Gabe - Eighteen

Gabe

          After that Sunday afternoon study session, Erich was colder than usual towards me. I didn’t know why, and I can honestly say I barely cared. Being without cigarettes made me feel like I was dying, and my mind could be occupied with nothing else for that first week in May. I would get used to it eventually, but for just that week, I couldn’t think of anything but how badly I wanted to smoke. Anyway, I was hardly dumb enough to expect warmth out of Erich.

            In my chosen solitude, I made up my mind about the inheritance. It wasn’t a hard decision, in the end. I had to accept. Broken up though I was about leaving the guys, rejecting the life that had been offered to me wouldn’t help them anyway. So I sent the letter to the firm. I sent the letter without saying a word to them. It was cowardly, I know. I just couldn’t face the idea of sitting them down, of telling them that I was going to be all right when they weren’t. In the end, it was that decision that changed everything. If I had been brave, if I had been able to tell them before I mailed the letter, I might never have confided in Erich on that first Tuesday night in May.

            It had been getting warm, finally consistently warm, that whole week. Erich and I made our way up to the roof without our blazers, buckets of sand and water that we knew would go unused for another week. I sprawled out on my back. Erich didn’t say anything, not so much as a request for a light. He let his tie loose and sat back against the chimney, the place that I saw him so often it was almost a kind of calming routine look at him.

            But his silence was unnerving, even for Erich. Something was on his mind, I realized. I figured I would have to draw it out of him if I wanted to know, since he would never offer it by himself. I sat up, propping myself on an elbow to talk to him, “you think Jim is dumb enough to sneak out tonight?” I asked. He would have to be an idiot to try and sneak out without me and Erich to cover for him if Hersch woke up.

            “F**k off,” Erich growled, seemingly unprovoked.

            I shook my head and sat back, figuring this was just a bad week for him. His mood swings were getting too much even for me. I didn’t expect him to say another word for the whole night, but then his voice came, hoarse, angry, uncomfortable, from across the roof: “why didn’t you tell me about the estate?”

            I sat straight up again, staring at him from across the roof. Of course that was what he was angry about. How could I have been that stupid? “Why do you care?” I asked. If he was going to fight me, I was going to fight back.

            Erich shrugged his massive shoulders. “I just thought we told each other things.” He paused for a second, and then added, bitterly, “I’ve told you everything.”

            So this was how it was going to be. I should have apologized, because I knew I had been a coward not to tell him, especially him, because he had told me everything. But something about the way he said it made me angry. I had told him things too. Hell, I had told him about my life, about my family. Up on that roof, I told him about my dreams and my fears and every happy memory I could possibly think of. Erich knew everything about me, everything except for what I had sworn never to tell him, what I would tell him that night. And the way he said that, it was like all that wasn’t enough for him.

            “You know I have things in my life that don’t involve you,” I replied angrily.

            Erich stayed sitting, but pulled himself to a fuller height, towering over me. I immediately shrunk back against the weathervane. “You don’t think I did, too? I used to have a life that didn’t involve you either, and that was fine by me. But I told you everything you wanted to know because I thought we were…” Erich broke off quickly, looking angrily at the ground.

            “Thought we were what?”

            “Friends!” Erich roared. “I thought we were friends, okay? But clearly I’m not too good at figuring out what having friends means!”

            I felt a lump in my throat in spite of myself. Erich thought we were friends. He was upset because he thought I didn’t value our friendship like he did. It was such an unbelievable feeling to know he thought of me as a friend, I had to swallow the lump slowly before I could respond. “Erich, we are friends,” I crawled over to him with an extended hand.

            “Don’t f*****g touch me!” he jerked away. “I’ve told you the most, God, the most s****y things you could have to tell. And what do I know about you? Nothing!”

            “That’s not fair!” I cried, immediately forgetting how sentimental he had just made me. “I’ve told you more about myself than I’ve ever told anyone. I thought you trusted me!”

