by JJ Jones
“Then you would be the meanest dad ever! Are you the meanest dad ever?”
“Shit, I hope not.”
“Eddie! Language, please.”
“Shoot. I apologize. Don’t use that word, Chase. Deal?”
“Deal. Now, pancakes please.”
Chase’s mom rolled her eyes while his dad bust out laughing and fixed up a heaping plate, setting it in front of a son who already had both of his utensils ready and waiting. He had already shoved several monstrously large bites in his mouth by the time they heard Katie tripping down the stairs. Chase chewed on, watching as his parents exchanged a look that was worried on her part and warning on his.
They were about to tell their children something and they knew for a fact that at least one of them wasn’t going to like it. His mother started making herself busy, making up a plate and setting it anxiously where Katie always sat to eat her breakfast. Maybe she was hoping that the food would act as a peace offering and Katie wouldn’t even notice that things weren’t quite right.
If that was what she was hoping for, however, the response she got couldn’t have been any different. Katie had hardly made it into the room before she stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes growing large and bugging out of her head in a way that had always made Chase vaguely nervous.
“What is this?”
“Pancakes, dear. I’ve already made up your plate. Did the syrup just the way you like.”
“You know that’s not what I mean, Mom. What is this? All of these boxes? Are you kidding me with this?”
“Now, Katie-”
“Seriously? We’re moving again? This is such crap!”
“Katie. Watch yourself. Sit down, eat your breakfast.”
Even an angry Katie wasn’t quite up to the task of standing up to their father and so she sat, tears of rage streaming down her face. Chase stopped chewing mid-bite, slowly realizing that she was giving him a look he was positive she wished could just kill him right there on the spot.
“What?” The barely intelligible words made their way around his mouthful of half chewed food. “What did I do?”
“You knew, didn’t you? When you asked me last night. You knew that we were moving and you just toyed with me about it, let me tell you how much I wanted to stay put this time. Do you know how messed up that is? You are the worst, Chase. I wish I didn’t even have a brother.”
“Katie! I said enough. Chase didn’t know a thing. If he asked you about it, well, he must have just picked up on things. You know he’s prone to do that. He always has been. You aren’t going to be able to blame him for this one, sweet pea. This one is all on your parents. You want to be mad? You be mad at us.”
“Fine,” she spat out with a vehemence that was totally uncharacteristic for the usually sweet natured (and sometimes brother bullying) girl, “I will be. What do you think this does to us? Moving us all over the country, all over the world, whenever you want to? Do you think we’re going to be normal adults? With normal lives and normal relationships? We won’t even know how to have those things. Not at all.”
“You know how to have relationships with us. That’s normal.”
“No! No, it isn’t normal. We aren’t normal, Dad. Why do you want so badly for us to be like everyone else? Why can’t we just be the dragons we are?”
“Katie, I told you not to speak about those things.”
“But why? You’re taking away the most special thing there is about me. You’re ruining my spirit, and Chase’s spirit, too.”
“Nope,” Chase said uncertainly, “my spirit feels fine.”
“That’s enough.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You will stop speaking,” their father said in his most dangerous voice, “or you will live to regret it. You may hate me for the rest of your life. I don’t care. That’s your prerogative. But you will do what I say. I will have obedience and right now that means packing. Since you don’t seem to have any interest in partaking in the family breakfast, I suggest you get started.”
Katie’s mouth dropped open and for a moment nobody in the room moved. For a moment that happy home Chase had been so confident of just the night before seemed like a distant memory. There were only strangers here. All he could do was watch as Katie pushed her chair back so violently that it toppled over to one side, leaping up and stalking towards the stairs.
It wasn’t until she was halfway up them that she turned back to her family with a look that was full of hatred. Chase had never seen her that way and it was so surprising it made him feel physically sick. It was like she couldn’t stand them, not one of them, and when her eyes landed on their dad they grew even darker still.
“You think you’re so good at this, that you run such a tight ship. Well, I will never forgive you for this. Do you hear me? I will never forgive you. I hate you. All of you.”
And then she was gone, fled to her room with the door slammed to keep them as far away from her as she could possibly manage. The three she left behind just sat and stared at each other and Chase thought to himself how maybe now nothing would ever be quite the same again.
CHAPTER TWO
“Katie! Where are you going, Katie? Can’t you just slow down? I told you, I can’t follow you there. Please don’t go places where I can’t follow. Don’t make me keep looking for you. I can’t see you in the dark.”
It didn’t seem to matter how loudly he called out to her, how much anger or pleading he put into his voice. Nothing he did made a difference and he could not see her, regardless of how he strained his eyes. He could sense her though, out there in the dark in front of him, so close that he knew he might even be able to reach out and touch her if he could only see.
