Free Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After by Sarah Lyons Fleming

and rests his head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I knew I was safe up there, but you weren’t safe. You didn’t seem to care that they were coming right at you.”
    “You know I cared that zombies were coming to eat me. I would’ve run if I’d thought we couldn’t kill them. I would’ve left Ana in the dust.” He sniffs at my joke. “You were the same way on the radio. I wanted to kick you because it seemed like you weren’t taking it seriously.”
    “I was, I swear,” he says. “I just wasn’t freaking out.”
    “Exactly. I don’t do anything stupid because I always want to come back to you and Bits. I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.”
    “I know.”
    “Plus, you don’t need to worry, not with my expertise in karate.” I shoot out my hand in a faux karate chop, which accidentally knocks half of my stack of books on the nightstand to the floor.
    “That’s not helping your case,” he says with a reluctant smile, and his shoulders come down a notch. “I really am sorry, sweetie. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I just love you so much.”
    “I love you, too.” I push him with my shoulder. “Even though you’re a jerk.”
    He pulls a little paper bag out of his coat pocket and waves it in the air. “Would a jerk have saved you the last Twizzlers in the world?”

CHAPTER 16
    “Trouble in Paradise?” Nelly asks, when I sit at the lunch table.
    “Oh, shut up,” I say. “He got worried and didn’t handle it very well. So you can feed that to the rumor mill before it has us breaking up and moving to opposite sides of the farm.”
    Dan and Liz, another of our patrollers, laugh.
    “I didn’t think you guys ever fought,” Dan says.
    “Of course we do,” I say. “How can you live with another human being and not get annoyed at them at least some of the time?”
    Dan points a finger at me. “ That’s why I don’t settle down. I always end up annoyed out of my mind.”
    “Want to hear my theory?” I ask.
    Nelly groans. “Here we go—Cassie’s Theory of Relationships.”
    “It’s true!” I turn to Dan and Liz. “Everyone is going to annoy you somewhat. The trick is to find the person who only annoys you a little, and where what you love about them outweighs what you don’t love. They’ll never be perfect, but they’ll be perfect for you. The problem is that people think it has to be perfect all the time, and that’s not possible.”
    “That’s actually a good theory,” Liz says to Nelly, who shrugs.
    “So, anyway, Nels,” I say. “We never got to finish our conversation about Adam. I mean, you admitted you like like him, but you never told me—”
    “Right now what I don’t love about you is outweighing what I do love about you,” Nelly says.
    “You love me so much that the good could never be outweighed by the bad. You can tell me later. In private ,” I whisper loudly, from behind my cupped hand.
    “I hate you,” Nelly says. I blow him a kiss.
    “So, are we really closing the cabin?” Liz asks.
    “It doesn’t make sense to have anyone down there if they’re going to have to be rescued,” Dan says. “Or waste ammo. It’s better to wait for the Lexers to come to the fence.”
    Liz nods. She’s in her early thirties, thin and tall, with short dark hair and muscled arms. I was a little afraid of her at first, but she laughs easily and is nice once you get past her tough demeanor.
    Caleb and Marcus pull out chairs. They’re brothers, but they could be twins with their platinum ponytails, snub noses and matching mannerisms. Caleb is nineteen and Marcus is twenty-two. They made it here last summer, after traveling home from college to find their parents dead. Well, they weren’t actually dead. They had to finish them off.
    “You can’t see shit from the cabin, anyway,” Marcus says. “Hey, we need to go on patrol soon. We’re running out of stuff.”
    Patrol is when we leave the farm for supplies. It takes a lot of gas to run what little