“It’s easy to get information, and what you’re saying is impossible. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what you want with me, but I’m done with this.”
I’m done with you.
I don’t know why the words echoed so painfully in my chest, or why the way he looked away from me while he said it hurt worse than the tangle of his fingers sending pinpricks of pain across my scalp.
Whatever it was, it was enough to make me reel back, jerking from his hold. He let me loose like I’d burned him.
“You know, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking coming here. It was obviously a mistake,” I snapped. The anger in my voice seemed to take him aback, and it was probably that shock that let me push past him. “Honestly, I should have known better. You always were an asshole, Sunshine. Guess I forgot for a minute, what with being thrown into a new body and all.”
Sunshine. Fuck. I’d called him that so many times, first teasing and taunting him, because he was anything but. Then, because I meant it—because he was warmth on my skin, the only light I’d ever really known.
Except… he was actually the biggest asshole on the planet. I was remembering that now, too.
“Wait—”
“Nope.” I made sure the word resonated clearly through the room as I wrenched his front door open. I wasn’t sure where I was going to go. Maybe back to Marshall’s condo. Maybe I could find more information on the stupid flash drive that would lead me to better answers.
Maybe I needed to do something even more useful, like try to figure out what the fuck had happened in the last twenty-something years… and what had happened the night I’d died.
But whatever I needed to do, it obviously wasn’t in this house, and it wasn’t with Axel.
So why did it feel so wrong when I slammed the door behind me and took off into the darkness?
Chapter 4
Axel
The sound of the door closing reverberated through the room and seemed to find a home in the center of my chest. It was impossible. There was no way it was him… but I was intimately familiar with the pain tearing through me.
I knew the sensation that forced the air from my lungs and nearly made me scream.
And I knew the feeling of my body freezing in some strange mixture of horror and soul numbing pain.
He was walking away.
Again.
The last time he’d walked away from me was the last time I’d ever seen him. And I hadn’t told him…
Fuck…
I’d shouted at him. I’d told him to get the fuck out… and I…
I…
Sunshine.
“Xavier!” his name came from my chest in a near scream, and for a moment I wasn’t a grown man. I wasn’t a forty-two year old who ran a successful business and had seen and burned more dead bodies than I could keep count of.
I was a twenty-two year old, and I was horrified at the thought of experiencing the same gut-wrenching loss that I had that night.
It was nearly impossible to draw enough air into my lungs to shout his name again, and it was pointless anyway. The door was closed.
He was probably halfway down my driveway already—halfway out of my life again, even though he couldn’t have walked back into it. Xavier was dead.
Maybe this was all a dream.
If it was, I didn’t want it to turn into a nightmare. It certainly felt like one, because my breath was still squeezed tight in my chest, caught up against the shattered pieces of my ribs… and I…