            Erich snarled, crossing his arms over his chest protectively. “You’re a liar,” he growled. “You haven’t told me a goddamn thing. You want me trust you? How about telling me what the hell happened to you in Italy?”

            “Nothing happened in Italy!” The lie had become an automatic response.

            “Who’s Leo, Gabe?”

            It was like he had punched me in the stomach. There was absolutely no breath in my lungs anymore, my eyes clouded with dots, my arms and legs and insides gone to jelly. Hearing that name, his name, come out of Erich’s mouth was the most awful thing I had ever heard. No one else was supposed to know that name. Leo, the memory of him, of his face, of his name, was supposed to belong to me. Didn’t I deserve that? To have the memories to myself? But Erich knew. Erich knew, and there was nothing I could ever to take that knowledge away.

            I knew right then, that I would tell him that night. That warm night in May, I would tell the story I had promised myself and God and Leo I would never, ever tell. I would break every promise I had ever made, because Erich was right: he deserved to know.

            “How do you know about Leo?” I asked.

            I must have scared him more than I thought, because Erich backed off immediately. “Nothing!” he insisted, hands raised, “I don’t know anything. It’s just… you know, you talk in your sleep. You, uh, say his name, kind of a lot.”

            His eyes dropped with a look of utter embarrassment. “Do the other guys know?”

            Erich waited a second before nodding. “They’ve heard you. I think they think…” he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “You know?”

            I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t cry yet, not if I was going to make it through this night. I opened my mouth to talk, and what came out was the question that had been on my brain for months, letting itself into the world without invitation. “You know, don’t you?” Erich still wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I try to hide, but everyone finds out anyway.”

            I searched his face for some sign of understanding, but Erich just kept looking embarrassedly at the ground. He lit a cigarette nervously, and in the light of the match I could see his pale cheeks burning up. “Look, Gabe, this is stupid. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

            “What if I want to?” The question was as much a surprise to me as it must have been to him. But now that I had started, I realized I didn’t want to stop. Just like it had been for Erich the night he told me everything, I realized wanted to say it out loud. There would be no moving past it, in my whole life, if I never told anyone. If there was no moving past it, I might as well have shot myself in the mouth back in Italy.

            I wasn’t looking at Erich, so I was not expecting him to respond. “Then go ahead,” he grumbled, “say what you need to say.”

            Well, there it was, the invitation I had been waiting for, secretly praying for. Someone wanted me to tell them. I shook my head again to clear it, lit a cigarette, and touched my rosary, the two things that were bound to calm me down. Then, shakily, I began.

            “So, you know both my parents died in an auto accident.” Erich nodded, and I knew this would be a one-sided conversation. “Well, they had a lot of money and the Heathshire estate, because my da sold his half of the family vineyard to his older brother Lorenzo. It was right before I was born, it must have been 1923, and they knew how hard it would be to get out from under Mussolini if they didn’t leave as fast as they could. Da loved Lorenzo, more than anything, and he begged him to come with to England. But Lorenzo’s life was the vineyard, and he thought my da was a traitor for leaving. It killed my da to leave him, but by then my ma was pregnant, and they had to take the money and go.” I thought about telling him how I had watched my father pray to see his brother again every day of his life, but I decided not to. Even after tonight, there would still be some memories I had that were my own.

            “So when they died, I found out that my father left everything he had to Lorenzo, including me. I was packed up and shipped off to the vineyard before I could even really get a grip on the idea that my parents were gone. My father had talked about Lorenzo like he was God, and the vineyard in Tuscany like it was Eden. But when I got there…” how to describe how it was when I got there, “… I was in hell. The vineyard was huge, but my uncle and aunt had no money at all, thanks to the government. I expected to have family there, people who could share my loss. But… but when I got there, they were still mourning the pope, note my parents. I figured out eventually that Lorenzo and my Aunt Maddalena blamed my parents for robbing them and leaving them to run the vineyard with no money. I don’t need to tell you that no one cared that I was there.”

