For a painfully long time, I had been able to put Liam on the back burner. I thought about him. I yearned for him. I wanted him with all my heart. Yet all the while, I knew that Liam was unreachable and somehow that numbed the pain.
I had convinced myself that finding Lee was impossible; that the League's grasp on me was simply too tight. I also knew that Liam obviously wasn't searching for me, which hurt, but was the honest truth. The combination of the two allowed all hope to slip away. Finding Liam was no longer difficult in my mind, it was simply impossible. It was the difference between 0 and 1 which to any person who has lived beyond the math classroom knows is drastically different from the difference between a million and a million and one. There was zero hope that I would find Liam, so I didn't bother trying.
Except all of a sudden, 0 became 1, and my world was thrown from its axis. Finding Chubs meant that Lee was abruptly within my grasp, which scared me to no end.
"Ruby, you going to bed?" Chubs' head poked out of the tent into the brisk night air. I twisted around from where I sat in the dirt with my back to the tent to look at him.
"Yeah, yeah. I'll come in soon. I just, need to think for a minute." For a moment, it seemed like Chubs was going to retreat back into the tent, but instead, he crawled out to join me. He sat next to me, shoulder to shoulder, and for some reason, the addition of his body heat reminded me of how cold I was. I wrapped Lee's jacket tighter around myself.
For a while, we just sat there, existing, a luxury that was certainly not guaranteed to us and the like. A biting wind blew through, carrying with it the scent of smoke from a nearby fire. This smell, combined with that of the leather jacket filled my head with Liam related worries.
"Chubs," I choked out. I could hardly bear the giant lump in my throat. Chubs leaned into me. "I really messed up, didn't I?" I hoped he'd say no. That he'd say I made all the right choices. That it was all for the best
"Yes, Ruby, I'm afraid you did, on many accounts. Care to pinpoint one?" I could always trust Chubs to be painfully candid.
"Lee," I force out. Somehow, the admission cleared the lump from my windpipe. "At the time, it was so obvious," I continued. "I knew what I had to do. But it just hurts so much now. Sometimes, I get excited that I could see him again, but then I just remember that even if we find him, in a way he'll still be lost to me. I was so busy trying to protect our futures, that I completely disregarded our past. I don't even know if I did what Lee really wanted. It definitely wasn't what I wanted. It's just…but even now, I feel like there was never another way out. I feel so hopeless all the time because whenever something goes wrong, there's never a bearable solution. I keep looking for a better answer, but there never is one. " I said it all in such a panic, that I actually had to catch my breath when I finished. I bent my body in to meet my knees, convinced that if I made myself small enough, perhaps I would just cease to exist.
Chubs didn't say anything for a while; he just stared into the distance as he contemplated what I had said. He was silent for such a long time that I actually began to worry that he was mad at me for what I did. That he blamed me. And why shouldn't he? I'm a monster and the monstrosities I commit cancel out anything that might have made me good.
"Have you ever read Of Mice and Men?" Chubs asked suddenly. The question caught me off guard, but I should have expected Chubs' response to involve classic literature. I paused before shaking my head.
It's about these two guys, George and Lenny. You couldn't find two friends closer. Lenny's stupid as could be, but he does alright because he has George." I couldn't say I understood what Chubs was getting at. Yes, Liam and I were close, but that was all gone. "Lenny ends up getting into a really awful situation. He's a good guy, Lenny, in a really shitty circumstance." That, I could understand. "He makes a mistake, and a bunch of angry guys start to hunt him down. When they catch him, they'll kill him in the blink of an eye, in the worst way imaginable. George manages to find Lenny first, but even so he can already hear the others coming. There's no way to escape. George makes a choice. He soothes Lenny by telling him his favorite story, about their dream for the future together, but all the while, he's drawing his gun. Lenny's dead before he could even realize what was happening." Now I get it, and I must say there are horrifying parallels to an extent that not even Chubs could have realized. "Ruby, there was no good option. There was no choice that George could have lived with. He picked what he thought was right. It sucked for Lenny. It sucked even more for George, because he had to live with his choice. He did what he needed to do. The way I see it Ruby, you're George."