Chapter 3 Clarke
Clarke
“Hi!” I said to Leith a little too brightly, I think, because his eyes widened—like I’d frightened him. Good. Maybe I could scare him off. “What can I do for you?” Even though I knew damn well what he was here about—what both of the Wilkes men were here about.
My gaze flicked to the ghost of his dad standing next to him. Wilder looked relieved, and…hopeful, maybe? I didn’t like that one bit. Wilder had a bad habit of causing problems for me—problems that could be avoided if I simply said no. I looked away from him.
“So what gives?” Leith asked and slid the baseball cap he was holding back on his head. My gaze snagged on the skinny silver hoop in his left earlobe as he did so. Why did hats make men hotter? It wasn’t like Leith needed any help in that department.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, still trying to keep my voice light and easy.
“Yes, you do, Clarke,” he said. Well, he was very sure of himself, wasn’t he? “Can we talk?”
“About what?” I asked, feigning cluelessness. Innocently, I hoped.
Leith rolled his eyes. “About that shit you said at the bar.”
“I was drunk,” I replied then immediately regretted it.
Me admitting that I said anything to him at the bar was going to give him inches, and the determination in his face told me he was ready to take miles.
I should’ve relegated all my answers to a good, solid I don’t know.
Isn’t that what lawyers told people to do? Or maybe that was I don’t recall.
“I don’t remember.” Close enough. Even though I remembered. Vividly. And I wished I hadn’t said it—that Leith should take a closer look at his dad’s will—information that his dead dad had been hounding me about for months but telling Leith anything about that was against one of my rules.
I liked having firm boundaries with the spirit realm.
It helped with the frequencies, allowing me to turn them up and down as I needed to.
Honestly, I liked having firm boundaries in general.
Collins would say that I had walls, but she didn’t really have room to talk there.
Her walls were indiscriminate, where mine were strategic.
I never approached the ghosts first. If they approached me, I kept our interactions as brief as I could.
I didn’t want a long list of ghostly familiars.
And, most importantly, I didn’t pass information between the living and the dead.
I treated it like the movies treated time travel: Don’t do anything that’s going to alter reality as the normies know it.
Until that night at the bar. I didn’t even know why I did it. I wasn’t drunk. Tipsy, maybe. But not drunk enough to break one of my rules and forget about it.
Maybe it was the way Leith was looking at me or the incandescent light of the bar.
It was the same way I used to feel him looking at me when I was taking notes in history, like he wanted to figure me out.
I didn’t know. But whatever the reason was, it wasn’t good enough to justify what I did. It was just stupid.
“I don’t believe you, Clarke,” Leith said.
“That’s your problem.” I shrugged. I walked past him—carefully avoiding walking through Wilder—most of the time, walking through ghosts was unpleasant at best and deeply uncomfortable at worst—and went to unlock my front door.
“Please, Clarke,” a different voice said behind me.
It was Wilder. He sounded like he was talking to me over the phone.
I knew the look he was giving me; it had been on his face since he figured out I could see him and talk to him.
It was a look full of both desperation and hope—like I could make everything right for Wilder and for his family, but I could also take it all away.
It was a lot of pressure. I could choose to ignore him—turn him down and tune him out like I did to nearly everyone else who stood where he was now: between the living and the dead.
I didn’t know what was in the will, but I could tell it was important. Wilder’s distress permeated every word he said to me. He couldn’t hide it—not even as a ghost. His heart was on full display, and it was filled to the brim with Leith.
Just like how I imagined my dad’s and Boone Ryder’s were with Collins and me.
My hand was on the doorknob. I took a deep breath before turning back to Leith, whose winning smile had faded, and a look of defeat was rising in its place. His posture had shifted, and a soft line appeared between his brows.
I was going to regret this. Deeply.
“Okay,” I said after a few seconds. “You can come in.”
Leith brightened again, and I was momentarily frustrated at how pleasant it felt to contribute to that glow. I wondered how it would feel to bask in it. “Really?”
“Really,” I said, sparing a glance at Wilder, who looked like he could fall to his knees at any moment. In relief, I assumed.
“Can Bill come too?”
