Chapter 268: Getting Rid of the Jacket

Once we were ready, the three of us headed out, leaving the cleared area behind and moving into the wider streets beyond our territory.

There was a shortcut to the Boardwalk—the barricade jump Summer used yesterday near the Pier Shops mall would have cut the walk in half. But showing up that way wasn’t exactly the impression I wanted to make with Marlon’s people. I mean, it would be weird and suspicious as hell to appear out of nowhere inside their territory through that way…

Better to take the longer route and walk in through the proper entrance, the same way Clara and I had entered the first time.

So we walked.

The sun was already working hard overhead. Cindy had been right about August, it was genuinely aggressive out here in the open, pressing down on the exposed asphalt and radiating back up in waves you could almost see.

“Ryan,” Cindy said from behind me. “Are you ever going to retire that jacket?”

I glanced down at myself instinctively, checking for tears or something visibly wrong.

“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.

Cindy made a sound that was mostly just a sigh.

“You wear it every single day,” she said. “Every day. You change your shirt underneath it, fine but that jacket is always there. Rain, heat, infected blood, doesn’t matter. That jacket is permanent.”

“I wash it every two or three days,” I said reasonably. “It’s fine.” I turned slightly and held it open to show her the interior. “And look, pockets. Lots of them. Useful.”

“You have a bag,” Cindy said, reaching forward and tugging the strap of said bag pointedly. “An entire bag on your back with significant storage capacity. The pockets argument doesn’t hold.”

I turned to look at her properly, then shifted my gaze briefly to Daisy as well.

“Do I actually look bad in it?” I asked.

Daisy opened her mouth immediately. “N—No, I think you look….you look fine with it, actually—”

“Daisy! Come on!” Cindy called out, turning toward her with a look that communicated she was being betrayed in real time.

“Eh?” Daisy blinked, genuinely confused about what she’d walked into.

“I needed backup and you folded in under three seconds,” Cindy told her.

“I didn’t know that’s what we were doing—”

“So I don’t look bad with it,” I said to Cindy, pressing the small advantage.

Cindy looked at me. Held the stare for a moment. Then exhaled the particular exhale of someone abandoning a position they’ve decided isn’t worth holding.

“Ryan,” she said, slowly and calmly. “You don’t look bad in anything. That’s the actual problem. You could wear a bin bag and somehow it would work and you still wouldn’t understand why.” She gestured vaguely at the jacket. “I just think you’d look better without it. That’s all.”

I looked down at the jacket again.

It had been new once, proper khaki, taken from a clothing store back in Jackson Township during one of those early supply runs when everything still felt improvised and temporary. After months of washing out infected blood and whatever else had found its way onto it, the original color had been worked out of it almost entirely. What remained was a faded, uneven shade somewhere between its original color and nothing in particular, with two dark stains along the left sleeve that had never fully lifted no matter how many times I’d treated them.

It had seen a lot. We both had.

I was quiet for a moment.

Then I slipped the bag off my shoulders, shrugged out of the jacket, and started emptying the pockets, handaxe to the hip holster, the rest into the bag. I dropped the jacket on the ground without ceremony and slung the bag back up, rolling my shoulders once in the sudden freedom of the direct sunlight.

Just a red checkered shirt now. Worn but intact.

I turned back toward Cindy with a slight raise of the brow.

“Better?”

She stared at me.

The surprise lasted just long enough to be genuine before something quieter replaced it, a faint color rising in her cheeks as she tucked a strand of blonde hair back with one finger.

“Yeah,” she said, quieter than usual. “Better.”

I turned and kept walking.

She was right about the heat. Without the jacket sitting over everything, the summer air hit differently, still warm, still relentless, but breathable in every better ways.

August was genuinely blazing this year. It would stay warm into September, maybe through October if the weather held and in this new world, a mild extended summer was a genuine advantage. Dry ground, clear visibility, longer usable hours in the day.

But winter was coming.

November, December, the cold settling into every cracked window and unheated room in every building we were relying on for shelter. In the old world that was inconvenient. In this one it was a survival problem that would need to be solved well in advance. Heating, insulation, food preservation, illness management with limited medical resources.

We had time. Not as much as I’d like, but time.

“That’s rude, by the way,” Cindy said, falling into step beside me.

I glanced at her. “Rude how?”

“We complimented you,” she said, gesturing between herself and Daisy. “You got told you look good, you accepted it, you moved on.” She looked at me pointedly. “We’re both standing here in skirts for the first time in months and you haven’t said a single word about it.”

I looked at them both.

I hadn’t really let myself look properly before, too focused on the objections I’d been forming but I looked now.

Well, they were both pretty to begin with so obviously wearing something so bold as knee cute skirts showing off their bare legs clearly only accentuated their natural beauty.

Though it definitely gave me a weird impression mainly because I had never seen them wearing such clothes and mostly saw them wearing pants and trousers.

This boldness was more Sydney like, or maybe not actually. She didn’t seem to actually like skirts, I didn’t see her really wearing ones but she loved wearing shorts just to ’provoke’ me and it worked quite well…

“Hum…”

I realized I’d been looking for a moment too long when Daisy’s already-present blush deepened noticeably and she reached up to adjust her glasses nervously.

“You both look good,” I said, and turned back to face forward.

“T…Thanks,” Daisy managed with a blush, pushing the glasses back up her nose.

Cindy, walking beside me now close enough that her arm occasionally brushed mine, said nothing for a moment.

Then she reached out and closed her fingers lightly around my arm.