How was it possible for it to be so dark in this place? Whatever this place was. If he hadn’t known better, Chase would have been almost certain that this place was hell. It seemed impossible that it could be anything else with its thick black air and putrid smell. This was a place of fear and anger compounded over years of suffering. What was hell if it wasn’t that?
Those were the things that hatred was born from and hatred had to be the foundation that hell was built on. That’s why it was so important that he get Katie out of this place. He could feel in his bones that the longer he left her here the more perilous her fate would become. He had to protect her, to steal her away from these things that would warp her and make her something he could not even recognize.
He knew he could save her. He had to believe that he could.
“Katie! God damnit, stop this! Stop hiding from me. It isn’t funny any more.”
“Hey. Hey.”
Chase’s head snapped wildly back and forth, trying to look in every direction at once. He heard the voice, some voice he almost recognized, but he could not find its source. He struggled forward, needing to know if this new intruder was friend or foe, at the same time knowing that every second he spent on this new distraction was only luring him further and further away from his sister.
He felt ripped in half and he could feel a scream building up from deep inside of his gut. He clamped his jaw shut because he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he let that scream loose he would never be able to stuff it back inside again. He would be condemned to scream forever, rooted to the spot he occupied in the truly terrible place.
“Hey, hey, handsome. Time to wake up now, OK? It doesn’t look like you’re having much fun.”
Was it a trick? Was he sleeping? Even as one part of him grasped at that answer as being by far the most reasonable solution in this gruesome quest he found himself on, the other part of him insisted just as loudly that this was real, god damnit. This was real and he had the most important job to do that anyone could ever be handed.
“Hello? I’ve got coffee. Seriously, time to wake up. I’m getting lonely out here all by my lonesome.”
Chase shot up in his bed so quickly, so violently, that he could hear his (still unknown, at this point) guest gasp in surprise and maybe just a
little bit of fear. His sheets were soaked in sweat and twisted around his body like a vine, as if he had crafted for himself his very own set of restraints. His eyes opened blurrily, open but unable to comprehend the things around him quite yet.
His body may have been awake but his mind hadn’t been able to detach itself from the horrible world it had been trapped inside only moments ago. Never mind that the awful world had been one of his own creation, his own imagination. As far as he could tell, those were usually the very worst kinds.
To his right, more sensed than seen, there was someone; someone sitting on the edge of his bed who must have been the one who had been calling to him in his sleep. His whole body went rigid and his eyes focused as he twisted faster than most men would have been able to in the direction of the intruder.
Except instead of finding some kind of danger, what he saw was a busty redhead with a small frame and wild, curly hair. She was so startled by his movement that she almost spilled the coffee in her hand and he reached forward for it, not wanting it to spill all over the sheets. That would mean he had to do laundry and he was in no mood for a laundry day. Not with a start like this.
“Thanks for the coffee. Sorry if I startled you.”
“You, well, you were having a bad dream, I think. You were yelling a lot.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, too.”
“That’s OK. You were yelling about Katie.”
“That so?”
“Yes, you said her name a lot. You seemed upset. Who is she? Is she an ex-girlfriend? A current girlfriend, maybe?”
Chase took a long swig out of the mug of now lukewarm coffee and set it down gingerly on his nightstand. He needed the coffee, badly, and he would drink the whole pot before too long, but coffee was a ritual he preferred to do alone. Besides, at the moment it seemed more important for him to have both hands to massage his poor, pitiful temples.
There was an angry little man banging against their insides and that angry little man seemed to think that he had indulged a little too heavily the night before. Shit, he had to stop going out that way, or at least not start his partying without a full stomach. He was getting older, closer to thirty-five now than thirty, and his body just wasn’t able to stand up to his youthful antics any more. His body was betraying him, waging a full-on revolution. In short, Chase was in no place to entertain company, especially company he hardly even knew. Hardly. That was a laugh. Truth be told, he wasn’t even too sure what this chick’s name was. He vaguely remembered meeting her, sharing more than a few drinks, and couldn’t even recall when they had left the bar.
When it came to whatever they got up to behind his closed doors, there were glimpses of it but it felt more like pieces of a movie he had seen so long ago it was almost forgotten. Shit. This was a dicey situation indeed. Chase had a pretty good feeling totally blanking on a woman’s name while she was still wearing your shirt from the night before, was a really good way to piss her the hell off.
“So that’s it, then. You have a girlfriend. I guess I should have known. A guy that looks like you do. Of course you have a girlfriend. Looks like you’re a pretty shitty boyfriend, though.”
“No, I’m not. I don’t have a girlfriend. Katie is someone from my past, something more complicated than a girlfriend. I don’t really want to talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”
“All right,” the girl whose name he did not know said testily, “whatever you say. So! What’s your plan for the day? Feel like grabbing a bite or something? If you feel half as hungover as I do, something greasy will be like heaven.”
