Chapter 4

• Bryce sat on the rock well into the morning staring at the cottage. She had seen him, he would swear it. How was that possible? No one in however many years he’d been wandering onto the shore had ever seen him! Why her? Why now when he’d finally decided being seen wasn’t as important as it had been. Why would she show up now and give him—hope? He looked down at the cup lying in the sand, the proof that she had seen him before she practically run back inside. For an all of three seconds he had thought of calling out to her, just to see if she could hear him as well. Now what? Did he just sit here all day and wait for the mist the next dawn and hope she came wandering out? Not many roamed around outside that early in the morning at this time of year.
• Even knowing he was about as visible as air right now he stayed on the rock and watched the window, she had wandered by a few times and even paused once and stared right out at him—but the fact that her facial expression didn’t look freaked out told him she wasn’t still seeing him. Did he want her to? Maybe there was something wrong with her. That could be why she was the first person in, well he was going to bounce the number of thirty years out into the universe and call it truth—that had seen him. If there was something wrong with anyone, it was likely that it was him.
• For a moment he wished he could smoke some of the grass in his pocket, if it was even still there—not that he could check because in his present he couldn’t touch a flippin thing, so inhaling what he couldn’t touch was probably just one more reason he had to be down in the mouth. Then again if his memories were accurate it was the weed that had gotten him into this bind in the first place.
• All he could really remember was Glory or Gabby, whatever her name had been had ended up right pissed with him and no matter how many years penance he did he could never quite understand what had happened to make her that way. Although he had to admit that at the time he had been totally baked, so the details tended to be a little foggy if not completely dimmed right out.
• He watched her come out of the cabin with gloves in one hand and gardening tools in the other. Deciding he had absolutely nothing to rush away to, he stayed and watched her as she worked on the flower beds. It brought a smile to his face, something he hadn’t done in a long, long while to see the way she mumbled and hesitated over each plant making it more than obvious that she didn’t know the first thing about flowers.
• Bryce continued to sit and watch as she worked her way through each bed. It still haunted him why she was here and how had she managed to see him. It hadn’t been that long ago—or it could have been a decade for all sense of time he had now— that he had finally decided to pass the time wandering endlessly, unseen or heard until his form was corporeal once more for that brief time when the mist rolls over the water. Of course it wasn’t actually corporeal, more like discernible and not really flesh, but he’d take that too.
• For at least what had to of been a month he thought of nothing but what the girl had screamed at him while he lay on the shore laughing. He hadn’t been laughing at her, just fried up with a well baked brain. The fact that she probably thought he had been laughing at her declaration of deep earthly love for him is where things had gotten a little aggressive.
• Bryce had replayed the parts he could recall her saying hourly for days and the best he could make it all out was he had to find an injured, or maybe it was a hurt woman, that had to also find something. And—well this is where the facts blurred together a bit, but she had to either hold him or whatever it was she needed to find in her heart, or it could have been with her heart—but that made no sense at all. The end gist was after those things happened he would be released from this endless curse. An impossible feat, but for the most part one he was willing to try until eternity tired of his melancholic presence and squished him out of total existence.
• All in all it had been a long tedious road to this point with no turns what so ever—until this morning when she had looked right at him with both disbelief and dismay on her face. It may not have been a positive cosmic vibe but it was a hell of a lot more than he’d had in all the years he had been waiting and wandering.
• Before he was filled with that woe feeling that plagued him daily, after all spending an eternity with no one but yourself got to you after a few years, he turned back to study her. This hadn’t been a huge past time of his, most of the time when there were people around he wandered the other way. After all they represented the one thing he wasn’t – there. With her though it was different, she was somehow different than all the others. What was it about her?
• There wasn’t anything in particular that stood out about her. She seemed to be an average height and build. He pinned her age somewhere close to thirty that much about women hadn’t changed that he couldn’t guess an age range and be pretty close to right. Her hair was a mousy brown, for lack of a better way to describe it, and she had it all chopped up like scissors had randomly been placed wherever and cut—he liked it, it was original. He didn’t know what the current in thing was, so it may not be all that original. He wasn’t close enough to see her eyes, but thinking about when they were huge and staring in his direction, he was fairly certain they were brown. So she was very much average across the scales—but what was it about her that just kept him sitting here on this rock, not that he felt his body against it, watching her.
• There were choices here, at least a few. He could sit here and continue doing what he was doing until night came, bringing morning closer. That would get a few bits past boring if she went back inside again and didn’t return. The second option was to go wander around the lake and pass the time with more speed than he was doing now. Grinning, he shook his head—because making time go faster had worked out so well for him in the last decade, or two.
• Getting up, he started towards her but paused before moving more than a few feet. What would it bring him to get closer and watch her? Making the decision before he could change his mind, he turned and headed straight for the water. Waiting out the day for her to turn and see him again was a fantastic way to cause his own insanity—again.