Page 7

EBEN

“Thomas,” I shouted, ignoring all the curious eyes tracking our movement toward the back of the settlement, and held onto Cale as his legs gave out. “Give me a second. Shit…” I lifted him into my arms, cradling him against my chest. “I got you.”

His eyes closed as his arm wrapped around my neck. His fingers like ice against my skin raised an army of goosebumps along my spine. Panic seized a few of my breaths and I stumbled. He was too cold. Too cold and…

“Can you handle the weight?” Thomas asked and I wanted to laugh, not with humor but with horror.

Cale weighed nothing. Nothing, like he wasn’t real, like he would float away at any moment. Too fragile.

“We have to get him inside,” I said, my voice wavering with anxiety and fear.

Thomas nodded and I followed him as fast as I could manage. He led me up a small hill toward a large wooden structure. Smoke billowed from the rickety-looking metal pipe sticking out from the roof. I realized as we got closer it was one of the shower houses. Steam, humid and hot, smelling of sage and pine, seeped through the cracks of the closed doors.

“There are three stalls,” Thomas said and pointed at one of the doors on the far right. “That one looks open. Take him inside, get him cleaned up and warm. I’ll brief the captain and circle back here in twenty minutes with some clothes and show you to the dining hall. If you need anything, if he’s…” Thomas’s assessing gaze swept over Cale’s face. “Struggling, call out for help, there’s a medic just this way.” He pointed to the left of the shower house. “You can’t miss it. Just look for the red cross on the door. All right?” When I didn’t answer right away, he took a step closer. “Eben… all right?”

“Y-yes, sir.” Cale’s arm was still around my neck. His eyes still closed, his body violently trembling. The cold-stealing spaces under my skin pooled inside my head like a fog. “Medic, cross, got it.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “You got this, kid. Remember, I’ll be back in twenty.”

A warm orange glow greeted us as I opened one of the shower house doors. A black, iron, potbellied stove sat in the corner of the small space, with stacks of wood piled high all around it. The heat pouring through the room was almost too overwhelming against my frozen cheeks, but I basked in it. The entire room couldn’t have been more than eight feet by eight feet, divided into two compartments. One for the stove and wood and a small shelf of dry towels, and the other for the shower. A pipe, made out of the same type of metal as the chimney, looped up and out of the ceiling and through the wooden partition into the shower, its path ending at the spigot. A tall wooden rack sat against the back wall of the shower, filled with green and brown glass bottles, and bars of soap. Small strips of cloth hung from hooks on the rack, while the used ones overflowed out of the wicker basket by the door. I had no idea where the water came from, but there was another pipe, longer than the others that connected to the pipe of the stove and shower head. It looked as though it originated somewhere out the back of the structure. All of this amazed me, the construction and how much planning this had to have taken to create, and once again guilt pinched at my chest. I’d lived with the enemy. Ate their food. Bathed in their cold locker rooms. I didn’t deserve to be here.

Cale made a soft sound, and I remembered I might not deserve this, but he certainly did.

“Can you stand for a moment?” I asked.

“I think so. I’m not as lightheaded.”

I set him on his feet, and when he swayed, I wrapped my arms around his waist. “Sit there, okay?” I helped him onto the bench inside the shower stall. “I’m going to throw a few more logs into the stove and then I’ll help you… if you want. I can give you privacy if that’s—”

“Stay,” he whispered, his eyelids drooping. “I’m not sure I won’t pass out. This heat is…”

“A lot.”

He smiled and rested his head against the wooden wall. “Feels good, though.”

“Yeah…” I returned his smile and watched as his eyes closed again, his lips lingering in a lopsided grin.

I focused on that image, Cale smiling and content, as I loaded a few logs into the stove, instead of the guilt and shame pumping through my veins. It was easier to forget everything I’d had to do to survive while I was in the thick of actually surviving, but here, in this place where peace was palpable, I didn’t want to think about how much of myself I’d left inside of Elysium.

CALE

The hot air stung my nostrils and lungs. The tips of my fingers burning with sensation as my capillaries came back to life. It hurt, the pain searing, but I welcomed it. I worked open the buttons on my jacket, my fingers too numb, and fumbled with every last one until I shrugged the fabric from my shoulders with a long sigh.

“Let me help you,” Eben said, his guard jacket already off, the muscles of his chest outlined under the dampness of his shirt. Of all the things to notice in such a precarious moment. But it was the most normal I’d felt in such a long time. “Can you hold up your arms?” Nodding, I did as he asked, and he stripped my filthy shirt over my head. His eyes looking everywhere all at once, started to swell with tears. “Oh God.”

