MIA.

The very good news is the heavy-machinery part of the driveway is done (after four long days of noise) and the very Bougie part of having a whole team laying bricks by hand has begun. It's a thankless, tedious, back-breaking job and I intend to reward each team member aside from whatever Ransom is paying. I've already ordered them hot breakfasts and hot lunches each day and bring them tea and lemonade in between meals and Ransom is mad that they take far too many breaks here. 

Have you laid brick? I dare you to try it and tell me a lot of breaks aren't required. 

He didn't dare say anything else and the hot meals will continue, though apparently they will be finished by Saturday night. 

I mean, that's pretty good. And next week will be quiet. I hope. I did a huge grocery shop with Ben. Surprisingly there are still no good cereals (Kelloggs is having a moment. A stop work order, I believe so no product due to labour disputes) and God knows where all the spices went, but I can make my own Italian seasoning and I did find pepper and I will use fresh stuff dried and stored from last year's gardens for everything else. 

Next week is a car week, as my vintage Jeep needs some TLC...A starter motor and some liquid or linkage for the four-wheel-drive. I don't know. It bit the biscuit over the last snow event and while I could buy a starter and bolt it on, I just want it done and no one wants to work on it with me so I will pay stupid labour costs to the garage too. Why not, I'm on a roll here. 

Then the cats. Oh yes. The cats. One is terminal as I said yesterday and lives on pain meds and cuddles these days with a super-short prognosis, and the other has an auto-immune disease and needs meds now too and suddenly the pets are all ancient, the kids are all grown up, Lochlan has an errant white streak appearing at his temple and all of the boys are staring down advanced middle age and I am here still stuck at seventeen and screaming for them to slow down so I can keep up. 

There's your barometer, I tell Sam, who sits patiently at the big table in the kitchen, iPad, notebook, phone, bible and coffee cup in front of him. 

Sounds like a good one. Not too busy, not too bored, not too panicked, didn't mention ghosts even once, worried more about your Apple Jacks than your devil and not the least bit worried about your own mental health. To what do you attribute the change today?

The noise finished so I'm grateful. And also the full moon is over. Oh, and the days are getting longer and have you seen Jake cause I can't find him at all lately.

George likes to add spaces and Bridget isn't impressed.

If the editing is wonky again let me just tell you George drags himself through life like a depressed sloth and no matter how fast I get going on a keyboard he is rife with insolence, determined to do his own thing here, and I am left also annoyed but in the dust. He has control over my dominate hand and control he will, even as I rail and go back time and time again to add the words he refused to type, change the words he added in spite of what I wanted to write and fix up the cadence, grammar and punctuation. I still see things I missed and I'm too headachey-tired to bother fixing it all a fourth time here today so never fucking mind, George. You win. Happy now?

In other news, the weather looks like it is going to hold for the weekend and I can fire my kiln. I'm very excited about this but also I did not make enough things and now I'm sad because as always life is about having all the time in the world and then suddenly having none (George tried to write now right there, gosh I hate him sometimes). On the upside the good weather for our region is coming, and the bad is retreating. The days will be longer and so I'm excited to have more time, not less with which to experiment and try things and make things. Even if it's all little trinkets and gifts for people. I've always wanted to do this. 

Schuyler asked me about marketing last night, as in if I have a plan to sell things. Maybe locally? I also had an invitation to sell my wares on a relative's website but I am only thinking about that for now, and not really sure what to do. Let me focus on being happy with what I make first and then I will worry about the rest of it. 

In any case, at least George likes to make things with me. Maybe he was a repressed fifties business man and he wanted to be a creative gay? Who knows. I just know we're both happier lately when we're not writing, which is an absolute first for me and a horrible, strange feeling overall. It will come back. I hope. 

I feel like I've somehow tested positive for pandemic-fatigue. Or maybe it's life-fatigue. I just know one of my cats is terminal, the other two pets ancient and hardly mobile, the whole house seems so empty without Ruth and I'm all but torturing Henry with frettish attention and the fact that life is still shut down and everything is awful is beginning to catch up with me in a way I didn't expect. For once it's not the dead, it's the living that's the problem and this is new. I hate it, for the record. At least the ghost emotions were predictable.

