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Gert sighed as she climbed under the covers to join him on the bed. It had been a long day. To be fair, every day was impossible long, and every single one of them was beyond exhausted, but that didn’t make it any easier going to bed every night, trying not to confront the reality of their lives these days. So yeah, he empathized with that sigh.
They lay there in silence for a while, both clearly restless. His eyes were open. He couldn’t tell if hers were. He had a guess, though.
“How aren’t you, like, affected by all of this?”
Chase knit his brows together. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone else is changing. I'm so anxious—I mean, I was anxious before, but it's like I'm paralyzed. And I hate losing control over myself like that," she sighs. "Nico’s always been tough but she’s clearly on edge lately. Karolina’s...darkened, somehow. Alex is so unnerving—like, more than usual, which is really saying something. And Molly…” Gert trails off for a moment. “I feel like every time I look at her, she’s visibly older.” She gets quieter. “I wish I could stop it.” Then, she turns back to him. “But you’re still so..so yourself.”
“Huh,” he says. He knows why. It’s so obvious to him, but he doesn’t want to say too much. A part of him cautions him against saying anything.But then he remembers—no more secrets. He couldn’t just lie. He takes a deep breath in.
“I think I didn’t change because nothing changed for me. I know all of our parents are murderers, and they’ve all done terrible things, but even before I knew that, my dad was a bad guy. When I was really little, I wanted to believe he was still one of the good guys. When I was less little, I stopped. I knew he was a bad guy.”
“What do you mean a ‘bad guy’?” Gert says softly.
“I thought you already knew.” He knows she isn't dumb.
“Knew what, Chase?”
His stomach stirs a little. He didn’t think he’d have to spell it out. Even now, he doesn't really want to. “Do you remember how we used to climb that tree in the park by the school?” He tells her about one of those days. The memory washes over him.
___
They'd been in the first grade. He had taught Gert how to climb a tree a few months before, right after the winter defrosted into spring. Now, it was summer, and the sun was hot on their faces, shoulders and knees. School was getting out soon, and a happy buzz filled the daylit early evening.
“Race you to the top!” Gert demanded, as she took off running. Chase giggled and started after her. Back then, she was faster than him, and her head start certainly didn’t help things. She was several branches up by the time Chase reached up to grab his first.
“Wait up!” Chase yelled up at her.
“No way! It’s a race, silly,” she called back down at him. He groaned, and tried to rush and catch up. He was reckless, though, and his side, tender with bruises, bumped into the trunk.
“Ow!” he yelped, sucking air in through his teeth. It hurt, but so did the reminder. Luckily, he hadn't been up too high and he met the ground feet first, but the shock of the fall still left him lying down on the grass, clutching his side.
“What happened?” Gert said, climbing to meet him. She landed on the grass with a thud, crouching beside him.
He opened his eyes to see looking down at him, concern in wide eyes behind glasses. He'd been crying, partly from the pain, partly from surprise and half from embarrassment. “Are you okay?” He just shook his head.
Gert looked down at his hand, and tugged his shirt out from where it was tucked into his shorts. Even as a first-grader, boundaries had not been her strong suit. She leaned in to take a closer look his side littered with red and purple splotches and squinted. “What happened?”
“I just—ah—hit a branch when I fell,” he stutt.
“You’re lying.” Gert pointed at his injuries. “Bruises don't show that fast. And some of them are getting brown-ish, which means the blood is old, so they’re from before,” she says matter-of-factly
Chase sighed. His tears hadn't stopped, but they'd slowed down enough for him to speak clearly. “Okay, fine. I…” He paused, trying to come up with something.
He knew his dad would make it worse if people found out. Though it was normal to him, he knew it was bad, and he knew Gert would also know it was bad—and if he knew something about Gert, he knew he wouldn't be able to change her mind about something like that. But it's not like his dad was one of the bullies at school. She couldn't stop him if she tried, and he knew that she would try.
Chase didn't want to lie to Gert, because he knew she wouldn't like that, and that she wouldn't ever lie to him. And yet.
“I was fighting bad guys. You know Spider-Man?”
More squinting. “Of course I know Spider-Man.”
“He came to my house and asked for my help fighting bad guys. Criminals, on the street in Brentwood.”
“There aren’t any criminals in Brentwood.”
“Yeah, cause Spider-Man and his friends take care of ‘em.”
“I thought Spider-Man lived in New York.”
“Uh...he’s on summer vacation already. Their summer vacation starts earlier there.”
Gert’s face lit up. He breathed a sigh of relief at passing the interrogation. “That’s SO cool! Do you think you’ll see him again? Could I meet him?”
“I dunno,” he shrugged. “I don’t think so. It was probably a one-time thing.”
“Oh. Well, that’s cool still.”
“I know. But don’t tell anyone—it’s top secret.”
Gert gave him a serious nod. Thank God.
“Well, luckily you made it out alive, but you still got hurt,” she said. He nodded. “You’re really brave, Chase.”
