Times change, routines don't.

Ben is home. I sensed him before I heard him, and when I turned around he had filled the kitchen archway, bag still in hand, smile on his face that said maybe he missed me as much as I missed him, and I dropped the pot into the sink and ran.

I am in his arms off the ground before he has time to say hello and I wouldn't have it any other way. His absence is a familiar ache and I always loved it when he came back. Still do.

I didn't get a welcome like this from PJ. 

He just doesn't want you to mess up his hair. 

And I get a kiss. A Ben-kiss which is one of the best kind.

Tired? 

Yeah. I didn't sleep. It was too quiet. There was too much space. I need my velcro friends. 

You got them. 

Okay, can we go to bed at maybe seven? I'm really wiped. 

I can do that. 

Lochlan? 

He's next door dropping off some papers with Schuy. Brace yourself when he runs at you. He's been working out. 

How so? 

Trying to get past the others to punch Caleb. 

That's a good workout for him. 

Not really but sometimes he's stronger than they are if he's in the mood. 

Where's Cale? 

Church, I think. 

Ooh. Alone? 

Yeah. I've done it. YOU'Ve done it. 

True. 

He smiles with crinkled eyes and I put my hands on his cheeks. I'm so glad you're home. 

Wow. I should go away more often to get a welcome like this. I figured you'd throw an Oh Hey over your shoulder and keep doing whatever. 

You should NOT go away more often and I've never done that in my life. 

Lies. You did it that one time I called Jake out and then went to Europe for three months. I've never felt so small. 

Oh, you deserved that though. You were being an ASS. 

I was. And I'm glad I'm not anymore. 

Me too. 

This is my brain on the sunrise.

I will not rescind a word
Of what I've said
For the vultures overhead
But for every line I vent
Another ten
I'm afraid I'd lose you then

Pre-dawn coffee from the firepit with Diabhal, who is soft-spoken and completely willing just to spend the time this morning. We've made toast with melted cheese directly on the grill over the fire and I give the ashes a stir, my own version of a dark zen garden, tracing patterns in the embers, envisioning them as water flowing black over my ruminations, eroding my efforts to shut him out as he deserves to be, these days.

The coffee is good. Hot, rich, tempered with just a little sprinkle of brown sugar. The bread is sawed rough from a round loaf of sourdough, broken with his hands into pieces small enough to eat, the cheese cut with his pocketknife and balanced on each piece of bread until soft enough from the flames to melt into the crumb just the way I like it.

The dawn is beautiful. The sun bursts quietly through the lavender-grey horizon gently and without announcement, casting a beautiful glow on our faces, erasing years, lines and deeds in a brief instant before casting shadows once again as it chases the moon out of the spotlight.

He's done it. He took a strongarmed action and strangled it off, returning to the patient Devil, to the reactive instead of the proactive emotional strategy he usually feeds off.

I watch him as I sip my coffee. He watches me back. Almost imperceptibly he nods. As if this is good enough, if this is going to be the way it is. He has softened around his sharp edges, mellowing at last, aging gracefully into what I always hoped he would be, but what I figured would always be just another daydream for a little girl looking out the window as the road wound like a ribbon around her life. She wanted to put the Devil in her pocket, along with the crushed paper cone from the cotton candy, and the seven pennies she found underneath the window at the ordering counter of the ice cream shop, so that she would always know exactly where he was, and he'd never be able to surprise her again. Then she would take her sticky hand and thrust it into Lochlan's and they would be safe.

Manic pixie dream boys.

Five nights straight all to ourselves and we've already resurrected old sleeping patterns, old habits and old feelings. Five nights straight of Ben being away (work. travel. argh. fuck. retirement. apparently) and I'm pretty sure that while we slumber away pressed closely together in each others faces, PJ is probably sleeping on the steps outside our door, an exhausted sentry, a one-man-band, tasked with keeping the peace. Not alone but mostly in charge while everyone else is off doing their dailies and he remains on high alert at all times because the moment you let your guard down otherwise Caleb and Lochlan will be at each others' throats because that's how their friendship is mapped.

Caleb thinks he is untouchable. Lochlan thinks he can carve rules in stone, that our routines will never change. Caleb has some foolish notion that we can move forward, all the while carving his name into the chip on Lochlan's shoulder.

We try to move on and then the past drags us down into the abyss. I worry that it might always be groundhog day around here, even as I tried so hard to move on, to find someone new, completely outside of the Collective and..it ended badly. It ended abruptly, and I went running back. 

