Sweet Romance11 min read
The Cat-Eye and the Axe
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The first thing I noticed was the smell.
It hit like a wall when I turned the kitchen tap: copper and iron, thick and wrong. I flicked the handle and watched dark red water coil down the drain.
"Maverick?" I whispered.
A hand clamped my mouth before I could scream. His palm was warm. His voice was low, pressed to my ear.
"Don't make a sound. They're out there."
He smelled of the morning—mint and soap—and of something else I couldn't name. He had a white shirt on that had not been white for long.
"Maverick, your shirt—"
"I got bit," he said quietly. "By a man on the stair. I grabbed him and ran. Listen to me: lock the door. Stay inside. Don't open for anyone."
I gripped his wrist hard enough to bruise. "No. I won't."
"You need to stay inside. For your own safety."
I had never seen him so stern. He pushed, one slow inch, then another. I wrapped my arms around him anyway.
"I'm not letting go," I said. "If you become one, I'll—"
"You can't," he cut in, eyes distant. "You can't waste yourself because of me."
"I will," I said. "If you turn, I'll stay with you."
He closed his eyes like someone trying to anchor themselves.
"Please," he said then, softer. "Just listen. Lock the door."
He left before I could stop him. The door slammed. The sound was a verdict.
I pressed my face against the wood and called his name until my voice was hoarse.
"Maverick! Answer me!"
The hallway outside rasped and dripped. Sounds I had never known in this city filled the gaps: shuffling, odd wet noises, a ragged groan like a throat clearing that never ends.
Then, a crash. Someone hitting the stairwell railing. A muffled scream. And then silence.
Through the peephole I watched the shape that had been my boyfriend—my Maverick—stand in the hall opposite our door. He didn't come in. He stood with his back to me, shoulders squared. Blood caked his collar, his jaw, and where his neck met his shirt was a ruin.
When he turned, his eyes were pale and glassy. Not quite the green I knew, not yet the blank white the others wore—but wrong in a way that made my stomach flip.
"Please be a trick," I told the peephole. "Please be a bad joke."
He blinked, slowly. The pupil near gone, the whites clouded. He leaned forward, and for a second I saw the man who used to kiss the knuckles of my hands. For a second I thought he would smile.
Instead he reached for the handrail and slammed a stranger's head into the wall when a couple on the other side of the corridor lunged at him.
"Don't come here," he growled. It was a sound between a word and a snarl.
I laughed—half hysterical, half proud. "Maverick, you're a beast. Kill him! Kill them all!"
He did. The thing that had been a man crumpled, and Maverick's ax—he had an ax now—came down with a thump that I felt through the wood.
Days blurred. I learned to check the tap before I drank. I learned the sound that meant someone had crept too close. I learned to sleep with my ear against the door, listening for the rhythm of his steps in the hallway. He never slept inside. He never crossed the threshold.
We developed a language through the cat-eye in the door.
"Are you there?" I'd breathe.
He'd turn, slowly, as if the motion took a thousand small wills to command. Once, he brought three bottles of water and a bag of the soy milk and pastry I'd wanted the night before, the ones he'd run for when nothing felt safe but my hunger for something warm. He stood with one hand on the knob, looking at the peephole, his back to me. He'd leave the packets, then retreat like a sentry.
"You could at least wave," I protested.
He leaned forward, and his jaw worked. He could not speak. But once, when a frail old woman lunged at him in the stairwell and clung to his sleeve, he slammed her head against the stair and then—without turning—he looked right at the peephole and gave the smallest nod. It was not a word, but I took it for hello.
Sometimes he fought until his arms trembled, and I watched from inside while the hallway filled with the sick-sweet stench of blood and rot. He'd walk back to the door carrying everything from deodorant to tins. Once he returned with a pair of boots and a bar of peppermint soap. The soap smelled like the person he had been.
"You bathed?" I mouthed at the peephole, incredulous.
He shrugged. He didn't smile, but the movement was small and human. I cried then, pressing both eyes to the lens as if proximity could stitch him whole.
"Lock the door," he would say without words by steadying his hand on the knob. His silence was the loudest thing in the apartment.
On the eighth day, the water tasted cleaner. The city voices changed: fewer screams, more distant metallic bangs like doors being shut for good.
"I'm going to the market for water," I told him one morning. I had already scavenged a backpack, a pocketknife, and the keys to the old sedan we'd always said we'd fix up. "I can bring some back."
He looked at the peephole then, and for the first time since the bite, he turned and met my gaze head-on. He raised a finger and waggled it—no, not a finger. A curt, human 'wait.'
"Don't go too far," I whispered. "I'll be right back."
He turned away and then, to my bewilderment, lifted the ax and began hacking at the dead bodies stacked by the stairwell as if he were clearing a path. He threw each carcass aside like a broom would a pile of dust.
