Page 75 of Chaos
The dark.
The cold.
The everywhere people with guns.
The smell of the cellar rises up,the sounds, but this time, faced with the onslaught of it all, more vivid than a nightmare, I can’t climb on top of Yorke and fuck the memories away.
And worse, Ben says a word, a precious word from his profane lips.Fatherhood.
Yorke’s face registers horror, and I can’t unsee it.
But what comes up is rage. Pure, violet hot rage.
I find myself screaming my throat raw, my right hand slamming into Ben’s stupid face, and I go in for another one, and I connect with that one, too.
And it feels so good, like the best thing, the only thing, the right thing.
I pull back my leg to kick him, and he’s cowering now, back against the wall, his handcuffed hands up in front of his face, trying to dodge me as I aim for his ribs.
Yorke grabs me by the hips and hauls me back, and my sneaker finds only air as Ben’s shiny red blood pours from his nose like a waterfall.
As his awful face recedes, the echo of his words grows.
Fatherhood. Fatherhood. Fatherhood.
Yorke, who never knew his father, who had a series of shitty men in and out of his life, who tries with everything he has to be good to Auden and Shane. This moment right here,thisis how he’s learning of his baby’s existence?
With blood and shouting, violence and stupid, fucking Ben.
Jacquetta and a few other soldiers jog into the room to subdue Ben. I think one of them is Rey.
Yorke hauls me past a gobsmacked Church, Tani peering like a terrified kitten with wide eyes from around his shoulder. Shasta’s shouting obscenities toward Ben who’s continuously hollering from the floor like an angry pig.
Wendell is against the wall to avoid getting in anyone’s way, his crutch pulled tight, staring from me to Yorke and back again.
My cheeks go angrily hot as Yorke drags me into an empty room off the prison hallway.
He hits the switch, the lights wash over us, revealing dank walls that were once painted a deep black, and a ceiling that, while dusty and at least a hundred years old, runs with pipes and ducts.
He closes the door behind us, motions slow, overly deliberate in a way I always associate with him. The more he feels, the slower he moves. Like he’s fully aware of the power and force of his own body and is taking pains not to throw his weight around. His shoulders give him away, though. They’re round and rigid, and a strawberry of blood blooms over his wound, a ripped open stitch.
His long-splayed fingers come down to settle on his hips like he’s bracing himself. “Say something,” he finally says.
“I wanted to make you a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting and light candles and tell you under the stars at a time when it didn’t feel like we were fighting for our lives. I wanted you to have happy memories of this.”
“Say something else,” he says with a voice like sandpaper.
I puff out a breath. “I’m pregnant.”
He turns away to face the wall beside the door he just closed. His arms come up, fingers raking through his hair to form a cage around his head like he’s literally protecting his brain as he struggles to process the tectonic magnitude of this shift in our lives. “Fuck.”
His biceps ripple under his shirt. Air rushes out of him like a balloon deflated or a raisin withered or a goddamned deferred dream.
And he’s blocking it all from me.
I wouldn’t have let him do it a year ago. Maybe not even a month ago. I’d have forced myself between him and the wall and stolen away the minimal privacy he just took for himself. But I know better now.
Not everything he feels has to involve me, so I let him have some space to feel with no one there to see his face but the painted cinder wall.