a burning hill.

And just lack that, they’re back to SQUARE ONE. Hostility warranted, Letha can leave all thoughts of gratitude behind. Coffee still in hand, however. She wasn’t about to suffer through this conversation—and the demanded road trip—un-caffeinated. 

     “ Oh, hey — right back at ya. ” Except he wouldn’t even make her list. A middle school type comeback that she keeps to herself. For once. “ It’s about the babies, you prick. I’ve worked with gators, remember? Like, professionally. And I’m not gonna let you take them on some impromptu road trip in an egg carton with no experience, just vibes. ”

“   Okay, okay, Jesus Christ, you can tag along then. Do whatever fucking   ...   ”   He gestures vaguely to the eggs.   “   Gator pampering you need to. I don’t give a shit. We leave in thirty minutes. I’ll be back here. Lunch on the road, we’re back in town before nightfall or you owe me one. Big time.   ”

By the time Beau had returned and the gators had been carefully transported into the back of the truck with their safety in mind   —   something he’s sure Letha would ream his ass had they not attended to   —    it’s a little later than he wanted to leave, which hasn’t exactly set the mood. Or maybe it has, for a trip with the capital-H Her Letha Newman had become.

Uncharted territory, Letha’s uncertain of the rules. Instinct, and past experiences, suggest hostility but… He’d helped her. And despite a begrudging reluctance to ever be in debt to the Rochesters, she was grateful. It’s not a feeling she relishes in. So it’s one that she ignores. Focusing instead on the alligators and the rescue he promises — and the implication that he’ll take it from there. Taking another sip of her coffee (the coffee that Beau had brought her), she gets out her makeshift bed. 

     “ Great. I’ll come with. ”

“   No. You won’t.   ”   He laughs a little, a smile quirking up the corners of his mouth, like it’s funny she even asked. It’s so quick, he almost feels bad about it   —   except he’s Beau, and she’s Letha, so he doesn’t really. He looks at her for a second, all enthusiasm and determination set against a backdrop of sun-bleached blonde and sun-tanned skin, and he tries to swallow the tiniest dregs of admiration he has for her commitment to the small creatures. 

It seems silly to dwell on their relation—how they’re not friends, how they’ve never been, and just how far out of her comfort zone this takes her. But still it looms over her like a dark cloud, suggesting rain when it has yet to drizzle. The banter remains predictable. The new morning routine not. She takes another sip of her coffee. The coffee Beau bought her.

         “Alive.” She confirms, reaching beneath the lawn chair to fish out the racket tucked beneath. Her trusty advisory in times where her grandfather’s dog was too cowardly. Even Elvis sneaking back inside when the midnight air began to nip. “All thanks to this bad boy. Told ya, Rochester—racoons are bitches.”

Putting it lightly. She’d nearly gotten scratched by one particularly ferocious, missing a case of rabies just in the nick of time. Elvis, once more, useless in the role of a guard dog. All bark and no bite. Much like the boy before her.

         “Any news on the sanctuary front?”

He nods, though it’s tentative   —   less so because the information is, moreso because anything pleasing Letha feels like it should be. TENTATIVE. Assisting her, bringing her coffee, looking out for her interests, even if said interests are tied up with innocent alligators. 

He doesn’t respond to raccoon remarks, the repetition of small talk and banter suddenly feeling suffocating: what was he doing here? On the logical side, the side he’d tell himself, it was to deliver news and gain a couple of karmic points by rescuing baby animals. God knew he could use them. And then there was the illogical, as anything related to the girl in front of him seemed to be. 

“   Went to school with a guy that lives two hours from here, his girlfriend works at some wildlife sanctuary. If we pass them off to her she can get them where they need to go, a bigger place down in Florida. Safer than you and your fucking   ...    gangster Steve Irwin routine.   ”   Hand placed on the back of his head, he gestures to the racket.    

Just as Andy didn’t understand his wife—or the persistent up and downs, mirroring the unpredictable tides of the pacific ocean—Bonnie didn’t understand her either. And sometimes, she wasn’t even convinced the two to be the same person. But decades dull a need for answers, so she settles. Because it’s the one unanswered why that she can still stand.

          “I don’t know.”

She hadn’t really thought it over. She rarely did when the dark clouds dissipated, leaving her mind a lighter shade of grey—revealing someone closer to who she should still be. Only she didn’t know that person either. A moment’s silence, and she weighs her answer. Searching for the obvious amongst the boring, coming up with a response a lot heavier than intended. Reminiscent in a way meant to be bittersweet but the context makes for something sour.

         “What about… Greece.”

“   Greece.   ”   It feels funny, when he says it. Like it’s a word he doesn’t know how to speak, something in a foreign language he can’t quite force his tongue to make the shapes of. He thinks of them: he thinks of them on white sand beaches, staring out at crystalline waters. He thinks of them eating delicious food and fresh fruit and sharing drinks until they were dizzy from alcohol and nauseous from how much they’d eaten, but it didn’t matter because they were happy. He thinks of them walking down the streets of Athens, him finally feeling smart enough to keep her on her toes, to keep up with her with tales he spins of myths and facts about architecture. 

