Too cold on the beach to be without shoes. My ears rang and I withstood it as long as I could until finally I asked Lochlan for his linty wool peacoat and then fifteen seconds after that I asked if we could go back up to the house because the wind. Sweet merciful fucking glorious wind, I should know better, I should know to bring something with a hood but I was in a hurry when he made the offer to go down to the bottom of the cliff to see how cold the water was after a night of freezing temperatures, 'freezing' being completely relative to living in a such a mild climate. Cold with wind is a different animal, always, as I have long-ago learned and so I tucked a knitted scarf by the door that I will try to remember to bring along each time I step outside until at least March now.
The skinny jeans are threadbare and far too long and wide for me with my glorious twenty-six-inch inseam, but I'm too lazy to buy custom-fitted jeans so I just go to Warehouse One and if they aren't too low cut but just low cut enough I get two pairs and wear them into the ground, yanking them up, rolling them, looking at them with dismay. I don't often wear jeans at all, actually and so this picture (like all pictures I post anyway) is a rarity. I am fond of my Converse though. They last forever, quite unlike anything else in this world, except maybe Lochlan's coat, bought in 1991 on a trip home to the Motherland (Scotland, if you're new). I think it might be a military-issue, and then worn ever since as long as it isn't as cold as it was when we all lived in the Prairies, for that brief eight-year segment of life.
There he wore Carhartt, much like everyone else, save for Ben, who wore leather, with flannel underneath and me, who wore everything I could put on and still walk in because it was SO. FUCKING. COLD.
So here in this place now, 'cold' is a relative term. A hilarious, inappropriate one as I stand on the beach. My beach, which is cultivating glass and leaving trace amounts of bronze on the line of the tide as it washes past the rocks in the dangerous part of our shore, right over to the now-completely-ridiculous private marina (A spectacle for the proles, we call it secretly, behind the Devil's back).
I frown as I inspect the progress on the final addition, a gigantic covered slip for the yacht. Because we're on a protected cove here, Caleb really has no need to move his boat anymore, but sometimes it needs to be inside for maintenance and it's not so much a roof as it is a full-service boat garage and what a monstrosity it is. It wound up being constructed precisely eight feet to the left after I complained that I would be able to see it from my balcony and that wouldn't do. I only said it to be a brat but they moved it anyway and now that I see how big it is I'm glad I pitched a fit.
Lochlan frowns at the excess. He's a closet anarcho-communist to boot, a beautiful bleeding heart. An odd belief for someone who can be so cold, and I'm sure this has more to do with Caleb than life in general. Maybe it's why he agreed to our collective, too, but Lochlan holds a huge disdain for people with too much money, only fully respecting Ben because Ben spends money like a hundred-year-old woman on a micro-pension, i.e. not at all, and Lochlan thinks that's good.
I think that's good too, because frankly Caleb's gotten a little over the top with the money he spends but I see his long term vision because he spells it out rather slowly when I ask. I am learning about his vision for this property, the means to an end it will become, the options he has left wide open for a variety of financial scenarios, pounded out on spreadsheets, his projections and risks transcribed by yours truly on a monthly basis, kept dotted and signed just in case. He is learning too. Just in case are three little words that have become a punctuation mark on everything we say or do now. Just in case is an excuse to do things that seem over the top. One hundred and fifty percent poured into everything, whether it be opening a pistachio nut, painting a wall, buying a shell company or saying I love you.
I didn't even understand the tens of thousands of dollars he spent on the fountain and the circular driveway until I realized I no longer had to find and wait for (at least) three guys to move their vehicles when I wanted to go out, or that Caleb stands in his bedroom window watching me as each morning I go outside to the fountain, make a wish and throw my penny into the water.
Ooooooh. A wishmaker conduit-fabricator-device. Not landscaping, exactly. How clever is the Devil, indeed. I think that was a simple perk, possibly for all the nights he's bitten me, tied me up or pulled my hair so hard I cried out but he needed to keep me still so he did it anyway. You think I have regrets? You should meet Caleb. I wish sometimes for him to feel feelings like regular people. Still waiting for that one to come true, sixty-seven cents spent in pennies so far, and that's only made on mornings that I hurt.
He is still very clever, if I may continue my train of thought, because one of the things he wanted to install down at the bottom of the cliff was a grouping of outdoor heaters with a range of around twenty feet each and I told him not to be crazy, that it's too mild here. We don't need it. How excessive and spoiled and over the top. Heat the outside? What are we, lightweights?
I refused to take off Lochlan's coat for the first hour after we went back inside, so the answer to that appears to be a resounding YES.