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She should have known back in the low-lit bar when Gretchen was holding back too much. Or when Gretch let her take the dogs. Or when she saw Number Six’s body on the boat, limp and motionless, and in that moment Linh didn’t remember her name and she was just a body. No, even then on the dock she had blamed her hesitance on her own past…
It takes sea water in her mouth, the unfamiliar air, and eight terrified faces to make her really, truly see it: Gretchen Klein is out of her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she tells Number Six—her name is Leah—and even though she keeps Jeanette’s accent she’s speaking as herself. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re brave, you know.”
Alex is the second person to call her that, after Gretch. Linh likes Alex. He is pliant at work—it’s all she really needs in a guy—and off the clock doesn’t make a bad drinking partner.
“For what?”
“Doing this.” He waves a hand at her bangs, freshly cut. He might be even tipsier than her. “Takes a certain type of person, that’s all I’m saying.”
Gretchen, he means. Linh frowns. She feels a lot of fury for Gretchen, not that her superior asked her to. Everyone looks at Gretchen Klein and thinks she’s just read too much of the Amazons, but Hippolyta let herself be swayed too easily by a man before Penthesilea accidentally slew her. Aegea just fucking drowned.
“You work for her.”
“Yeah.” He stares into his shot. There’s a story behind the hardness in his eyes, she thinks. Maybe they’re both searching for something. She watches his jaw move, tighten and untighten.
She takes his silence in stride. Doesn’t think twice, not in the way she will begin to when it’s too late. She doesn’t doubt Gretchen because Gretchen doesn’t doubt her. Maybe that isn’t enough to warrant the kind of unwavering faith she has, but all Linh has ever wanted is someone who could look at her and see her. And Gretchen, Doctor Gretchen Klein, does.
“For the matriarchy,” she says, raising her glass at her colleague.
He crooks a brow at her, at the way she says it like a test.
“For the matriarchy,” says Alex, clinking his glass to hers.
The matriarch and the matriarchy are not the same. Gretchen’s castle crumbles right before her eyes.
Linh doesn’t have time to put it all together. She feels something rising in her throat and she has that dreadful, bottomless feeling again. She can’t move, she can’t breathe, she doesn’t remember why she’s here. Something about an ivory tower. Somebody who called her brave. Eight girls who are counting on her.
Survive, she tells herself. Just survive.
And what a dangerous game they play. Gretchen has balanced them so precariously it is impossible, for either of them, to tell that the hand which seals a promise is the same one folded neatly over Linh's nose and mouth.
(How does it begin? With an idea. With pain.)
“Ms. Klein.”
Gretchen rolls her eyes. Linh only ever calls her that when she’s really fucking drunk. “Come on.” She adjusts Linh’s arm around her shoulders. “Don’t fade on me now.”
“Ms. Klein, are you taking me home?” She smiles, her head flopping against Gretchen’s. “Such a lady you are. Thank you. Thank you, have I ever thanked you?”
Something in Gretchen is prickled at the sight of her subordinate so out of control. She just wishes Linh would be more careful. (But then, Gretchen reminds herself, this is why you chose her in the first place.) “You better tell me who let you get so hammered all by yourself.”
“No one,” Linh whispers, eyes wide like she’s telling a secret. “I can get quite self-des-truc-tive, you know.”
Gretchen stops at Linh’s apartment door, leans her against the wall. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, I have an image to keep up.”
“Is that so?” She takes Linh’s purse from her and digs through it for keys. Carefully, she adds, “Is it because of me?”
“Maybe.” Linh’s brows furrow in seriousness. She blinks a couple times, reels in her train of thought. “I don’t think you should be seeing me like this.”
“I don’t,” says Gretchen, “mind, really.”
Gretchen places a balancing hand on Linh’s shoulder and finds herself winding another around her hair. When she flicks her eyes up to meet Linh’s dazed gaze, she swears she could leave it behind for this.
One.
Moment.
Gretchen knows what she already is to Linh: an outlet. She gives Linh the space to breathe and grow and reach for something greater than herself. She lets Linh believe that she makes her world boundless.
But that's all it is. Belief. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her on a leash. It doesn’t mean she hasn’t trapped her in a box. But as much as she moulds the girl to her vision, Gretchen feels the effect echoing back to herself, tiny little manipulations changing the shape of her topography.
And that’s what’s so confusing about the young woman, the only one who could have ever pulled her stubborn body up from the booth to the stage. She’s afraid that one day Linh will have chipped away enough to reach her core, the dark spindly thing of it, scoop out her heart and do something to it—she doesn’t know what, but she has a feeling it would be more than ephemeral.
It makes her want to cut the leash, give Linh a hard shove out the door, tell her Go, before this ruins you. But there is the mission. There is work to be done.
There is control.
If she were to lose that—
Gretchen jerks herself out of—whatever that was. She straightens and slings Linh’s arm around her again and drags her in through the door. Her apartment is small and dark. Messy in the way that, if Gretchen ever said so, Linh would counter that it’s her kind of organized chaos.
She sees the door to her bedroom off to the side, but decides to drop Linh on the couch instead.
“Take the day off tomorrow,” she says tiredly. “God knows you need it.”
“Wait,” Linh slurs, grabbing her hand before she pulls away completely. “Do you want—do you want to stay?”
Gretchen’s smile is gentle, and true in a way she rarely allows. “You are drunk out of your mind.”
"Am not."
"Linh."
“That’s never stopped anyone before.”
“I know.” Gretchen squeezes her hand, their fingers intertwined. She bites the inside of her mouth. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”
Linh opens her mouth.
“No,” Gretchen shuts her down, “goodness, you really don’t.” She lets go of her hand. She looks around for a throw or something, but of course a college student wouldn't have a throw. Gretchen takes off her own coat, snapping it open and laying it over Linh’s body.
Linh murmurs a response before closing her eyes. She’s out cold in seconds.
Gretchen takes out her legal pad and writes Linh a note to return her coat on Tuesday. She leaves it on the coffee table.
She wonders why she feels like she’s dying. Alex doesn’t come to mind. Not even Gretchen, not really.
She thinks of the stories. A queen drowns at sea, or is enamored by a handsome god, or is crowned when she kills her sister. She can see it now. How quickly bravery can morph into something else. How idolization can be mistaken for a flicker of love, or the other way around. How far away doom can feel, like a distant memory, like it belongs only to the past and you are moving only towards the light. How unreal, until it surrounds you on all sides like a shroud.
Linh turns away from the group, chokes on a surge of blood, and falls against the sand.