“That’s all?” She asked, looking up at me with an expression that was somewhere between amused and genuinely wanting more.

Cindy was careful about it. She kept her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry back to Daisy, her fingers still light around my arm as she leaned just slightly closer.

“So….how do I look?” She asked, tilting her face up toward mine. She pressed my arm gently against her side as she said it, and I felt the warmth of her breasts through the thin fabric of her top.

I looked at her properly.

The sapphire necklace I’d given her sat against her collarbone, catching the sunlight in small, clean flashes. The summer top left her shoulders bare—smooth skin, unblemished. The skirt moved lightly around her legs as she walked, and her legs themselves were—

I pulled my gaze back up.

Her blonde hair was cut just along her neck, framing her face the way it always did, and those bright blue eyes were looking up at me with an openness she didn’t always let show, patient and expectant and quietly wanting something real rather than polite. And that small mole just beneath her lower lip, the one I’d memorized without meaning to at some point and couldn’t unmemorize…

Honestly. Genuinely. How had I managed to make this girl fall in love with me?

“You look amazing…” I said. Quietly and without any decoration on it. Just the straight, sincere thing.

I meant it in a way she could probably hear in my voice whether I wanted her to or not.

She felt it somehow, through the words or through the way I was looking at her, I wasn’t sure which. The color rose in her cheeks slowly and she didn’t look away, holding my gaze with something warm and slightly unguarded moving through her expression.

We’d stopped walking without either of us deciding to.

I was very aware of how close she was standing. I was equally aware of the very strong and very inconvenient pull toward closing the remaining distance to kiss her and the equally strong and equally inconvenient reasons not to.

I was fairly certain she was fighting the same thing.

“Cindy?”

Daisy’s voice came from a few steps behind us, confused and slightly concerned at finding us stopped in the middle of the street.

Cindy blinked. The moment broke cleanly and she pulled back, the color still sitting in her cheeks as she turned and moved back toward Daisy with the slightly over-corrected energy of someone rejoining reality after a brief absence.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said brightly, falling into step beside Daisy and slipping naturally into the easier register she used with her. “I was just going to say—you look genuinely beautiful today, you know that? If you just took the glasses off for like five minutes, every man in Margaret’s community would completely lose their mind over you.”

Daisy blinked behind the cracked lenses. “I—I wouldn’t be able to see anything without them,” she said quietly. “And I don’t really… I’m not comfortable with people I don’t know.”

That tracked. I remembered Elena mentioning it once in passing—how she and Alisha had originally gotten close to Daisy because of exactly that. Other students at Lexington Charter who’d tried to take advantage of how easily overwhelmed she got in social situations. Elena had inserted herself between Daisy and that problem with her characteristic complete lack of subtlety, and Alisha had followed, and that was apparently how the three of them had become what they were.

“You’re never going to get a boyfriend if you keep hiding like that,” Cindy told her, nudging her arm.

Daisy went pink. She was quiet for a short beat and then glanced sideways at Cindy hesitantly.

“What about you, Cindy?” She asked softly.

Cindy walked straight into it without seeing it coming.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. I watched the exact moment she realized she’d walked directly into the hole she’d dug herself and there was no graceful way out of it.

“W—Well…” She started.

I said nothing. I looked straight ahead and said absolutely nothing.

“I think,” Daisy continued, quietly and without any apparent awareness of the chaos she was causing, “you and Christopher seemed really good together. When we first met all of you. It seemed like it was just… a matter of time.”

And there it was.

She wasn’t wrong, either. Anyone who’d spent five minutes around Christopher and Cindy during those early weeks could see it—the specific ease between them, the way they moved around each other, the natural way they worked on together. When it shifted, it had surprised people who’d been watching. Daisy had clearly been watching.

“We were,” Cindy said, after a pause. “But things change. We moved on. We’re good now—just differently.” She glanced at me sideways as she said it—a brief, loaded look that carried everything she couldn’t say out loud in front of Daisy.

She seemed very frustrated.

I caught it and understood it completely.

She didn’t want me feeling guilty. She genuinely didn’t. But she also couldn’t say what she wanted to say—couldn’t reach over and take my hand or lean against me or do any of the hundred small things that would communicate the actual truth of it—because the actual truth of it was still this complicated, unresolved thing that existed in the strange space between what we were and what we could openly be.

And honestly, that frustrated me too.

There were moments—more of them lately—where I just wanted to be done with the careful management of it. Done holding back with Rachel, with Sydney, with Cindy. Done pretending in public that the relationships were something simpler and more conventional than they were. Just—done. All of it out in the open, everyone aware, no more reading between lines or stolen moments or careful distances maintained for appearances.

But then I thought about the timing of it. About Margaret’s community—sixty people who had just joined us, who were still calibrating how much they trusted us, who were in the middle of a dangerous and unresolved situation with Callighan. The moment I revealed that I was in a relationship with multiple women simultaneously, I knew exactly what the reaction would be. The faces. The conversations that would follow.

It would only bring some useless troubles.

This wasn’t the moment of it.

Not now. Genuinely not now.

But how to do it properly, how to let it come out in a way that was honest and managed and didn’t set everything on fire, I had absolutely no idea. I’d turned it over enough times to know that I didn’t have an answer yet.

I supposed I’d figure it out when the world gave me slightly more room to breathe.

We walked the rest of the way without much conversation—just the three of us moving through the quiet summer streets, the heat pressing down steadily, the distant sound of ocean air getting gradually stronger as we got closer.

Eventually the main barricade of the Boardwalk came into view ahead of us.

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