Chapter 11 - Luna #2
"So, heads up for you - Reid, Kara, and I are going to drive out to our parents' houses tonight.
Kara needs to grab her stuff from theirs, and I know for a fact there's a couple hundred thousand in cash sitting in my parents' safe. Cash will still work with a lot of people who haven’t figured out it’s about to be worthless, at least for now, and I'd rather use it to outfit us than leave it sitting in their safe. "
He walks back into the room buttoning a shirt and finds me gaping at him, and a laugh breaks out of him at whatever my face is doing.
"Sure, just a couple hundred thousand dollars you need to swing by and pick up.
" I shake my head at the sheer ridiculousness of the sentence I just said.
"Just an errand, makes total sense, very normal.
" A thought follows on its heels, and I ask it before I think better of it.
"Do you think your parents will want to come with us? "
"They wouldn't be invited even if they were here." The scoff comes out of him instantly, no hesitation at all, as he drops onto the bench to pull on his shoes. "Last I heard, they were in the Canary Islands. Also, fuck them. They're the last people on earth I'd want to spend the apocalypse with."
He says it lightly, like it doesn’t bother him at all, but it still hurts me to know that those people never seemed to care or make any kind of effort to know and love this beautiful man.
"I'm sorry, Jules."
He stands, crosses to me, and presses a soft kiss to my forehead, and his voice quiet and certain. "Don't be sorry, baby. The only family I have is in this house right now, and I'm good with that. We won’t be long. There and back in an hour."
From somewhere downstairs, Gage's voice rolls up, calling my name, so I give Jules one more quick, hard squeeze around the middle before I slip out of the room. I spend the whole walk down the hallway and stairs very deliberately not thinking about what happened when I was standing between him and Reid. But what I can’t stop thinking about is them leaving, even if it is only for an hour or so.
I swallow down the dread that fills my throat at the thought and rub the skin on my arms that suddenly feels too tight.
The kitchen is bright and warm, and Gage is standing at the island freshly showered with his chestnut hair still damp and curling at the ends.
He's building an assembly line of sandwiches big enough to feed a small army, which is exactly what we've become.
I slide in beside him without being asked, and he nudges the bread my way.
We fall straight back into the old rhythm, two years and one apocalypse erased for the length of a sandwich line, him slicing, me spreading.
Penny is stationed at our feet with the focused optimism of a dog who knows the law of averages is on her side, and something will be dropped for her.
A smile takes over my whole face, and I let it, pushing aside the worry of Jules and Reid leaving.
This, right here, is everything I spent the week praying for.
Gage's elbow bumps mine, the peanut butter jar sits between us, somebody's shower runs upstairs, and the house is full and breathing around me.
Making sandwiches in our kitchen with my guys home is such a beautifully normal thing that it makes so much of the hell of the last week alone dim and start to fade.
But on the heels of that another thought hits me, quiet and vicious. This might be the last time.
We're leaving in the morning. The counter my mother picked out stays behind.
So does the table where I learned to hold a fork, and the pencil marks inside the pantry door tracking mine and Atlas's height.
Tomorrow night I'll be living in a coal mine, and I might never stand in this kitchen again.
Grief hits me in a wave, huge and sudden, and tears flood my eyes before I can blink them back, one escaping down my cheek and dropping onto the bread.
"Hey, hey, come here." Gage sets down the knife and turns to me, gold-flecked blue eyes going soft with alarm, one big hand coming up to cradle the side of my face. "What is it, sweetheart?"
"We're leaving it all behind." My voice cracks straight down the middle.
"Tomorrow we drive away, and this is the last time we make sandwiches in this kitchen, and I know it's just a kitchen, I know that, but it's my parents' kitchen, and it's Atlas's height marks in the pantry, and I'm not ready to leave all that, leave them. It feels like I’m losing them all over again. "
He pulls me in against his chest without a word, wrapping me up completely the way only a man his size can. I press my face into him and breathe him in, that warm, clean scent that has meant safety for so long.
"I'm so sorry, sweetheart." His voice rumbles under my ear, low and sure. "Leaving here is going to cost you more than any of us, and I know exactly what this house is to you, and I know how hard walking out that door will be. I wish to God I could fix it."
I let myself have one more minute in his arms, and then I sniff my tears back and pull myself together. Falling apart is a luxury with a two-day expiry, and I refuse to spend it early.
"It doesn't matter." I wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand and make myself mean it. "As long as we're all together, none of the rest of it matters."
His eyes search mine, and I can see he doesn't believe me, not fully, because Gage has always been able to hear everything underneath what I say. He lets it go with a slow nod, and I'm grateful all the way to my bones that he does.
"Change of plans on my end tonight." He picks the knife back up, easing us onto what he thinks is safer ground.
"I'm going to run out to Gramps's farm, check on him, and lock in the plan for the morning with him face to face.
Torrin and Mars are coming with me. We'll be back in a few hours, well before midnight. "
The knife in my hand goes still against the bread.
They're all leaving. The thought moves through me all at once and something cracks open in my chest. All of them are going to walk out that door, into the dark, away from me, tonight, and my lungs forget how to breathe air. The last time they left, the moon broke. When they scattered before, the world tore itself apart with all of them spread across it. Gage fell out of the sky, and Reid and Jules almost drowned and swam and fought their way back across a thousand kilometers. It was luck, dumb, undeserved, impossible luck that every one of them came home to me, and more of that luck is not something I can count on. My head is shaking hard back and forth before I even realize I’m doing it.
"Luna, hey, look at me." Gage's voice comes from somewhere far away.
Light blooms up my arms, bright and wild, throwing our shadows against the cabinets.
My breath is coming in short, useless little pulls that don't reach the bottom of my lungs.
They can't leave, not all of them, not again, not tonight, not out into that dark with all the dangers in it, because I can't risk it again.
I won't risk it again.