            I stopped, to make sure Erich was still listening. He was propped up against the chimney, not making eye contact, but alert. He noticed me looking at him and cleared his throat, “so, what did you do?”

            I sighed, remembering. “What was I supposed to do? I was fifteen years old, barely. I didn’t speak Italian. I didn’t know how to take care of a vineyard, which was all my aunt and uncle expected me to do. They didn’t even put me in the house. I stayed in abandoned servants’ quarters.” Saying it out loud, I could hardly imagine how I managed. The loneliness, the months of isolation, rushed back to me and almost knocked me backwards. How had I done it? “I was always alone. I never spoke. For more than six months I didn’t speak. I went to church, I played my violin, I planted grape seeds, and I cried.

            “Then he came. It was January, I remember that because he was twenty and I was still a month away from turning sixteen when I met him. His name was Leonardo Abandonato,” Leonardo Matteo Salvatore Abandonato, I thought to myself without saying it out loud, “but everyone in the village called him Leo. He came to work to get the vineyard ready for spring planting, because Uncle Lorenzo finally decided I was useless on my own.

“At first, he wasn’t around much. I would see him through the trees or wrestling with the vines, but we never spoke. I didn’t even know how to speak to him.” I didn’t tell Erich that Leo was beautiful, that he looked like a great sculpture, taller and stronger than me with thick, wavy brown hair and long-lashed brown eyes. “But all I wanted was a companion, someone to make that wasteland of a vineyard bearable. So I practiced. I practiced my Italian for a month before I finally introduced myself to him. And when I did, he just laughed and said he knew I was the boss’s nephew. And he shook my hand. Erich, it was the fist time someone had touched me in almost a year.”

            Erich, realizing he had been acknowledged, gave an uncomfortable grunt and pulled his hat over his eyes. I went on. “We became great friends. After that, there was never a day when we weren’t working side by side. His English was about as bad as my Italian, but once we started talking it got easier to understand each other. And even though we barely spoke the same language, it just felt so good to have contact with another person again.”

            I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say to Erich next. I inhaled a deep, shaky drag off my cigarette before diving in. “But I didn’t know then what… what I know now. I mean, I knew how I felt about… other boys. I guess I had always known. I think my parents knew, too. But, but no one had ever talked to me about it. I didn’t �" bloody hell �" I didn’t know what it meant… to be…” I wouldn’t have the strength to say it then. That night, I didn’t have the strength to say the humiliating, shameful word that had eaten away at my insides ever since I learned it: homosexual. Erich understood my jumbled explanation, I could tell by the way he was looking at me, wide-eyed, like he was unable to process that I had finally confessed. I tried not to look at his embarrassed expression.

“All I knew was that Leo was like me. I could tell, not quite right away, but almost. The way he acted around me, it was so new I almost couldn’t figure it out. He would touch me, just on the shoulder or on the chest, but always like he meant to. And he would… say things to me, while we worked. Things that made me…” how to put this? “… dizzy.”

That night, I would not tell Erich just what Leo had said to me, only three weeks before everything started. We were supposed to be planting, but instead we sat under the olive tree, eating grapes off the vine and watching the orange sun set over the vineyard. Leo had leaned in close to my ear and whispered in his husky, soft, thickly-accented English: “Have you ever been kissed, Gabriel? Have you ever touched another boy? Hmm? Has anyone ever been inside you?” He had put his hand on my knee, and his face was to close to mine I could feel his hot breath. I had just stared at that hand without saying anything, because it was like a bolt of hot, white lightning had shot through my leg to my brain. His words were terrifying. No one had ever said anything like that to me. And though the way he said it made me feel dirty and afraid, I had looked back into his deep brown eyes and wanted to kiss him. It was a desire that was as foreign as it was exciting. Then I got so scared of what I would do, I had run away without looking back. I wanted to tell Erich all of this, because it was one of the memories that hurt the most. But how could I ever find the words?

