SEVEN

Rex’s apartment was warm but not unbearable. He didn’t have an air conditioner, but it was essentially one room and the solar fans on the windows made a decent cross breeze.

He put the kettle on without asking if I wanted anything. I sat on the sofa and stared out the window, looking over the rooftops, in the direction of the Church of the Eternal Truth. It was the spiritual home to H4H. The pastor there, a guy named Kern, was the person who gave H4H’s hate-mongering a spiritual seal of approval, working hand in hand with Howard Wells to give all that toxic anti-chimera sentiment a veneer of respectability.

The open air I was looking out at had once been dominated, briefly, by a massive cross on top of the church. It had been controversial because any church that preaches hatred like that is controversial, but also because the center of the cross had been emblazoned with the H4H logo, which many in the religious community—including Reverend Calkin—said bordered on blasphemy.

Another local minister had caused a stir calling it a case of the tail wagging the god.

Rex and I had been sitting right there on that sofa just a few months earlier when the cross had come down. Part of a series of bombings committed by CLAD—the group’s first terrorist action, as far as anyone knew.

It had made things worse at the time, as violence usually did. But no one had been hurt in those bombings. Unlike today.

My vision clouded with tears as my mind returned to the vision of Reverend Calkin. Throughout the day, memories of what I had seen had been increasingly interspersed with imaginings of what it must have been like inside when CLAD’s bomb went off. By now, a cinematic loop was playing in my brain: a handful of young people, some of them chimeras, standing on one side of a long table, and Calkin and a bunch of older 4H4 types on the other side. As they all move to their seats, there’s a flash and a bang, and everything is turned to chaos and carnage and fire. I wince when it happens, trying to stop the film, trying to stop my imagination. But I can’t stop it, can’t look away. I see Calkin, burned and battered and covered in blood. Then the loop starts all over again, interspersed with images I really had seen.

I couldn’t make it stop until I felt Rex lifting me up off the sofa, and I realized only then that I had fallen asleep. I smiled at the sight of him looking down at me, as he crossed his tiny apartment in a few steps.

“Your mom was right,” he said softly, his voice a deep rumble I could feel through his chest as clearly as I could hear it. “You should be in bed.”

He lowered me onto the bedspread, but as he tried to take his hands away and step back, I hooked an arm around his neck. “You should be, too,” I said.

His smile widened as he eased himself down beside me. We lay facing each other for a moment and he rested his hand on my hip, sliding it up until it was cupping my face.

“You sure you don’t want to rest?” he said. I could see in his eyes the same longing that I felt.

“I’ve never been surer of anything,” I replied, kissing him. Then I put my hand on his face, too, and for a while at least, the thoughts and images of the day, horrors both real and imagined, were finally banished from my mind.

When I woke up again, the sun had moved, and the far end of the apartment was filled with orange light. I was tangled in sheets and Rex was sitting on the edge of the bed, his broad back turned to me, his silhouette clear against the light. He turned to look at me.

“You’re awake,” he said, brushing my hair from my forehead. “Hell of a day.”

“Yeah, it was,” I replied. I took Rex’s hand in mine, spreading my fingers wide to fit around his, and hefted it, lifting his arm so I could press my lips against the back of his hand. “Thanks for taking care of me.”

He smiled, and then the doorbell rang and I shot upright, pulling the sheet around me. “Are you expecting someone?”

He smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Some thing. Round. Covered with cheese and sauce.”

I laughed. “Man, you are good.”

As Rex thumped downstairs to get the pizza, I pulled on one of his T-shirts that I had appropriated as mine. It came down to my knees and was pale blue and worn soft from age. On the front was a picture of planet Earth made into a vaguely sarcastic smiley face—with tiny people crowded on the top of it, like a head of hair—poking through a guillotine, with the blade suspended menacingly above. Underneath were the words HOW ABOUT LET’S NOT KILL THE PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT?

Rex never wore it—he said the sentiment was too dark—but I thought it was just about right. And it was really soft.

I reassembled the bed—not as precision-neat as Rex would make it, but close enough that he wouldn’t feel compelled to remake it, or to stare at it side-eyed trying to resist the urge to do so. As I flattened out the last major wrinkle in the bedspread, I felt the apartment shake with the vibration of his footsteps as he thumped back upstairs.

I smiled to myself, feeling bad for the neighbors. When Rex came in the door, carrying the pizza, he looked at me and said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I kissed him on the cheek and got plates from the cupboard as he put the pizza on the coffee table. Then we both sat on the sofa and each took a piece.

Rex grabbed the remote and turned on the holovid. “Movie?”

I nodded as I took a giant bite. Romance time was over. I was ready for some brain candy. And dinner.

Unfortunately, before Rex could find anything suitably mindless, the holovid picture from a local station assembled in front of us: a three-dimensional talking head, Talia Chen, who had been on the local news since we were kids, and next to her, a two-dimensional aerial shot of the Seaport Museum. It looked like a police video that had been AI-enhanced.

Rex’s thumb jabbed the buttons on the remote, but before the holovid shifted to the free movie channel, I saw the words across the bottom of the screen: WIDESPREAD CONDEMNATION IN PRO-CHIMERA BOMBING.

