Page 14 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

I gently prodded my cheek. Ow. Shit. The shock was wearing off, and with every passing second the pain would only get worse. Ice. Huh. That wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe if I caught it soon enough I could stop my face from feeling like I’d spent half the day making out with a meat grinder.

We didn’t have ice packs, because of course we didn’t. So I grabbed a bag of freezer-burned peas and pressed it to my cheek. It smelled funny. Chemically. The moment the cold plastic met my feverish flesh I winced but didn’t let go, tapping my fingers on the counter as I slumped in relief. The pain melted away, as a cool numbness settled over the area. Better. This was better. I was a genius apparently.

Painkillers.

Right. Painkillers. That wasn’t a bad idea either. I fumbled my way into our medicine cupboard and popped a bottle of ibuprofen open. It was tricky working the childproof lid one handed, but I managed.

Maybe I should take extra?

Yeah. Extra was a good idea. The back of the bottle was really only a suggestion, right?

No.

Okay, fine. One it was.

After popping the pill, I sprawled across the couch with the peas pressed to my face. I did feel better. My phone lay accusatorially on the floor where I’d thrown it. Fuck. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that? But it wasn’t like I could shatter it more. The thing was already broken.

“You got any advice?” I asked no one in particular, staring up at the ceiling, wondering how the hell I’d even survived in the first place. At the time I’d been so sure someone had grabbed me—but…there’d been no one there.

I’d been lucky.

Again.

And suddenly…it occurred to me.

The necklace.

What if it had fallen?

I scrambled my free hand up to grab it, surprised to find it still around my neck. Sure, I’d been the one to put it there—but I’d forgotten as I’d wallowed around like a lumpy sad-sack. The white cross was warm from where it had been pressing against my skin and I clutched at it, shocked and more than a little excited.

Isn’t that what the guy had said?

That it was lucky?

I thought about the coffee, the twenty-dollar bill, the car—and wow.

Wow.

Wow-wow-wow.

Holy cannoli.

Hope burst through me and a startled laugh bubbled out. Maybe my luck was turning around. Maybe there was a sunrise after all.

Luca had the weirdest habit of walking into rooms, staring blankly at the wall, and spontaneously bursting into tears. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, what room it was, or what he’d been doing previously. His tears, apparently, didn’t have the decency to conform to a nine to five schedule.

Though every room in the house had been christened by sobbing, Luca’s favorite spot to cry was huddled over a bowl of cereal, while he sat at the wobbly kitchen table. The wood was covered in hand-painted astrology symbols. It looked like it had spent the last hundred years collecting dust in the back of a thrift shop before it had been resurrected from furniture Hell and adopted into Luca and Violet’s horror show of an apartment.

I’d learned Violet’s name that first night I’d inhabited his body, watching impassively as Luca had flopped next to her on the hotel’s horribly flat mattress. She’d talked his ear off about hot blonde women and the dangers for youth today, caused by consuming hormone-altering chemicals in common everyday food.

Both of them were annoying.

Dramatic.

I thought the waterworks would finally be over when Luca ran out of cereal to cry into. I’d been wrong. Undeterred, he gathered the crumbs from the hollow skeletons of the mostly empty boxes he found scrounging through the dark recesses of his pantry. When that was gone, he went to the store and bought more.

With my talisman swinging from his neck—his gray eyes lost, muscular arms flexing—he ate his way through three different boxes before I decided enough was enough and began hiding them away when he was asleep.

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