Recipe for a good night's sleep.

We were alone. He had my face in his hands and his weight on my whole heart, lowering himself slowly into me, never breaking his gaze. It's a nightly reinvention for us. A show, just for us. An intense, quick-burning but slow-smouldering act of contrition against everything (and everyone) else. By the time our hipbones touch I am desperate for the inevitable quickening of our pace which always follow a languid, almost-hesitant to the point of torturous beginning. He always looks for my doubt and he can extinguish it quickly, an errant spark left to burn before being put out for safety. Lochlan was my very first true lover and he will be my last. That alone gives us a depth that no one else can touch. 

A kiss followed by one hand moving away while the other slides down around my neck. The one that moves away is now against my hip, flattening my pelvis out for him as the gentleness leaves us in favour of that desperation I referenced before. I pull the sheets up around us with both arms and then give up if only to hold on to something that isn't moving at all. Then I give up on that too and hold his arms, muscles flexing them almost too big for me to hold onto so I am clutching his shoulders.

Are you looking for a handle? He whispers with a laugh as he pulls back and flips me onto my face. Pulling my hips up while I laugh into the blankets I am flattened out once more, this time under the weight of his own heart, and I close my eyes. He takes my  hands and pulls them up above my head where he gathers them in one of his hands, and his other hand presses my stomach up so that my back is pressed against his chest and abdomen. The whole world ignites in this space now and the darkness is left behind. His lips press against my temple, his breath ragged in my hair. I am a captive audience. I am a meal. I am flammable, combustible-girl for Lochlan's very own brand of fire. I am sent to the moon while he circles around the stars, joining me on the surface to see the earth, just for a moment.

And we are warm at last. His breathing slows, his hands unclench, his whole body relaxes as he lies down beside me, pulling me up and into his arms, letting my hands fall. A kiss against my lips and his fingers to smooth away the hair from my face and his own and he presses his forehead in hard against mine. 

Good? 

So good, I whisper back.

He nods and pulls my shoulders in close so my head tucks underneath his chin. We are both asleep in seconds. 

Useful idiot.

One good thing about Ransom is he'll always ask for my list. He knocked on the door yesterday late afternoon and Dalton got it and then all of the sudden Ransom is in my kitchen, masked up, as per house rules if you don't live on the point, asking me if I have anything else for him to do. There's always a honey-do list on the side of the fridge with things that Have To Be Done and yesterday was no exception. 

There's the caulking at the bottom of the stairs, the screen door needs to be replaced on Duncan's door and on August's and caulking the kids' bathroom so check the others, the step at the bottom of the sauna is rotted through and if you can find out what's taking my electrician so long. Just kidding, that one is on me. 

I cough and he asks when I booked.Then he says to just have PJ call and cancel and Ransom's guy will do it. 

It was done by four-thirty and now I have an operating kiln and no time to try it out. 

Actually there's a little problem with the fact that it needs to be outside. I would wheel it out on a dolly. I'm not concerned. But I need a roof over it so the stables need a porch. Then they won't be stables anymore and it will just be a fully-fledged house and I can just go live in it and get away from these-

Anything else? 

No, that's it thank you. 

He winks and turns and leaves. Just like that. Perfect. 

Dalton asks which crystal he should bring down to fix the vibes in the room now. 

All of them. 

PJ laughs from the couch where he waits for me. Right beside Lochlan. Lochlan is where those vibes came from. He likes Ransom less than I do.

I'm not going near the front of the house today. That's where all the noise is.

Today's t-shirt reads ONLY THE BLONDE SURVIVE. I love it. Matt got it for me in an airport overseas somewhere and it's starting to pill slightly. It also pulls just a little in the front and the cut is perfect for a girl. Nipped in at the waist and skims over my hips perfectly. Sleeves actually fit. When I wear Ben's XL men's shirts it's like putting on a black garbage bag. Shapeless but soft. I threw on green leggings with it, since the shirt is ivory with pink bands at the arms and neck and I look like a little kid fresh out of her snowsuit, complete with messed up hair. I dried my hair with a blow dryer but I couldn't find my brush. Then I started coughing anyway and added a sweater to my outfit because within an hour Lochlan will demand I put one on.

