3. Nathan

3

NATHAN

Glancing around the group, I noticed no one in particular looked as shocked as I felt, not even Micah, who wore his cool façade like a mask.

Daisy and Jay had betrayed the sweetheart of a woman next to me in the worst possible way, and she still saved them?

I couldn’t wrap my mind around being that selfless, but at the start of the apocalypse, I had been in a very public area at the beginning. Survival meant numbers when the world ended, and I assumed that was her thought as well.

But with the way that woman spoke, I didn’t know why the family kept her around.

“Daisy, I know this has all been hard on you, but there is no excuse for your behavior,” Grace, Tori’s mother, scolded her.

Daisy didn’t reply, she just put her head down.

I wrapped my arm around Tori’s waist and helped her to her feet. “Don’t worry, killer. You dodged a bullet with those two. Besides, not having to worry about birth control is a plus in my book.”

“Excuse me.” Tom coughed, and my face heated as I shot him a sheepish smile.

“Sorry, sir. I’m just saying.”

“Thanks, Nathan. That’s another plus to infertility in this world,” Tori murmured.

“Break’s over,” Micah said in the deepest gruff voice I’d heard from him. I knew that whole thing had pissed him off just as bad as me.

Tori had to be the prettiest woman I’d ever laid my eyes on, and the way she held herself was magnetizing.

I led her back to her horse, reaching out and petting him. “Take good care of your owner.” The horse puffed out air before nodding his large head, and I grinned. “You’re a smart one.”

“He really is,” she murmured, glancing up at me briefly before turning back to the horse and kissing his forehead.

My heart seemed to stutter in my chest at the way her big blue eyes had stared up at me in the dark.

There was barely any light out as the sun dropped below the horizon and the crescent moon started to rise.

I glanced up toward the sky. The sunset had faded into twilight, and we still had a good few hours left until we made it back home. “Need help up?” I turned toward her, but she had already hauled herself up on the horse.

She let a slow smile spread over her lips as she shrugged. “I think I’ve got it…but thanks.”

Spencer hopped up behind her sister and winked at me. “We got it, but Tori will definitely need your help later.”

“Spence!” Tori’s cheeks tinged with pink, and I sent her a large smile before winking and making my way toward Micah, who was already up on the horse.

I put my foot in the stirrup and moved myself up onto the saddle. The saddle was big, but I hated how it still managed to squish Micah and I together. I’d much rather have ridden bareback. My ass hurt.

“Did you have to flirt so openly at a time like that?” Micah asked once we were settled on the horse.

I shrugged. “I wanted to hit on her and comfort her. That’s all.”

“How much longer do we have?” Grace asked as the horses started to get into a rhythm toward our home.

“Few more hours, I’d say,” Micah grumbled. “We have to keep going. If we stop, the horde will catch up, and I don’t want to go out that way.”

The group fell into silence again, and the farther we rode into the forest, the darker it was.

I was impressed the horses were doing so well.

“Fuck,” Micah cursed as a branch whacked him in the head.

I stifled a laugh, and he grumbled something obscene under his breath at me.

“What are the treehouses like that you live in?” Tori asked, her voice stark against the quiet night.

“Micah’s is the biggest,” I told her. “Mainly because he built it before all this, but the layout is similar in each one.”

“Two rooms, an area for the living room and kitchen area, and a bathroom with a toilet,” Micah explained.

“What about a shower?” Spencer asked, and Micah chuckled.

“We have an outdoor shower. It’s in a shed so you have privacy, but getting a shower set up was more difficult than you’d think. There’s a sink in there, though.”

“You’ll all have to pile into the guest treehouse to ride out the horde,” I added as the horse picked up its speed.

“Have you ever seen a horde before?” Jay asked, and I immediately recoiled at the sound of his voice.

How could Tori deal with someone like him? How could he even bring himself to cheat on a woman like that?

Her infertility shouldn’t fucking matter if he cared about her.

“Seen a few hordes run through,” Micah bit out.

“We want to go home after this though,” Grace said softly. “The ranch is our home.”

“We appreciate you letting us ride the horde out in a safer place, but that is our home as my wife said,” Tom clarified.

I scrunched my face up in a wince. They had not seen what a horde was capable of. That ranch had little chance of actually surviving it.

“We get that,” Micah said.

“But the offer is always open,” I added, specifically thinking of the cute brunette woman who had saved my life with a golf club. “My father’s a prepper. He and I always joked about how the apocalypse would come about. I told him zombies, but his thought was society collapsing or nuclear war… I never thought I would be disappointed to be right.”

“I get that,” Tori spoke softly. “I played a lot of zombie video games before everything, and seeing it play out in real life is a lot less thrilling.”

“Same here.” My lips curved into a small smile.

We had a lot more in common than I suspected.

I hadn’t been this interested in a woman since the night my father, step-mother, and I lost our home.

Going down this road could’ve been dangerous, but my gut told me that Tori was safe.

Micah glanced over his shoulder back at the woman we had both become infatuated with before turning back to the front.

She could be the key to a type of happiness we had long given up trying to achieve.