Near death (which isn't a bad thing if you are me).

Coffee with Ben this morning, old familiar patterns in new unfamiliar feelings as we sit at another tiny unbalanced table in a noisy, busy shop full of people talking superficially about crap like clothing and top forty music and fitness while we slice into deep, cutting subjects like death and whatever the hell it is that we're doing to each other here because we haven't talked at all.

I sip my coffee and launch into the third coughing fit of the moment.

You're not fit to be out. 

I shake my head. Nope. I'm not, and he will be lucky if I don't put my head down on this table and slide right off my chair at some point.

Jesus, I thought Caleb had all the answers with his Russians looking after you. He fishes his phone out of his pocket.

What are you doing?

Calling him. Just a minute, bee. 

Ben. Stop. 

Wait. He holds up a finger. What the fuck. I stand up and reach across the table and take his phone right out of his hand. We're having coffee. You don't talk on the fucking phone. You don't bring up the devil. You SPEND TIME WITH ME, DAMMIT. 

The conversations concerning yoga and Billboard comes to a screeching halt all around me. He stands up and begins to gather up our breakfast to take to the car. I follow. Neither one of us want to wind up being recorded, or even noticed for that matter.

He opens my door, puts our coffees in the console and then holds out a hand for me to help me up into the truck. I watch him trace the ground with his eyes all the way around the front of the truck and then he gets in. He looks at me.

I think I made a mistake.

Just one?

He laughs. Oh Jesus. Bridget, You're going to make this tough, aren't you? You know something? I'm sick too and I don't need this shit.

I open my door again and climb out. I think I'd rather talk to my Ben and not the one who's posturing if it's all the same to you. I slam the door, curse being uncoordinated enough to even consider bringing my coffee with me and head back into the coffee shop. Because, you know, I left my purse in the truck too. He roars out of the parking lot far too fast and doesn't look back.

I ask to borrow a phone and call Mike to come and get me because if I talk to anyone familiar I'll lose it. He says for me to hold tight for fifteen minutes and so I go back outside to wait. I cross the street and sit in the bus stop. I don't feel well enough to stand. I lean my head against the glass and close my eyes. A bus comes and stops for me, holding the doors open before I shake my head and it roars away from the curb. Someone drives by and yells something at me but I can't hear it. Then I hear a familiar purr and open my eyes again.

Caleb. He leaves the car in the middle of the lane with hazards on and comes around to the bus shelter, taking my hand. He leads me to the car and shuts the door once I'm in and then goes around and gets in his side. Traffic is lining up behind his car but he flashes that million dollar smile and calls out Sorry! Sorry! before pulling away.

I just need to know who stranded you here in this condition. You don't have to say anything else because if it's one of Pyro's stupid stunts then he's done. Just done, Bridget-

I stranded myself. And Lochlan is at work. You should know. You're working him into the ground now so he can't be home ever. 

You didn't get here by yourself. 

No, I came with Ben and-

Don't say anymore. He fishes out his phone and asks Siri to call Ben. She dials and it goes straight to Ben's voicemail.

Caleb's message is short and sweet. When you get this, come and see me.

He disconnects the call and all I can think of is great, everyone has an ego today.

How are you feeling? 

Really really bad. I burst into tears, which makes it even harder to breathe, and he drives faster still. Be home in a minute, Baby Doll. He squeezes my hand for reassurance but it only makes me cry harder. I try and wrench my hand back but he won't let go. Finally he pulls off the highway into a neighborhood I don't recognize and invokes Siri again.

Siri, call the Pyromaniac. 

Okay, calling the Pyromaniac, she tells him obediently.

What is it? Lochlan answers on the first ring. That surprises me.

Can you postpone the remainder of your day and meet me at the house, please? Bridget had a rough morning with the Beast and would like to see you. 

Be right there. Loch hangs up and Caleb looks at me. I told you I do what's best for you. Even when it isn't what's best for me. He pulls a u-turn and heads back toward the highway.

When we get home the gate is barely closed when it begins to slide open again and Lochlan's truck speeds into view. He blocks everyone in when he parks it right in the middle of the driveway. He pulls me out of the car, into his arms and rocks me, looking over my head. I hear him say Thank you to Caleb, or maybe he says Fuck you. I can't tell.

An actual elephant in the room.

This is my movie screen. It's ten feet across (more like fifteen, PJ corrects me) and I would hug it if only I could reach. I'm watching The Fall again and waiting to feel better after a few scary episodes in which simply breathing became some sort of Herculean task and I have more drugs now because I'm a lot sicker than I thought I might be, and really bad at things like Resting and Taking Care. It's hard, okay? I like to feel useful. I like to be needed.

