Chapter 20 Brady
Brady
“Good thing I have all these candles, huh?” Collins said as she lit a bunch of them around the kitchen and living room.
“God,” I said. “Your smugness is palpable right now.”
“How would you survive this power outage without me?” Honestly, I’d probably be doing better if she weren’t here.
The darkness and the glow of the candles made me want to touch her again.
To finish what I started earlier. I thought I had just been teasing her, but I was teasing both of us, and I was regretting it.
Today, Collins was wearing this long-sleeve black sweater that looked like it should have buttons, but instead, it just had two spots where she tied the sides together. I had spotted flashes of her skin all day and the black bra that those useless fucking ties did nothing to hide.
I wanted to pull on those ties and watch them come undone.
“Earth to Brady,” I heard Collins say through the haze of my thoughts. She was right in front of me.
“S-sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”
“I asked you if you thought this is enough candles,” Collins said. “It’s only going to get darker. We might need more later.”
I looked around the apartment. There were at least twenty candles, all emitting a soft, warm glow. I purposefully kept my eyes off Collins. “I think this is plenty,” I said.
Collins flopped onto the couch. “Well,” she said. “What should we do?”
“We?” I asked. She nodded. “I don’t know.” Against my better judgment, I sat down on the couch beside her, laid my head on the cushion, and closed my eyes.
“Believe it or not, Sweetwater Peak loses power quite often,” she said.
“I do believe that,” I said. In the year I’d lived here, we’d lost power six or seven times.
“You should really have a generator handy,” Collins said. I peeked at her through one open eye. Her body was angled toward mine and her arm was on the back of the couch, and she was looking at me with her head resting on her palm. If I moved my knee two inches, I’d bump her.
I moved my knee.
“So I’ve been told,” I sighed. “What do you usually do when the power’s out?”
“Clarke and I would talk to the ghosts, usually,” Collins said. “We’d also play board games. It always felt like the best time to read a good horror novel, too, but I’d get sick of holding my flashlight.”
“And ghosts don’t like artificial light,” I said, parroting Collins’s words.
“Right.” She nodded. “They also don’t like inclement weather.”
“Can they get wet?” I asked. Collins bit down on a smile. “From the rain,” I clarified.
She was still smiling as she shook her head. “I think it’s just one of those things that rolls over from life to death. You get used to being inside when it rains, standing next to a fire when it snows—that sort of thing.”
“That makes sense.” I nodded. The version of me that met Collins last month wouldn’t believe how easily I’d just accepted these facts about the supernatural. He’d probably think I was just as nutty as Collins.
Now that I had my own experience with her ghosts, it was easier for me to notice the way her eyes constantly tracked things around the room wherever we were.
I watched the hope in her eyes when she saw something I couldn’t, and how it faded away in an instant when she would say something that didn’t get the response she was hoping for.
“So what did you and the ghosts talk about back then?” I asked, opening my eyes now and angling my head toward her.
Collins shrugged. “I liked listening to their stories.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Their lives, usually, but also about how they’d died or what they’d seen since. They see our world more clearly than we ever will—they’re better at understanding a bigger picture, where I get lost in the details. I just like hearing about life from their perspective.”
I never thought about it that way. Collins scooted a little closer to me. “I’ve, um, never told anyone about my abilities before. It’s nice…that you know.”
That took me aback. “Nobody?” I asked. “Not your friends or a boyfriend or even Boone?” Collins’s questions about Jackie had me unwillingly thinking about her romantic history—whether she had left anyone behind when she came back to Sweetwater Peak.
Collins shook her head. “I don’t really have friends like that.
It was hard for me to get close with anyone in photography.
My career took off kind of fast. That plus my general distrust of people made it hard for me.
I never really knew if that was because they liked me or because they liked what I produced and what they thought that meant I could do for them.
I think it was a form of self-preservation—avoiding friendships.
“It never felt worth it to me to share more pieces of myself with other people than I had to.”
“And what about a boyfriend?” I asked—hoping I was pulling off the playing-it-cool thing.
“You’re fishing,” Collins said with a grin.
“So what?” I asked. “You were fishing the other day, and I bit.”
“Fair.” Collins paused as if in thought. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a relationship in the way you would define it. I could barely imagine being in the same place for seven months, let alone seven years. Honestly, I admire that—the stillness.”
