They didn't actually put me down in the grass. Jesus, people. Can you use your imaginations? I'm pretty sure they just drug my food as needed. It's far more fun to be facedown in my dinner plate anyway, isn't it? Especially if it's tacos. Ouch. That would hurt. I imagine taco cuts are like paper cuts, you get all sliced up with stingy corn cuts in your cheeks, unless they're soft tortillas in which you wind up with a big squishy cheese mess all over EVERYTHING and that would be just-
What did I come here to talk about? I forgot.
Lochlan runs his warm hand across my stomach early this morning. He hates this tattoo. (You look like the end of a pirate treasure map, for Pete's sake.) Hates it but he understands why I have it. Honestly he's glad I have it as much as he hates it. As he said on his way out the door while Mark was finishing cleaning it up, One down, one to go.
The open vitriol surprised me so much I gasped. Mark's face came up over mine. Okay, there, sunshine?
I nodded.
Give him credit. I would have blown Caleb to kingdom come years ago.
Jesus, guys. My eyes water and Mark passes me a piece of paper towel. I ball it up and hold my fists against my forehead. Count to fifty, Bridget. Let it pass. Explore a city you don't know inside your mind. What's around the next corner? What would you put there to find?
Sam was teaching me self-control, emotional control before they took him away from me too. Not literally but figuratively. A 'break', they called it. Because I'm so intense I can break people from twenty yards away. He was breaking. I was breaking too.
Lochlan got a tattoo while Mark was here as well. Dóiteáin (pronounced doe-chane.). It means fire. (Surprise.) Across his back.
[Oh, you want a Gaelic lesson?
Neamhchiontach is pronounced nav-shun-toch. Diabhal is said as doe-vol.]
But yeah, a week from now is the date that ten years ago I watched as the light went out of Cole's eyes and let me tell you it's the most frightening thing I think I've ever seen. Certainly the most profound in that you have no control. You can't stop it, you can't change it and I had to mark it. I had to do something about it. I had to find some way to have some power over that moment or it would continue to eat me alive. Maybe it's never going to stop. Maybe I am doomed by my ghosts and by my living alike.
Maybe the X is perfect. It does mark the spot. But I'm not going to write much about Cole today, I'll save that for next week but I'm deliriously happy with the tattoo, in spite of Sam's teasing. It's just a big fucking X. It can mean anything. It can mean everything. It can mean nothing. It's just perfect.
Something I'm not.