Bridget's pillow fort/Perfectly.

When all was said and done we reverted back to the past. Time teaches us so much and it also teaches us what is temporary and what is forever. We can make infinite mistakes and stretch the bonds until they threaten to snap painfully back, but it won't change fate. Fate is decided before you are even born and eventually it becomes your job to stop fighting it and embrace the path chosen for you by your very own soul and the one connected to it.

***

I lingered in dreams after I was no longer welcome. Floating in the warm darkness, unable to properly focus, content in the failure of anxiety and fear to chase me into the deepest recesses of my mind. A hand slid underneath my shoulder blades and I was lifted gently out of my sleepy fog into the morning. Lips slid across my own. I put my arms up around his neck and he exhaled and kissed my clavicle before pushing me back down into the mountain of pillows, a luxury we never take for granted, having shared a single thin battered one for whole entire seasons without complaint.

Lochlan smiles against my face, pushing his cheek against mine with his widening grin. He tucks his fingers into the band of my pajama pants and pulls them off. He pushes up the hem of my t-shirt until it is twisted around my ribcage and he grabs my ankle and pulls it up as he pins me down with his weight. I have to fight to breathe until he lets go just a little bit and then I am lifted right up again, pressed against his jaw, rubbed ragged over light stubble and rough hands, before he finds our rhythm and puts me down again. He groans, kissing my eyelashes, pulling me tightly against him. My breathing is laboured, harsh little bleats of want for him, louder when it hurts and he brings one hand up to cover my mouth. Shhhhhh. His eyes dilate so huge in the dark they turn black and he stares at me as if he is waiting for me to confirm answers to questions we don't ask anymore.

Then he is gone again and I cry out. It's cold. It's dark. Where did you-

Oh. Lips first. Trailing up my stomach to my ribs. Thumbs against my hips, fingers wrapped around the bones. I slide my hands into his curls and he exhales his hot breath in a rush all over me.

Loch. 

It's a plea. Don't make me wait. Oh God I can't not have you right this second please. Don't stop right in the middle like this, not for anything-

Cold again as he take both of my arms and pins them high above my head. I arch my back against him and he pauses for a moment, a look of sheer joy on his face before he buries his head into the pillows, hard against mine and drives until we're both gasping from effort. He wraps his hand around my throat, clutching his fingers lightly. I hold my breath and tip over the edge, falling up as he slows to a crawl to let me ride the clouds to the outer atmosphere. He leans back away from me, crouching on his knees, lifting up my hips, slamming into me over and over until I begin to beg him to finish.

Complete the night.

Connect the stars.

Make me yours again and take everything else away. As we fall back down out of the sky together he kisses me, eyes open, souls tethered in a bond made of  feathers and iron. He says he loves me in the middle of a kiss. I never hear it, I feel it and it's one of the most amazing things in my heart, in my life.

His hands are shaking as he reaches up to smooth my hair out of my eyes. He pulls my face up to his for another kiss and then wraps his arms around my back, pulling me in tightly until my head covers his heart. I fall asleep on a steadily slowing beat, back into those recesses where he found me, taking him with me to show him the world where I never ever worry about anything and where he doesn't have to either, not anymore.

He says it out loud for good measure just as I walk off the edge of consciousness.

I love you. I love you Bridget and I don't know a goddamn thing in this world for certain but I know that.

And then I get that extra little thrill in feeling every molecule of this man lighten all at once, putting out the fire, just for a little while.

It's pneumonia.

And I just discovered I'm afraid of flowering teas.

Degeneracy pressure and cheeeeeese, baby.

(He spent decades teaching me astronomy so I would be uncharacteristically bright and all I wanted to do was listen to him sing. Just fucking sing to me, that's all I ever want.)

She climbs into bed, pull the covers overhead and turns her little radio on
She's has a rotten day so she hopes the DJ's gonna play her favorite song
It makes her feel much better, brings her closer to her dreams
A little magic power makes it better that it seems

Yesterday I heard a song I haven't heard since I was nine. It was one Loch used to sing to me, and he'd strum his (salvaged and now long gone in the fire) guitar along with the words. I thought he wrote it. I thought he was a genius and was going to throw away all that talent for the amusement racket. (See, he played me all kinds of songs but he had never performed one cold before.)

