Gabe - Six.

A Chapter by emily

Gabe

Once I kissed Erich, I forgot everything else. I forgot that I had punched him, that I told him about how Leo hurt me, that Erich had left me behind in England, that we were in the godforsaken ghetto where we would almost certainly die. I forgot everything but Erich. I was kissing him, and that was enough to make my world warm and bright and perfect.

Erich wrapped his arms around me and fell backwards, pulling me with him onto the table. We sent papers flying and dishes clattering to the ground. I was lying on top of him, with his left leg between both of mine. Erich fumbled to pull his suspenders off his shoulders, tearing off his thick leather gloves in the process. I yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it aside, trying not to stop kissing him.

It was a desperate, hungry kiss. Reckless, angry, urgent. We were both starved for this. I won’t say love, because neither of us was thinking that way at the time. But we were hungry for something, anything that made us feel alive. I held onto Erich’s face to keep my hands from shaking. But Erich’s hands were everywhere, rushed, like he couldn’t decide where to touch me, like there wasn’t enough time. In my hair, on my face, my neck, my shoulders, my back. Our breath came in sharp, panicked gulps. It felt like drowning. Erich’s lips, cracked and dry from the freezing cold, burned and chafed against my mouth. His fingers twisting in my hair, clawing desperately at the nape of my neck. Erich’s underbite made his teeth knock clumsily against mine. He tasted like toothpaste washed down with whiskey, and something sharp and metallic. Someone was bleeding.

I groped blindly between his legs and found the bulge of his erection under his heavy uniform. Erich gasped, teeth nicking down the corner of my jaw. I tried to get his trousers undone, but I couldn’t get a good look. Erich ran his hands across my torso, tangled his hands in my rosary, slid his palms down my back and into my pants.

I felt the moment it all went wrong, felt it on the small of my back. Erich’s hand jerked back violently. His hands were behind me, so I couldn’t see what was wrong. He cursed in German, but he couldn’t seem to move his arm. His right hand was stiff and trembling against my back.

“What is it?” I asked, rattled, unable to catch my breath. Erich was grimacing, squeezing his eyes shut. “Erich, what’s wrong?” I reached back and put my hand on his right arm; it was spasming out of control. Something was really wrong.

“Don’t touch it!” he roared. He grabbed onto his right arm with his left hand and yanked, untangling himself from me. I stayed were I was, but the force of the tug sent Erich crashing off the table and onto the floor. He got to his feet with another howl, still clutching his right forearm. I could see the problem now. The hand had clenched up against his chest, seemingly trapped there. It was his disfigured hand, with the scars. His fingers curled, involuntarily, into a stiff, misshapen, painful looking claw. Erich sat tensely on the couch, cradling his quivering arm.

I looked anxiously at him, but I didn’t dare get any closer. This was the kind of thing Erich couldn’t take: evidence of his own weakness. The hand especially, I realized, was a source of agony for him. It must have reminded him of Wellington’s, of me. I didn’t know if he would want my help with this.

Erich noticed me looking at him, still kneeling on the table, and must have decided he couldn’t say nothing. “It gets like this sometimes,” he said softly, angrily. “Seizes up, you know, tremors. Bad tendons, or muscles, or something.”

“Do you need…?”

“No!” Erich snapped. “Just �" s**t �" just let it be. Stay over there.” I dropped my eyes, knowing he would feel better if I didn’t look at him. I retrieved my shirt from under the table, tried to look immersed in doing up the buttons. It obviously wasn’t going to happen now, though I wished I could tell that to the throbbing between my legs. “S**t,” Erich said again. “S**t, I don’t know what I… I should have known…”

“It was a bad idea,” I said softly. I wasn’t sure if I meant that. What we had don certainly wasn’t smart, kissing like that in the middle of Hersch’s home, without saying anything we needed to say to each other. But I couldn’t make myself feel like we’d made a mistake; we both wanted it so badly.

“Yeah,” Erich said, still looking down at his hand. “I mean… yeah.” He seemed to want to say something else, but he didn’t.

I couldn’t read him. On one hand, he didn’t seem to be angry at me. He wasn’t panicking, or trying to claim that he hadn’t wanted to kiss me, or that kissing me didn’t mean he was a fairy, like he used to. I decided this was a good sign. “Maybe it was too much at once,” I ventured cautiously. “But I guess I’ve been wanting to do that for more than two bloody years.” I carefully made my way over to him, sitting a little ways away from Erich on the dirty, threadbare sofa. He didn’t move away, but he didn’t turn towards me either. He didn’t react at all, actually. I put a hand on his shoulder, “Erich?” He flinched, but he didn’t jerk away.

