Chapter 6 #3
My chest aches. I can barely swallow through the knot in my throat. His unrelenting kindness, his unquestioning understanding—reality crashes in all at once.
I’m going to lose him. Wanting anything is a weakness, and like an idiot, I’ve opened up my heart to taking punches. Tomorrow, in a month, in three, either he’ll be gone or I will be.
The sour electricity on my tongue evaporates, replaced with rot and ash. I turn away. I break the moment because I can’t stand to keep it and be the one to lose it later. Forcing a half-hearted smirk, I shrug.
“A last kind act before my inevitable execution?”
“Beheading in the public square,” Bas agrees and gently, so heartbreakingly gently, thumbs the streak of lipstick at my throat.
I should scrounge the makeup wipes out of my bag, scour the evidence of today off my skin.
I should throw out these half-eaten chips, abandon our sour-straw swords, but I—I don’t want to.
I know better—know it will only lead to worse pain later—but you know what?
For once, I’d rather risk a little. This day was too perfect not to seize it by the throat and hold on to it with my teeth, even if it kills me.
Reaching out, I tangle my fingers in his.
“You can walk me to the cul-de-sac sign, but probably not any farther than that,” I tell him. “My executor’s gonna be ax happy. I don’t want her turning it on you.”
Bas smiles, something in it solemn. He says, “I can take her,” and it sounds like a promise.
“Maybe,” I agree. “But I don’t want you to.”
Something in his smile changes. His grip slackens, shoulders pulling back. “What, embarrassed?”
“No!” I grip him tighter without meaning to, and God help me, he notices.
His eyes flicker to our joined hands and my face practically combusts.
Glancing away, skin burning up the back of my neck and into my hairline, I clear my throat.
Maybe let’s try that again without looking like I wanna eat the guy alive, jeez.
“No. It’s just… my mom has this way of ruining everything.
Like, it’s compulsive. She’ll just pick, pick, pick at everything until it looks like something it’s not. ”
We emerge from the woods, spilling out onto a side street, its gas streetlamps just now sighing awake.
“So what is it then?” Bas asks. The firelight flickers in his black eyes, its warped reflection scattering into a sea of stars.
I have to remember how to breathe before I answer him.
“You’re just the first good thing that’s happened to me in years.”
Shit—too honest. I wince, but Bas just laughs, head tipped back, flipping damp gray hair off his forehead.
“Well, that’s new. Not used to being a good thing.”
“Really?” I sneak a glance at the inviting curve of his smile in the setting sun, try not to think about kissing him again. But Bas looks at me and I’m not hiding anything. I swear he already knows. “What are you usually?”
He grins, shrugs.
“I’m the harbinger of death,” he says, perfectly serious, and holds out his arm like an old-fashioned gentleman.
I take it, looping us together at the elbow.
Even through his hoodie, his heat envelops me, closer than a kiss.
The ache of an un-memory pulses where my heart should be, a clear bell echoing—
(Home, home, home)
Slipping his free hand into his pocket, Bas hits play on a new song.
We dance to it between gas lamps, making up the steps between fireflies, a parade of hungry sparks trailing in our wake until our ragtag procession glows bright enough to cast shadows on the houses, on the ratty sign that reads Golden Fields Private Community.
We pause there, fingers tangled.
“I see you,” I whisper, into the deepening dark.
It feels like a coin down a wishing well, silence after a long fall. Too little. Too late.
Bas doesn’t say anything, the silence grown too heavy to break. He just offers me a smile, soft and a little sad.
When his hand leaves mine, the ghost parade goes fluttery and vague again.
Many of them dissolve into the night, fragmenting back to wherever their death loop started.
Hollowed out and aching, I watch them and him go, a cold wind threatening winter rustling through my hair, heavy with the ozone scent of dead things—leaves and little ghosts caught in the current, tissue paper fragile, clogging up the gutters.
My eyes sting. Feeling like a lone mourner at an unfinished funeral, I whisper good night to Bas and walk away.
It takes me a whole block to outrun the feeling that I’ve left a crucial part of my own body behind.
Another block for me to get my head on straight, start running tactics for the coming battle.
I walk the third block to my house—an identical house in a sea of oatmeal boxes distinguishable only by the ancient RV rotting in the driveway—taste-testing plausible lies.
By the time I walk up the driveway, I’ve steeled myself. I’m ready.
Unfortunately, as with most battle plans, it all falls apart on contact with the enemy.