CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN #2
“How does that work with three of us, unless Jonah eats two like last time?” Penn asked before the girl could inquire about me. I gaped at the total spectrum shift of his voice, free of gravel and sleep.
The guy (Jonah, I figured) made a stop sign with one hand. “Last time it ended very, very badly. So, no thanks.”
“Just checking,” Penn told him over a sly smile. “You owe me for Friday, so bring me back two barbecue burgers so I can take one to work tonight.”
When the blonde hooked her arm into Jonah’s, nuzzling close, my heart winged a little.
(She was his girlfriend, not Penn’s.) The three roommates traded comfortable, worn-in looks.
And my mind twirled over the fact that Penn liked barbecue burgers.
Penn tossed Jonah a set of keys from a glass bowl on a side table.
The moment caught up to me then—the one promised to dying girls and ghosts. Because watching this scene was exactly like watching a movie of myself from high above my body. In this frame, I was only an outline drawn in chalk over the cold, dark floor.
Technically, I was still breathing. But Penn was living a big, big life, and he didn’t know me.
The evidence was clear and cruel. Somehow, the jester watch had dropped bits of memory of this Penn into his dream-state form—just enough to clue me in.
But the magic hadn’t followed through in reverse.
Waking Penn had no idea what dreaming Penn had lived through. With me.
It was worse than dying. No final death blow would make this universe fade to black over blood and pain. I stayed when his roommates left, watching him shuffle through the mail, feeling every wound from the inside out.
“Patrick?” I said so quietly, because that’s all I had left.
He gripped a blue envelope and shifted his face quizzically. I caught a glimpse of my Penn—the one whose forehead would wrinkle, whose lips would purse while he figured out a map or a memory. For a short span, he gave me his attention, eyeing me up and down.
“Have we met?” he asked.
I could’ve made it easy, but I didn’t want to tell him my name was Sylvie, or that I was the same girl at the beach he said he more than knew. (How I’d stopped him before he traded out those words for another.) I didn’t want easy. I wanted his mind to catch up and put me everywhere.
“We have met,” I said, grasping at a scrap of his attention.
His head made a thirty-degree angle. “You go to Oregon?”
University, he meant. I shook my head. “I’m from Los Angeles.” My uninjured hand balled into a fist. “Penn. That’s the nickname you told me.”
He blinked once, then again. “Weird. No one calls me that,” he said before he snapped our connection clean off, pivoting as my heart rapped against my chest wall.
He didn’t even recognize his own name in the whites of my eyes.
He didn’t register the fact that we must’ve shared something big for me to know a nickname no one else used.
The problem wasn’t Penn, though. It wasn’t even his memory.
This was the price I paid for living in limbo.
Magic aside, no matter what we’d shared before, my presence didn’t hold enough power.
When he stepped into the foyer and wedged a cell phone from his pocket—forgetting me like everyone else I met in this state did—I locked my spine and pulled my last trick. Earlier, I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. But hope had gone and proved it was what it always was.
I pushed up the sleeve of my black crop top and marched over, waving my wrist like a weapon. “When we met, you told me about this.”
Penn’s cell slipped from his grip, slamming onto the floor. His jaw went hard, then too lax, then so heavy it dragged his entire head downward. “Where did you get that?”
My heart spun with this one real piece of connection. “An antique store in Sacred. The town.”
“I wondered where that fucking thing ended up.” The darkness in his tone hit me with a shiver.
It’s the watch, not you, Sylvie. He was talking to me and maybe even experiencing me. But only through a gold band and champagne face. “I think it found me instead.”
Penn’s gaze landed on something over my shoulder, but he was so damn close. The hairs along my arms sprang up with the promise of sensation, and I took in my first-ever hint of his scent: deep and spiced like cider. A hint of vanilla and musk. I couldn’t stop my hand from inching forward.
Go ahead, he’d said weeks ago. But that was a gift from a different realm. I pulled my hand back and shoved it into my pocket.
Real talk, Sylvie to Sylvie: Wasn’t this the real reason I’d come here? Just to touch him, even once?
I could simply do it, but I wouldn’t. Not having his consent would be wrong and too easy when I needed everything. When I wanted even a few moments of us, alone and fused inside a world he’d said might not always be fair but could still be good.
Nothing about this entire day, this insatiable ache, was good. I glared at the watch that had made Penn see and remember. But it couldn’t make him curious enough to look for me this time.
“You should go,” he said, and stared so hard and straight into the midpoint of my face. “And take that cursed thing with you.”
A nightmare. My breathing changed, my heart pumping harder and harder. “Okay,” I managed, sucking back an entire creek of emotion. “Goodbye, Patrick.”
I made it come true. I escaped from Penn’s living room and his house and his city before he could see what was happening to me.
I didn’t want anyone to see it.
As I fled, I didn’t understand how almostdeath and limbo had taken my dreams and the texture of my skin. The ease of my breath. It made me lose clumps of hair and bleed and hurt. But even as pieces of me were dying—as I was dying—I was overwhelmed with emotion that could not have been more alive.
You should go, he’d said. And I cried.