Didn't know I had a reset button.

I was getting ready for bed, putting gloss on my lips from a little pot and Lochlan appears in my reflection, turning me around, taking the pot from me and putting it on the counter, taking my hand, finger still up, using it to trace my lips. His face is an inch from mine but he's very intent on holding my finger steady, gently sliding it over my lips. His mouth is open, breath held just for a moment as my eyes try to take everything in. Is he angry? Is he resigned? Is he fine with it, fine with everything or is he going to barge in with some sort of gentle demand that I can't fulfill?

He moves my finger to his lips and traces his bottom one. It's probably the most tender moment we've shared in months. Maybe even years. Then he kisses me and I replace the previous moment with this one, because it's soft and slow and perfect. It's not a Hurry up and prove I'm the One, it's a We're going to take our time moment.

He picks me up and sits me on the counter, legs dangling over the edge on either side of his hips. He pulls his shirt off and unbuttons mine, leaving it around my shoulders because I'm always cold. He pulls my hips right to the edge where he is there to meet me, and I cry out, surprised at the cold counter, and at the warmth of his skin, always. When he hears me he lets go of my hips and wraps his arms around me, lifting me up, taking me out of the room, into our bedroom, gently putting me down on the quilts, then following me there. Another kiss and he smiles and turns me over, pressing me down into the covers with his weight, pushing his arm down underneath me in order to pull me back up against him, hand firm against my belly, suddenly driving so hard into me that I have to make fists into the blankets just to breathe, just so I don't cry out too loudly.

His other hand is twisted in my hair. God, it's so long finally, he says, and I don't know if he's talking about my hair or the length of time we've been without this kind of comfortable privacy. He pulls my head back and kisses my ear, then lets go and I am shoved against the bed over and over again until he evens out, turning me back over, making me climb walls until I'm begging him to stop and then he comes too and I feel like his grip might pull my head right off, his other hand anchoring my thigh so hard he leaves a placemarker bruise, one that is still present this morning.

He slows to a crawl against me and another kiss is my reward for conquering the dark.

I like your lipgloss, he says. It tastes like raspberries. 

Everything ends in a fistfight. That used to be my complaint about movies, that it didn't matter what special powers anyone had, they would fight the enemy with punching and beating. 

My guys have super powers. They do the same. 

Six weeks of penitence, six weeks of grace (six weeks of violence, all up in your face).

As I learn to count my days
The less I care to veil
Something of a deeper truth
Is begging to exhale

When the time has come to bleed
And air my fill
Will you be there for me still
And if you turn and walk away
Well then I know
You were never there at all

Lochlan is watching the dark, watching a rare winter night with clear stars visible all the way to heaven if you remain still enough.

I gave Caleb up for lent. It is supposed to be a luxury, something you would miss. Something you would struggle to avoid, something difficult.

He is perfect for the job.

Just let me catch my breath, Lochlan says over the piano notes in my mind.

It can be more than forty days-

I don't know, Bridge. Just leave it. 

What will you do?

Give him up as well. He laughs but it's not a happy sound. I don't know. Fast, maybe. Pray. Something. 

Pray to who? 

Jake. Who else? As close as I can get to God, anyway. Jake is a good middle man. 

Why? 

I've done so many bad things in my life. I can't walk around like a hypocrite pulling faith out for special occasions. God let me down so I let him down. We haven't actually spoken in years. 

It's never too late. 

Bridget, if you knew the things I wished for on an almost hourly basis you would agree with me. 

He sounds like Caleb right now only he doesn't mean me, for once.

Leave him be. 

You breathing is the only thing that keeps him safe. 

Why did you let me go then? On the trip? 

You asked me. Remember? But you're home now and I don't have to play this game if I don't feel like it.

Piefaces, poker hands.

Happy birthday, Diabhal. I hold up a plate with apple pie and one candle stuck through the centre, lit with a match. I don't sing. He takes the plate and exchanges it for a whiskey, the thick glass so heavy it actually needs both my hands to hold it. I nod and take a sip. He takes a bite of the pie.

Your cook is a master. 

Anyone can bake a pie. 

You don't have time, anymore, so I must give my overwhelming enthusiasm to someone else. 

True. It isn't cake though. 

Sometimes a change is good. He holds out a forkful but I shake my head. I don't eat pie. I continue to sip the whiskey and wait for him to talk.