I growled and sighed, but then it was gone, replaced with an old-fashioned movie intro. Part of me wanted to ask Rex to switch the channel back, and when I looked over at him, he was staring at me expectantly, like he was anticipating the question.

“Let’s take a break from it, okay?” he said.

I didn’t want to take a break, but I knew he was right. “Yeah, okay. What’s the movie?”

“The Empire Strikes Back.”

“Perfect.”

And it was. I’d seen it at least twenty times, but it was still a favorite. I used to watch it with Del regularly—enough that we could recite pretty much all the dialogue. Del was particularly fond of the Darth Vader lines. Whenever we watched it, for days afterward, he would randomly break into, “I’m your father, Luke”—which we both knew wasn’t the actual line, but was funny anyway. And when his own dad was being awful, which was most of the time, he’d follow it up with a mordant, “Darth, I wish you really were.”

It was rough humor, but he would laugh his butt off, and I’d join right in.

I smiled at the memory, then felt teary. Taking another slice of pizza, I pretended to watch the film as, despite my best efforts, my mind once again replayed the events of the day. I cringed at the horror of it and scoured my memory for examples of things I should have done differently or better, ways I could have changed the outcome, ways I could have handled the questioning—or my mom—better.

And I wondered why I’d been spared. The fact that I had been was gnawing at me in a way that made me think it would continue to do so for a long time to come.

Judging from his frequent, furtive sidelong glances, I think Rex was mostly distracted with wondering how I was doing.

Periodically, I’d look back at him and say, “I’m okay.”

He’d nod and say, “Good,” then we’d both go back to pretending to watch the movie.

It wasn’t just the day behind us that was on our minds. I think we were both worried about tomorrow, too, the first official day of the week-long convention. After the bombing, tensions would surely be escalated. Howard Wells’s keynote was going to be incendiary to begin with, but who knew how much gasoline he was planning to pour on the fire now.

The credits began rolling up the screen. The movie was over, and I hadn’t even noticed.

I turned to Rex and said, “I think we should still go tomorrow,” just as he turned to me and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t go tomorrow.”

We had a good laugh at that.

“Oh, you do, do you?” Rex said when we stopped, his eyes sparkling in the dim light.

I kissed him, just because, then I said, “Yes. Especially now, it’s important to let the world know that whoever did this, CLAD or whoever, that’s not us, and we’re not going away. And that we lost people, too.”

“It could be dangerous.” Rex worried a lot about things being dangerous. To be fair, he was usually right to be worried.

“It’s a dangerous world, right? We’re protesting to make it less dangerous.”

“I guess we are,” he said, but he didn’t look convinced.

I hadn’t spent the night before.

It felt nice. It felt cozy and domestic, and I loved the idea of sleeping next to Rex. And he didn’t even snore, which could have been a serious problem.

But it was also weird. I wasn’t used to it. I couldn’t sleep the way I usually slept—which apparently involved my arms and legs sprawled in all directions. And even without snoring, Rex kept me awake just by the sound of his breathing, not to mention the occasional mattress tsunami whenever he changed position.

It gave me more time for reliving traumas and stewing in guilt, regret, and second guesses. Good times.

I tossed and turned until two a.m., but I woke up at seven anyway, exhausted but apparently done with sleep. Rex awoke almost immediately, opening his eyes with a soft, surprised snort. He looked vaguely bewildered at first, but he glanced at the clock, and when he looked back at me, his gaze was crystal clear.

“Good morning,” he said with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”

“I slept.”

“Did I snore?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

“I already did.”

He laughed. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Got any coffee?”

He gave me an awkward, apologetic grin. “Sorry.…I could go out and get some.”

“No, don’t do that,” I said. “I can get some when we go out. I’d love a cup of…tea.” I do love a good cup of tea, but I’d gotten into the habit of having coffee first thing in the morning, and hadn’t realized until that moment how much I’d come to depend on it.

As Rex put the kettle on, I went into the bathroom. I was standing at the sink, realizing I didn’t have any of my stuff, when Rex called through the door, “You can use my toothbrush.”

It was hanging in the toothbrush holder, alone, over a tube of toothpaste. I felt momentarily overwhelmed by the intimacy of it. I mean, we’d been intimate, but sharing a toothbrush was intimate.

But I plucked it up and put some toothpaste on it. “Thanks,” I said as I ran it under the water.

When I came out, Rex was waiting for me with two mugs of tea and a grin on his face. “How’d it go?”

I grinned back, wide enough to show my teeth. “Minty fresh.”

He handed me one of the mugs and I got dressed while he was in the bathroom. He got dressed quickly afterward, and we agreed to get breakfast when we got coffee.

I was sorry to go, sorry to leave our little bubble and go out into the world. But, seeing as it was the first time I’d stayed over, and it had been just about perfect, considering, I kind of also wanted it to end before anything ruined it.

I knew I could count on Rex not to ruin anything, but I was a little less sure about myself.

As we descended the stairwell to the street, I felt not only relieved, but fortified by our time together. And hopefully ready for whatever was next.