When he thinks of them, there, they’re younger still. He doesn’t know why. The reason that he couldn’t imagine them that happy now sits in the back of his line like a lump in his throat — pained and palpable and unavoidable. Maybe he was a better man then: maybe he was better for her then. Maybe then they’d be built to survive tragedy, before the aches and pains of real adulthood had bloomed across their shoulders and left red-hot branding marks. 

“   I don’t think we could manage a day trip to Greece, Bon.   ”   He says, and he wants to cry for saying it, like it wasn’t already obvious. He doesn’t mean to ruin it, but he still feels like he has to say it. Lest they fly too close to the sun and   ...   well, Bonnie’d heard that one before.   “   A museum with a Greek exibit maybe. A restaurant with some gyros.   ”  

He gives her a crescent moon smile, just the bottom halves of his teeth exposed, like he’s afraid to grin, to feel too good, lest the conversation falter, lest the good mood hemorrhage out of the room, leaving them blood-stained and silent. It’s been so long since they’ve had a good day, that he wants to bear hug it and hold it down, even through fears of smothering it. Sometimes he worries, that he does that, still, to her. Hold her down.

Their respective crowds dictate a Freaky Friday like switch of attitude — her; sweaty palms and sentences stumbled through, and him; a cool facade and borderline flirtatious quips. But she’d never been much for clichés. Or the boys with the sharp tongues and played up indifference. He presents her with options, a first of the night, and her mind is made up.

        “   Well, I suppose I could postpone my inevitable descent into super villainy for one night.   ”     Or an evening spent in the garden, strategically avoiding her mother until her curfew. A time set way too late by Judith dearest. Too lenient with her teenager who never wanted lenience to begin with.      “   Think I need a better grades for that anyway. To get into business school, I mean. Finance, Wall Street, world domination.   ”

A far cry from the plan currently in store. But one still more appealing than the expectations placed on her. Expectations to stay, by any means necessary. And in her mother’s world that translated into methods of domesticity. Husband, kids… No mention of a career in this small town of theirs. And that’s where she lost Bonnie. Maybe there’d been a shot otherwise — if Sheffield didn’t snuff out dreams and ambitions, allowing her to grow rather than to suffocate. 

She wonders, to her disbelief, if she was being too vexatious. Too much Bonnie and not enough Elizabeth. Her repartee considered more of a defect than a gift by most. It’s a most irritating moment of self-consciousness, addressing not only how she was behaving but also how Andy felt about it. The pause taken thus for a moment’s reflection, and candor peeks through.

         “   I love ring pops.   ”

“   Ring pops. Cool. We can do ring pops.   ”   

He focuses on what he does know  —  concession stand snacks  —  and glosses over what he doesn’t, like Wall Street, and the word inevitable. Quickly, he opens the car door, and books it around the other side of the car to open hers for her. Athleticism should make him not breathless, but the sudden burst of movement after a night of loneliness and popcorn make him exhale a sigh. Or well, he’d rather think that than think it’s about nerves. 

He opens and closes his mouth a little like a fish for half their walk there, reminding himself to not fuck this up: act like a gentleman, but let her know you think she’s pretty. Okay, well you can’t just blurt out that she’s pretty. And you cannot ask her back to your place to hang out. You’ll look like a creep that’s trying to get in her pants. Come on, Andy, get with the program. It’s just ring pops, she just wanted to get away from some other idiot...

“   What’s your favorite part, of history?   ”   Fucking idiot...   “   Since you’ve got an A+. I don’t really like war, or anything like that, but I like um, the real old stuff. Like, Greece. I always thought the statues were neat. Or the pictures of ‘em. I’ve never been to Greece.   ”

While Letha hadn’t ever considered herself a morning person, their respective moods prove her otherwise. Taking only moments to wake, she does so in good spirit—one reaffirmed by caffeine and plenty of sugar. Beau, on the other hand, grumpy as ever. If not even more irritable. Still he was there, breakfast in tow, enduring the banter of a peculiar blonde. She imagines herself a Blue Jay, chirping away outside the window of a worker returned home from the night shift. Disruptive but a given. 

           “Trust me, Beau, no one’s confusing you for an optimist.”

She wonders whether or not it’s a direct reference to her interests or rather a general dig. A misogynistic one at that. Still it’s too early for her to ponder the possibilities… Him knowing her, him being sexist, or some combination of the two. She decides it doesn’t really matter. Beau is Beau and everything he says is meant to antagonise. 

         “So, um, what’s with the wake-up call?” And the coffee. Especially the coffee. 

