Devoured by Love

Sometimes what we don’t say is exactly why we change.

I had not meant to see her again. After ten years of outbreak, boarded windows and empty streets, I had learned to move without expecting anything. The sirens had stopped long ago, and the city had quieted into something unrecognizable. I only went inside the building because the wind had turned sharp and I needed shelter before dark.

She was sitting at the table.

For a moment I thought memory had tricked me. Ten years since the first infections, ten years since everything collapsed, ten years since I had last seen her standing in a doorway, saying nothing when I left. Sunlight slipped through the boards nailed across the windows, falling in thin, trembling lines across the floor, and dust hung in the air like something waiting to be disturbed. I stood there longer than I should have, afraid that if I moved she would disappear like all the other things I had lost.

She turned, and I realized she was looking at me fully, without the shyness or fear she once carried.

There are faces you forget, faces that blur into survival, and then there are faces your body remembers before your mind allows it. I felt it then, the recognition, not loud, not dramatic, just certain. I had run into the one person I had once loved more than I ever admitted.

Wrinkles traced gently across her face, time having marked her carefully, but her eyes, those same brown eyes that once held mine too long, still carried everything we had never resolved, everything we had avoided naming. Everyone else would have seen a survivor. I saw the woman who used to sit beside me on apartment floors covered in unfinished paintings of the same gray-blue coastline we swore we would visit one day. The woman who once fell asleep with her head against my shoulder while we argued about whether the moon landing footage looked “too perfect,” her always defending it, me always teasing. The space between us felt familiar, charged, untouched by the years, and yet heavy with them.

“I didn’t know if you were alive,” she said softly, her voice steadier than mine would have been.

“I didn’t know how to come back,” I answered.

The truth sat between us. I had left before the world ended, left because loving her felt too large, too exposing, and left because silence was easier than confession. And now here we were, in a world stripped of everything unnecessary.

At first it was small, a dull ache behind my eyes and a heaviness in my limbs that felt like exhaustion. I had walked for miles that day, and anyone would have been tired, but my reflection in the silverware caught my attention. My skin looked pale, slightly gray at the edges, and my pupils were wide and glassy. Her gaze lingered on me, and her hand brushed mine across the table. My hand trembled before she even touched me — not from fever, but from the old fear that she might pull away. Heat rushed through me, and her fingers were colder than they should have been, not winter-cold, something deeper.

My jaw tightened and my tongue felt thick, and a hunger stirred low in my stomach, deeper than food, deeper than thirst. It felt like want, and it felt like grief resurfacing after years buried. I tried to say her name, but the sound scraped in my throat and dissolved. She swallowed hard, and her breathing had grown shallow as well. It seemed we were both pretending, pretending this was only fatigue, pretending our bodies were not quietly shifting, pretending we had not already lost enough.

I remembered her laugh, bright, sudden, unguarded. I remembered the night the power first went out across the city and we lit candles and promised each other it would pass, and I remembered the last morning before I left, how she stood in the doorway wanting me to stay and refusing to ask. Being near her had once felt effortless, and now it felt fragile, as if one wrong breath would shatter everything we had just found again.

The tremors grew stronger, my hands twitching without permission, my joints stiffening, my muscles tightening beneath my skin, every movement feeling slightly delayed, as though my body were learning new rules without telling me. She stood slowly from her chair, her shoulders trembling, and said almost calmly, “I was bitten three days ago.”

The words did not shock me.

“I was too,” I admitted.

For a moment, something inside me loosened. Relief — quiet and terrible — moved through my chest. I would not lose her alone.

The hunger sharpened, pressing against my ribs and mixing with the ache in my chest until I could no longer separate infection from regret. Outside, something knocked against a street sign, the sound echoing down the empty street.

“We always waited too long,” she said quietly.

Not just for this.

Each step toward her cost me something, my knees threatening to give, my fingers twitching without permission, but memory moved me forward. I saw us younger, sitting cross-legged on the floor, paint drying on our hands, promising we would see that coastline before we turned thirty. We had almost built that life, almost stayed brave enough. That was the alternate life that never came.

Then the sensation deepened. My vision blurred and sharpened in waves, my hearing dropped out and returned too loud, and my nerves sparked beneath my skin like exposed wire. Thought began to narrow until all that existed was her hand, her warmth, her presence. Everything else receded.

“I used to think we had time,” she said, the sentence breaking apart as her jaw tightened.

“We were just afraid,” I tried to answer. Even on the days I told myself I wasn’t.

We reached for each other fully this time, no hesitation left, no pride, no silence. Our palms met, cold and warmth, skin against skin. I tried to brush a strand of hair from her face the way I used to, but my fingers jerked wrong, bending stiffly, and fell uselessly against her shoulder. The virus had already taken the streets, the houses, and the future. It had stripped the world down to survival and instinct, but it had not taken this, not yet. I had loved her every year I was gone, even on the days I tried not to. Words were leaving me. Thought was thinning. All that remained was the pull.

Finally, the last layer gave way. Pain splintered through bone and nerve, my muscles jerked without rhythm, my jaw locking and unlocking in cruel reflex. Hunger rose and drowned everything else. It was never metaphor, never just regret taking physical form. It was an infection, moving through blood and marrow, unraveling thought, stripping memory down to fragments. Across from me, her body convulsed, her fingers bent wrong against the table, and a low sound escaped her throat, something not entirely human. Fear flickered in her eyes, not of me, but of losing herself, of losing us again.

The truth settled heavily between us. It was the virus. It had always been the virus. But even as memory peeled away, even as language disappeared, one thing remained: her. Not her name, not her quiet nature, not the art, not the years apart, just the pull. Our bodies jerked toward one another, broken and unsteady. No speech passed between us, no recognition that could be measured, but something older than thought tugged at my chest, pulling me toward her.

Side by side, we stood, not human, not whole, not what we once were, but together. We had run into each other at the end of the world. We had found each other when there was nothing left to lose, no past to rewrite, no future to promise, only instinct guiding ruined bodies through a ruined room, moving in the same direction, taking everything from our hearts to our brains, where the soul kept its lessons.

In the end, it wasn’t the virus that changed us first. It was the silence.

What we never said stayed with us.