When he finally turned to me, he looked much more sad than angry. Blood was collecting in the crease in the corner of his mouth; he was the one who had been bleeding. I reached out and wiped the blood away, ran my thumb gently across his face. His jaw was starting to swell, and I was suddenly felt awful for forgetting I had punched him. Erich bent his head, pressing his face to my hand. “I don’t want to lie anymore.” He rubbed his petrified knuckles self-consciously, still looking down at his hands. “Two… two damn years,” he said, his words a low breath. “I spent every damn day wanting to be with you, and I don’t want to pretend I didn’t.”

I was kissing him again, before I could ask him why, in that case, he ever went back to Germany, or why he had been so cold to me for the past few weeks. I wanted to kiss him more than I wanted to ask hard questions. I was just so happy that I wasn’t the only one who had spent two years wishing we could be together. Erich kissed me back, stroking my cheek with his good hand. His right hand was a stone slab between us. I felt him try to move his arm, only to have another tremor force it back into place. He inhaled abruptly, painfully. “Gabe. I can’t. I can’t,” he breathed, running his good hand down my neck to my shoulder. “This hand… I can’t do this now.” Admitting weakness was so hard for Erich; he pressed his mouth into a hard line and looked away from me again.

“I know. It’s all right.” I didn’t want to push him, when he was being so open with me for once, but I also didn’t want him to feel like his hand made him into a monster. Everything wrong with his right arm had come from protecting me. Erich thought his scars made him weak, but to me, they were a reminder of how brave he was.

He had gone back to rubbing his knuckles, and I put my hand on top of both of his. When he lifted his eyes to mine, he looked ashamed and vulnerable. I didn’t want Erich to feel that way. Slowly, he dropped his good arm, allowing me to touch his damaged hand.

It didn’t even really feel like a human hand, and the texture sent a shudder through me that I tried not to let him see. The tendons were so rigid, as if his bones had suddenly calcified and turned to stone. A new tremor spasmed from the tips of his fingers up his forearm, and Erich took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut. I felt awful. I rubbed his stiff knuckles, trying mirror the way he did it, since it obviously made him feel a little better.

“You, ah �" ” Erich began, cut off by another tremor. This one seemed to indicate the end, though, and his hand finally relaxed a little. “You don’t have to touch it. I know it’s awful.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “Let me see your arm,” I said softly. The burns weren’t so bad around his hand, but I knew that more than just a bad cut had gone into the destruction of Erich’s arm. Cautiously, I rolled his sleeve up, and Erich didn’t stop me. The sight of his ravaged forearm made me want to cry. The burns wouldn’t have been so bad, if they had healed properly in a hospital. But they were awful, alternating between shiny, thick, dark purple-red blotches, and patches that were as dry and white as bone, tapering off a little above his elbow. Tentatively, I traced my fingers across his rough, scarred skin. I remembered the morning after he fell asleep next to me, before the fire, when I had wanted to touch the blue veins in his forearm. I couldn’t even see those veins anymore. Erich shivered as I touched the burns. “I can’t feel it,” he said quietly. “There’s no feeling left in the skin.”

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“It’s going to stay this way,” he mumbled bitterly. “The doctor says one day, it will seize up and it won’t ever come back.” I thought he might cry, but the sob that burst from his chest was tearless. “I’m broken, Gabe. S**t, I’ve been waiting for this for two years, and now I can’t even touch you.”

This was the worst of all possible outcomes for Erich. He already struggled with the idea that he could sleep with me and still be a real man, and now he couldn’t even do that. This episode was worse than emasculating.

I put my head on his shoulder, “I’ve been waiting, too. We can wait a little longer.” I rested a hand on his chest; it felt so good to just sit there with him, like everything was normal and good.

Erich cocked his head. “You mean, you haven’t… you haven’t, with anyone else…?”

I bit my lip and looked down, shaking my head. No, there hadn’t been anyone else since Erich. I hadn’t learned from my mistakes after Leo; I had gotten involved with Erich even though I knew nothing good could come of my romantic aspirations. I wouldn’t pull anyone else into the path of my destruction. Anyway, even if I wanted to, it wasn’t worth the risk. I had seen what happened to people like me, in the shire town in Yorkshire. Incarceration seemed too much like the natural last step in my catastrophic walk through life, and I would do anything to avoid it. “What about, uh,” I cleared my throat, trying unsuccessfully to sound relaxed, “what about you?”

I didn’t know what I wanted to hear, but what I didn’t want to hear was the silence that followed. It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but still far, far too long. It was an ashamed silence, a silence in which I could hear Erich contemplating whether to tell the truth. “Not really,” he said hoarsely. “Only… no, not really.” He rubbed his forehead tensely with his good hand; something bad was coming.

