Kristen Simmons: Breaking Point

He glanced over to me, and for a moment, our gazes locked. It made me remember things I didn’t want to remember. All the letters I’d written that had gone unanswered. The pressure he’d gotten for fraternizing with any girl, much less one with a noncompliant mother. How they’d made him arrest her anyway.

How he’d witnessed her murder.

I believed him, that he couldn’t have saved her. But even though it was useless, sometimes I wondered if he’d really done everything he possibly could—everything I would have done. Thoughts like this led me nowhere, of course, and only made it harder to be close to him. He was both the cause of my pain and the cure.

“So how are you?” He cleared his throat. “Really,” he added.

I felt my skin stretch tight at his words, like all the anger and fear was expanding. It was pressing at my lungs, making it hard to breathe. And he must have felt it, too, because he pushed off the wall and stared a hole through his boots.

“Hungry,” I said. “What do you think it’ll be tonight?”

A beat passed. Then another.

“Pizza,” he said finally, and I breathed out a sigh of relief that he’d changed the subject. “Maybe spaghetti. And ice cream for dessert.” The corner of his mouth quirked up.

“Sounds delicious,” I said. Canned ham and beans were more likely, but sometimes it was easier to pretend.

“WHOwants ice cream sundaes?”

I buried my head under the pillow. Was she seriously going to pretend that we had ice cream, when we didn’t even have a freezer?

“Too bad. I guess I’ll have to eat it all myself.”

I groaned. The blank tablet of paper lay beside me, untouched. How many letters had I written to Chase in the last six months? Twenty? Thirty? And not one response. Not to say he’d arrived in Chicago and started training. Not to say he missed me.

He’d promised he’d write, and I’d believed him.

I shouldn’t have.

I ignored my grumbling stomach as long as I could, but facing her was inevitable. I pushed off my bed and dragged myself into the kitchen.

She sat at the table, hands folded neatly behind a heaping bowl of instant mashed potatoes, the powdered kind that came out of a blue box. There were two spoons, one directly before her, the other in front of my seat. She’d fashioned some kind of triangle-shaped sailor hat from a brown paper bag and placed it regally on her head.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

“Oh, did you want some ice cream? I’m not sure there’s enough to share,” she taunted.

Just to humor her, I sat. I couldn’t look her in the face though; the hat was too ridiculous.

She lifted her spoon, filling it with a huge dollop of mashed potatoes, and stuck it in her mouth, making all sorts of satisfied noises.

I smiled.

After a moment I picked up my spoon. Took a bite.

“Tell me that’s not the best ice cream you’ve ever had,” she said.

“It’s not the best ice cream I’ve ever had,” I said, trying hard to swallow without giggling.

A look of disbelief spread across her face. Then she slung a spoonful of mashed potatoes across the table, and splattered them all across my shirt.

“HEY.”

I jolted up straight in my chair as Sean snapped his fingers in my face. My chest still ached with the memory. If I had known my mother would be dead three months later, I never would have fought with her over something stupid, or yelled at her when she’d gotten a citation. I would have packed our stuff and we would have run, and we’d both be at the safe house now.

I tried to hold on to the sound of her laughter, but it blended with the others down the hall. Cara’s soprano rose above the rest. They were probably playing poker again, competing for something someone had picked up in town. Candy maybe, or cigarettes. I cringed. They might as well invite the whole base over with all the noise they were making.

Billy pushed away from the computer, shoving back his hair absently. I’d zoned out while we were scanning the mainframe for more information on girls’ reformatories in Chicago. There wasn’t much for me to do while Billy hacked into the server and Sean scanned the lists.

“Go to bed,” Sean told me, squinting at the screen.

“I’m fine,” I said, yawning. “And anyway, you’re not the boss of me anymore.”

He tossed me a pointed look over his shoulder. “Was I ever the boss of you?” When I grinned, he said, “That’s what I thought. Go away, you’re making me tired.”

I did what he said, but only because I wasn’t helping any. I took one of the candles; its wavering yellow light made the walls look that much more decrepit. When I got to my room, I paused outside, listening through the door for the sound of Chase’s breathing. The noise in the hall seemed amplified; the guys that had left before curfew returned. Houston and Lincoln were arguing about a cute girl they’d seen in the Square. Someone was singing in the shower. The walls were way too thin.

I tried to imagine Chase lying on the bed, but the thought made me nervous. I wondered if I should go inside at all. He didn’t sleep well—I knew the nightmares still plagued him, though he never talked about them. I could crash in the supply room and let him catch up on some much needed rest.

Before I could change my mind, I inched the door open and slipped inside, careful to cover the flame with my hand. It didn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, to find him stretched out over the moth-eaten velvet chair, placed strategically in front of the window—the same window I’d escaped from when he’d told me about my mother. He’d left our blanket folded at the foot of the sagging mattress, empty in the center of our tiny space.

Empty, just like me. Lost without my mom, without any lead on Rebecca, without any sense of purpose here.

The yellow light was small and didn’t grant much visibility, but even so I could tell he wasn’t moving. Barely even breathing. He was too still to be anything but awake, and I matched his stillness, feeling his eyes graze over me, conscious of my breathing, too shallow, and the hot wax that dripped on my thumb.

I blew out the candle.

Crossing the room, I placed it on the window ledge, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d climbed into his lap. My palms searched through the dark to grasp his face, and my thumbs raced over his cheekbones, rough from not shaving, to his lips, parted and soft. There was no time to question how he’d respond, or think of how we’d barely touched these last few weeks. I needed this, needed him, and he needed me as well. His arms surrounded me and pulled me close, and then I was kissing him and he was kissing me back, his lips pressed hard into mine. He was alive and warm, smelling vaguely of sweat and mint toothpaste, and I told myself his touch would make me warm, too.

I squeezed my eyes closed and kissed him with that kind of pressure, begging him to make me forget, to feel anything beyond this bottomless, irreconcilable black hole that had torn open inside of me. His teeth skimmed my jaw, nipped my ear, and the groan he drew from my throat made his own breath stutter. He crushed me against him then, closer, impossibly close, scooting to the edge of the chair. I thought he meant to lead us to the bed, but he paused, and in those damp, trembling moments, something between us shifted.

I clung to him. Like a strong wind might whip him away. And he must have sensed it, because I could feel his fists knot in the back of my shirt and his ragged breaths heat my neck.