He downplayed it to the point where we both forgot about it, and in later years if I brought up that song again he feigned confusion over what I tried to describe since I only knew a line or two. I figured it was gone. I wondered if it was an actual memory or something I imagined.

Then I heard the song yesterday on the Triumph album and I busted him and he downplayed it again, saying it made him think of me so he learned it to play for me but was surprised that I liked it so much, and was afraid to tell me it was a song off the radio.

He was fifteen years old and just trying to impress a girl, after all.

I told him the only way he could have impressed me any more than he does (present-tense) is if he performs Killing Time for me on the spot. Like, now, if you please.

Naw, Peanut. You already know I didn't write that song. It wouldn't be the same. 
 

Sure it would.

Heavy water reactor.

1983, 2006, 2007.

I would erase those years from the page if I could. Struggling to make the marks vanish, tearing the paper, licking the end of the eraser and then trying again so that dark grey smudges remained and what used to be underneath the marks is unreadable, unpredicted.

Then I can burn the book for good measures and bad ones too.

I don't know if it matters if it's healthy. I'm not healthy but I'm not green either. Today I struggled through an early shower and then crashed back into bed, setting the alarm for yet another hour away from right now and in my dreams Jake said he would get up and see the kids off to school and when I woke up again it was so real.

So real it made my head ache and I want to undo all of it.

But then Lochlan came in with a travel mug full of apple juice (I am notoriously uncoordinated when sick. No, like way more than usual) and a ipad full of Erky Perky videos for me to watch and doze. He told me he bought me Triumph's greatest hits album (LOVE THIS GUY) and I could download it to my phone whenever I felt like it. Then he pretended he was hanging by his tie and said he had to go, that PJ and Dalton (God help us he's up before noon?) would see the kids off this morning. Not to get up at all, for anything until at least lunchtime and that Sam would be home to see that I eat something besides Jack Daniels and Pixy Stix.

(Because I found a store here that sells them in bags of hundred counts. JESUS CHRIST IT'S THE HOLY LAND FOR CERTAIN. Not the Jack by the hundreds, the candy, you idiots, though...okay no.)

I think the bourbon was helping though. Certainly with the lucid dreaming.

And of course halfway through one show I defied him, dragging my sorry arse out of bed, pouring out the juice, looking at my hair in the mirror and laughing until I coughed up things I maybe could have named if I wasn't so horrified instead (Nyarlathotep, Balaur, and perhaps Sabazios would be GREAT names for what I saw) and then I pulled on blown out jeans and a soft sweatshirt and laughed again in the mirror and opened the door.

Ben was sitting at the top of the steps working on his laptop and he leaned back, looked at me and said I was disobeying house rules.

Then he laughed too, not sure if it was aimed at my hair or all these damned rules. Either way we're a comedy road show here at home.

He put down his machine and got up and blocked the door so I coughed in his face except he's very tall so it didn't accomplish much of anything. He frowned and asked if I wanted to go to the doctor and I waved my hands at him and said if I got much worse I could just summon my own personal scary Soviet medical team to my bedside with their cold war strategies (get it? Get IT?) and then he said I was talking absolute nonsense and he walked over the bed and held the covers up.

I stripped out of my clothes, got back into bed and he stretched out beside me with his laptop again and told me to sleep while he...types really loudly and listens to music on his headphones which I can hear far too easily. If he isn't pickled then he'll surely be at least profoundly deaf before he's fifty.

But eventually it all faded away and Jacob came back in and leaned over me, one hand warm against my forehead. He swore lightly in his native unintelligble Newfiespeak and pushed my head under the water until I couldn't breathe anymore and I finally stopped fighting and lay still.

Ben didn't even try to stop him and Lochlan was too far away by then to even know what was happening. But true to form I resurrected myself because that's what I do, day after day after day.

I know exactly who the enemy is.

Some days I just want to prop Cole up and resurrect Jake and fly August back and make Sam look up from his book and PJ from his chores and I'd like to get Dalton to pay some attention and Duncan to put down his pen and Christian to come over so I don't have to ask twice and if I can get Daniel to stay in the room and maybe get Schuyler not to work so much for a minute and Caleb can put away his evil and John can put down his sandwich, Matt could feel at home as part of us finally and I'll ask Ben to be comfortable in his own skin at long last and ask Lochlan to hold off in laying down more rules just for a minute, then maybe I could...

Hold on, let me just...

Just stand there, boys, okay? And form a wall.

And save me from myself.

The real-life Ancient Mariner.

But soon there breathed a wind on me
Nor sound nor motion made
Its path was not upon the sea
In ripple or in shade

My grandfather turns one hundred years old today.