            “Then, in May, he moved into the servants’ quarters with me. My uncle had decided to keep him on for the summer picking, and he would stay on until the harvest ended in October. The quarters were small, really just one room attached to the kitchen, with a few beds against the far wall. I was unreasonably happy to have him there. We stayed up late talking as much as we could for the first two weeks. He was basically an orphan, too, with his father in the navy and his mother dead.  I felt like… like he understood me, even though so often he didn’t know what I was saying.”

The next part I couldn’t even think about, because I knew I would never be able to say it out loud if I thought about Erich hearing it. “Then, one night �" I remember it was Saturday night, because we had mass the next day �" he came into my bed. I wasn’t asleep. He must have known I was awake. I had been tossing and turning because I couldn’t get comfortable in the heat, and I felt someone climb in with me. I remember it was so hot that night. He was slick and sweaty next to me. He climbed on top of me, pressing… every part of his body against mine. I tried to ask him what he was doing, but Leo touched my face and told me not to be scared. He took my face in his hands and kissed me. Then I was scared, because I had never been kissed before. And then he whispered my name and told me I was beautiful. And then… then I kissed him back. And all I said was ‘yes,’ because I knew that was the only way I could say what I was feeling so he could understand.”

I turned back to Erich, who was listening with his hat pulled down so far over his eyes I could barely see his face. “I’ll spare you the rest. I think it’s pretty clear, and I know you don’t want to hear it.” Even under his hat, Erich looked grateful.

There was so much I couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell Erich how small and boyish I felt when our bare chests rubbed slickly together in that first kiss. I couldn’t tell Erich how, though Leo’s skin tasted salty, his mouth was sweet with stolen wine, or how it felt when he had put a hand in my boxers and felt all of me. There were no words to tell how vulnerable I was when he slid my underwear all the way off or how hard my hand shook when I touched him below the waist. There was nothing I could say about the moment when he laid me down again, when I realized exactly what we were going to do, that he had done it before. There was nothing I could have said to explain the moment when he turned me gently on my stomach, kissed the back of my neck down to the base of my spine, how I had shivered with anticipation and fear and an thrill I didn’t understand yet when he knelt behind me between my bare, spread legs.

“Was it, uh, good?” Erich’s horribly uncomfortable question came from across the roof, snapping me out of my daze. I realized I hadn’t said anything for a while, and Erich must have decided to say something out of the sheer awkwardness of the situation. I couldn’t help giving him a funny look, and Erich cast his eyes to the ground below us, and I wondered if he was considering jumping off just to end this nightmare of a conversation.

I had to answer, and I had to answer with the truth. “God, no,” breathed, picking at a hangnail. “It hurt like hell.” The pain, more than anything, I had no words for the pain, for the awful noises I made and the soothing ones he made, until it was over and we were swollen and wet and shaking all over. “But it was special, you know? I mean, your first time should be special, right?”

            Erich nodded uncomfortably, seeming grateful that I hadn’t pointed out the awkwardness of the question. “Right after we both, you know… finished,” I could have see Erich’s cringe with my eyes closed, “I started to think about what I had done. You know how Catholic my family was, and right then I realized �" well, I thought, at least �" that what we had done was so sinful we would both go to hell.” I would never forget how the knocking of the headboard against the wall had upset the crucifix hanging over my bed, how I had watched it fall to the floor while Leo was still in me.

“I started to cry, with him right there next to me, and I told him I was scared and I wanted to go to confession. But Leo told me no, because every wall had ears, and even if Mussolini wasn’t in power, bad things still happened to people in that tiny village who did what we had done. When I wouldn’t stop crying, he took out his rosary, which I had never seen him without.” I remembered how he held me close, even though I was soaked with cold sweat and sticky with seamen. I pulled the rosary, the same rosary, out from under my shirt and held it up to Erich. “He held it with me and prayed for forgiveness with me. He kissed the tears off my cheeks and told me over and over that we weren’t going to hell.”