I didn’t shy away from his assessment. I knew how terrible I looked. How my ribs jutted out, how my pale skin was covered in fading bruises from the beating I received on that final day. I’d been left for dead, and if it wasn’t for the heat on my cheeks, I might have thought I was dreaming. That all of this was conjured up inside my head. Some type of self-induced fantasy.

“Cale, I…”

“We made it out. This…” Finding strength in this small taste of freedom, I trailed a shaking hand across my torso. “It will heal. We can heal, Eben.” He didn’t speak, something dark building in his eyes as he stared at the ground. I shivered as I stood and turned on the faucet despite the fact that we were both partially dressed.

“What are you doing?” he asked, finally meeting my gaze.

“Washing it all away.”

The water was cool at first, slowly warming as it moved through the heated copper piping. Like tiny needles injecting my skin with fire, the water splashed against my bare chest. Eben’s eyes held mine as he lifted his shirt over his head. Neither of us looked away as we shed away the layers of fabric, the layers of the life we had been forced to endure, until we were naked, and our blood and the dirt and the memories swirled at our feet and disappeared down the grate. Eben lifted his hand, pushing my mop of hair out of my eyes, and I forgot the emptiness in my stomach, the hunger replaced with thousands of butterflies. The indulgent flutter foreign and familiar warmed my bones. Gave me strength.

“I…” he stuttered as rivulets of water trickled down his cheeks, dancing along the line of his jaw. “I have to tell you something.” His expression grave, he swallowed. “I’m afraid… you’ll hate me.”

I placed my palm at the center of his chest, ready to tell him it didn’t matter, that the past was the past. His skin was warm and wet, and I fought myself not to lean in and bury my nose in his neck. I didn’t want to know; I didn’t want to hear it. We were here and it was over. But he looked at me like a man about to confess his greatest sin, a man willing to hang himself on the truth, his heart racing beneath my hand, and as scared as I was to hear him, I couldn’t find the words to stop him from speaking.

“When I went back,” he said, barely above a whisper. “When I left you in the woods to get supplies. A Dusk Guard caught me. H-his name was Treban.”

“Was?”

“I didn’t know what to do. He stopped me, called me a traitor, he had a gun and—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, my voice cracking. “Eben.” His entire body shook as I closed the distance between us. Chest to chest, I held his face in my hands. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I took a life,” he argued. “I lit the lamps every fucking night knowing what was happening inside. I ate their food. I took their orders. And then… and then you… I… God, I didn’t know what to do. I k-killed him.”

“Would he have killed you?” I asked, wiping away the tears from his face as they mixed with the water from the shower under my thumbs.

“I don’t know.”

“You do,” I said, my tone low and adamant. “He would have, or if not him, you would have died on the front, or at the hands of another guard. You did what you had to do to protect yourself, to protect me. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. You lit their lamps. You ate their food. You were complicit. But when it mattered, you made the right choice.”

“I killed him.” He rested his forehead against mine, his hands at my waist. “And fuck, I’d do it again if it meant we ended up here like this.” Eben’s lips were less than an inch away, the steam gathering around us, blotting out the world, granting us privacy. “I feel like I don’t deserve this. And I know… I know what you’re going to say.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, and it was real and warm like this room, like this moment. “Oh, you do? What am I going to say?”

His shoulders relaxed, his mouth raising into a quiet smile. “That I did what I had to, that I deserve to be free.” His brows dipped, stealing the lightness in his eyes. “But it’s not that simple.”

“Nothing is ever simple. It never has been, even before… Eben.” I kissed the corner of his mouth, and his arms pulled me closer. Skin to skin, hip to hip, close, closer than I’d been to another person since the world had been torn at the seams. “You’re a good man.” I kissed his jaw, his stubble scratching the tender skin of my lips, igniting something base and primal low in my stomach. “You were before and you are now, everything in-between… We’ve all lost something.”

“I don’t want to lose myself,” he said, tipping my chin up with two fingers. “Not ever again.”

“I won’t let you.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “Not ever.”

And I kissed him with waterlogged lips and with our legs and knees unsteady, and his fingers in my hair, and with bruises on my ribs. We were two men sharing a shower, a simple, intimate moment. Not prisoner or guard, or runaways. There was no guilt or shame over the things we had done to survive. There was only him and the heat and the skin on our bones dying to remember what it was like to feel. We kissed and covered ourselves with pine oil soap until every last speck of Elysium had been removed from our flesh, our history cleansed of stale prison cells, rotten apples, and kerosene lamps. The suds bubbled in my hair smelling like earth and rain, and we emptied two of the glass bottles until we were clean enough to remember the good, to smile and touch and come undone with slick hands, and mouths pressed to the other’s neck, open and desperate, with wild gasps we’d never expected to breathe again. Overheated with time forgotten, we were men again. Just men and feeling and love. And I never wanted to let go.