When I came back with three heavy jugs of water, he was waiting at the door, slumped and exhausted, arms still stained. He looked smaller somehow. He held out one bottle with hands that trembled.
"Thank you," I said, and he made no reply. But he watched me drink until my cup was empty.
We learned to trade like lovers again—his offerings for my human warmth.
"Stop driving me insane," I scolded one evening. "Come in. Bring the axe in. You can strip the room for whatever you want, just—come in."
His hands froze on the iron knob. He tapped his forehead—and then, in a gesture that was all manners and memory, he touched the spot where my hair fell over my shoulder, like the man who had once brushed it away.
"Please," I said, the sound small and very like prayer. "Please remember me."
He turned and looked at me. The glass of his eye caught the light, and there was hunger there—an animal hunger—but also, for a moments like a crack of sun, the man I knew.
Then the hallway sounded again: a low, inhuman growl like a door scraping the sky. Maverick clenched his ax tighter and stepped out.
He didn't come back for hours.
When he did, he slotted into the small of the door to leave a sack of canned goods. He stood in his white shirt, dirt riming it like the edge of a moon. He didn't meet my eyes.
"Please," I said, leaning so close to the peephole my breath fogged it. "Please come in tonight. I can't sleep."
He remained at the threshold as if the line the frame made kept him from undoing everything he'd done to remain sane. Then—so slowly I could have sworn he moved through syrup—he lifted his hand and tapped the glass twice.
It meant yes.
He had always found ways to be wordless and devastating. He had once taught me to carry small things in my palm and savor them. He had once placed cheap roses in a jar and called our rent-controlled kitchen a palace. He had once kissed me in the rain with such reverence I thought seasons might change to fit us. Now he left me bread and sugar and tiny things that startled me by their normalcy.
The world outside the villa we'd finally reached was merciless. The city had been a rumor of light and bodies, and we found a house with a high wall and running water, a bathroom that flushed, a refrigerator that hummed like a living thing.
He had been there before.
"You stole someone's bath?" I accused, half-laughing, half-captain of my own grief.
He shrugged and made an off-key noise that looked an awful lot like a grin.
"You came back for me," I said. "Even if your jaws are a little scarier lately."
He tilted his head. Then, in the private church of our tiny living room, he stepped forward and for the first time in weeks met my face.
He had bathed. He smelled like soap and mint and something faintly metallic. The white shirt hung on him like hope.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
He answered with a sound between a hum and a chuckle. It was almost a voice.
The next few days were a strange negotiation of habits. I wanted to make him memorize words. He wanted to remember how to be careful with a doorknob. I learned to feed him first, always, because hunger was lightning in his jaw.
"Don't bring strangers," I told him when we left the gate for the first time to see if a human community had set up any safe points.
At the market turned reclamation site, a woman in a uniform called over by a megaphone caught sight of him and aimed a rifle. I threw myself in front of him, the way I'd once shadowed his shoulder in crowded subway cars.
"Please," I said, voice quivering. "Please don't shoot. He's with me."
The woman—Harper Henderson—lowered the weapon slowly. "Is he infected?" she asked, and her question was a hunt.
"No." I said it with the force of belief. "He protects me. He saved people."
A cluster of survivors came forward, murmuring, nodding, telling stories. Some of the tales were about a pale man in a white shirt who hacked through night and day to keep a neighborhood alive. Some stories were about a shadow that left water on porches and knocked twice.
"You two should come with us," Harper said. "We have a safe zone with generators. If he's—"
"No," I said. "We can't. Not yet. He can't meet crowds. We need to be private."
She looked at Maverick then and studied the scar at his neck. "He doesn't bite you," she observed with a scientist's bluntness.
"He's… careful," I said.
We drove to a big house on a hill. It had walls that meant something. Inside, the water was clear and running as if nothing in the world had ever ruptured.
"Take a bath," I told him like a command and then laughed. "We always said we'd finish each other's sentences. Now we finish each other's supplies."
He stepped into the shower like it might burn him. He came out smelling like someone I could invite home to dinner again.
And then, because the world has a trickster's sense of timing, the miracle happened in the place miracles sometimes wait: a mouthful of blood and a greedy, foolish idea.
We had argued earlier—about nothing and everything. I was childish and defiant. I teased him, prodding the idea of him leaving me for someone his new kind would prefer. He retreated to the doorway, jaw clenching. He was trying not to be what he feared.
"Leave me," I said, worse than mean. "If you walk out that door, I'm going to find someone to bite me and we'll be done. You can have your kind then."
He stared. The knuckles in his hands went white.
Then I did the stupidest thing of my life: I pushed forward and kissed him like the world had not ended. I bit his lip—just enough for him to hiss—and tasted iron.
He jerked. For a breath, the hallway smelt of the sharp copper I had learned to despise. He pushed me away.
