“Oh.” I look up at him. “What did happen to the Jolly Roger?”
“I d?nnae ken.” He shakes his head. “It’s just gone—disappeared.” He shrugs. “It disappeared before he died, actually. Bit o’ a sad demise.” He looks far away when he says that, and I want to reach over and touch his hand, and then I wonder who that hand has touched and how many times since I saw him last, so I do nothing.
We’re around the back of summer now, the edge of the island. It’s a sharp drop-off into the bluest, clearest water I’ve ever seen. More so than on our side of the island. There’s an honesty to this shade of blue—a trueness to it that makes my heart spark in a funny way.
“I heard yer his girlfriend,” Jamison says a bit suddenly, and I look over at him.
I frown. “How did you hear that?”
He shrugs. “Word travels.”
“Yes.” I nod. “It does. And I think his are empty.”
His face pulls a little. “So y’are?”
I purse my mouth. “So he says.”
He nods a few times and doesn’t look at me when he asks, “What does that look like?”
I glance at him, confused (or, in the very least, thrown) by the question.
“Ye…what?” he fishes. “Ye share a bed?”
I lift my shoulders mindlessly. “We always have.”
His eyebrows dip in the centre, a quiet frustration present. “Yer fucking him now then?”
I stare over at him. My mouth falls open, and I say nothing.
I hated hearing him say that. It was awful, that word in his mouth in that particular way. About me, no less? I don’t want to hear him say that about me. The back of my neck goes immediately hot.
Jamison takes my silence as a yes, and he breathes out in a way that makes me wonder for a second if the thought hurt him.
“No,” I tell him quickly.
“No?” he repeats. “Why no’?”
I stare at him for a good couple of seconds—any seconds spent looking at Jamison are good seconds, I think, maybe?—and then I look back down at the water.
“Why is the water so blue here?” I nod at it.
His eyes don’t immediately move from me. They stay a couple seconds more than they probably should before he speaks again.
“Compared to yer planet, do ye mean?” He sniffs. “We d?nnae throw our shit in it.”
“No, I mean”—I give him a look—“it is exceptionally blue.”
“Aye.” He nods mostly with his chin, watching me closely. “Sometimes things are just extraordinarily beautiful fer no reason at all.”
A breeze dances over my face that reminds me of a thing I think I forgot, and I frown trying to remember exactly what it was, because I feel as though perhaps it’s a thing I should know—?
Jamison takes that to mean I found his answer unsatisfactory. However, the truth is I find nothing about him unsatisfactory, at least what I am beginning to remember.
“They say this is where the colour blue comes from.” He nods at it. “That this here is the original deposit from the start o’ the universe, and then the fae carry it out to the other places.” A little shrug. “Thon’s why it’s so concentrated here.”
“Oh,” I say, because what else can you say to that? I clear my throat, nodding at him. “I like your coat. Is it new?”
His brows tug. “No?”
“Oh.” I keep walking.
“Ye’ve worn it before,” he calls after me, and I stop, turning to face him.
“Have I?” I ask.
He stares at me a few seconds, and then he blinks in this funny way, as though he’s annoyed or tired. “Ye went to the place in the sky.”
I nod. “Yes.”
He nods slowly. “Ye put things away o’ me?”
“I guess,” I say quietly.
His mouth turns down at the edges, like a shrug, and then he moves past me, walking ahead.
“You go up there,” I tell him.
“Everyone does.” He shakes his head, not looking back. “But I’d never put away a thought about you.”
I stop walking.
“Liar,” I say with some authority.
He turns back to look at me, eyebrows up. “What?”
“I know you have,” I tell him, brows daring.
Jamison walks back quickly and right up into my face. “Ye went through my baggage?”
I shake my head quickly.
“Then how do ye ken?”
“I could tell.” I stare up at him, my eyes big and kind of afraid. I don’t think he’d hurt me, but I sort of feel as though I’m going toe-to-toe with a storm.
“By the shape.” I swallow. “How it looked—I don’t know.” I shake my head. “It felt like it called me.”
He glares at me for this, like I already know too much. “Ye d?nnae know what I put away,” he tells me as he shakes his head, right up in my face. “Whatever ye put away o’ me and what I did, it’s no’ the same thing.” His eyes drag over my face. “There’s nothing about ye I want to forget,” he says before he turns and keeps walking.
“That’s evidently not true,” I call after him.
“Ye d?nnae ken o’ what ye speak,” he calls back, and I frown even though he’s not looking at me to even care.
We walk in a prickly silence after that. Mostly just dotted with “careful’s” and “it’s slippery here’s” and “d?nnae touch that, it’s poison’s,” things like that. That’s all it is for hours between us, but I don’t mind because I’m using the time to remember what’s in those bags that I put away. Something about a coat, obviously. I remember that now. He put a coat on me. But why did I care about it? And snow or something? And there was another? Something about family? His family? And one more that escapes me— I feel I’m on the cusp of remembering it right as we get to the mouth of a cave.
Jamison looks back at me. He still looks a bit cross with me, if I’m honest.
“The Carnealian Mouth,” he tells me as he trots down a few rocks on a beach at low tide.
He offers me his hand to help me down, and I’ll be honest with you—I do think about not taking his hand. Maybe that’s what I should have done.
It’s easier if I don’t remember things with him. And I think, perhaps, if I didn’t take his hand, he’d have stayed angry with me the whole time we were in the volcano, and it might have made for an overall wiser trip.
But I’m eighteen, and it’s not wisdom that I want for my birthday, so I take it. A wave crashes loudly on the face of the cliff right by us, and my hand stays in his a few seconds longer than it needs to before we each snatch our respective hands away.
I gesture at the entrance. “After you.”
He nods, and I follow him in.
It’s dark instantly and humid and rather difficult to see—though not impossible—and then I trip on something.
“Ouch!” I cry, looking over my shoulder, glaring at the nothing I tripped on.