Cue a hot chocolate, because damn near everyone's trained now. 

And we've hit that part of January where not only did most of the boys go for a dry January if they aren't already in recovery, but they really went for a dry January, in that the remainder of the solitary men almost one by one gave up the faint hope in their dating apps and unsubscribed and deleted them off their phones. 

They do this every year. 

It always makes me vaguely sad but also mindful of years past when the desperate, poor-decision panic would set in so that people would not be alone for the holidays and the boys would make a go of burgeoning relationships in one of the most stressful periods of the year. It never ended well. I doubt it ever would, except in rare occasions and I see this as an armchair anthropologist, always. I've watched these boys my whole life and life is a roller coaster with free admission, for sure.

PJ has his head in my lap as I sit by the fire gingerly holding my piping hot drink over his head and trying to take sips as he laments the state of the world, that this wasn't what he intended but that he also wouldn't change a thing and he can't quantify why he feels fulfilled but he does. It's a stream of consciousness existential crisis and he has a few each year. 

I'll indulge him until he's good and finished because he's had nothing but time for me. I braid his beard while he talks and look at the colour of his eyes and the flecks of light in his irises and I will lament the almost-waste of a perfect man save for the fact that he did say he was fulfilled and maybe not becoming a husband and father but still having the role for the best years of his life is enough. 

This is a man who cried a little the other day when Ruth came in and told him how many paintings she sold over the holidays and how much she made by doing so. He's always got patience and concern and pure love for all of us and it shows. PJ's love language is service and I'm glad he's never let that part of him shut down. 

He's also the world's most comfortable human weighted blanket. 

He's also rude and completely incorrigible and I love him for that too.

I love that my face is mere inches from your-

Padraig! Don't be gross. We were having a moment. 

We could have a moment-

Hush, you.

Unspoiled.

What is happening with the fountain?

They're going to change it up. A Cherub, maybe. You choose.

Medusa. 

Bridg-

You told me to choose! That makes the most sense, honestly. 

The fountain is getting a big upgrade. And they'll be removing the little pond altogether and just making it look like the rest. Perennials. Etc. etc. Work starts tomorrow because of course, ofc. ofc. Just delay someone else's project so you can pull a whole team and come harass Bridget and overcharge and just..GOD. I wish we could get a new contractor. Emmett is 'unavailable' (I love that word so much) and Ransom is weirdly free. 

RIIIIIIIGHT. 

Yes, so Medusa. 

We'll discuss it. What if we got some koi-

No. Take the pond out, please. It should never have been there in the first place. No one was going to look after it. 

Caleb looks so defeated. We're trying to make this a paradise for you, Neamhchiontach. When you are happy, we'll be happy. 

I thaw a tiny bit. I liked it before. 

It was muddy and deteriorating pavement. 

I know. Now it's just so...sterile. 

Your input is what makes it less so. He's so gentle with his words. 

The fountain is ridiculous. What if we take it out? 

And put in? 

An apple tree with a swing and a garden of flowers around it. Some more lampposts.

Done. 

Oh, thank God. 

You hate the fountain that much?

It looks like when you drive up to a hotel. It's dumb looking. I want a home, not a house. 

I start coughing again and he says that's enough for now and heads off to make hot chocolate for me. It's like a bottomless cup. 

He returns in five minutes with a cup on a plate and some cut up apples. Good, I wasn't about to indulge you with the Medusa anyway.

No Easy.

In a commune full of big, strapping, ridiculously-healthy men it's almost hilarious how the germs go in circles, bypassing everyone with any seriousness until they get to me. The weakest link. The runt, as it were, feral girl prone to every last crumb of sickness and once I get and develop it into a full-blown illness then I give it back to everyone, they work through it and then it lingers only to infect me once more. 

It's not Covid. I've been tested twice now. It's just the flu. Probably because I sleep three or four hours a night and just run on white-knuckle breath-held vibrations and that never changes. Lochlan was running a mild fever too this morning almost as if on instruction, as the doctor said this will run it's course in a few days and to call him if anyone spikes a fever over 104 or if we can't keep control of the symptoms. I worry slightly about Caleb and about New Jake who are both men with health concerns but they both seem fine. 

