CHAPTER TWO
S ilence stretched as the ghost duo stared at me.
Was it something I said?
“What?” I cleared my throat, startled by their sudden intensity. “I mean, can I think thoughts to you both simultaneously, like a group call?”
Gabriel was the first to recover. “Oh, I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to play around a bit to see what we can do. You never know when that information might help.”
Ben crossed his arms but conceded to the beneficial nature. “Agreed, even though I hate the reasoning behind this. Willa, don’t you think you could, I don’t know, get in less life-or-death situations?”
I blew a raspberry. “It’s not up to me. Ask the universe to take a chill pill.”
Ben snorted, but his dimples popped out on his cheeks, revealing his true amusement. He had the deepest dimples of anyone I’d met, and they never failed to melt my heart—even now. “Touche. So, would you like to try the ‘ghost group chat’ idea first?”
It’d been pretty easy to direct my thoughts to Gabriel before. “Sure, let’s give it a crack.”
I closed my eyelids. They sprang open almost immediately at the snorted chuckle.
“Sorry,” Gabriel apologized. “But it’s not meditation. Do you have to do it with your eyes shut?”
“Man, let her figure it out first,” Ben admonished. “Then we can fine-tune.”
Staring right at Gabriel, I thought, See? Ben’s my favorite.
Gabriel rolled his eyes. Ben burst into laughter. Yeah, they’d both heard loud and clear.
“Of course he’s your favorite. He was your boyfriend,” Gabriel teased.
That killed the levity with a sobering wash of reality.
Ben’s expression grew distant, the classic thousand-yard stare only ghosts could truly pull off when thinking about their lives—the living ones.
If there weren’t a million other pressing matters in my life, I’d research the person who coined the phrase.
Hands down, they shared the same supernatural ability as me.
“Ben?” I called, taking a step in his direction before halting.
Ben reanimated, flashing his smile—less genuine and more rote.
As it often did these days, a sharp pain lanced my heart of all the potential cut short too soon.
Gabriel glanced between us. “You know what? I’ll go check on my family and see how long I can stay away.”
He didn’t wait for either of us to acknowledge him before blinking out of existence. Cats chased by slavering Dobermans wouldn’t have fled the scene as fast as he did.
Not that I could blame him.
A weight pressed on the space, the mass of everything left unsaid between us as the months progressed. It felt as if I’d drown beneath it. I sprang to my feet, taking a breath that failed to help.
“Willa?” Ben began.
“Hmm?” I asked, pacing.
Where was my journal? I should write about the mind-speak there.
“Are you—what are you doing?” he questioned, his perplexion clear in his tone.
“Have you seen my notebook?” I lifted a pillow. “The one I’m always writing in?”
“I don’t recall. Is it important right now?”
“Well, I should note the information about the ghost telepathy. If things are changing for you, we need to keep on top of it. It’s not like there’s a user-guide to reference for advice.
What if we do something bad or irreversible?
Well, we kind of already did something irreversible, I guess.
That was the whole point, right? Gabriel didn’t want to lose his connection to me like the first time, hence the whole—”
“Willa,” Ben blipped before me, one second five feet away, and then suddenly in front of me. If that wasn’t the ghost-equivalent of a coach’s whistle during a mid-field scuffle, I didn’t know what was.
I couldn’t quite conceal my gasp.
He winced, his hands reaching for my shoulders as he normally would’ve before falling short. “I’m sorry, but you were rambling.”
“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I should be used to it by now, right?”
Ben adopted a skeptical expression. “Used to ghosts randomly popping into your personal space?”
I crossed my arms. “Sure, when you put it like that, you make it sound bad.”
He huffed a laugh. “So, this is…”
“Weird?”
He clasped a hand to his chest. “Ouch. I planned to say delicate.”
“You were not.”
“Was so.”
“I know you better than that.”
His teasing stopped.
He sighed. “Yeah, you do, don’t you? Listen, Willa, I’ve been unfair to you these past few months.”
I blinked, because of all the ways I imagined “the talk” going, it began with an apology on my end, not his. “Wait, excuse me?”
“No, really. You’ve been through so much already. I can’t even imagine.”
Was he actually telling me he couldn’t imagine?
Ben must’ve read the skepticism on my face because he doubled down. “Don’t give me that look. It’s true. Sure, I died—wait, no, don’t cry. Please?”
Despite my best efforts, a sniffle snuck out. I might as well have struck Ben. It would have hurt less. His desperation to comfort me shone plain as day in his crumpled expression.
