Chapter 9: Parker

                                    

                                              
Author's note:
                          
Hey guys.  Hope you've been liking the story so far!  I'm up to 700+ reads, which is insane.  I really didn't think more than 20 people would read this, so I feel very lucky.  Thank you so much for all the comments.  Please feel free to give me feedback, and please don't forget to vote if you like the chapter.



                          
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Parker thought that watching Aggie Caulborn break down crying in front of him was like seeing a sturdy dam crumble and fall apart beneath the sheer force of a natural element.  He wouldn't have thought it was possible had he not seen it with his very own eyes.
                          
    At that moment, he thought perhaps he had breached whatever barrier he had been seeing in her thus far.  Suddenly she wasn't that strange, dark, porcelain perfection.  There were cracks in her demeanor that shined with a bright white light underneath.  She was real.  She might have been the most real thing he had ever seen in his entire life.  
                          
    From that day on, Aggie would appear at the Lighthouse every evening at 3pm, like clockwork.
                          
    Sometimes she'd be sitting on the edge, dangling her feet through the bars of the balcony.  Sometimes she would be leaning against the wall, reading Anna Karenina, with a pen, underlining her favorite parts.  Sometimes she would be holding an expensive looking camera, taking a picture of the view.  Even though there wasn't much to see aside from fog.
                          
    It was around the third day that he realized: she was coming there for him.
                          
    She wasn't nice to him.  In fact, most of the time she was downright mean.  She would always start with an insult.
                          
    "How long have you owned those shoes, Parker?"
                          
    "Took you long enough"
                          
    "You need a haircut"
                          
    "Did you steal that jacket from a homeless person?"
                          
    And every time, he would laugh.  First of all, because she was smiling slightly, and he knew she wasn't serious.  And second, because he was always just a little relieved that she was there.
                          
    He expected every day to be the one that she'd finally lost interest in the lighthouse, in her conversations with him.  But there she was, always.  Smiling before spouting whatever insult she had been waiting to say.
                          
    She would chatter away as he cleaned, telling him stories of her and her sister.  Of things they used to do, places they used to go, jokes she used to tell.  Parker would always prefer listening to her rather than speaking himself (he never felt he had anything interesting to say.)  But she would press him for bits of information about his life.  He told her about his parents and his friends.  He told her about television shows he liked.  About his collection of maps that he had started back in the fifth grade.  All rather mundane topics, but she would listen with all her attention, and even stranger, she would remember nearly every detail of his stories.
                          
    He brought his sketchbook every day to show her what he had been working on.  And when he went home at night, he found himself drawing something new just so he could show it to her the following day.  
                          
    Sometimes, she would grab his mop and start doing his work for him, saying, "I'm much better at this than you.  And I've never worked a real day in my life".  Once she stole his bucket of soapy water and tried to dump it over the edge of the Lighthouse, but he'd gotten it just in time.  He had been irritated, but she'd started laughing so hard that in the end, he had laughed as well.