Chapter Five
Eve smiled and stood up to give Hyde air, and sat on the lounge chair next to him. I dismounted and moved beside her. Hyde, for his part, looked perfectly content.
“Did you…” I trailed off, unsure how to ask him.
He nodded, “And there’s no mess from me, plus no risk of pregnancy.”
“Like a strap with extra steps,” Eve mused.
Hyde and I chuckled at the sentiment. Eve and I laid back on the lounge chair, it was wide enough for us to lay together, arms holding each other, legs entwined.
For a while, we just looked at each others faces.
It felt like she was committing mine to memory, and I tried not to worry about the sense urgency I felt.
Her studying me like this, like I was a painting at a museum she wanted to take home but couldn’t.
As if we were approaching a goodbye. I closed my eyes and focused on the moment we were in, the post orgasm high, the flood of relaxation in my veins, the slight buzzing from the Fireball.
Eve’s slow and steady breathing, blowing warm air on my cheek.
The cool summer night, the gentle lapping of the water in the pool, and the wonderful way my body felt, it is no surprise I fell asleep. The quiet was interrupted by Hyde’s voice, “What time is it?”
Eve and I jolted awake. She disentangled our limbs and stood up.
The woven fabric cover on the lounge chair had left a crossing pattern along her ass and back.
I wanted to run my fingers along it, to kiss each indentation.
Before I could, Eve walked away, over to her phone in her pile of clothes to check the time.
I sat up and crossed my legs, suddenly cold and my hair had dried in sections like ropes ready to be wound.
“Fuck,” Eve said, grabbing her clothes and getting dressed.
“It’s almost sunrise.” Shame at my nakedness rose up and I briskly walked over to my pile of clothes at the other end of the pool and put my shirt and underwear on.
Hyde was already dressed, he must have put his clothes on while we were asleep.
When I approached him, he was standing near the fence with the jasmine in full bloom, deeply inhaling. “I hope I remember this,” he whispered.
Eve and I grabbed his hands. “Are you scared?” Eve asked.
Hyde shook his head. “I’m just grateful,” he turned to me, “Thank you for spilling that lemonade on my control panel. I hope I did a good job helping you.”
“You did,” I told him. The sun was starting to paint the night sky in shades of pink and purple.
“Maybe there’s something we can do?” Suddenly it didn’t seem right.
“I mean,” I look at Eve, “He’s alive, and maybe he wasn’t always and maybe he never was meant to be, but he is now and we can’t just let him…
” die. My voice faltered at the last word.
Eve looked at me, tears welled up on her bottom lid like audiences in a viewing room. “Will it hurt?”
“Don’t worry about me, ladies,” Hyde soothed us.
“I just want you both to remember one thing.” He stepped back and we turned to fill the space he had vacated.
Eve and I held hands as well, making a small triangle between the three of us.
“Remember that we only have the time we are given. Life is too short to leave it with what ifs and should haves. If you have a wish, grab it by the horns. And enjoy the ride.” The sun was about to crest over the horizon, Hyde turned his face toward it.
“We’ll stay with you,” Eve said. I could hear the fear in her voice.
Hyde shook his head and kissed each of us on the cheek. “It’ll be over and it will be okay. You have the rest of your lives together and I will be a shared memory between you. But in reality, I was never really here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t that just happen?” I looked over at the lounge chair.
“A wish come true,” Hyde said, “a magical lemonade, and a minor potion of illusion.” Hyde smiled and faded, for a moment I swear I saw purple and the drawn eyeliner stars. The bartender.
I staggered backwards. “You, what are you?”
Hyde’s voice and the bartender’s voice blended together. “Just someone who loves love.” And then a sudden gust of wind kicked up dust. Eve and I shielded our eyes at the onslaught of the dirt. When we looked again, the sun had made it’s debut for the morning and Hyde was gone.
“What the hell?” Eve stuttered. It was impossible, and yet it had happened just before our eyes. Eve stepped back, away from the spot Hyde had been, away from me. I swallowed the lump in my throat, trying not to read too much into the distance she had created between us.
It felt like a crack had formed in the bond between us, and that crack caused a structural uncertainty. I was desperate to push the pieces back together before they splintered, but I was also aware that the wrong kind of pressure would only speed up the destruction.
“We should check the trailer,” I said, my voice a distant hoarse whisper.
She turned and walked over to the trailer.
Slowly, I followed her. My hesitant pace was a juxtaposition against my racing mind.
Had everything been an illusion? What was real?
What wasn’t? Eve and I had sex, we had been physically intimate and all the walls were down.
She had said she loved me, but now reality was crashing back in, Hyde had vanished, and Eve was walking away from me.
How could I be sure it wasn’t just the magic twisting my wish into something that would hurt me?
I watched Eve’s tense shoulders relax when she looked into the trailer. “Well, everything is back to normal in there,” she said.
Back to normal? Was she trying to tell me something here? Was she wanting to wrap everything up and leave it in the past? Just because Hyde was back to being a mechanical bull, was I supposed to act like it never happened?
“That’s good,” I said. And it was. At least, it was good that the machine was all as it should be.
Silence hung around us, the morning bird song might as well have been a million miles away. It couldn’t penetrate the bubble around Eve and I; just us and this huge unspoken thing between us.
What did you wish for?
“Eve,” I started the same time she said, “Mady.”
“You first,” Eve said as she lit a cigarette. A nervous habit. Something to steady herself.
I wished I smoked for just a minute. “We should talk about it,” I said.
Eve blew out a puff of smoke, “Yeah.” A moment passed before she continued, “I mean, I had a good time.”
“Me too,” I agreed, eager to find common ground.
“I mean, it was insane, right? Like, a mechanical bull?” She pointed back at the trailer with her thumb over her shoulder. I nodded. “And honestly, I don’t know,” she flipped her hair back over her shoulder, “I feel like it was something we were building towards for a while. I don’t regret it.”
“Me either,” my heart was in a vice. I could barely breathe.
“I wouldn’t take it back for anything.” I closed the distance.
“You asked me what I wished for?” Eve’s eyes were glassy.
“I wished for a chance, to tell you how I feel, to see,” I interlace my fingers with her empty hand, “to see if we had a chance to be together.”
“Oh, Mady,” Eve whispered. I didn’t give myself the chance to spiral, to decipher if her voice was coated in pity or if it was raw with emotion.
“Loving you is part of who I am, it’s the easiest thing.
I don’t even have to think about it, like breathing or blinking.
You are my best friend. We are two parts of one whole, and I don’t regret anything that happened tonight.
” I gave her hand a squeeze, and when she squeezed it back I was steadied.
“There is one thing, though, in all of this that I wish I could change,” I said.
Eve’s glassy eyes at this point had divulged into tears, a single one on either side of her face, nearly symmetrical. “And what’s that?” She choked out.
I raised her hand to my lips, rotating her wrist and gently kissing the vulnerable soft center of her inner wrist. “I regret waiting so long to tell you, that my one heart’s desire, my wish, will always be the opportunity to love you. Fully. Proudly. Out loud and wild.”
With that, Eve closed the distance, her cigarette on the floor to fizzle out and her lips on mine.
Her smokey breath, her electric touch. I rested into the kiss; I would never ever take this for granted.
“I have been in love with you since that first summer when we raised pigs together. I would think of how I could get close enough to hold your hand, but I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.
After a while, I just assumed I imagined the spark between us, you never seemed interested. ”
I laughed, “I was trying to hide my feelings for you because I love you too much to risk you!”
Eve kissed me again. “You don’t have to do that anymore.”
The sun, fully risen, shone against her black and blue hair. “Come on,” I told her, “I’m taking you out for breakfast.”