“Here?” I asked. Probably he could have found at least one other boy in the battalion. Erich shook his head. “Another �" ” my mouth felt dry, “ �" another soldier?”

Erich wouldn’t look me in the eye, continued rubbing his hand even as the muscles relaxed. “No. Not like… that.”

He didn’t only mean that it wasn’t a soldier. My breath froze in my throat as I realized what he meant: he’d slept with a girl. For some irrational reason, it suddenly felt like a bigger betrayal. I knew Erich had sex with plenty of girls before, and that he didn’t dislike it. I had never imagined he would go back, though. My voice felt constricted, even as I tried to sound calm. “In Germany?” He nodded. I had a sinking feeling that I knew what he was going to say.

Erich pressed his lips together, running his fingers agitatedly through his hair. “It wasn’t really…”

“Was it Brigitte?”

Erich screwed up his face, looking defeated and defiant all at once. In the long silence before his answer, he just kept compulsively rubbing his hand. I knew it was keeping him calm. “Yes, it was Brigitte.”

I shoved away from him, shot to my feet, the shock of fury coursing through my veins. “Brigitte?” I shouted, not willing to believe it yet. “That bleeding c**t?” I wasn’t sure if I had ever used that word before, but it certainly got my meaning across. “You f*****g despised her! You bloody hated her, Erich! After what she did to you �" f**k, after what she accused you of �" you went back to Brigitte?”

“Listen to me!” Erich got to his feet angrily. His arm had relaxed a little, though not all the way. Even oddly lopsided, Erich could make himself look frightening. I didn’t care this time, though. For once, I was angrier than he was.

Was this how it felt to be Erich, with rage burning inside your chest like it’s the only thing you’ve ever felt? I felt like punching him again. I had seen how Erich doubled his hatred of Leo, felt all the hatred I couldn’t feel for him. I realized now that it was how I felt about Brigitte. I couldn’t conceive of the fact that Erich wouldn’t hate her, after what she put him through. Erich knew her too well to truly hate her, but to me, she was pure evil. “You ran off on me! You left me behind in England, with no explanation, after everything we’d been through, to go back to Brigitte, the b***h who ruined your life?” Losing Erich had been awful, but realizing that I had lost him to Brigitte was unbearable.

“Hey! Would you shut up and listen?” Erich barked. I gave him a chance, though I was still fuming. “Yes, I tried to f**k Brigitte! I tried, but I f*****g couldn’t, okay? It didn’t work. I could only get hard thinking about you and I lost it after about two seconds inside her! And there hasn’t been anyone else since then because I never want to feel that f*****g awful about myself again! Is that what you wanted to hear?” He his voice was angry, but I saw bitterness and humiliation in his face. I knew his admission should have made me feel better, but the fact remained, he had left me and gone back to Brigitte. “You can’t blame for wanting to forget about you!”

A fresh burst of rage ripped through me. “Can’t blame you?” I yelled. “Of course I can f*****g blame you! It’s your bloody fault you were even in a place where you needed to forget me! You were supposed to be living with me at Heathshire, not learning to hate yourself again in Berlin!”

Erich pulled back his lips, revealing his terrifying, doglike snarl. “You think I wanted to go back to Berlin? You don’t know a goddamn thing about Berlin.”

“Then tell me!”

“No, f**k you!” He advanced on me, and though I was confident that he wouldn’t hit me, I shrunk back. “You have no goddamn idea what I went through back there,” he growled, poking me hard in the chest. He gave me a shove before storming towards the door. “Can’t f*****g believe…” he grumbled as he wrenched the door open.

“You’re always the one who leaves!” I called after him, following him towards the hall. “This is how it is! I stay right here and you run off, because you’re a bleeding coward. You’re the bloody weak one Erich! You’ll always be the one who leaves! You think about that!”

Erich spun around, just before he reached the door at the end of the hall. He was just a shadow in the dark hall, but I could see how his body tensed up like he’d been punched. “F**k you!” he roared down the hall, slamming the door behind him.

When he was gone, I went back into the room, sinking back down onto the sofa. I rubbed my tired, stinging eyes, determined not to cry. Was this how it would always be; would Erich and I always get right up to the edge, only to find myself helpless to stop him as he stormed away from me? I wasn’t really so angry about Brigitte. I was angry for the same reason I had been angry for two years, because Erich had left me behind. Rage continued to pump through my blood like adrenaline, and I knew that it was rage for Erich, that I had every right in the world to hate him right then.

But I couldn’t explain why, when I thought about Erich hiking back to the barracks in the snow, lying alone in his room, rubbing his poor, ruined hand, I finally started to cry. I just wished he had stayed. I just wanted to hold his hand again.

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