It's stuck in between her ribs like a dollop of tar, like cold molasses, like the sticky-sweet tang of blood from a clotting wound. If it sounds unpleasant—that’s because it is. She feels it pulse within her, but whatever it is lacks a name.

Except, maybe, pining-wanting-adoration-needing, and that’s a pisspoor name indeed. Whatever it is, it’s bundled up into a cluster, like a bunch of neurons form a nerve. And, much like a nerve, it hurts when struck, thoughtlessly or otherwise. Unlike a nerve, though, it just hurts even worse when she tries to ignore it—tries to ignore a very particular her.

So, instead of forgetting, Clerise counts down the moments, ticking like a faithful clock. If she said it was for every second or minute or hour, she’d be lying. Clerise isn’t dramatic, not like this, so she doesn’t try to be too aggrandizing, even in her own mind.

Clerise knows that she is not in love. She knows that it’s not lust, or simple loneliness. She just doesn’t know what it actually is. She doesn’t know anything, actually, except this:

Every day, at the end of the night, she curls up in a blanket that's too big, in a bed that’s too large, in a room that’s too vast. Every day, she tallies the fact that another day has passed without the return of Clarice. Every day is one less to wait.

It’s not enough.

But what can she do? She’s but one, and there’s research to be done in the land of things that go bump in the night. So, when it strikes her fancy, or when she gets the balls, Clerise sends a text message, or two, or three. They go out into the void, and the redhead knows without question that they are read and that they are cherished. She hopes, maybe, that those feelings extend to her person, too.

They go on missions, the collective they, all of the expendable trainees they, and something horrible seems to happen before she can just make it the ******** over—and time passes. It passes: day by day, week by week. And Clerise forgets the look of her. Sure, of course she knows that Clarice is all blonde and tall and regal and too tired from the weight others lay on her without thinking. She has a picture, of course, and all she has to do is flip open her phone to see it.

Snow crusted hair, fluffy coats, making snow angels and snow girls because the world was ending, and why not?

But it’s not the same. She doesn’t pretend it is. Clerise forgot how Balthazar sounded, before he came back, so it’s no surprise to her and her pisspoor memory that she can’t keep the details of how Clarice is solidified in her mind.

So instead, she remembers:

The look in defiant eyes before Clarice’s golem body exploded into smithereens.

Drinks shared in the sauna, crashed by two drunken men, one of them whose heart was in smithereens.

A kiss shared in the snow, vibrant and breathless and giddy, innocent and pure and so goddamned relieved that her life wasn’t over, not yet.

The dark circles under her eyes from the time immediately after the apocalypse.

The keys left to her room, with the note that was carefully tucked into a pocket of her duffel bag that went everywhere with her.

The details are hazy. She doesn’t know what to make of it. And it hurts, in more ways than one, and it drives her ******** insane. Clerise Nicole Wilson isn't used to wanting so wantonly without being able to pursue it. Be it a dream or a girl or a career or anything. She is impulse instead of thought, of action instead of plans. But there’s nothing to do, now, except plot.

On one hand she ticks off the pros of going to another, to Dwight or to Dakota or that one lab tech, with the eyes--

The eyes that are blue and bright and not the right shade at all.

It’s frustrating. She never asked for this, never wanted to make room in her selfish little heart for another—it was downright inconvenient. Clerise worried about her wellbeing, her happiness, and if anyone was making her eat. She wondered if Clarice missed the Herpicorn that still carried a little scarf. She wondered a lot of things, and it was so hard to compress them all into text message format.

Because it felt so impersonal, so anti-tactile, and all she wants to do is reach out and touch.

She can admit it, here in the dark, lip bitten in frustration as her mind flies at a million miles a minute, half formed sentences crashing against her skull like waves against rocks.

Clerise wants to touch, and not just in ways that are in between sheets. She doesn't ******** know what to make of it.

So she sleeps, fitfully and without reprieve. Tomorrow, the routine restarts, and another day passes, and it’s stuck in between her ribs—