I'll tell you about the Evan Peters thing. We started watching American Horror Story to fill in the gaps while we wait for Season 3 of Game of Thrones to show up on Apple TV and wow, is it ever bizarre and tense.
But then the character of Tate moved to the forefront, who's all a hundred and eighty miles an hour of white-hot teenage-boy sexy angst (oh, shut up) and he reminds me of someone I know at that same age, also with curly hair and determined stubbornness and almost-teary eyes when he gets so frustrated at things.
Yeah.
Totally a trip down memory lane except for the obvious living, breathing and non-psychopathic parts (knock on wood).
Lochlan was not at all impressed when I pointed out all the glaring similarities that I could see and he spent the entire second half of that episode staring at me. Not angrily, just curiously, as if I were some great riddle he was studying. Then he begged off the next one entirely, saying he'd catch up on it later, perhaps.
I went up after it was over and he was outside, sitting in the dark deep down into one of the Adirondack chairs, arms crossed over his chest, staring into the flames shooting up from the giant copper firebowl. He pulled me down into his lap when he saw me and buried his face in my hair, saying he was sorry. He kept saying it. Over and over and finally I pulled away and asked him what he was sorry for, leaving me to watch a television show? Yelling about some stupid offhand comment that may or may not be obvious to others but was just something I found interesting? For all the things since 1983 that didn't exactly go as planned so meticulously once upon a time?
No, Peanut. No, this is a big thing I did. Just now. Look at the fire. I'm sorry but I'm not sorry at all. In fact, I'm relieved and I wish I had done this years ago.
I look at the fire and after a minute I see why he's sorry because I see what he's burning. Jacob's letters. All of them, still stacked and folded in small white bricks in packs of fifty, tied with gold and silver ribbons because that's what I did to keep myself from swimming in ashes or from slitting my wrists after he flew. I folded each one carefully and made groups of them and then tied them like presents with the prettiest ribbons I could find.
And now they're gone.
The yelling by the others started almost immediately. They said he's brainwashed me, that he always has, they say I don't think for myself when he's around, that I revert, that I regress but maybe he's taking those risks by doing what needs to be done, even if it's an unpopular or horrifically shocking decision.
Even if he's right.
I wasn't curious but I am now. What if all the answers were there and I'll never know? What if everything would have been better had I read them?
I pushed away from Ben and Sam and ran back out into the dark where Lochlan sat, still in the chair, still watching the flames now with an audience of detractors and dissent.
I flew down the steps and he stood up and I smashed into him with an alarming violence. He caught me and he looked scared to death.
Did you read them? At least some of them?
Yeah. I did and I wish I hadn't.