(Do not even ask me why New Jake wouldn't be fine because I ain't talking.) 

Daniel has the sniffles but no fever. PJ coughed once and Caleb glared at him until he lied and said he breathed his coffee by mistake instead of swallowing it, and otherwise everything seems good so at least it's not pneumonia (I still have at least eight weeks to get that and I'm sure there's one with my name on it waiting in the wings, as ever) and it's not bronchitis. The other favourite.

I lamented being sick all the time and Lochlan pointed out germs are heavier than air so it makes sense if I'm shorter I catch more. Like krill for a baleen whale. I'm just walking through life filtering them with my teeth. 

A vision.

Indeed.

Bathic content.

(I'm doing nothing but waiting so here's a post about nothing.)

Lochlan reaches up and turns on the light on the chest of drawers. My face is illuminated in the mirror. Delirious eyes, wild hair. Pink cheeks. He kisses my shoulder, without taking his eyes from mine in our reflection.

Bathtime. 

I close my eyes and he leads me into the big ensuite and I am put on the chair to not fall over while he runs the water in the tub. He adds a capful of rose oil and a capful of bubbles and then one of salts too (which takes away a lot of the bubbles) and then he comes back and takes off the Hello Kitty pajamas I am still wearing. 

We can burn these. 

They're my favourite. 

I'll get you a new set. He kisses my forehead (should we burn that too? I feel like I already am, from the inside out) and I'm neck-deep in bubbles finally. I lie back against the little pillow and instantly slide down so that just my face is visible. 

Good? Lochlan appears upside down above me. 

Come in with me. 

After I wash your hair. 

He sits on the little stool by the tub where I normally keep my phone and washes my hair for me before stripping down and sliding into the tub behind me. The water is now up to my shoulders and I'm still sitting up. He lies back and I use him as a pillow. I offer sleepily to wash his hair and he says he doesn't want salt in it. 

Salt should be in everything, I point out. 

Tomorrow you can have a saltwater bath then. 

I don't know what he means but I close my eyes and breathe in the steam and my throat feels a little better. The doctor is coming after lunch today. He would have been over first thing but he is flying back. It's fine. I'm not going anywhere. Other people have far worse problems. Get to me when you get to me, I think and before I know it our time is up in the tub, because Lochlan doesn't want me to overheat. 

I could live in the bathtub.

Come on, mermaid. Let's get you dry. He steps out and towels his skin off quickly, giving me the most wonderful show while he's doing it. His milk-pink skin, freckles scattered everywhere like sun stars, hair still tied back, woodchopping/fire throwing muscles threatening to blow his white-collar cover, as ever. Tattoos damned never everywhere now and I love it. He was late to the game, but took it up eventually.

What are you staring at?

You. 

Let me return the favour then. He holds out his hands and I take them, stepping ungracefully over the very high side of the tub. He wraps me up in a giant towel and lets the water out of the tub and then comes back.  

Oops. Forgot your hair.

It's fine. 

Another towel and he blots my whole head. (One of the advantages of being with a man with super crazy curls is he doesn't rub your head dry like he's polishing wax off a car. My hair used to be straw for a while there, right through the Cole/Jake/Ben years, but now it's shiny and soft again. God, my brain's going everywhere. It's probably a prion disease). 

I am combed and dressed in clean clothes. A warm baggy sweater and comfortable soft jeans. Matching Lochlan only his sweater is a navy and mine a robin's egg blue. Our jeans are the same shade of dark indigo and he goes back, after a thought, and gets socks for me. Thick cream-coloured wool socks that feel so nice. I am the barefoot princess, usually. 

I wait for a hat and a coat, possibly, but he seems satisfied at last. 

Breakfast-

-I'm starving.

God, I love it when we can read each other's minds. Good girl, he says, and I go weak in the knees.

Hello sicky.

Two in the morning and there's a knock at the door. I startle awake because I'm a light sleeper. Lochlan's hand grips mine and then lets go as he turns over. He's in dreams, at the fair, no doubt. His happy place. Way back at the start. 

I open the door just a little. The Devil's face in shadow from the light from the windows at each end of the hall. 

