Chapter 3 #2
If he closed his eyes, he could see her now with her dark hair brushing her shoulders, wearing athleisure and flipflops.
She’d be sitting beside him despite the cold.
She’d look out over the water, content to let Blake squirm in the silence.
His dad would have spouted out random information about the river or the deciduous forests of the northeast United States, but not his mom.
She’d get right to the point.
How long are you going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself?
Her words would cut deep, just like she’d meant for them to. A harsh slap. But like all things with his mother, you’d have to look deeper. To understand why she was saying it more than what she was saying.
His mother’s love language had always been criticism. Blake had just been too stupid to understand that.
The worst part was that he couldn’t even get mad at her—she was right.
Blake was feeling sorry for himself. Sorry, that for the first time in his life, he’d found someone he thought could be the one.
But he was so worried about saving lives and not dying that he couldn’t even properly be with him.
That every time they got lost in themselves—whether it was the first time Gabriel tackled him into the pool, kissing him as they hovered over the bottom, or discovering just how much he really liked sex—he was reminded that people died.
Were dying. Cities were destroyed. Tomorrow, an alien could immolate him.
After they first got to the motel, it was like the world outside didn’t exist. They were coming down off the adrenaline high of surviving DC, finally able to stop and breathe—to enjoy each other.
They talked about everything back then. The big stuff, and the little stuff.
Their dreams, their pasts. Gabriel showed him all about intimacy, physical and emotional, and made him feel treasured. Protected. Valued.
And then the hits started coming, bringing injuries and death.
Gabriel would leave on missions with larger teams and come back without them.
His smile became a little slower, more brittle.
Fingers twitching toward the pocket he used to keep his crochet hook in.
Phin nearly lost an eye, and Victoria once had to drag the entire team into a drainage ditch, hiding while Monkey Cats and Off Formers destroyed themselves above them.
He’d come back and force himself to smile. It was so fragile, Blake wondered if he kissed him hard enough, it’d crack.
And Blake noticed. How could he not? But he just…didn’t care. No, that wasn’t it. He couldn’t care. He was so busy flipping through textbooks he didn’t understand, desperately hoping that something would stick. A dosage. A diagnosis.
Sarah Conner didn’t have that problem with her shit kicker boots and enough ammo to wipe the aliens off the face of the planet.
Real life was always more disappointing than movies.
Blake was so busy trying to save a life, he was losing the one good thing that happened in this godforsaken dystopia.
And now he was sitting here whining about his boyfriend not taking him along on missions.
God, he was even pouting on a riverbank like an insufferable lead in an indie flick. All he needed now was a folksy soundtrack. Maybe a ukulele?
Sighing, he curled his arms around his legs and rested his chin on his knees. Sunlight was dappling on the quiet river. It looked cleaner than he’d ever seen it. Blake might even be tempted to swim in it come summer—if he were still alive.
Footsteps crunched behind him, and for a brief moment, Blake’s heart lifted, hoping it was Gabriel. But when he turned, he saw Tommy’s slight figure shuffling down the lawn, his fuzzy hood pulled up over his head.
Despite his grumbling, Blake never truly minded Tommy’s presence…but he wished it were Gabriel. He wanted to talk to him. Should talk to him. But he didn’t know what to say. Or how to say it.
Tommy flicked off his hood, his overgrown hair flopping down in his face. Unlike Blake, he looked cute with his long hair. Like one of those designer cows with the big eyes.
“I think about the zoo a lot,” Tommy said, his voice bright.
Blake squinted at him. “What?”
“You know, about what happened to the animals when the aliens came. Did they escape? Did a keeper let them loose to try and survive? Or did they starve in their enclosure?”
“If I see a polar bear walking down the street, I’m done.”
Tommy smiled sadly, looking out over the water with his face screwed up. Blake sighed, stretching his legs out. “I’m sure the keepers figured it out.”
It was bullshit. Blake knew it, and so did Tommy.
But it helped to think that those dedicated zookeepers had formed an underground resistance where they continued to care for the rare and exotic animals.
It was one of those thoughts. The kind that was too big and too painful to handle, so you lied.
To yourself. To everyone else. Denial at its finest.
They lapsed into a comfortable silence. There was no noise save the periodic splashing of a fish on the surface of the river.
Not even aliens could keep the birds from flying south, and Blake missed their chirping.
He wasn’t used to this kind of silence. It was thick with meaning he was too tired to understand.
“Gabriel slept in the lobby last night,” Tommy said, still staring at the river.
“He’s a big boy. He can decide where he wants to sleep.”
Tommy snorted, hearing the deflection for what it was. “What happened?”
Making a face, Blake turned back to the water and contemplated lying. He could come up with any number of things—but he was so tired. And maybe, just a little, he wanted to talk about it to someone outside the self-projection of his mother.
“I yelled at him,” Blake huffed. “Well, more like whispered angrily, I guess. I don’t even really know why. It’s not his fault I can’t seem to do anything right. It’s just that after Graves I was…angry.”
