Re: [The Lake: Atticus & Cass]
You could not run from fate. She had tried. New York. Chicago. Rome. She had tried to wash herself free from its grip, in large cities teeming with people and small places, vast and empty in Iceland, in Norway. You couldn't run from anything that was intended. It would find a chink, a crack and it would force its way through until it was easier all along to just let it run where it would. It was a fatalistic day, before the fate had truly set in, all possible futures running alongside each other like music on a stave. The morning had made up its mind; fatalism.
"I don't think I've ever met an absolute." She said it, considering. It was the lack of an absolute that took away the keys. Absolutes were easier. They were definitive by nature and impossible to pin down. "Have you?" She looked at him, the quiet philosopher who drew through conversation like the paddle on the oar, quietly drawing it back in order. "I've met people who believe in them. But not the thing itself."
The sun beat and beat, and her skin felt hot, all in one piece. She was pale as milk in the cradle of the boat but she hadn't been. She liked heat. Sticky, summer nights and long, gasping days and she drew her fingers out of the water and looked at the back of her hand. He was brown, Atticus. From summer, from living on an island, and she looked along the line of his finger to find a house she couldn't see. She could imagine it, a little.
"So it it just you. With your island. Is that not lonely, or do the creatures act as company?" Cass asked all the things people didn't. She didn't intend to; there were questions that wished to be asked and she asked them. "I don't live anywhere. But I'm staying in town."