Chapter 11 #2
“Mm-hmm,” she confirmed. “When was the last time you had a drink?” The question rolled off her tongue without thought, and
it wasn’t until she saw the furrow in his brow that she realized his last meal might be a sensitive topic. “Sorry. I didn’t
mean—”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just sincerely trying to remember,” Cole said with a small laugh. It lifted her heart. He continued to
watch her eat, and the heat of his gaze left Dell tingling, despite the cold. Another sound of pleasure escaped her throat,
but it wasn’t from the food.
“Feeling better now?” Cole asked.
“Much,” she said, feeling more than just better. “Thank you for this. It’s been . . . quite a day. I hope we don’t get in too much trouble.”
“Listening to the sounds you make when you like something will have been worth it.”
She almost choked on her next bite.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was a bit forward. I just meant I am enjoying watching you enjoy something so much.”
Dell gulped another mouthful of wine, trying to quell the fire in her chest that was rapidly spreading into her lower abdomen.
“That’s okay.”
A tension hung between them. One with as much bite as the wine on Dell’s tongue.
“For what it’s worth, you’ve handled everything astonishingly well today,” Cole said.
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Don’t tell me I’m not your first mistake and you’ve spent entire days in the past trying to
undead someone out of the in-between.”
He gave her a gently exasperated look. “Of course not. I just meant you’ve handled the day’s revelations rather well. It’s
been impressive.”
“Well, too bad this isn’t a Christmas Carol situation, and the lessons of past, present, and future haven’t paid off for finding my wrong turn.”
Cole gave her a sympathetic look with a twist of his lips.
Dell shook her head to clear her thoughts. She sipped her wine again, wondering if she’d have to suffer the consequences or
if the hangover would stay rooted in this woman’s body only. “Let’s talk about something else. My failed attempts at knowledge
gain are killing the vibe.”
“Sure. What would you like to talk about?” The open expression on his face pulled her in with a welcome interest. Tommy never
asked what she wanted to talk about. He just jumped right into whatever was on his mind.
Dell took a moment to consider, because there were so many things on her mind, but one had been dancing around with more fervor than the rest.
“Tell me more about your job.”
“My job?” Cole asked, eyebrows raised high.
“Yes. I want to know what your day-to-day is like. Do you sit at a desk? Are there boring afterlife meetings and committees
to serve on? Do you go on corporate retreats?”
He softly laughed with a bounce of his shoulders. “Um, yes, to some of that. I do sit at a desk. With a computer, of sorts.
I do attend my share of boring meetings, and no, I have never been on a retreat.”
“Unless you count this little adventure,” she said with a coy smile. “Had you ever been to the Bay before? Sorry—forget I
asked. I know you don’t remember.”
“Actually—” he said with a tone that made her look up in interest. “I haven’t been here since death, but I do feel a certain . . .
pull to the area, if that makes any sense. Something is familiar here, though I can’t say what.”
A pull. Yes, she felt that too. But not to the area; she grew up here. Of course it was familiar to her. The thing she felt a pull
toward was him. From the moment she first looked at him standing in her entryway, she recognized something in his eyes. And then the visions.
None of it made any sense to her, because she’d never met him. Unless there was something truly bizarre going on, and they were living out some wild reincarnation scenario and were lovers from a past life.
Cole gave her a soft, warm look. That soul-searching gaze and flicker of . . . something she didn’t know what to make of.
Dell ate the remaining bites of her meal in silence.
She had had the dish countless times before, both while she’d been perfecting the recipe and when she was hungry after work and looked for leftovers.
She let each forkful melt over her tongue before she swallowed it, savoring the flavor profile and texture the whole way through.
The comfort was something that had been missing all day.
“How did you get into cooking?” Cole asked, again watching her with heated interest.
“Working in soup kitchens, actually,” Dell said. “My mom has run and contributed to charities my whole life. I think I was
ten or eleven the first time a cook at a kitchen let me help. I fell in love with it. Not only the cooking but also the joy
in nourishing people. Getting to see someone enjoy food I made for them fills me with a kind of satisfaction I don’t get from
anything else.”
“Is that why you became a chef?”
“Clearly.” She grinned at him. “Alex and Andy were busy building LEGO towers and going to preteen business summer camps—it’s
a real thing, believe it or not—and I was writing recipe books and making everyone sample my kitchen experiments.”
“I’m sure they weren’t hard to convince of your career path if you were churning out dishes like that.” He pointed at her
near-empty plate.