“You were sad.” Tommy reached out and forcibly pried Blake’s hand from around his leg, squeezing it with his cold fingers. “You’re allowed to grieve.”
“That’s—” Blake began, staring down at their hands.
Suddenly, his throat was dry, and he worried that if he tried to speak, his voice would crack.
He tried several times before he found his voice.
“I’m just…I can’t save them, Tofu. I can’t.
And I’ve been trying, but I—I’m not a doctor.
I can’t do the things I need to do, and even if I could, I don’t have the—” he cut himself off.
He was tired of saying it. It felt like a well-worn tread he’d paced in the floor.
A constant loop of all the things he couldn’t do, and he didn’t want to say it again.
Didn’t want to voice it aloud and give it even more power.
His vision blurred. “We’ve lost people before, but this was…I did this. I killed him, and I don’t know how to be okay with that.”
Tommy was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t.”
Blake yanked his hand free from Tommy’s grip so he could wipe his eyes. “What?”
“Do you remember what you told me when we lost our first patient?”
Scoffing, Blake tried to remember that far back. It seemed like another life. “Probably something stupid.”
Smiling, Tommy scooched closer so he could bump Blake’s shoulder with his. “You told me to cry. To feel the loss. Because saving a life didn’t mean a damn thing if it didn’t hurt when we lost one.”
Blake didn’t remember saying that, but he’d probably burned off a few brain cells with all the caffeine. Sounded good, though.
“I know you won’t hear me when I tell you Graves’ death wasn’t your fault, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
You didn’t kill him. Maybe it was his time to go, or maybe life just isn’t fair.
” He paused, waiting for Blake to look at him.
“You are doing an impossible job, in horrible conditions, with nothing but your sheer stubbornness and weirdly comprehensive knowledge of movie trivia. No one blames you but yourself. You can’t work miracles, Blake. You’re not that special.”
That made Blake laugh. It was wet and sounded a little bit like a sob, but Tommy didn’t call him on it.
Blake looked over at Tommy. His cheeks were red from the wind, his lips chapped, and his face a little gaunter than it should be, but there was a light in Tommy’s eyes.
One that even a fucking alien invasion couldn’t dim.
“How did you get so smart?”
Tommy grinned. “It’s the Tofurkey Jerky.”
Blake hummed and dropped his head to rest on Tommy’s shoulder.
He was a little taller, and it was awkward, but he didn’t want to move.
Even when the chill from the grass ate through his pants, and it became uncomfortable, he didn’t move.
When he got up, he’d have to go back to the Med Bay and do his job. Figure out how to survive another day.
Blake just needed a few more minutes.
“What are you going to do about Gabriel?” Tommy asked.
“I should apologize. It wasn’t right to dump all that on him when he just got back. But I’m still angry. We need someone going out there who knows what to look for, not just Judd guessing.”
“You want to go out on missions?” Tommy sounded a little surprised.
“No? I don’t know,” Blake admitted. “I don’t really miss the whole running around terrified thing.” He thought back to their dwindling supplies and the look on the soldiers’ faces when he asked if they’d even considered looking for something besides bandages and weapons.
And maybe he would feel better if he could just do something. Be proactive. At least then he’d know if they didn’t have the supplies, that they’d truly done everything they could. It might lessen the guilt.
All of which was a moot point because Gabriel had made it very, very clear he would not be taking Blake out. He considered him a liability.
Thinking about it made him angry all over again, and he didn’t want to be angry at Gabriel. He wanted to hold him. Kiss him. Tell him he finally finished that bodice ripper Victoria had brought him, and the ending was as ridiculous as Gabriel had guessed. Blake had loved it.
Sitting up, Blake picked at the grass. “What about you and Phin?” The subject change was about as subtle as a car crash, but Tommy was used to the whiplash.
“Nothing to tell,” he said lightly.
“You don’t think he likes you?” Blake asked incredulously.
“I don’t think he likes himself very much.”
Which was true. Blake suspected Phin was so big because he needed the strength to carry around all his baggage.
And it was more than just the PTSD. If he were a betting man, Blake would bet he had a deeply repressed childhood.
Probably religious. But Blake had never asked.
Phin would probably push him into the ground like a thumbtack if he tried.
Blake looked over at Tommy, squinting against the glare of the sun. “So, what are you going to do?”
Tommy’s cheek dimpled. “Like him even harder.”
Blake wasn’t sure where Tommy got the confidence, but he wished he had some to spare. With everything going on, he knew exactly what he wanted and what he was going to do about it.
“Doesn’t it seem pointless? Worrying about all this…relationship stuff when the world has ended?”
Tommy seemed to think about it before getting up and dusting off his pants. “I think we need to worry about it now more than ever. It wasn’t our choice, but this is our life now.”
He extended a hand to help Blake up. “You’ve got to live a little or die a lot.”
It didn’t make sense, but Blake took his hand anyway.