Gert leaned down and gave him three little kisses on the area he was bruised at. It tickled, but Chase tried his best not to flinch.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re welcome.” Gert took him by the hands to help him sit up.
“Please don’t tell anyone I cried either.”
“Your secrets are safe with me. I’m trustworthy!” She smiled at him.
___
“And it was. You didn’t tell anyone else, so no one else found out. Of course, no one at all knew it was my dad who did that.”
“I remember now that you tell me like that. That was a smooth cover-up for a first grader. I mean, for a horrible reason, but…”
Silence fills the air for a moment. Gert breaks it. “How...often was it? And how bad did it get?”
“Weekly, -ish. When I made a mistake, when he was angry at something unrelated to me, when he was bored. Didn’t matter." He pauses. "But there'd be 'breaks. When he would be ‘better.’ When I was little, like that, I’d have hope every time that he’d never do it again. And as for how bad it’d get, it’d usually be pretty consistent. Standard bruising. But sometimes it’d get pretty bad. I think I got a fractured rib once. Went to urgent care a couple times.” His tone is scary casual, and he knows it. He hopes it isn’t off-putting, but he doesn't want to put on a show. "It is what it is. Or, now, I guess...what it was."
“Oh, my God,” Gert whispers. Chase pretends not to hear it. He can't stomach making her sad, adding to the stress she's already under.
Chase clears his throat. “It, uh. Sucked, because I knew he wasn’t supposed to be bad, but I knew that he was. I know they say that you learn from what you see growing up and imitate it, but no part of me saw a real dad in the way he treated me, or a real husband in the way he treated my mom.”
“Your mom, too?” He closes his eyes and nods. He hates admitting it, having to explain himself.
A few tears leak down his temples and wet the pillow beneath his head. Wordlessly, he’s met with a soft and gentle thumb on one side of his face, wicking the tears away, then the other side. He doesn’t know why she’s this sweet to him, and it’s enough to make him cry again, but he fights the tears down.
“My mom wasn't strong like that. I had to protect her. I started working out in middle school, building muscle so I could put up a real fight back. Sometimes I wish she was. Stronger, I mean.” He sniffs. “I'd get mad, actually. At her, for not being...strong enough. Even though it was all him." He laughs drily. "It's so stupid, cause it's not her fault he was like that. She shouldn't've had to be strong.”
“You shouldn't've had to be strong," Gert says, moving her hand to the top of his head, where she stroked his hair lazily. "She was your mother, Chase. She's supposed to protect you."
He lets her words wash over him. "Even still, I wanted to do the right thing. I couldn't just stand by. Like–like a hero. It always felt a lot more like being a soldier than a hero, though. Mostly because I almost always lost. Badly. I think a point came where I had lost everything I had left to lose.” His stream of consciousness takes over. “Home wasn’t family. There wasn’t love there, not any that I could feel. It was a war ground. I couldn’t ever relax, really. I had a job to do whenever I was around them, and I was around them all the time. It fucked my shit up on the regular.” He turned to face her. “If that makes sense.”
There’s a little pocket of silence before Gert replies, “I think you’re a hero.” His chest flutters a little at the compliment. She grabs his hand with one of hers. “And even though I don’t inherently need one, because I’m an independent woman who can take care of and protect herself above reasonable expectations for most people, you’re my hero, too. Even though it just so happens to align with archaic gender dichotomies, I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Chase chuckles and tilts his head. “Let’s be each other’s heroes, then.”
She smiles. “I’d like that. And I feel like it’s been that way for a while already.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Also, I’m sorry. About everything you went through. I don’t mean to make you feel pitied, and I know it’s a part of your past and there’s nothing I can do about it, but I care about you. A lot. And I am.” She strokes his thumb with her own under their covers.
He usually hates when people say sorry about this—whether it’s therapists, his lacrosse buddies, his coach—but he doesn’t mind when Gert says it. Maybe because he knows when Gert says something, she means it, because she wouldn’t say it if she didn’t. Maybe because he might just actually love her. Either way, it makes him feel better for once. “Thank you.”
Gert brings her other hand up to his face, traces the side of it. He sighs and leans into it. On a decades-old mattress in an abandoned underground mansion, he’s never been so comfortable.There are people just above the surface who want him dead, but he’s never felt so safe, or so loved in his life. She leans in to kiss him, and he melts into it. It’s not very long, but not too short either, and a thought crosses his mind; that if being in love had any real meaning at all it had to be this, that maybe love was real if the manifestation of it resembles anything like them together, warm and calm in the eye of a whirlwind of chaos. They pull away, both of their faces tingly, pinker, happier. She’s stolen the words away from him, again. It takes him a moment to find them.
“I think I have changed, though.”
“How so?” Gert asks, still smiling.
“You.”
“Me.”
“Yeah. I said before that I didn't have any...love. That I could feel,” he says, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her into an embrace. His heart beats a little harder. “I do now.”