I watched him by the pool. It's warm enough, though only if you spend enough time in the hot tub or the sauna before heading to the pool. It's warm indeed and as I watch him talk, as I let my brain register the fact that he is losing his accent slowly but consistently, that he is losing the blonde in his hair in favor of the same silvery-gold that I have now, that he has such little patience for impersonating ghosts even as he still needs things that people need, just like I do.
I use that to my advantage but he doesn't take it.
Instead he dropped me flat on my back on his bed in the sun, a bed that sways slightly from the heavy ropes suspending it from the ceiling. He dropped me there and he smiled his August-summer smile and he pulled off my bikini bottoms and got on his knees.
Heaven, like August, is a place you can go to. I went but the door was locked and so I hung off the knob, shuddering, sweating, crying out as August got back up and put all of his weight on me. Same moves as Jake. Same everything, same joke that maybe they were brothers instead of just friends. Same thoughts in my head that if he helps me pull on the door handle we'll get it open, eventually. It works and we spill to the floor just inside that threshold of heaven and then before I have time to look for Jake, or Cole, or Butterfield for that matter, August reaches up and slams the door shut, pulling me upright, pulling me away from it even as I reach back out for it, telling me I needed to go back, to let him be, to stop implicating him in this effort to stay stuck in 2007. That Jake is gone. That he isn't Jake. That he doesn't want to be Jake anymore.
And then he says if I want to come and see him for his own sake, for his own soul, that I am welcome absolutely any time and it will be different. That it won't be something Jake would do, but something new.
You're lonely.
Everyone's lonely, Bridget. It's the human condition.
And that made me more sad then the part where he said I should go.
It helps.
I don't want to help you anymore. I want to help me.
I use that to my advantage but he doesn't take it.
Instead he dropped me flat on my back on his bed in the sun, a bed that sways slightly from the heavy ropes suspending it from the ceiling. He dropped me there and he smiled his August-summer smile and he pulled off my bikini bottoms and got on his knees.
Heaven, like August, is a place you can go to. I went but the door was locked and so I hung off the knob, shuddering, sweating, crying out as August got back up and put all of his weight on me. Same moves as Jake. Same everything, same joke that maybe they were brothers instead of just friends. Same thoughts in my head that if he helps me pull on the door handle we'll get it open, eventually. It works and we spill to the floor just inside that threshold of heaven and then before I have time to look for Jake, or Cole, or Butterfield for that matter, August reaches up and slams the door shut, pulling me upright, pulling me away from it even as I reach back out for it, telling me I needed to go back, to let him be, to stop implicating him in this effort to stay stuck in 2007. That Jake is gone. That he isn't Jake. That he doesn't want to be Jake anymore.
And then he says if I want to come and see him for his own sake, for his own soul, that I am welcome absolutely any time and it will be different. That it won't be something Jake would do, but something new.
You're lonely.
Everyone's lonely, Bridget. It's the human condition.
And that made me more sad then the part where he said I should go.
It helps.
I don't want to help you anymore. I want to help me.