Page 27 of Chaos

“The gangrenous pirate smell is gone.”

His fingers twitch at his side. “Can I hug you?”

The muscles of my chin spasm. “I … I think I’ll cry if you do.”

“That’s okay.”

“You hate when I cry.”

“I hate when you’re so sad you need to cry. It’s not the same thing.”

“I’m not sad right now. I don’t think.”

A faint line spreads across his forehead. “What are you?”

“I don’t know. I …” I’m breathing harder now, my lungs frenzied, like I just opened a door that shouldn’t be open yet. “I said … I said once that I’d be okay if you died, but it was a lie. I wouldn’t be. I can’t do it. You can’t die. Everyone keeps leaving me. Dad. Mom. Jee. Jimmy. Ruby. I loved them all, but this thing with you is different. It’s a trauma bond or a mating of souls, or a pair bond or something. It’s more. I can’t lose you. I kept thinking that down there. What if I never see you again. And I’m scared it’s the same for you. What if you die? What if I die?”

“Don’t die.”

“What if I do though?” I’d be leaving him alone in this bleak, grim, fucked world forever with Auden and maybe a baby. “It’s not healthy. This … us.”

“Does it have to be healthy?”

“We have kids to take care of and a dog”—I could die delivering this maybe-baby— “I need to know you’ll keep going if I die. I have to know that.”

“Shane barely needs me. I’ll always take care of Auden and Beast. You do know that.”

“What about you?”

“Whataboutme? I’d be miserable every single day.”

“That sucks.”

“So don’t die.” He lifts me easily, carries me across the tiles and into the hot spring water. It’s so hot I hiss, and the cuts in my elbow and hands burn sharply. He sits down on one of the steps with me in his lap, my legs around his waist.

I give in to the exhaustion, the headache, and rest my cheek carefully on his shoulder, sagging against him. “Do you believe in anything?”

“What do you mean?” His voice rumbles.

“Like heaven?” I close my eyes and listen to his heart. “Or reincarnation?”

Finally he says, “Not really. Maybe sometimes when stuff gets really bad. I find myself trying to make deals with nothing.”

“If neither of us know what to believe, or feels all that powerfully about what’s coming, can we choose together?”

“What would you choose?”

“I want to believe in an afterlife. Wherever it is, even if it’s just particles in the dirt, or growing into a tomato and being pickled and eaten and breathed out like a molecule in the wind, can we believe in it together? And promise we’ll find each other?”

His arms tighten around me, and his smiling mouth presses against my temple. “If we’re choosing what to believe in, I don’t want to be a tomato particle.”

“We can be anything then. We can be in a Desert-verse or a Snow-verse or Blue-Aliens-verse. It’s just something to believe in so when I’m dying for real, I have something to look forward to.”

His smile fades instantly. He’s almost died, too. He knows what I mean. It’s scary to face it and not know, and sad to imagine it’s the end of him and me.

“I’d rather be staring at a coming bullet,” I add, pressing harder, somehow needing this, needing to have a plan forwhat to think as I do, so it’s something good. My last thought has to be hope, whenever it comes. It can’t just be … terror. “I’d rather face death and think something absurd likehere I come, tomato loverorget ready, Alien Yorke,than just be straight-up terrified I’ll never see you again.”

“Maybe …” His voice gets thick. “Maybe I’d want us to be just like us now, only in a place without guns.”