I couldn’t believe I had said all that to Erich, but he was still listening without interruption. The horror of his last question must have been keeping him quiet, so I kept going, “I don’t need to tell you we kept it up, even though it was so unbelievably dangerous. That whole summer, Leo and I were together every minute. In the daytime, we worked together in the vineyard. My skin got tan and my hands got rough, and for the first time, I felt like a man. Leo said he loved watching me become a real Italian. We would steal kisses in the vineyard when no one was around.” I thought about the times when would run to the abandoned edge of the vineyard, when we made love in the grass under a tree with the sun beating down on us. I remembered how we would bathe in the river on Sundays, remembered the sight of Leo climbing out of the freezing water and standing naked on the shore. “It was… exciting.

“At night, we never slept apart. By June it got unbearably hot in the servant’s quarters, and we started spending our nights in my uncle’s wine cellar, where it was cooler. We would drink all night he would stay awake for hours to listen to me play the violin.”

I looked at my hands, trying not to get swept up in the memory of the incredible happiness that I felt during those months. “I was so happy. I made Leo so happy. He called me his angelo, his angel, because of my name.” There were two archangels in my name, Gabriel and Rafael, and he thought that was incredible. I didn’t tell Erich �" that night, at least �" about the first time Leo called me that, when he whispered it into my trembling shoulder when we finished praying and started kissing again that first night. I didn’t tell Erich how much I loved when Leo called me that, how it made me feel like I was some beautiful boy who fell out of the sky and into his arms.

In my whole life, I thought I would never be happier than I was on those long nights in the wine cellar. Whenever I closed my eyes at night, I imagined I was lying on the dirt floor of the cellar with his coat spread out under us, listening to him whisper to me in Italian until I drifted to sleep in his arms. I could still hear his voice when I lay alone in the dark: “Mio angelo.”

“But by the time autumn came, I knew I had to start thinking about what would happen next. The fall harvest got so busy we never had time to talk about what we would do when Leo went back to the village, or maybe we just didn’t want to. Leo never thought about anything further than a few hours into the future, but I knew I couldn’t stay in that village my whole life. I wanted to run away with Leo. I thought if we made it England, away from that vineyard, we could have a real life together.” I sighed, remembering how stupid I had been. “I was so dumb then.

“The night before Leo had to go back to the village, we went to lie out in the vineyard. We laid there under the stars and I cried because I was scared I would never see him again. I was scared of what would happen to me when he went away. And then I told him what I had been thinking for months: I loved him, and I wanted him to run away back to England with me. I didn’t mean to tell him, but I thought I might never get another chance.

“I thought he would want to go with me, but he got so angry. Leo was twenty years old and the vineyard was the furthest he had ever been from the village. As far as he was concerned, the rest of the world didn’t exist. He would never leave. He yelled at me, like he never had before, because he felt like what we had should have been enough to make me want to stay. It wasn’t until he realized how hurt I was that he said he loved me too.” I remembered how he had wrapped his arms around me and kissed my hair and said he was sorry, how I hadn’t stopped crying the whole night, because I was happy he had said it and so sad he was leaving.

“Once Leo told me he loved me, I didn’t want to leave anymore. He was the most important thing in my life, and I would have done anything to keep him. But everything went to hell when he left. He came to the vineyard maybe once or twice a week to work, and if we could find an hour together we were lucky. Leo was always suspicious and jealous, now that I wasn’t under his constant watch. It was crazy, because I never even spoke to anyone else.”

God, this sounded so insane now. Of course Leo wasn’t good for me, he never had been. I could see the truth now, when I wasn’t under the influence of my blinding love for him. I had been seduced, an awful word that had occurred to me on the boat ride to England, a word I had come to accept.

“In the summer, he had been mean sometimes, but nothing like what he became in the winter. When we were together, he would accuse me of sleeping with other boys. He scared me when he got angry, and we would fight sometimes, though I tried not to let it reach that point because he was a much better fighter than me and I always had bruises when he boiled over. I tried to tell myself that the stress of being apart was making him like that, and maybe it was true, but he stopped being the person I had known in the summer. But then, sometimes, he would treat me like he used to. After we fought, he would kiss me and tell me he loved me and I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to change anything.”