Ah Christ, this was just getting worse and worse. It was pretty hard to let a drunk mistake pass gracefully when she was asking you out to brunch. He just couldn’t stomach it, both literally and figuratively speaking. Besides, that dream, it was still with him and he couldn’t imagine getting up and going to be around people. No, he needed to process whatever the hell that had been. He needed to talk to someone who knew Katie.
“Shit, you know, I would love to, believe me, getting food with you sounds pretty amazing. The thing is, I’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do and I’m behind on it as it is. I really need to get to it, and I’ve gotta call my mom.”
“Your mom?” the girl scoffed in disbelief.
“Yes, actually. Gotta call my mom.”
“Well then, looks like I’ve gotta go.”
The feisty redhead with the brutal looking mascara underneath her eyes stood and stripped down naked, peeling his oversized Navy SEALs shirt off and tossing it aside unceremoniously. She gave him a flirtatious look over one shoulder and padded over to her little black dress, bending over to give him a good show before picking it up and pouring herself into it.
She grabbed her ridiculously high heels with one hand, letting them dangle casually from one hand. Apparently she had no problem with the walk of shame, even if it meant walking through an apartment building and onto a probably filthy street. Chase shuddered inside, wondering what kind of girl he had fallen into bed with last night. He had to be the worst kind of fool.
“Hey, handsome.”
“Yes?”
She smirked at him from his open door, a smile that made her face look far less pretty than it had only moments before, and then looked back in the direction of his SEALs shirt.
“Are you even a SEAL, or do you just keep the shirt around to show it off?”
“Careful,” Chase said darkly, “you’re stepping into territory you may not be able to step out of.”
“OK, fine, whatever. You’re a SEAL. Still, I’m glad you didn’t take up my lunch invitation. After all, nobody likes a mamma’s boy, right? It’s a pity, too, you sure are a beautiful specimen of a man.”
With that she was out his door, not even bothering to shut it after herself. Chase rolled his eyes and hefted himself out of the bed, wrapping a sheet around himself just in case someone happened to walk by his open door before he managed to shut it. The last thing he needed was for Mrs. Fefferman to see him with his junk hanging out.
She was already convinced that he was the worst kind of a rake, a ruthless bachelor who was trying to sleep with every woman alive, including all seventy-five years of her. But he pulled it off, shut the door without anyone peeking in, and turned to survey the damage of his apartment. It looked like he had thrown some kind of rage last night and it had only been him and the stranger who had just left in a huff.
Looking at the place, a place that was actually a damn fine apartment when he kept it clean, he was actually surprised that she hadn’t commented on it the night before. The place was pretty much a wreck, with clothing strewn across every surface and a pile of dishes in the sink that should have been done at least a week ago.
He shook his head, wishing wholeheartedly that his hangover would just go ahead and get gone, already, and let the sheet fall to the floor. Just one more thing to go in the pile of laundry he wasn’t going to do. Who the hell cared? It was just him in the place, after all. He walked to the shirt she had tossed aside and picked it up, inadvertently catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he did so.
How strange, to see yourself and for a moment, not recognize who was looking back at you. Sometimes that was exactly how Chase felt. It was like he was surprised by having grown to adulthood, like he had expected Peter Pan to pick him up somewhere along the way and whisk him off to Neverland so that he would never have to be an adult.
But he had grown up, and he guessed that a lot of women thought he was good looking enough, or at least they had told him as much. Who knew if it was true or not? There was really no accounting for taste, after all. He was tall, that much was true, taller than most men you would see walking down the street, at almost six foot five.
He had deep sandy hair, a color he had gotten from the gradually darkening white blonde ringlets he had been born with. Being a high ranking officer in the Navy SEALs, he had an athletic body maintained by hours in the gym and real live combat combined. He guessed it
was true, he was a good looking man, as if that amounted to much. He was still there alone, wasn’t he? Still nursing a hangover that he felt likely to be crippled by. He winced at the sun streaming into his messy and otherwise stark apartment and pulled on the first pair of sweatpants he could find before flopping back onto his bed and picking up his phone.
He needed to talk to his parents, to try and figure out why he had such a god awful, ominous feeling about things all of a sudden. He hit the first number on his call log, the one that was almost always at the top. Dear old dad, the man he still admired the most out of every one he had ever met.
“Chase! Hello there, Son. Whatcha got going on? What’s the news? How’s work going?”
“Whoa, there, Dad, hold your horses. That’s a whole lot of talking coming at me real fast.”
“Ahh, alright. I see how it is. Have a little too much fun last night, did we?”