Page 15 of Beyond Reason

No one else kissed the way he did.

No one else touched me the way he had in that alley.

And honestly… when he’d looked up at me, when I saw the vulnerable expression on his face, it was too much to resist. It was the expression he could have had if I’d gone after him the night he walked out, the night we’d fought. If I’d followed my instincts then instead of letting him go, I would have never had to know what it felt like to miss him, what it felt like to have a part of me completely ripped away.

That part was inexplicably back. I could say it was impossible all I wanted, but I couldn’t deny the sensation of every jagged piece of my chest realigning when I’d pressed our lips together.

And I couldn’t stop my fingers from entwining with his as we walked home. If this was all some fucked up trick to get close to me, whoever orchestrated it had won. I led him back to the house in silence, picking up the bag he'd dropped on the porch, and didn’t stop him when he peeled off from me and headed to the shower.

At least I had the sense to go to my bedroom and lock myself in after I’d thrown some leftovers into the microwave for my unexpected guest. And if I ignored the gentle rap of his knuckles knocking on the door in favor of trying to grasp at what was left of my sanity, he let me get away with it.

That was probably the most un-Xavier thing he’d done.

As I lay beneath the sheets with every part of my physical being somehow aware of the fact that there was another person in the house with me—another person I could feel along every nerve ending that I had even when he wasn’t in the room with me—my mind drifted.

Back to that night a few months ago.

Back to my phone ringing and a very familiar voice spilling through the speakers.

Kade.

Only… Kade was dead. He’d died a bit after Xavier. It was like the best of the best suddenly lost their game with luck, with fate, and had been unceremoniously taken out without so much as a second glance. They were both gone, and when the man had said he had a job for me, I’d nearly hung up on him.

I did hang up after he told me who he was, told me that there were going to be a lot of bodies popping up in the future. I was the best. He wanted the best.

And apparently, Kade Neil only worked with the best.

But Kade was dead, and the second he started with a let me explain, I’d done the exact opposite.

When the number called back, I’d ignored it.

And now, I was wondering if there was a very pissed off Kade out there somewhere, ready to kick my ass for having the audacity to blow him off.

I was wondering exactly how many impossible things were actually happening.

“I’m too old for this shit,” I murmured, but it didn’t stop me from standing up and inching toward the door. I couldn’t hear anything on the other side, but if I closed my eyes, I could picture him. Only… it wasn’t the man in my house I was seeing.

It was Xavier as I remembered him. He’d probably pulled his shirt off and dropped it onto the hardwood floor like a complete asshole, then stretched himself out on the couch instead of taking any of the spare rooms that weren’t locked. I’d found him like that more than once when he’d come in late from a job and he hadn’t wanted to disturb me.

When I’d asked him why he hadn’t used a bed, he’d informed me that there was only one bed he wanted to sleep in.

Our bed.

It had been our bed since the second he’d stepped into my house, because it was the bed he’d woken up in. When he was bleeding out, when I was half afraid of him dying in the middle of the night and half afraid of him waking up and trying to kill me… I’d put him in my room under the excuse of keeping an eye on him.

It was total bullshit, and we both knew it. I could have just as easily kept an eye on him in the guest room, but…

I wanted him close.

I wanted him where I could see him, where I could keep him.

Even then—from the very first moment—I’d known Xavier was supposed to be where I could see, where I could touch. Where I could feel.

There was a reason his ashes were over the fireplace…

There was a reason I’d never been able to scatter him to the winds like I was sure most normal people did.

I hadn’t been able to let him go then, and I wondered if that was why I was so willing to believe what was happening now.

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