I took a deep breath; this story was getting harder to tell. The good memories were easy enough �" if embarrassing �" to share, but these ones made me hurt in a place inside that I sometimes forgot I even had. “Then, in December �" this last December �" the village came under occupation. I was worried. I knew what would happen to us if the troops were tipped off about Leo and me. People who were clearly nothing like us were arrested and never seen again, for doing exactly what we were doing. It was the most afraid I had ever been.

“I was desperate. It was getting so hard to be discrete, with so much constant surveillance. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone caught us. So I wrote to the admission’s board here at Wellington’s, the school where I would have gone if I hadn’t been sent to Italy. I pleaded with them to let me in, and in February, I got letter that they accepted me for the spring term.” I tried to smile at Erich, but I’m sure it just looked sad.

“The next day was Sunday, so I went to mass with my aunt and uncle. Afterwards, I pulled Leo into an empty room and told him about Wellington’s. I begged him, begged him, to come with me.” I pictured myself as I looked that day - kneeling in the cloister at his feet with my arms wrapped around his legs and my face buried in his knees, pleading with him to understand - and felt like vomiting.

“I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He told me he wasn’t leaving, and that he wouldn’t let me leave. He threatened to tell the authorities if I tried to. That was when I realized who he really was. He never loved me. And all I wanted right then was to make him feel as awful has he had made me feel. So… so when he tried to kiss me, I pushed him away and told him I didn’t need him.” I didn’t tell Erich that I had never been able to convince myself that I hadn’t really loved Leo. I did love him. I loved him the way you can love someone before you know what love is.

My nose felt drippy and the lump in my throat was back. I sniffed, fighting helplessly back against the tears. I couldn’t look at Erich, and I couldn’t say anything else. I just sat there sniffling like the pathetic kid I was, until Erich said, “Was that it, then? The end of it, I mean?”

I wanted to lie; it would be so easy not to tell him what happened next. But I had come this far, and I was going to tell the story. “No,” I sniffed, “but that was the last thing I ever said to him.

“I thought about him all night. I couldn’t bear to leave things like that with him, even though I had learned what a terrible person he really was. I wanted to take back what I had said. I knew he was coming the next day, to work, and I wanted to talk about it with him, once he had cooled down.”

I had to take a few shaky breaths before I could keep going. “But he didn’t come. It was the second day of February, and my uncle wouldn’t pay him to come on the coldest day of the year. If Uncle Lorenzo… God, if he would have just given Leo the lira maybe everything would be different. Instead I worked by myself in the freezing cold, and I thought I had missed my chance. But then… then when I got back to my room that night, there was a note on my bed. He told… he asked me to meet him in the wine cellar at midnight. I was so happy. I thought he had changed his mind. I waited and waited for midnight to come, and when it finally came, I raced out to the cellar.”

My voice was starting to sound constricted. I could hear it. It felt like this last part of the story was trying to strangle me before I could tell what happened. The tears ran down from my eyes, and by now I didn’t even care enough to feel embarrassed. Erich knew things now that would change everything he thought about me. So, really, how much worse could I make it by crying in front him?

“There was one second, when I didn’t realize what I was seeing, so when I understood, it all just came… crashing down on me.” Breathe. Breathe. Just keep breathing. “He was dead, hanging by a rope in our cellar.” I clenched my jaw and closed my eyes, willing myself to continue. “I cut him down, and… and he was still, still warm. Warm like I remembered him. His neck was broken… he was s-still and his face was blue, and I c-, I couldn’t get his head to sit right, no… no matter how hard I tried. But he was so warm. H-he still f-felt like himself… when I… when I held him… and when I k-kissed him. His… his rosary was still around his neck, and I held it, and I-I prayed for God, and the Virgin, and all the saints to make it not true.”

