53. Bowen
Bowen
The condensation on the mirror blurs my reflection. I can make out my dark hair, dark brows and beard. It’s not until I swipe my hand, smearing through the fogged glass, that I get to come face to face with myself.
Sometimes I lock eyes and forget it’s my own I’m looking at.
I never thought Brett and I looked all that much alike until I was all that was left to look at. Time has its way with memory, leaving behind a dimmed version of what we got in reality. Looks a lot more like me that way.
I don’t always wipe the glass.
Some days, I do, and don’t bat an eye.
Some days, I look at the face of my brother and feel like I’m going to puke.
Have fucking puked.
On my worst days, I talked to my reflection like I was talking to him. I yelled. I screamed. My first days in the cabin were a fever dream. Years of mostly pent-up grief and fear tore me down until I stumbled in here on the edge of sanity.
I had never been so scared in my life as I was two years ago.
Before the wooden walls of the cabin held me in, I walked the planks of the dock to the end and dreamed of stepping off. I closed my eyes and envisioned the water embracing me. Lulling me in its quiet peace, pulling me down to the deepest part, and holding me there until the pain stopped.
A crow squawking overhead snapped me out of my daydream, one foot dangling over the edge. I haven’t considered going in once since.
Today, I see myself. Just me.
My breath is steady as I cover my cheeks with shaving cream. I go through the process and pretend it's just another day.
Hard to do, though, when Kit is singing some sad indie folk shit out in the hall. My face splits into a grin when his voice cracks on a powerful note. My heart fucking jolts when I see the reflection of it.
He belts out something about your needs and my needs, then follows up with a truly horrendous guitar riff that sounds something like, “nurrr nur nur nur nurrrr nur nur nur nununununu….” Whatever is left of the smile slips off when his singing is abruptly cut off by a loud bang and him yelling.
The bathroom door bounces off the wall with a crack when I whip it open. My bedroom door is already wide open, though, and I see Kit in the hallway in a heap on the floor. The contents of the cupboard are scattered all over the floor around him.
“What the fuck, Kit?” The rhythm thumping wildly in my chest doesn’t feel right until his hazel eyes find mine from the floor.
They’re wide as they take me in. “Why are you always wet and naked?” he asks. Well, yells because he still has headphones over his ears.
Rolling my eyes, I crouch, holding the towel in place around my waist with one hand and use the other to move the headphones off his head. My heart is pumping double time.
“Stop screaming. What are you doing?”
“Trying to reach the light bulbs,” he says, cheeks red.
He spends a stretched-out moment staring at my chest before he looks up at the top shelf and points.
“Why are they so high up? Dad always kept them on the bottom shelf. Did you know the shelves are just…sitting there? They’re not even anchored in. Just sitting on the little ridges.”
“Did you try to climb my shelves?”
“They were mine first,” he grumbles, then melts onto his back on the floor. “Just leave me here, Boe. The wave has come and gone. I was going to be helpful, but all the helpfulness was knocked out of me.”
Boe. I swallow roughly and rub my chest.
I like him on his back.
His hair falls away from his face.
“Want me to cover you with a washcloth?”
“Is it the one you’re wearing?”
“It’s not a washcloth,” I say, standing and quirking a brow down at him. He looks like he’s posing for a chalk outline.
Death by towel avalanche.
The joke falls flat, even in my own head. Don’t like joking about that.
“Are you sure? Looks a little small,” he teases. His eyes are somewhere in the vicinity of my dick, and his smile is bitten away by his teeth in his bottom lip. God, he’s so fucking obvious.
I turn on my heel. “You’re small.”
Nice comeback, moron.
So much for him wilting away on the floor—Kit follows me into my bedroom. “What are you doing today? Ya know, besides grumbling and size shaming me.”
The closet door creaks when I push it open.
I desperately need to do laundry. I snatch whatever my hand touches first, then grab what I need from my dresser.