I’d been so good at hiding my grief anytime Ben was around, but he’d also spent a lot of time checking in on his sister after their dad got arrested for trying to flatten Manuel and me like a pancake with his monstrous truck.
His dad failed at that but succeeded in shooting Manuel, Gabriel’s “primito” and my…
friend. It’d been a graze in warning, but it could’ve just as easily been a kill shot, as my nightmares often reminded me of—vividly.
And that was enough of thinking about Manuel, especially during this conversation.
I’d grieved Ben. He’d died in August, and he’d been gone gone—according to him, off recuperating after risking himself to protect me from my dreams. Then, he’d returned, and my ability to see and communicate with him really shone a spotlight on how much had changed.
It wreaked havoc on my emotions. My pendulous feelings often swung from one extreme to the next, sometimes cycling through all five stages of grief within the same hour.
We would be discussing something benign, and my body would wait for a brush of his hand because small, playful touches were Ben’s love-language.
Then I’d remember, and my heart would cleave in half all over again.
Ben was here, but he wasn’t. He’d been murdered—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. His little sister had to move a state away to live with their estranged aunt. Yet I cry-babied over his inability to hug me.
Hand on heart, I was the selfish party in this scenario.
I scrubbed my tears on the sleeves of the hoodie. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
His voice softened, just a notch off from a soothing croon for pacifying upset infants. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s okay. Actually, I was starting to wonder how much you’d cared,” he joked.
That morphed my heartbreak into an indignant glare, which must’ve been his last resort goal judging by the smug satisfaction radiating from him. “Hey, I’ll take irritated over tears any day of the week.”
“You don’t fight fair,” I accused half-heartedly.
“Not one bit, princess.”
He hadn’t called me that since the last time I saw him alive. I doubted it was a slip of the tongue. My heartbeat increased beneath the weight of a thousand questions. “Ben?”
He swiped a hand down his face, looking disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“What? Why?”
“Because!” He paused, taking in calming breaths. “Because that nickname is everything. It was everything. I’m dead. It’s not fair to you when I try to pretend otherwise.”
I propped my hands on my hips. “Shouldn’t I be the one to judge what’s fair to me? After all, I’m the reason you’re—”
“If you say dead, I will my ghostly best to hide every single pair of your fuzzy socks from you for the rest of eternity.”
“Not fair.”
“Yes, we established that.” He tried a different tack. “Look, Willa, it happened. And I don’t blame you at all.”
“You’ve mentioned that, once or a million times, even as recently as five minutes after you blipped.”
“I don’t blip. And I’ll say it a million more times if it helps the idea sink in through that stubborn, thick skull of yours.”
“Flattering,” I quipped.
“I’m serious. Willa, I don’t care how much you claim it’s your fault. Even if we find out that you are distantly related to the mayor or something, and he went into overprotective mode to remove the ‘unsavory boyfriend’ from the picture—me—I would still not blame you.”
I shivered, rubbing away the goosebumps that popped along my arms. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“Sorry, I wanted to make my point which is that you don’t have to feel bad about what happened to me.”
I spread my arms wide. “Ben, it’s not exactly something I can turn off.”
He smiled. “Yeah, yeah. I should just be happy you’re not bottling everything up, right?”
“Hey, you said it, not me.”
He shook his head. “Well, lucky for you, it looks like I’m going to be around for a while. I’ll wear you down, eventually.”
The “for a while” part snagged me, sending a trickle of ice along my spine. Did he really need to put a time frame on it like that when all I wanted to do was live in blissful ignorance for as long as I could? I’d earned that, right?
“You think? Are you forgetting about my stubborn, thick skull?” I teased.
“Not likely.” Ben grew serious. “And since we’re saddled with each other—more than any of us thought if Gabriel boomerangs back here soon—we need to clear this up.”
I nodded, maybe a touch too quickly. My throat constricted, like a malicious entity reached out and gripped it, except I knew there was nothing paranormal about the emotions clogging my airway. “Yeah, sure.”
“So let’s start with the most painful one right away. You were my girlfriend—”
“Were?”
Ben winced. “Yes, were. Willa, as much as I would like—no, love to kid myself otherwise—because believe me, I would—we can’t keep ignoring the fact that I’m dead. And you should move on with your life, princess.”
If he’d hoped to soften the blow with the endearment, he’d be disappointed to know it accomplished the opposite. My eyes burned. “We’re breaking up.”