Page 153 of Chase
I take the stairs up two at a time, my heart feeling like it’s too big for my chest. I walk down the second-floor hall to the door of Chase’s studio, and I push it open to step inside.
My throat tightens the moment I see him.
He’s in the corner, sitting on the ground, curled in on himself.
When he hears the door open he looks up quickly, startled, and I see that his eyes are completely bloodshot, and his cheeks are streaked with tears.
He doesn’t say a word.
The man who always has something to say, not saying a thing.
I step over and kneel to the floor, getting on his level, and he looks at me with a type of shame I didn’t know he was capable of.
It feels like someone is ripping out my whole heart to see him like this. His eyes look so bleak, the green contrasted against the redness of his eyes.
I reach out and bring my arms around his shoulders, gathering him toward me.
He doesn’t move.
And that’s the most certain I’ve ever felt that I never needed to worry about Chase.
He doesn’t move.
When I come to him, he doesn’t run from me.
When he’s reeling, hurting, feeling the worst he’s probably ever felt, he doesn’t shove me away, or scream at me to go, or any of the other shit that I went through with Daniel, when the media tore him apart.
Chase is nothing like that.
He hurts, and he feels emotions deeply, and he wears his heart on his sleeve, but after all of that, he doesn’t fucking give up.
Even here, now, he isn’t giving up on me.
And it makes me choke up as I keep my arms wrapped around him, knowing that Chase’s ugliest, broken moments are still precious to me. He doesn’t push me away. And even though I’m certain he saw the flood of different comments on social media, I know that he can process that pain and come out on the other side of it to make something beautiful.
I believe in him.
And that makes all the difference in the world.
I hold him for a minute, then five minutes, saying nothing as a tear breaks off from my eye, too. The sounds of the city come in through the windows of the studio, with occasional car horns, people talking, or music from cars driving by.
I can feel him breathing steadily, and when I finally move, I just rest my forehead against the side of his, holding a whole ocean inside me.
He swallows, taking in a breath, before he finally speaks.
“I’m a mess, but I haven’t been drinking or taking anything,” he says, his voice quiet and broken.
I squeeze my arm around his shoulder tighter. “I know.”
He shifts just a little in my arms. “You didn’t automatically assume that?”
“What? No. That didn’t even occur to me.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I trust you, Chase,” I tell him. Nothing has ever felt so true. “I trust you.”
He doesn’t move or speak for a while again. I move a few times, gently pressing a kiss to his hair, then stroking the back of his neck for a while, then going back to wrapping my arms around him.