He doesn’t know. Or maybe he does. He’s not heartless, as much as he wants people to think that of him  —   as much as he was Letha to think that of him, though he’d deny he wanted her to think anything. If you asked Beauregard Rochester, the weight of the world rested on his shoulders, and that didn’t mean that he had a lot of time to make friends.   (   Truthfully, it was more like no one wanted to be a part of his friendship. In his experience, anyone that wanted to be spend more than twenty minutes with him wanted something from him. Or ended up hating him. That part, at least, he could understand.   )

But Letha still spoke to him. Letha, who he was worried about, in spite of antagonistic experience  —   maybe he was worried about her, alone outside all night. Maybe he was worried about the stupid fucking alligators she’d gone out of her way to save. He’d never gone out of his way to save ANYONE. Part of Beau didn’t know if he had that: the ability to be anything for anyone, to make a sacrifice, even one as small as getting dirt on your knees and smell like swamp to watch baby alligators all night. Though, as he studied Letha, she looked almost at home here: like this wasn’t a sacrifice to her, but a gift.

He didn’t get that either.

Her pencil taps against the wood of the library’s table  —   she’s already sketched lines between the grain of the wood, trailing the pattern of darkened lines with charcoal, sharpening, and doing it again. It’s mindless, boring, numbing: but anything is better than her Calculus work. 

What kind of photography major has to take Calculus? 

So it’s only out of sheer boredom — not forgiveness of a transgression committed against her  (  really, who abandoned someone on the FIRST DATE?  )  or out of actual interest in talking to him  (  ha, she’d tell herself in the mirror later, trying to stop the twinkle of excitement from creeping into doe eyes, like I care what he thinks...   )   but instead out of that same, painstaking, charcoal boredom. 

“   You see ?   ”   She needs no introduction, at least not to HIM, but likely to   ...   anyone else, placing down the textbook with a loud thunk that earns the dismay of the neighboring table. Sorry, New York Public Library... 

“   Spiderguy stopped a bank robbery yesterday. Like, how does he know that guy wasn’t all Jean Valjean,   ”   Lips quirk, a reference just for him, it’s blink and you’ll miss it affection. She’d poured over Broadway cast recordings the second he’d made a reference to Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.  

An abrasive personality aside, Letha is not high maintenance — something it seems Beau have mistaken her for. Suppose you could still be choosy, living in a home that’s housed generations of blue collars. And you could still be difficult to please, despite expectations of people and things snug tight against the ground. But that’s not her. 

It’s almost a tag line then, for her life and how she’s lived it. You get what you get, and you don’t get upset… She never did. If only the former. Single exception found with the company she keeps. If her father had asked her to put her best foot forward (He had, instructing she stay polite and out of the Rochester’s hair. And she’d agreed. Of course, back then, she hadn’t known just how god awful their son could be.) she had most certainly failed.

Circumflexed brows, a twinge of amusement trails after Beau’s words. It was almost… nice, and he seemed embarrassed by it. Like being kind to Letha Newman was a particularly challenging hardship, most certainly his only. And while it should act an insult, late nights and early mornings disorients her in the direction of delight. 

         “   Thanks.   ”   A murmur of gratitude that was sure to be unexpected, and she reaches into the paper bag; fishing out the sugar and leaving the milk. Old habit, mirroring her father’s — sans the Red Bull to wash it all down. Sugar packet in between teeth, she continues.     “   Didn’t take you for an early worm, Rochester.   ” 

Not that she knew what she took him for. Not someone that would come when she called. Not someone that would bring her coffee in the morning. Yet… Lid opened, sugar poured, and she reaches for another. 

         “   Before I saw your place, I used to think you slept in a coffin. Or upside down, you know… like a bat. But then I realised,   ”     She pauses, not for the sake of dramatics but rather a yawn, and a shake of her head follows.     “   No moats.   ” 

The truth is  —  he doesn’t know her. It’s assumptions and half - truths loosely tied together with the red string that seems to tug him back at her time and time again  (  he knots it around the bullshit he comes up with out of resentment that it’s there at all.  )  It’s jabs thrown like darts, hoping to stick somewhere that hurts. She seems unaffected, and it almost adds to the frustration. He’s easy to read on the surface level, and that’s what counts. What matters isn’t the depths of someone’s personal traumas and secrets and desires, what matters is what they see when they look at you. She looks at him, and she sees a spoiled rich kid incapable of being kind to her, or more than likely, to anyone but other stuck up snot nosed men like him.

He looks at her, and he doesn’t know what he sees. 

For now, he learns something new: packs of sugar dumped into coffee, the little white cups of creamer gone abandoned. It’s a small fact, the kind you only know about a friend, and it’s a strange sensation to know it when they decidedly aren’t. Little facts pieced together, like favorite Disney movies and sugars in her coffee and an affinity for baby alligators work to paint the picture that is Letha Newman, and it’s unnerving that he can see the picture forming in his mind as something real and concrete. As a person. It’s easier to hate someone when you know nothing about them. 

“   I’m not.  ”   He is. Instilled in him from an early age  —  sleeping in is for the lazy, and Rochesters aren’t lazy. Rochesters work; Rochesters thrive.   “   I didn’t take you for an aspiring diabetic.   ”   Eyes flit to the next pack of sugar poured in.