She was tempted to lick it. “What about your parents? What do you think they were like—I know you can’t remember. But what do you think?”
“That’s one of the things I wish I remembered most. I like to think they were caring. Intelligent.”
“Good-looking,” she chimed in.
He coyly grinned. “Tall, obviously. At least one of them was. I got these genes from somewhere.”
“Maybe they really were a poetry professor and a Jane Austen hero!”
“Unlikely, since I haven’t been dead long enough to have had a father from Mr. Darcy’s era.”
“You really don’t know how it happened? How you . . . died?” Dell asked.
He shook his head with his lips pressed together. “No.”
A sadness crashed into Dell, and she didn’t know what to make of it, so she made a joke. “Maybe it was something heroic, like
saving puppies from a burning building.”
He snorted. “With these hands, I doubt I was a firefighter.” He held up his right hand, and Dell recalled the soft feel of
it in hers from earlier.
“Who said anything about a firefighter? You could have been a poetry professor riding his bike home from campus one night,
and you saw a burning building and couldn’t help but intervene.”
“Hmm. A heroic, puppy-saving poet. I like it.”
“Hey, look at you! And you said you weren’t good at rhyming.”
“That was a slant rhyme, at best.”
“Jargon. More proof my assessment is accurate.”
“Your lips are starting to turn blue,” he said.
“What?”
Cole pointed at her face. “Your lips. I think your host has probably had enough of this freezer.”
“Oh God,” Dell said, and set her plate back on the shelf. She pressed her hands to her mouth. “You’re right. She’s not used
to this cold.”
“Her date might have noticed he’s been ghosted by now too.”
“You are giving that guy too much credit, but we should probably go.” She recorked the wine and set it on the shelf by her plate. When she turned for the door and gripped the handle, it didn’t yield. “Oh,” she said, feeling a swell of panic rise up inside her. “Oh no.”
“What’s wrong?” Cole asked.
Dell yanked on the door again, but the slab of steel didn’t budge. “The door sticks sometimes.”
“What?” Cole asked in alarm.
She kept tugging on the handle, noting the woman definitely kept up with arm day at the gym. Even still, she couldn’t get
the door to open.
“You mean we’re stuck in here?” Cole said like the walls were closing in.
“Calm down,” Dell said, still yanking. “You’re a ghost; you can pass through the wall. I’m the one stuck in here. Ugh. Stupid door.” The damn thing wouldn’t give.
“Well, give her her body back, and let’s go!” Cole urged.
“And leave her in here alone and confused to fend off frostbite?” Dell snapped.
“Right. Good point,” Cole said. “Well, what are we going to do?”
Dell stopped yanking, knowing the only solution was opening it from the outside. But they couldn’t very well wait around for
someone else to come in; her poor host was starting to go numb. And she didn’t think whatever ghostly power she possessed
for moving objects stood a chance against the industrial-strength door. “Well, you said you wanted close proximity and conversation
on a date, so what’s better than being stuck in a freezer together?” she said flatly.
Cole looked at her with a twist of his mouth.
Right then, the woman’s phone pinged from her purse.
Dell was wearing the small crossbody bag under her chef’s coat.
“Oh!” she said, reaching for it and getting an idea.
The ping was a text from someone named Kendra, and Dell remembered this was the person who’d set her host up on this date.
“I can call for help from her phone,” she told Cole.
She swiped the screen and used her face to unlock it.
“Great, but call who?”
Dell was already dialing. “Who do you think?” She pressed the phone to her ear and listened to it ring. She chewed her lip
while she waited.
“Pergo restaurant, how can I help you?” a familiar voice answered.
“Jason!” Dell all but shouted. “We are locked in the freezer and need you to come let us out.”
A heavy paused filled the line.
“I’m sorry?” Jason eventually said. “Can you repeat that?”
Of course she called her best friend. Not only was he the only one who’d believe her, but he also happened to be about fifty
feet away, at the host’s desk.
“It’s me, Dell. I borrowed a body and snuck into the kitchen to eat something. Now Cole and I are stuck in the freezer, and
I am in said body. I’m calling you from her phone. The door is stuck. Can you please come let us out?”
She could sense his brain sorting through her jumble of words even from a distance, and silently thanked him for not making
a scene in the middle of the restaurant.
“Of course. I will be right there to assist you,” he said in the polite, professional tone he used at work.
“Thank you.” She ended the call and proudly smiled at Cole. “Help is on the way.”