"Please," I begged, tears hot in my eyes. "If I'm going to die, I'd rather die with you."
He looked lost, a cart that couldn't find a road. Then he turned and slammed the door so hard I thought the hinges might break. I sat on the floor and felt my world capsize.
Then things got loud.
He ran. He didn't look back. For two hours I sat by the peephole and watched life in that corridor—Maverick approaching like a white flag, then vanishing, then returning with an army I did not know he kept in his pockets: the corpses of our enemies dragged like bad weather behind him.
That night he returned soaked in dusk and smelled of exertion and iron. He slipped inside without fuss. He was at the bathroom sink, and he said something I could hear—
"Jensen."
He said my name.
It wasn't a paper-thin thing. There was warmth in it now, a steady tread. He touched my face like someone mapping a territory and then, with ridiculous innocence, pressed his mouth to mine.
It was cold. It was not what a kiss had been a year ago or even three weeks ago. But under it, something else pulsed: a heartbeat.
"Did that—what—" I began.
He held my face and looked at me. "You bit me," he said, slow and as if tasting the words. "And something changed."
Our theory was ridiculous. We told ourselves a story because stories are what keep people from unraveling. We said maybe an exchange—blood for blood, human for not—had done something. We called it a reversal, a joke the universe allowed once. We tested. I avoided letting him bite me again; he avoided letting me kiss anything but him. We watched him get stronger. His eyes cleared. The gray washed out. The blank, furrowed stare came back into a face that laughed at bad puns and locked me out of the apartment when I left my keys inside.
When Harper came back with medicine and a plan, she examined Maverick like a work of nature. "He has no detectable virus left," she said, and for the first time since the man in the stairwell had put his teeth to Maverick's flesh, there was a clinical certainty.
"We have to run tests," she said, excited and fearful in equal measure. "We need to know if this works."
We did the tests. He passed. The line on the page that had promised "infected" was now a blank slap of normalcy. He could talk. He could remember the name of the song he hummed when he thought no one was listening. He could listen to me about the things I bought that we did not need.
The day they made a list of survivors and the recovery teams put out their paper notices, everyone looked at us. Whispers followed us like small dogs. "That's the woman with the man who was a—" they'd start, and then stop as if the word might open a wound.
Harper recommended isolation studies; some bureaucrat from the relief camp escorted us through forms and into registration. I read each sheet and felt my hand shake. People looked at us like we were a medical miracle and something morally complicated rolled into one package.
The story spread: a woman who lived with her partner through the bite, who refused to give up, who bit him in return and brought him back. Some called it love. Some called it science. Some called it luck.
We laughed and cried in equal measure. The thing I loved—the way he used both hands to take my face, the way he hummed when he was nervous—came back whole.
Years stitched themselves forward like knitted rows. Our house filled with small noises: toys under couches, the soft footfall of two children who had never known the world before the dark. We lived in a city that had reassembled itself into something sturdier. The virus became a hard chapter people read about and then set on the shelf.
Our children called him Papa and me Mama. They fought over who would sit in his lap and who would get the last pancake. The ax hung above the fireplace, polished and ceremonial and ridiculous. He joked about it sometimes with his old tender grin.
"We promised to wash up and share a bath," I would remind him on late nights when the house was quiet.
"You threatened to bite me if I left you," he would reply, and we would grin at the memory of raw fear and rawer devotion.
Sometimes at night, when the kids slept and the city noises became a whisper of lives being lived, we'd sit by the window and look at the street where the first taste of blood had come down our tap.
"You saved me," I said quietly once, thumb tracing the thin scar at his jaw.
He looked at me like I was the map he'd always needed. "You saved me too," he answered.
We never solved how exactly the bite that had been intended to finish either of us turned into the thing that made him whole. We didn't need to. Some things keep their mystery, and keeping it made our life richer.
"Promise me one thing," I asked him, half in jest, the way lovers make vows about trivialities because they are terrified to make them about permanence.
He lifted a brow. "Only if it's not silly."
"Never leave me standing outside the door," I said.
He leaned in, one hand on the ax, one hand on the window frame, and said, "Never."
At our ten-year mark, two small faces blinked up at us in the bright morning like proof that the future had not decided to be cruel. The older one asked me, serious as a judge, "Mom, who do you love more—Papa or me?"
I looked at Maverick as he smeared jam on toast and answered as only someone who'd once pressed her face to a peephole and begged could answer.
"I love them both. But I love him first. He taught me how to wait for the sun."
We kept the cat-eye in the door. It became a relic, a thing full of memories. Sometimes I still press my face to it, not because I need to see him—he's right there on the other side of the living room—but because that cracked lens is where the worst and the best of us met.
And sometimes, late at night when the house breathes slow and the kids dream loud, I can still smell peppermint soap on him and remember the day the tap ran red and the world did not end us.
The End
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