I'm concerned you're going to give me up for Lent. I know the trip wasn't what you expected and I need to make that up to you. 

Actually, you don't. You've done enough. 

I don't leave loose ends. 

Sure you do. 

I was hoping for a little high-speed romance, some good bonfires in the snow, some aurora and a change between us. I missed the mark. 

You took someone with a bad cold, who shouldn't have even been cleared to fly, to Alaska. 

It's different. 

Boy, is it ever, I laugh in spite of myself.

So let me fix this. 

Lochlan isn't going to be receptive to another trip. 

So we take him with us. 

I really need to stay home. 

So we have a mini-vacation at home. With lots of pie. Damn this is good. 

I'll talk to him. 

I will. It'll make more sense. I have some ideas. 

I sip my whiskey again. It's making my gin hangover lose a grip on my brain. Like what?

Better surprises. And he kisses my cheek with his crumby lips. You'll see.

Thank God I'm still drunk or I'd really feel this.

I am home from the war. Home from trying to keep the peace because today is his fifty-sixth birthday and he wanted to spend it in the past. Home from trying to wage a battle as a worthy adversary when I am nothing of the kind. Home to Lochlan's arms which tremble with regret and home to stay, because I shouldn't have left in the first place. Home to sleep off what is going to be a two-day gin hangover.

Home with my monster. Who ages but never changes, who likes a different vantage point from which to conduct his same-old same old, who doesn't ever seem to understand that his charm (and his threats) have changed me, permanently, and not for the better.

Though I tried to keep things smooth, to make sure he enjoyed his trip with little pushback I failed to impress him with my lack of enthusiasm or maybe he just keeps forgetting who I am, that I'm not going to magically become a yes-girl when he flashes his infinite credit cards and his cufflinks. That he can call a plane on demand no longer makes me wish for a sugar daddy to cover my bills and fix my life. The only time I truly liked him over our blink-and-you'll-miss-it getaway was when he sat back by the campfire, looked up into a cloud-filled, aurora-free night and said Maybe they didn't get my memo and then laughed disparagingly  as we failed to catch the whole point of the trip, which were the Northern Lights.

The only Northern Lights to be had the whole trip were my labradorite earrings, often called as such due to their quiet flash.

It was then that I looked at him in the firelight, at his unshaven, relaxed face, at his capable hands holding a mug full of hot whiskey and cream and I thought to myself,

God, I wish I was home.

And then he asked What are you thinking, Neamhchiontach? and I told him because I have a really hard time lying. It didn't go very well. Not very well at all and he certainly made no effort to extend the trip, to stretch it out through today or to segue into another trip or anything at all.

The five years of good birthdays was nice but I guess that's over now. And it's my fault because I told the truth, because no one asked if I wanted to take a trip. No one asked if now was a good time or even if I ever had Alaska on my bucket list (I do not). It's my fault because I am ungrateful for all that he has done for (to) me and because I don't listen (I did) and it's my fault his birthday is ruined because I can't let the past go, even as he's the one trying to remake it, trying to reorder history, trying to soften the blows of the bad guy so I forget everything he did. The past is an albatross, it's a carving in stone. It can't be outrun because it knows where we're going.

It followed me here. It follows me everywhere. How is this my fault?

He comes to find me not that long after we get home.

Neamhchiontach. We really need to talk. 

We do, just not right now. 

ALASKA.

In March.

No more bad birthdays (a promise we've kept for five years now).

Tiny (and so beautiful) labradorite earrings in a beautiful little box that he holds patiently for me. Caleb has the patience Cole never could grasp but they share a temper and I'm always loathe to wake it up this early in the morning.

Instead I say nothing and wait for him.

These are for you. 

I nod.

What's wrong?

On birthday weekends you get presents, you don't give them. 

I'm not most people. 

I nod again.

It's actually going to be a very long weekend if I have to force your words out of you. 

Sorry. Just trying to read the moment. 

And?

They say it's a bestseller but I'm still on the fence. 

And he laughs a great big laugh out loud. It's easy to love you, he says.

And I nod again. Of course. Very easy. Too easy, and that's what makes this next part so hard.

I was thinking that I need a little getaway. 

Is that right?

With you. 

I need to be here, Caleb. 

Two nights only, for my birthday. It's already cleared with Lochlan and everyone else who matters, and we leave at two sharp so please pack early so we're not behind. I sent the itinerary to your email. 

Where? 

It's a surprise, and you're going to love it.