Neamhchiontach. Will you come to me? 

I study his face in the dark. The expression holds, as if cast in stone and I meet his eyes. Yes. 

I come back to the nightstand for my phone while he waits by the door. Lochlan touches my hand and then makes his warning. 

You bite her again and I'll kill you. 

You have my word. Caleb says it softly in order not to wake up Ben. 

I close the door gently and we move down the hall, around the corner and to his door. He bends down to kiss me on the forehead and then opens the door and waits for me to enter first. His rooms are dark. He wagered on me saying no, or not being allowed. He turns on a few low lights and the gas fireplace and then comes back close to me, pulling me in against his chest, tucking his head down toward mine, breathing in my hair. 

He exhales slowly, as if he has been holding himself tense and ready.  I hold my breath like a line thrown from a ship and I'm in the water. As hard as I can. It forces me to cough and he just holds tighter, smoothing his hand up and down my back as if to soothe me. His hand is warm. 

For once. 

When I stop long enough for him to relax again he steps back away from me, shrugging out of his jacket in one motion. It's fine wool but he lets it fall to the floor in a crumple anyway, and then he takes his cufflinks off. He doesn't unbutton his shirt though and he steps closer again, hands around the hem of my Hello Kitty pajama top. It's a glorified t-shirt. Soft and thin. He pulls it up gently and I raise my arms over my head dutifully. The shirt joins the jacket. He takes his shirt off quickly and pulls me back in to his warmth and I don't mind. It's cold. 

The sound of the rain against the windows drowns out anything he has said so far, or maybe he's said nothing. Either way we stare at each other but don't speak. He lets his pants fall so he's down to his briefs and I'm still in my pants, shivering now. I look at my shirt and he snatches it up, pulling it back over my head, threading my limbs through the holes. 

For now, he reassures himself and again, I say nothing. 

He leads me down the hall into the dark and I can appreciate his form. Strong and tall. Confident in a way that only comes with time and money. A sudden confidence compared to the acting he did at my bedroom door. Just vulnerable enough for me to drop my guards and then back to predictable devil. 

He takes his time. He takes all night, almost. I am not released for sleep just yet though. He isn't finished with me yet. 

And then I cough again and he stops. 

Bridget, are you sick? 

I didn't think I was. It's just a tickle. 

By morning there is a roaring fever to accompany that cough and I can hardly move. No one blames him, though. I am still in my pajamas, and they are stuck to me as I sweat right through them. It wasn't cold. It was chills. It wasn't a delirious dream, it was a fever dream. The best and worst kind all at once.

Honoured.

Home to the Devil and the magician who take notes and are collaborating this morning on breakfast. There's a roaring fire in the woodstove, all my tiny lights are lit and nothing else and the rain pours down outside like a punishment for something dire. They are making marshmallow fluff toast and hot chocolate mixed with coffee. My very own early cafe mocha, as it were. Lochlan makes a last-minute healthy choice to peel an orange, as is his custom so that I don't die of scurvy but I always feel like Veruca Salt at the chocolate factory in life. 

Or maybe that's Augustus Gloop. 

Shakti. Lochlan's voice floods into my head. It's amusing. Caleb can't hear him in here.

Either way, I am well-fed, rested-up, touched-out and content right at this moment. I reach up to hit the pause and Caleb takes credit. Almost instantly, before my finger can touch that invisible but necessary button, he crows that he knew it would work. Lochlan glowers at him but says nothing and I let my arm come back in close against my body for warmth. Not pausing right here, suddenly I'd like to hurry through. Suddenly my handknit sweater isn't warm enough and the fire's heat isn't reaching me and the coffee's grown cold in the cup. 

Lochlan feels it and comes and pulls me in against him, his arm tight around me, fist holding me to his heartbeat. A kiss on the top of my head stakes his claim and I am written into the logs as his forever. I always thought I never deserved it maybe, or that he was simply too good to be true. Oftentimes I thought I would never be good enough or that his standards were so high I couldn't see over the top and then he reminds me that life is simple, that we have what we need and we have each other and I can't hear the devil any more and then Lochlan works his magic and I can't see the devil either and it's a moment I can finally breathe.