven swept past him back into the bathroom and closed the door to get dressed.

For a moment, he just stared at the closed door, trying to figure out what had just happened. But then something caught his attention that he hadn't noticed before their bath: small shreds paper scattered on the floor and Aven's notebook lying open to two pages that had been scribbled completely black until they tore. He picked it up and began flipping back through it to see several pages in the same condition, only a few of which had been fully torn out. He looked closely and could tell there had been writing that Aven successfully destroyed any legibility of. He flipped back to the first page that hadn't been destroyed and it was dated that same day.

Negan skimmed several pages of writing and realized Aven had been trying to piece together a timeline of what happened in the weeks, days, and hours before he met her. It all began as bullet-pointed notes with messy arrows pointing to different places on the list, followed by pages of the same notes rearranged properly in chronological order. They got more and more detailed as they went on and eventually just turned into one long paragraph. He stopped on one of the last legible pages before the ones she tore up.

That car broke down too and it was getting dark so I walked to a town in the distance and got lucky with the first house I found. I still couldn't find any food but the house was empty and I stayed the night without a problem. I wasn't sick yet. The next day I found a few cars nearby but none of them worked. I found the highway and started walking north.

I walked most of the day with a few breaks to refill my canteen. After a day or two I couldn't find water again. Found an empty car and two old granola bars. Car didn't work, kept walking. Found another car to sleep in and kept walking again the next day. By that night, I was on an empty stretch of highway and had to keep walking rather than sleeping out in the open.