Page 108 of Haunt Me

“I need you to know something,” I grab her arms and look at her with so much intensity, it scares me a little. “I tried to pretend that I had moved on, but I never did. No one could move on after you, Eden. No one. Four years or forty or one hundred; I’ll never get over you. You said you’d haunt me, well, you already do. You haunt my dreams. You are not a girl a guy gets over.”

She just stands there, and I am barely touching her, but my body is turned into a live wire. Electricity is running through me just at her proximity, just at the fact that she exists.

“It will always kill me, wanting you,” my voice is a rasp, hoarse with raw, live want. “I haven’t moved on. I never will.”

I screamed my guts out on that stage, but this feels like the loudest thing I have said tonight. All my life.

Eden opens her mouth. Closes it.

“Don’t say anything.” I don’t know why I’m whispering, except that this feels like holy ground. The place where I spoke these words. Where I found her again. “Just… go.”

“Go?”

“Catch that flight home,” I tell her, “but promise me you’ll haunt me, like you did before.” She turns to leave, but I tighten my grip on her elbow. “Promise.”

“That is stupid.”

“I’m not kidding. Promise me, or I’m not letting you go.”

“Promise what exactly?” she’s looking away from me again.

“That you won’t forget me.”

“I wasn’t the one who forgot,” she replies and I shut my eyes against the sharp pain.

“Don’t even joke about that,” I fight to get out the words. “I, forget? You were in every lyric of every song, in every breath, in…” I close my eyes, try not to pass out. Again. Skye’s huge form is approaching in the distance—he’s been giving us space, but it’s over now. I’m out of time. “I didn’t forget for a single second, Eden. I remembered everything wrong, because I didn’t know the truth. But I did not. Freaking. Forget.”

Eden looks scared. She looks like she can’t take any more. “Ok,” is all she says.

“Promise me you won’t forget me.” I just look at her, not blinking. I don’t move a muscle until she replies.

Someone, not Skye, calls my name frantically, but I don’t give any indication that I heard.Promise me, I beg her with my eyes. I hope she can’t tell that I’m drowning. She probably can.

She always could.

“I won’t,” she says finally.

Ideally, at this point I would exhale, but it’s impossible right now. My chest is too tight.

“I need to leave you alone,” I say, my voice a rasp.

“You need to drink some tea,” she says with a small smile.

How can she smile right now, when we are both dying? At least, I am. But she was always braver than anyone thought.

“You know what I need.” My eyes are burning into hers.

I need you. I need to feel you in my arms. I need to sink inside your skin. I need you to kiss me. Kiss me. Kiss me. Kiss me.

“You needed me to promise, so I promised,” she says.

“I need you to haunt me,” I tell her.

She almost snorts. “Don’t talk to me about haunting. I have been haunted more than any other person on the planet. You’ve haunted me all these years.”

“And you think you haven’t hauntedme?”

“I told you, I thought you forgot I existed. I thought that for years. It’s hard to… unthink it.”

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