I buried my face in my hands and let out a sob. In my whole life, I knew nothing would ever be able to erase the memory of cradling Leo’s broken body. It would be with me until the day I died. His blue lips, his rope burned throat, his staring, lifeless eyes that wouldn’t stay closed no matter what I did: the horrible image was always right behind my eyelids. That was the nightmare that took hold of me in my sleep and would never let go until I was screaming into the darkness. I hadn’t gone a night without crying in twelve weeks.

Erich took a deep breath and, for the first time since I had started talking came a little closer to me. “Gabe…” he began, but didn’t finish. What could he possibly say? He touched my arm, and that made me cry harder. It was a long, long time before I could keep talking.

“It felt like hours before I found the note. There was a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket, a letter to me. It said… it said that after our last fight, he had gone to the authorities and told them about me. Me, not us. And he said, God, he said couldn’t live with himself. What he had done to me, what he had become, the secret life he was tired of living, he could take any of it anymore. I don’t know why… why he did it in the cellar. I think maybe he really did change his mind, but gave up before I could get there. I don’t know. All I know is that I thought my life was over. The noose was still tied, and I thought for a long minute about following Leo into the ground.

“Then Uncle Lorenzo stormed in. You should have seen his face when saw me holding Leo. He tried to pull me away form Leo’s body, but I wouldn’t let go. He screamed at me that the police were on their way, that I was useless and sick and the ruin of the family, a lazy, worthless criminal like my father. He said that I would go to hell for doing what I had done. I just cowered on the ground while he at kicked me. He told me he would give me up to the police when they came. I begged him not to. I told him about Wellington’s and promised, lying at his feet, that he would never see me again if he would only drive me to the train station. I don’t think he would have agreed, if I hadn’t done what I did next. I pulled Leo’s rosary off and held it up to my uncle. And I said… I said, ‘mercy, in the name of Christ, mercy.’”

I was still clutching the rosary in my hand, the rosary that had saved my life. Erich looked at it too, with a kind of awe on his face. I wiped my eyes and dragged my sleeve across my nose so I could finish. “He pulled me to my feet and pushed me out of the cellar. He yelled at my aunt to bury Leo, since he didn’t have a family anyway. I kicked and screamed, because he hadn’t let me say goodbye, hadn’t let me see Leo or touch him one last time. But my uncle dragged me to my room, shoved everything he could reach into a bag, and forced me into the auto. I was lucky I managed to get my violin. It wasn’t until I was in the car that I realized I had been clutching the rosary so hard my hand was bleeding. He drove me to the train station and bought me a ticket. He… he spit on me before I left.”

“Glad that b*****d’s dead,” Erich muttered, half jokingly, trying to break the tension. I let out a coughing, half-hearted laugh. “And that’s how you ended up here?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. My eyes were nearly swollen shut. “That’s how. You know, I don’t blame myself anymore. I know that he was awful, and I shouldn’t have trusted him. But… but I don’t think it’s ever going to stop hurting.”

There was a long, almost electric silence. Then Erich dropped his eyes and shook his head. “S**t, Gabe, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you tell me.”

“No, you were right. You should know.” Honestly, I felt better, having told him. I wanted to thank him, but I wouldn’t. “I guess it’s not any worse than your story.”

Erich sighed and sat back against the chimney again. “Well, now we know everything.”

“We do.” Despite everything, I smiled at him. Erich had just listened to every horrible detail of my life, and he was still here. He really was a better person that he knew. “Of course we do. We’re friends.”

Erich smiled back at me. “Friends.”

 

Author's Note

Like I keep saying, this is sure to undergo a lot of revision. But here's the first draft

Reviews

[Bexfinch]

This was really cute!!!!squeeeeeee

[Arianna]

OH MY GOSH! . okay honestly im crying....like my mom just walked in, turned around and walked away cause im curled up in my room with a computer crying! that was so sad!! and my poor gabe! :( i cant belive that all those things happed to him and he doesnt deserve it at all. that was amazing :) the best chapter yet! and there are a lot to compare it to!!!!!!! :) i cant wait for the next one.
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