One did not observe Bridey, Milo thought. She observed you. Something inside her did, a regal solitary thing that compelled you to act on its behalf. She’d an air of resignation about her, like she was abiding the real world and might decide to get rid of it altogether.
At night or early in the morning when Jasper’d fallen asleep, Bridey and Milo would stay up and talk; the balcony door open and the sound of the street echoing in the high-ceilinged room, Jasper’s pale body lying sated between them.
Shouts echoed up from the street, then a woman’s angry voice. Far away the minor notes of an ambulance siren stretched past like the bridge of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” then faded into the distance. Bridey laid her head on Jasper’s chest while he slept.
“That’s the sound of them taking Jasper away,” she said, smiling faintly, hair matted from being ground into the mattress.
“Anywhere,” she said, her eyes closed. “Where is good?”
Milo slid his thigh over Jasper’s and propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. It was getting cooler. The shape of her collarbone was set shining against the hollow shadows.
“The sea.”
“Where he can live with the other mermen.” She ran her short, dirty nails over Jasper’s skin and he stirred, breathed heavily in his sleep. Then she reached across and found Milo’s hand, wove her fingers between his.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
The question startled him. There were many reasons and he was sure she knew them all. Jasper’s voice, her strange face. The heat of day. The warm sustained painlessness of drink. The music on the platform. The feeling that everything had already ended and this was the place you go after it’s over. He was there for the sound of Jasper’s breathing, his mouth, his cock. Her eyes upon them. Everything a symbol, a shape replacing the thought that created it. All the words they’d swallowed, the words they couldn’t say. He knew it was the drug of their bodies had him thinking like that night after night. The nearly invisible down on the back of Jasper’s neck had poisoned him. Why was he here? Who would look after Jasper, he thought, if he wasn’t?