“You’ve seriously never had a boyfriend?” I asked. “Or a girlfriend?”
Collins shook her head. “Nope. There were a few times I could’ve come close. I like sex and intimacy, and sometimes that means the lines get blurry, but I didn’t let myself go too far down that road.”
All it took was a mention of sex from Collins for the dam on my thoughts to break and for my mind to be flooded with all the things I’d pushed down—the way her dagger tattoo disappeared under her black miniskirt, the flimsy tank top she wore to bed that left nothing to the imagination, the way she looked at my naked body when we had our unexpected run-in—even the way she was bent over the counter on Saturday.
Collins snapped her fingers in front of my face, startling me. “What?” I asked quickly.
“You totally zoned out,” she said. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere,” I said quickly. “It’s just hard for me to believe that you’ve never been in a relationship,” I said. “You’re…”
Collins raised a brow at me. “I’m what, Brady?”
“P-pretty,” I stammered. “And intriguing.”
“Hmm. Well, thank you,” Collins said. “But regardless, this ability is the part of myself that I’ve always been smart enough to protect—sometimes it feels like the only part I’ve been able to protect.”
I was honored that she trusted me enough to share this so openly with me, but I was also sad for the Collins who thought she needed so much protection.
“What about Boone?” I asked.
Collins shook her head. “We’ve never told him outright, but Boone is observant. He always knows more than he lets on, so I’m sure he knows somewhere in his mind that the Cartwright family isn’t totally normal.”
“Your whole family can do this?” I asked.
Collins shook her head. “Just me and Clarke can do the talking and the seeing. My mom calls herself ‘sensitive,’ meaning she can feel the things that we see. She knows when ghosts are around, she can sense their intentions and their energy. We got the mutated version of her genes, I guess.”
“And your dad?”
“Wonderfully normal,” Collins said with a soft smile. “But he consistently says it makes sense that the remarkable woman he fell in love with produced two more remarkable women.”
“You have a good family,” I said.
Collins nodded. “You’re a good listener.”
I was starting to think that listening to Collins talk was one of my favorite things to do. “You listen to the ghosts, I’ll listen to you—deal?”
“Deal,” Collins said.
“I have an idea. You said you used to play board games when the power was out?” She nodded. “You in?”
“I’d have to see the games before committing,” she said with a smile.
I got up from the couch and went to the closet at the end of the hall on my side of the apartment. I scanned the top shelves and moved some towels and a junk box before I saw them.
Life, Sorry, Candyland, and a chess board. I pulled them down from the shelf and went back out to the living room. “Pick your poison,” I said to Collins, who was squinting to see the titles of the games on each box.
“Life,” she said after a few seconds. “Definitely Life.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I thought you’d be more of a Sorry girl.”
Collins shrugged. “Life has better props.” I pulled Life out of the stack and set it on the coffee table.
The layer of dust on the top of the box was thick and grimy, but when I pulled the top off, the game inside was mostly pristine.
Collins and I both took pieces out of the box and set up different parts of the board.
“Pick your car,” I said.
“Blue, obviously.” Collins plucked the blue game piece from the box and put it at the starting line. I picked the white one, and Collins shook her head. “Typical Brady,” she muttered.
The paper money and stock certificates were looking a little worse for wear, but everything else was great. “All right, let’s play the Game of Life.”
“That makes me want to quote that one Prince song,” Collins said. “?‘Dearly beloved—’?” she started, but I cut her off.
“Do not get that song stuck in my head. I’m begging you.”
Collins’s eyes immediately went feline. “I love a man who begs,” she said.
I shook my head. “I walked right into that one,” I sighed. If given the opportunity, I wouldn’t have a problem begging Collins for anything.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make you beg in front of an audience.”
I tilted my head, confused. “What? Wait—are there ghosts in here?”
“This whole building is crawling with them, Brady,” Collins said. “But yes. We currently have company.”
I looked around, not knowing what I was expecting to see.
“Don’t worry,” Collins whispered. “No one is too close. They’re not here for us—they’re here for the candles.”
“Really?” I whispered.
“Moths to a flame and all that,” she said. “I don’t think they can feel the warmth, but I think they like the glow.”
“How many?” I asked.