Kristen Simmons: Three

My hands slid up the back of his shirt and traced the puckered skin from a scar on his lower back. He tensed in that way he did when he remembered things he didn’t want to.

The cloud that crawled over the moon hid his face. Sometimes it felt like the past was pulling Chase one way while I was pulling him the other.

Sometimes the past won.

I found the spot where the strong cords of his neck met his shoulder and kissed him there, in the place I knew would always distract him. His breath expelled in one hard rasp.

“You taste like salt.” I tried to make my voice steady, to give him something to hold on to. “You need a bath.”

His muscles loosened by the slightest degree. “Maybe you should take one with me.” I felt his grin against my neck. “Make sure I don’t cut any corners.”

My stomach fluttered. “Maybe I will.”

He went still. I giggled. But the thought of us together, like that, made my mouth dry.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked after a moment.

He straightened, and my cheek found its place on his chest.

“Couldn’t sleep.” He paused. “My head’s not right.” I heard his sigh, and the scraping sound of knuckles dragging along his unshaven jaw. My fingers laced behind his waist to lock him against me.

“You could tell me about it,” I tried.

He broke away, and though I tried to hold on, it was clear he needed space. Apart, I felt the cold for the first time since I’d come to the beach. The air around us had shifted and now felt somber and humid.

In the quiet that followed, my dream returned: Chase as a child, stretched out over the ground, bleeding. A prickle of unease crawled through me. I wished I could read his mind; then maybe I’d know what to say to help him instead of feeling so powerless.

“He was never going to come with us—that soldier. Whatever his name was.” The words burst from him with enough force to make me jump.

“You mean Harper.”

His gaze shot to mine, the question clear.

My stomach dropped. Had we really never used his name? I’d heard it a hundred times a day in my mind—over and over, like a whip coming down on my back. But Chase and I hadn’t said it out loud once. We hadn’t talked about what had happened in Chicago at all, and I wanted to. We needed to. We couldn’t keep pretending like it never happened.

He fell back a step.

“Harper was the soldier,” I said quickly. “The one at the rehab center in Chicago. The one we … you know.”

Shot.

His expression changed. His whole posture changed. Became tortured and twisted in a way I hadn’t seen since he’d told me how my mother had died. The reminder was enough to make my stomach hurt.

“His name was Harper?”

“I … saw his name badge.” My arms crossed over my chest. I forced them down to my sides.

Chase retreated toward the house where we’d made camp, and when I pursued he held up a hand. Something close to panic swelled in my chest. The sand beneath my feet seemed to quake.

“Chase, I—”

He turned. A forced smile flickered over his face, then went dim. “We need to keep moving. If it rains again today we’ll lose any chance of finding the others.”

“Wait…”

“It’s my uncle,” he insisted, as though I’d somehow implied that we should stop tracking the survivors. My shoulders rose.

“He took me in after my mom and dad were gone,” Chase explained, as if I didn’t know. As if I wasn’t there when his uncle had come to pick him up after the car accident had killed his parents. “He’s the only family I’ve got left, Ember.”

His words felt like a slap. “What about me?”

“He’s my uncle, ” Chase said again. As if this explained everything.

“He left you when you were sixteen,” I said. “In a war zone . He taught you to fight and to break into cars and then he left.”

The words hung between us. Instantly I wished I could take them back. We didn’t even know if his uncle Jesse had been at the safe house, much less if he was still alive. Regardless what he’d done, Chase cared for him, and it did no good to pick apart his memory.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Chase responded, focusing on the water. “He did what he had to do.”

A different past returned then: a hill above a gray stone base, sour tendrils of white smoke spiraling to the sky, a gun in my hand.

I’m a damn good soldier. I did what needed to be done.

My knuckles were white peaks, nails sharp in my palms. Tucker Morris had said those words right after confessing to my mother’s murder. Chase couldn’t use them; he was nothing like Tucker. He knew not everything could be excused.

But at the same time, I understood why Chase tried. If he slowed down, every disappointment, every pound of shame, weighed on him like a man in quicksand. And so he never stopped. He barely slept. He pushed on. Like he could keep running forever.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You did what you had to do, too.”

The air was misting, heavy with the coming dawn, and in the dying starlight I could make out the shadows under his eyes, the damp ring around the collar of his shirt, and his fists, balled in his pockets.

Tentatively, I reached for his shoulder. Hard muscles flexed beneath my palm a second before he flinched away.

“We should go,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “We’ve got to get an early start.”

My hand fell, empty, to my side.

Come back to me, I wanted to say. But he was the boy in my dream, running away, and as much as I tried to hold him he slipped from my grasp.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s wake the others.”

CHASEwas right; rain was coming.

The night was lit by a straight, pink scar on the horizon, and from it rose a ghost of the sun, muted and pale yellow. The air became palpable, thick to breathe, slick on our skin. Nearly as heavy as Chase’s silence.

I wished I’d never said the name Harper—that I’d never even seen it on his stupid ID badge. I tried to banish it from my mind, but the harder I tried, the more I could see him. His crisp blue uniform. The high flush in his cheeks. The young soldier who’d nearly joined us in that Chicago rehab hospital before he’d gotten scared. I hated that he’d gotten scared. I hated that he’d blocked our path, and threatened to turn us in, and raised his gun. That he’d made Chase shoot him, because Chase never would have done that if he hadn’t been forced to.

It was Harper’s own fault he was dead.

The black tentacles of guilt that had snaked around my chest eased their hold. But in their place, something slippery remained.

I told myself it wasn’t right to think that way. That despite being a soldier, Harper was flesh and blood, just like us.

Just like Tucker. Who’d redeemed himself several times over, but who’d still killed my mother.

I shook my head to clear it. Traveling down that road just made me crazy. This was a war—just as much as the War that had brought it. And if Harper had chosen the right side, he’d still be alive. At least for now.

I still wasn’t sure where that left Tucker.

By the time we’d reached the house the others were already stirring and I was glad for the distraction. They packed quickly as there wasn’t much to pack, and with only a few mumbled words we moved out, heading south in the same direction we’d been traveling since we’d seen the tracks three days ago. Time was ticking—we’d told the injured we’d return to the mini-mart with a report within five days. Our return trip would be quicker without the search, but we were still cutting it close.