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Alex can’t sleep.
It’s always been like this when he first arrives at the lake house. The buzz of the city is still in him, rattling around in his chest until his body adjusts to the pace of life at the lake house.
But he’s been at the lake house for ages, and he still hasn’t adjusted, the truth of the matter even clearer here than back in the city. He should have seen this coming.
He’s known for a long time that the lake house is good for getting away from everything except himself.
*
Jack does not have this problem. He’s snoring away in his favourite dog bed by the window. Alex envies how utterly unfazed Jack is about everything, even as he recognizes how stupid that feeling is.
Jack is a dog. Jack does not have to wrestle with living up to his father’s expectations or the sudden, undeniable truth that time travel exists in the form of the lake house’s mailbox.
Jack heaves a great sigh and he twists onto his back and resumes snoring, even louder than before.
Alex tosses the covers off him and hauls himself out of bed.
*
Alex loves the lake house, but he loves it even more at night. The floor to ceiling windows make it feel like he’s walking directly between the stars and the still lake, suspended between them as if by magic instead of architecture.
It is otherworldly, a singular experience that only the lake house can provide.
He walks barefoot into the kitchen and fires up the lake house’s distinctly unmagical coffee maker. He has the foresight to make himself decaf, but he does not have the strength to stop himself from wishing he was making coffee for two.
*
His loneliness has more room to spread out here, filling the lake house to the glass windows and out into the lake and forest beyond.
Alex doesn’t remember being lonely before Kate’s letters started showing up. Not like this.
*
Alex sits at the kitchen table and thinks about how strange it is that Kate both has and hasn’t been here. From when he is, she hasn’t yet sat in this very chair and sipped her morning coffee (milk, two sugars) as the sun rises over the lake. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s happened for her. She told him all about it in one of her letters, because she’s already been here.
Kate remembers things that haven’t happened yet.
No wonder Alex can’t sleep.
Sometimes Alex wonders how long he’d have to stay at the lake house for Kate to join him here. He wants nothing more than for their timelines to intersect, which he figures eventually they must. There is only two years between them.
Two years isn’t so long to wait…
Alex puts down his mug and gets up. He tries to tell himself that he’s going back to bed, but he wanders over to the front door and unceremoniously jams his feet into his shoes instead.
*
The mailbox is empty, as Alex knew it would be. Kate lives in the city. She has to travel to the lake house to reply to his letters (and Alex is grateful every day that she does) but he knows better than to expect to have a letter waiting for him in the midnight hours of a Thursday morning.
Kate’s a doctor. She’s probably working, saving lives two years in the future while Alex stares at an empty mailbox in the middle of the night.
But knowing the mailbox would be empty doesn’t stop the pang of disappointment he feels when he confirms that it is.
*
Kate hasn’t written to him since the weekend. Alex has already read it so many times he can recite it word for word.
Kate had told him all about her favourite trail through the woods near the lake house. About how much she enjoyed walking through the footpath through the tall grass on sunny afternoons. You should check it out, she had written. It starts over by the three big rocks to the left of the lake house. Jack knows the way.
So Alex had gone to investigate, letter in hand, Jack bounding along beside him.
He found the three big rocks immediately.
There was no path.
And Jack was just as lost as he was.
The realization struck like lightning a moment later.
*
It’s only been a few days since Alex got that letter, but he’s already walked the path Kate described through the woods and tall grass with Jack a dozen times at least.
Alex has half a mind to go collect Jack and a flashlight and walk the route again right now. He wants it to be ready for when Kate gets here. If he has to walk the path ten times a day until Kate arrives, he will.
He tries to take comfort in the fact that he knows, he already knows, the route he walks is her favourite trail in the whole world, but it’s not enough.
More than once he’s asked Jack to show her the way when the time comes.
*
Alex lingers by the empty mailbox until the chill of the still air has seeped into his bones. He knows it’s time for him to go back inside, to go back to bed, to go to sleep, but still he waits.
He can’t help it.
*
Eventually, very eventually, he follows the painted paw prints Jack left back to the lake house.
He takes off his shoes. He yawns. He knows he should go to bed, if only because the thick blankets will be a welcome change from the night air.
He doesn’t.
*
Alex finds himself at the kitchen table, all of Kate’s letters spread out in front of him. He looks over her most recent letter yet again and her words warm him from the inside out.
He picks up a pen and tries to craft his reply.
He starts and stops and starts again.
Crosses his words out, crumples the paper and tosses it aside.
Grabs a fresh sheet.
Thinks of Kate.
Tries again.
*
After god knows how long, all he’s managed is I wish you were here, scrawled across the top of another blank page.
Is it possible to miss someone he’s never met?
(The other question, the one that presses against the inside of his ribcage every time he thinks of her with that ache in his chest he’s come to associate with her name, he dares not ask.)
*
Alex returns to bed no less restless than he left, and infinitely lonelier.
He thinks of Kate still.
(He thinks of Kate always.)
With his cock hard in his hand, two years feels like an awfully long time to wait.