“I’ve got shit to do.” I shrug into a t-shirt and step into black boxers without taking the towel off.
When the goods are covered, I grab the towel and toss it to Kit.
He holds it with both hands, looking down at it with a perplexed look. “The hamper, Kit.”
“Right.”
“There’s supposed to be a storm rolling in tonight. I want to make sure the gutters around back are cleared out.”
“Oh? Can I help?”
An image of Kit and his two left feet climbing a ladder is enough to give me fucking indigestion.
“Fuck, no.”
“Rude. Why are you so rude?” He tosses the towel into the hamper.
It slides off the mountain of clothes and plops onto the floor.
He shoots me a disgruntled look that he perfected as a child, then drags the hamper out of the bedroom door and into the hallway.
“I think that raccoon moved his family into Fiona. I saw one of them this morning at the end of a trail of garbage. I will absolutely clean it all up, by the way. I can’t believe… .”
I watch him talk, but my ears are whooshing too loud for me to hear him.
All I can do is watch as he talks with his hands between adding articles of clothes to the washer.
My clothes. He laughs at something he says, tossing in detergent pods he has to reach for on the shelf.
A sliver of pale skin peeks out the bottom of his shirt above the waistband of his shorts.
I think they get shorter every day.
“Bowen?”
“Yeah?”
“Is that okay?”
“Whatever,” I say, grabbing my phone. I have no clue what the fuck I just agreed to, but Kit looks damn pleased by it.
I leave my wet hair down but grab a hair tie and my phone before heading out.
I can feel him trailing behind me all the way to the shed. It’s another cloudy day, but not the fluffy white ones. Gray clouds are hanging low, only breaking in small streaks of faded blue. I can already smell the coming rain and feel it in the thick air.
Two hours later, the gutters are cleared. Kit was the designated ladder holder—his words—once I again told him there was no chance of him climbing up. But I had apparently agreed to hang out with him.
That’s why we’re here now, Kit crouched on the warped section of fence I pulled from the old garden. He’s holding the power drill, pretending he knows what the hell he’s doing with it.
He jumps when he pulls the trigger and huffs. “This is not my strong suit,” he grumbles, squinting at the nail he was meant to aim for. “In case that wasn’t abundantly clear. I swear I wasn’t lying about doing this kind of stuff when I was…gone, though. I did. I just never said I was good at it.”
I don’t look up from where I’m measuring a clean board a few feet away. “It was abundantly clear when you held the drill upside down.”
“That never happened.”
“That was this morning.”
Kit huffs and sets down the drill, falling back on his butt. “This does not feel like the domestic, soft, woodland labor I thought it would be. This feels a little too…manly.”
I finally look up to give him a deadpan look. “You specifically asked to help. You threatened to call my mom if I didn’t let you try using the drill.”
Kit shoots me a glare, but his hazel eyes are dancing with humor.
He huffs dramatically again while getting on his hands and knees and snatching the drill back up.
His back swoops in at the base, t-shirt gapping under him and exposing a glimpse of his taunt stomach.
He’s got the tip of his tongue poking out, lining it up.
“Alright, Captain Carpentry, how’s this? ”
I clear my throat and look away from the slow sway of his hips as he scoots back a little to get the right angle.
“The nail would make it to where it needs to go a hell of a lot easier if you used the right tool.” He frowns at the tip of the drill then down at the nail.
His eyes scan the tools he scattered around him, and they light up when he sees the hammer.
He crawls over to snatch it up, then back to where he was.
“I’m gonna nail this so good.”
“You’re gonna hammer your thumb.”
“Oh, so much confidence, Boe. I’m positively thriving under your guidance.” He lines it up…
And then he hisses and sits back on his heels, the hammer clattering on the wood beneath him. He looks down at his thumb and then sucks it into his mouth and looks at me like it’s my fault.
I drop what I’m doing and walk over to him, crouching.
“Let me see.”