“Who’s Bill?” For a split second, I wondered if Bill was someone or something I couldn’t see, which would’ve been quite a plot twist. But then I heard a bark from Leith’s truck. How did I not notice the truck when I was walking home? If I did, I would’ve snuck to my back door through the woods.
Leith brought his hand to his mouth and let out a loud whistle using his thumb and pointer finger. Bill—who just looked like some variation of a farm mutt—opened the truck door and scrambled out.
“Did he just open your door?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s a nightmare,” Leith said cheerfully.
The dog might have been talented enough to open the door, but he didn’t close it. It didn’t seem like Leith minded. “What if I said no?” I asked.
Leith gave me a look. “You love dogs,” he said just as Bill’s head made its way right under my hand. I fought the urge to kneel and give him a good rubdown.
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve known you my whole life, Clarke.” The sense of familiarity in his voice annoyed me. Everything about him annoyed me. It always had.
As a kid, Leith was kind of a perfect match between golden retriever and troublemaker.
He was talkative in class, and teachers constantly sat us next to each other in the hopes that my studiousness would keep him on task.
In adulthood, I realized how messed up it was that being a good student somehow made me responsible for both mine and Leith’s academic success.
I developed a massive, ridiculous, and embarrassing crush on Leith that lasted from the age of five.
It had annoyed me that he always could find a way to distract me.
It annoyed me how warm I felt when he brought me the jar of honey on Valentine’s Day, and how much I liked it when he started occasionally calling me “honey” afterward just to see how I’d react, even though I knew it was a joke.
After all, I was half of the Cartwright weirdo duo, but not in a cool, mysterious way like my sister.
I was the one who worked too hard but couldn’t seem to work hard enough to control the noises in her own head. I cussed him out after that.
My temper had flared around him more than anyone else.
Crushes in general made me feel out of control—I didn’t like that.
And with Leith, I felt even more off-kilter.
Maybe because he was my first one or because it lasted way too long, considering he never liked me back.
I wanted my feet to be firmly planted on the ground or even below the ground—like roots that kept me in place.
So sure, we had known each other all our lives, but he only knew the small parts of myself that I let him see. Because I had always been scared of what he might think of me if I showed him too much. Or that I might want to give him everything.
“Right,” I said sarcastically. I unlocked the door and pushed it open.
Leith shook his head. “Always so nice to everyone but me.”
I whipped my head around to face him again. Leith looked amused. “That’s not true,” I said.
“Right.” Leith winked, and I hated that too. I swear, he learned how to wink in, like, the second grade and never stopped.
But I had matured in adulthood, learning how to control my teenage hormones and angst toward Leith into perfectly pleasant civility!
At least, I thought I had. And that had been mostly easy because he had maintained an on-again, off-again girlfriend for the better part of a decade.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t still think Leith was good-looking.
Almost too good-looking. He was the definition of a pretty boy—an unnervingly symmetrical face, blue-green eyes, and a sharp jawline.
Growing up, his hair was blond. All the kids used to call him golden boy when we’d go swimming in the river.
Now it was an earthy brown. But it still got lighter in the summer.
It was unfortunate that I knew that.
He was clean-cut in the way that made you wonder what he’d look like if he got a little dirty. Not me, though. I didn’t wonder that.
Obviously.
Generally, I didn’t rattle easy, but I think my consistent stress levels over the past few months were wearing me down.
Bill bumped my legs as he ran into the house with no hesitation. It seemed like he was still a puppy. That was good. My senior dog, Pearl—a mastiff mix—loved puppies. And human babies too. Oh, and elderly people. Frankly, she seemed thrilled with any company that wasn’t me.
“Take your shoes off, please,” I said as I slipped off my own and walked farther into the house.
I loved this house. I bought it a few years ago.
It was exactly what I wanted my space to be: warm, cozy, and colorful.
I loved my pink couch, my purple armchair, and my side table that was painted to look like a strawberry.
I loved all my knickknacks and treasures and mismatched pillows. I adored whimsy.
Bill was already jumping on Pearl and going for her ears. She didn’t mind at all. “Outside,” I said. She did let out a groan before she got up from her spot on the couch and led the little terror through the dog door to the backyard.