One hundred years.

He's as healthy as a horse, a retired Merchant Marine. He's shorter than I am now, though. (So there is always hope, folks.) He does not have internet so we filmed ourselves singing a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to a camera and my parents played it for him on their iPad. They said he loved it. He can't hear to talk on the phone so I write him long letters. He writes back and sends birthday and Christmas cards with funny little notes. He has never raised his voice to me and he's navigated life as a widower for the past twenty and a half years. He built all of my barbie furniture  and a full-size teepee in the woods when I was little and when I was big he made matching cedar chests for me, a small one for my jewelry and a huge one for bedding. Both are still going strong, built to last.

Just like him.

Barrister noon.

I realize it's Monday, yes. I was up so early today (long story) that I walked right past the keypad without turning off the alarm and opened the back door and treated the whole point to a blaring siren at 4:45 a.m. I think the dog would have peed on the floor right there without going outside but he saw the look on my face and chose wisely. Then I started coffee and tried to pinch myself to make something hurt below the neck because my voice wasn't working, I couldn't breathe and then I realized that there are only eighteen hours to go and I can go back to bed and try again to get some sleep. I'm not good at this. I think I figured out what sends people into the hospital for two week stretches. 

They aren't crazy and they aren't in rehab, they're just fucking tired. Tired is a bitch, she is. She makes you want to give up and just cry. She makes you throw caution to the wind. She makes you feel completely and utterly unhinged. See the picture of the mug? PJ bought that for me a year ago and he's used it ever since for his own morning coffee. Because everyone needs to feel like a princess, even big bouncer-types with beards. 

In other news, the next person who writes to me to tell me how selfish and horrible I am may please fuck off far in advance. Did I give you Ben's side of the story here? No? Exactly. Maybe because it isn't my place to have to be the one to point out that he basically said he was happy to be home but not interested in pretending we can just pick up where we left off because he's not sure he wants to. That he'll be 'around' but I am not to wait for him. I'm not to..something something, Bridget, please don't cry.

Yeah, envy me. 

Seriously. 

So basically I took my passport back down to be kept by it's master and accepted a glass of champagne for lunch (this is how the other half lives) and fell asleep standing at the big window, my head on the glass while Caleb tried to talk me out of, oh, pretty much everything. 

I just kept saying I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. 

I am too tired to care.

Escaping with the ghost of Freddie Mercury.

I think we're going to keep those rules after all.

Tried to be a teacher and a fisher of men, an equal
Will you lead us all the same?
Well I traveled around the world
To find a brand new word for day
Watching the time, mustn't linger behind
Pardon me I have to get away
What will you think of heaven
If it's back from where you came?

It was sort of an epiphany. We were sitting in a scraped-up booth in a well-worn restaurant with a view of train tracks and a truck lot. Lochlan was reaching across his own plate to steal a french fry from me. He made designs in the ketchup on his plate with the fry before popping it into his mouth. He reached for another, talking to the plate instead of to me, telling it that he will do whatever it takes, that if we didn't have this moment as a sign that we're meant to be together after all this time then he didn't know what else he could do. That we had to figure it out and move forward already. We're wasting daylight.

Everything is a metaphor for movement. We're stuck up to our wheel wells in quicksand and we need to get out. It's so easy to throw it into reverse and then we just get stuck again in the same hole.

It's simple, he smiles at the thick china plate. We just have to go forward.

I nod and cough into my elbow. I've left a smear of mustard on my sleeve and on my cheek but I'll get a pass, because I'm only a child.

Are you with me, Peanut?

Where else would I be?

What will we do about the mess? He indicates my face and sweater with a half-eaten french fry but he's not taking about my outfit anymore.

I put both hands up in surrender. I don't think we can do anything. This is sewn up tight, Locket. Caleb's not going to give in and I can't put the children through any more. I just..

Let me put it another way. He drops the fry, leans in close across the table, crosses his arms and lets a soft smile play across his face. Do you remember when everything was against us? Nothing was going right, we had nothing but we still had one thing. What was it?

I don't-

Think hard, Peanut.

I smile in spite of myself. Each other! We had each other.

Was it enough? Is it enough to fight through this and see what's up ahead instead of always looking over our shoulders?

Always. Yes. 

He looked so proud for that split second before I started coughing again, and when I was finished he reached across the table with a napkin to clean the mustard off my cheek, threw two twenties on the table and stood up, holding his hand out for mine. I took it, germs intact. He should be sick within a week if they don't kill him first.