Chapter 20
Dustin was kissing drywall.
His brain took a full two seconds to catch up with this information. His lips were still parted, his hand still raised where Greg's jaw had been a moment ago, and he was kissing a wall. The kind with the little bumps that looked like cottage cheese and tasted like paint.
“What the fuck?”
Dustin stood there with his hand hovering in empty air, staring at the spot where a person had been standing.
“Greg?”
Nothing.
The room was very quiet.
Dustin lowered his hand. He turned around slowly, scanning the room, but there was nowhere to hide. The motel room was twelve feet by fourteen and contained a bed, a desk, and Dustin's gear. No reaper.
“Greg.”
Still nothing.
Something cold slid through Dustin's chest.
He thought about what Greg had told him about the thin soul stuff that reapers were made of, about how they dissolved when they couldn't hold themselves together.
Could a reaper dissolve from being kissed?
That was a horrible thought. That was an actually horrible thought, and Dustin needed it to not be true immediately.
He crossed the room in two strides and pulled back the curtain.
The parking lot was mostly empty, basked in dim orange light. He spotted his truck, a dumpster, and—
Greg.
He was sitting on the ground outside, back against the exterior wall, legs stretched out in front of him.
Dustin exhaled—and then he immediately grabbed his jacket and went outside.
He rounded the corner of the motel, and there was Greg.
His back was against the exterior wall, legs stretched out in front of him, hands in his lap. His glasses were crooked and he was staring at his own fingers, turning them over slowly, like he was checking they were real.
He looked wrecked.
Undone.
Like someone had reached inside him and pulled out the pin that held everything together, and now he was just sitting in the wreckage trying to figure out which pieces were his.
Dustin's chest squeezed.
He'd been ready to joke about this. He'd had a line prepared—something about how most people just said “not interested” instead of phasing through architecture. But the joke died in his throat.
He walked over and sat down next to Greg on the asphalt.
Greg didn't look at him.
“So,” Dustin said. “You went through the wall?”
“I did.” Greg's voice was hoarse.
“Is that a reaper thing or a you thing?”
A pause. “A me thing.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“It shouldn't.” Greg was still studying his hands, flexing his fingers like he was testing them. “We can phase through solid matter intentionally. It's a standard ability. But I didn't—” He curled his fingers into his palms. “I didn't choose to do that.”
“So you just... what? Came loose?”
“I lost cohesion.” Greg said quietly. “I felt too much at once and I forgot how to hold myself together.”
That was… wow.
Dustin didn't know what to do with that. He was used to being a good time, a warm body, a distraction—not this. He'd never shaken another being apart at a molecular level just by pressing his mouth to theirs.
“I'm sorry,” Dustin said, and surprised himself by meaning it. “I shouldn't have kissed you like that.”
Greg shook his head. “Don't apologize. I enjoyed it. But…” He pulled his knees up, wrapping his arms around them.
“I should have listened to the warnings.
Morrith told me that attachments in this line of work don't end well and I didn't listen and now…” He gestured at himself, at the wall, at the empty parking lot.
“Look at me. I'm sitting on the ground behind a motel because a human kissed me and I forgot how to be matter.”
Something about the way he said that stung.
“That's what I am to you?” Dustin kept his voice light. “A human?”
“Isn't that what you are?” Greg looked at him then, and his expression was raw in a way that made Dustin's stomach lurch. “It's what you are and what I'm not, and that's why…”
He stopped. Pressed his palms against his eyes under his glasses.
“This can't happen,” he said.
“What can't happen?” Dustin asked, even though he knew.
“This. Us. Whatever—” Greg dropped his hands. His eyes were bright and slightly wild. “I lost cohesion, Dustin. I wasn't made for this. This is so far beyond my purpose.”
“And your purpose is all you can be?”
“Yes.”
The parking lot was very quiet while Dustin grappled with that, while they both did.
Dustin had been rejected before. It wasn't a new feeling, but it had never clawed quite this deep before.
Why was that?
Why couldn't Dustin just get up and tell Greg that it was his loss if he wanted to miss out on all that Dustin could offer?
Walk away with a self-assured smile.
Maybe it was because Greg looked so miserable and Dustin found he wanted to put a smile on his face rather than his own.
But he didn't know how.
Greg stared straight ahead. “I wish I were mortal,” he whispered.
“You can't mean that,” Dustin said almost reflexively.
“I do, though. I really do. The other reapers make fun of me for that, but…” Greg's voice had gone distant, almost dreamy. “I know you think your life is…I know you don't value it. I know you think death is meaningless and cruel. But do you have any idea what you have?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Everything. You have everything. You have taste and touch and cold asphalt under you right now and the ability to be hurt by it. You have lemon ice cream and bad decisions and dreams about better ones. You have grief, which means you had love first. You had a brother. You have his memory. You have the coordinates of your first jump tattooed over your heart because it mattered enough to carry on your skin.”
Dustin's jaw tightened. “Greg—”
“And when it ends—” Greg kept going, like if he stopped he wouldn't be able to start again.
“When it ends, that's just another beginning.
Whatever's on the other side of the threshold—the place I guide souls to, the place where Marco saw someone named Eddie waiting for him—you get to go there. You get everything, Dustin. Life and love and pain and loss and then, at the end of all of it, you get to move on.”
His voice broke on the last word.
“Reapers don't get any of that. We get the job.
We get the clipboard and the collections and an office building with little cubicles.
And if we choose to stop, there is nothing else for us.
We dissolve. We scatter. We don't reach a threshold with someone else waiting on the other side.” Greg's hands were clasped so tightly in his lap that his knuckles had gone white.
“This job is all I am. It's all I'll ever be. And you—”
He stopped.
Dustin waited.
Greg didn't continue. Instead, he rose to his feet, clutching his clipboard. “I can't let you keep interfering with my job.”
Dustin stared up at him, scrutinizing the reaper who'd sat in an ice cream parlor with him just a few hours ago, marveling over the taste of chocolate. The reaper he'd kissed—not because he'd needed the distraction, but just because he'd wanted to.
He still wanted to.
After everything Greg had just told him, Dustin still wanted to kiss him.
He filed that thought away, unsure what to do with it as he slowly stood to face Greg. “You know I won't stop just because you ask me to.”
He wasn't sure if he was talking about kissing Greg or saving people.
Maybe both.
He pressed on. “You just told me I have everything. Taste and touch and grief and love and all of it. You said that. So how am I supposed to hear that and then let a nineteen-year-old lose it on a highway?”
Greg's mouth opened wordlessly.
“You can't have it both ways,” Dustin insisted, finding his momentum. “You can't tell me life is this incredible, precious thing and then ask me to stand back while yours gets snuffed out.”
“Hers,” Greg corrected quietly. “Jessica's.”
“Yeah. Hers.”
They looked at each other. Behind them on the motel wall, a faulty light flickered on and off.
Greg's features cycled through different emotions. Dustin thought he saw frustration, fear, resignation and something else he couldn't name. Longing?
Was that it?
“Fine,” Greg said finally. “Fine.” But he said it like the word was made out of glass.
He turned and walked across the parking lot without looking back. Solid. Steady. Every inch the dutiful reaper, except that his hands were shaking where they held the clipboard.
Dustin watched him go.