Chapter 21 (post five)

Pre-read note: I am so bored... and I know I should be doing my soc readings, but they are so boring! Like, terribly boring! I can't wait until tonight: going to a dance with my bff! Finally something interesting! lol :P 

OMG, I sound like a valley girl! I should shut up now, before I start saying, "Totally!" and "That's so fetch!" 

Chapter twenty-one, section five:

“Here.”

Jake took the knotted string from my fingers and replaced it properly, looping it around my thumb.

“Now pull it tight.”

I stretched it until the Eiffel tower came into view.

“There!”

I laughed. “I’m no good at this!”

“It takes practice.”

“You used to play this all the time?”

Jake nodded, twisting the blue string around my fingers again. “Me and my sisters could make all sorts of things. We used to play games where we could pass the string back and forth until someone messed up. The loser would have to do the winners chores.”

I smiled. “You were close to them?”

Jake nodded, his eyes locked on the task before him. “Really close,” he said slowly as he finished looping the string through my pale fingers. Gently taking my wrists, he moved my hands until a teacup appeared.

“Lovely,” I said.

“It really is,” he smiled, looking me in the eye.

I smiled and shook my head. “Show me another one,” I said as I passed him the string.

He quickly and easily set off on a slideshow of images. Butterfly, dog, yoyo, something I didn’t catch.

“What’s this called again?” I asked.

“Cat’s cradle.”

“Why is it called that?”

“I have no idea,” he laughed.

“You know everything though!” I nudged him, smiling.

“That’s not true,” he said, wrapping the string into a neat ball and placing it in the space on the blanket in-between us. “That’s not true at all. I don’t know all the answers.”

“I used to think that after you died, everything would be explained, you know?” I looked from Jake to the ocean, where the waves were slowly pulsing onto the shore. “I thought there would be finality and ... I don’t know, ending.”

“But the end of one thing is just the beginning of something else.”

I contemplated this thought, watching the clouds and ocean mesh at the thin seam-line of the horizon. Jake touched my arm, and when I turned his way, he looked me right in the eye.

“I am really, truly sorry,” Jake said slowly, “About everything.”

“Everything?”

“This wasn’t the way things were planned. You aren’t supposed to remember your past or that you even existed before this place.”

“But you can.”

“It’s complicated, really complicated. But I’ve been prepared. You just got thrown into all this.”

I wanted to tell him that it was fine, but that would have been a lie. So rather I looked down at the place where his hand was still touching my arm, and said nothing. Jake moved in closer, then took his arms and wrapped them around me.

“It will all be ok, though. I wish I could explain this world to you, but I can’t. You just have to trust me that it’s going to be ok.”

I wanted to trust him, and I did, but at the same time I felt as though he was holding something back, something that I wondered if I would ever get to know.