ALL THE LOVELY BAD ONES | CARL GRIMES

eight. heart like yours

Anxious energy crackled in the air, setting my nerves alight as I paced back and forth, a prisoner to my own restless thoughts. Should I return to the cell block and confront the aftermath of whatever calamity had befallen us, or should I continue to cower in the icy grip of fear, paralyzed by the unknown?

I was a coward, plain and simple, unwilling to confront the harsh realities that lurked beyond the safety of my own solitude.

My body had brought me here with a purpose, to seek refuge in the shadows, to shield myself from the impending storm that threatened to consume me whole. And so, I remained ensnared in the suffocating embrace of my own cowardice, unable to break free from its iron grip.

The prison was falling apart, just as Woodbury had, just as Montgomery had, just as the entire world had. I was going to lose everything all over again. Something I was unsure that I was emotionally capable of doing once more.

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit—

"Eleanor?"

At that moment, Carl's voice was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

Not everything was lost.

I turned and there he stood, not twenty feet away. Living, breathing and heart beating. His face was one of shattered glass, stained red with misery, written with bewilderment at the tragedy.

Something snapped inside me. Allowing myself, for a moment, to feel. To care. And suddenly I could not stand the space between us, like a thick cord of piano wire was strung there. In some mutual fit of insanity, we both broke into runs, closing the distance by meeting in the middle.

"Patrick is dead." He told me, voice breaking at the end.

"I know-" Then the full impact of the predicament hit me. Patrick was dead. "-Oh, my God."

In a quick movement Carl reached out for me and I immediately fell into his sturdy arms, letting them hold me for the first time. He tucked my head beneath his chin and brought me close to his chest.

"That could've been Beth. Or Lizzie. Or you," tightened my grip around his neck and buried my face into his chest. The thought of losing this stupid, arrogant boy effecting me illy.

His whole body radiated warmth and he smelt like the air after rain. I can't believe I had never had him this close to me before, save for that fleeting moment in the hallway. If I could stay in this spot for the rest of the day, that be just fine by me. For something had clicked when we moved into each other's arms. It felt familiar and comforting, and I wondered why I hadn't hugged him before.

"I couldn't find you. I thought you were...gone." He muttered into my hair after a long time. "Everyone was freaking out. A lady was carrying her dead baby. Bloody people were screaming. It was bad, Eleanor. It was bad."

I had come out here to cower in fear after only seeing Patrick while he had faced the horrors of the entire massacre with his own eyes. I felt shame, truthfully, I had to have been a terrible friend. A weak friend. How could he console me when he had been the one to see it all?

I did not deserve to be consoled, yet I was afraid to release him. For one, I was partly embarrassed to have embraced him so willingly in the first place, especially after we had such clear unspoken boundaries, making me fret over the consequences. And two, I knew there was a great chance that we would never touch this way again and it had been so long since anyone had held me. So I clung to him like a small, plaintive child. Eyes shut tight, like maybe for a moment I could pretend we were somewhere else, in another life, and Patrick wasn't dead and summer wasn't ending and—