Page 56 of Haunt Me

She goes quiet.

“I love you,” I say again. It feels so amazing to say the words out loud. Intentionally. The truest words I can say. I close my eyes and savor them. She is still quiet, her eyebrows meeting. “I love you. I don’t expect you to say it—”

She closes the distance between us in two steps, walks up to me, and gives me a peck on the lips. Just a soft brush, barely there. It paralyzes me.

I freeze, all the way down to my toes.

She retreats quickly, but I’m not going to let her run away. Not now. Not after this.

I reach her with a single step, put my palm under her jaw, my fingers closing lightly around her slender neck, and fit her mouth to mine.

“No no no no no,” I whisper against her mouth, teasing her lips open with my mouth, kissing her and not quite kissing her yet. “You finish this.”

“I don’t know how,” she murmurs. Her breath is coming short. I breathe it in.

“Then I guess it will never end,” I say.

And then I’m tasting her lips. I turn my head to fit her mouth better, my chin melded to hers, and my legs bend so that I can reach down to her height. My arm is around her waist, my other hand cupping her ear. I taste her lips again and again, electric fire scorching my body, and I feel her shaking as badly as I am.

“Is this your answer?” I ask, almost too out of breath to talk. “Is this your ‘I love you too?’”

“That is my ‘haunt me’”, she says against my lips and I smile, still shaking.

I don’t care if she ever says the words or not. She has said more than words can say here today. She came up to kiss me first. I know how much courage that took. I saw her trembling as she stepped up to me, I saw the inner battle she fought. She won that, for me.

She is still shaking, but I hope there’s more of a reason for that than fear.

I hope that reason is fire. My fire.

“I love you,” I say against her mouth, and I can’t get enough. Of saying it. Of tasting it on her lips. I can’t get enough. “I love you I love you I love you.”

Eden’s Old Phone

Eden: I am condemned.

Eden: I will surely die after committing a sin like this.

Eden: Is it silly to want to haunt him after I die?

fourteen

For the rest of my life, whenever I close my eyes, I will see her image standing there in the middle of the highway, small, frozen, all alone in an ocean of cars.

Even after years have passed, I will still wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, and close my eyes and try to picture her as she looked afterwards, safe in my car, my hands inching to touch hers. I will try to change the image of her standing in that rushing river of cars. Some days, I will succeed.

Some other days, the mere memory of that day will have me dry-heaving.

Some days, it will have me wishing I could go back in time and ask her exactly what the hell was going on in that house of hers. But I won’t be able to.

I will only remember and hurt.

It will hurt so much to know what she was going through. The pain will be unbearable to the point of making me physically sick, but I will deserve it.

In the future, when I remember this day, and know the real reason it happened, I will instantly feel the need to throw up, to purge these images from my memory, from my brain, from existence, but I won’t be able to.

I never will.

In my memory, she is forever stuck on that highway.

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