Page 68 of After Life
Epilogue — Oscar
“Admit it. You’re happier to see me than you were spending time with Julian,” Ezra said, stretching out on the sofa and flopping his feet onto my thighs.
Julian snorted but didn’t look up from his laptop. He’d been head down in something for the past several days and, while I had my suspicions, I wasn’t going to dwell on them, not until it was necessary.
“I don’t know,” I said, turning my attention back to Ezra. “How’s your kissing? Is it better than Julian’s?”
Ezra cocked a brow. “One way to find out...”
We both paused, glancing at Julian. He looked up from his computer and made a go on gesture. “Go on then. I won’t stand in your way. Best friends to lovers... One of my favorite romance tropes.”
Ezra leaned in as if he might go for it, and I puckered up. Then we both burst into giggles like we were twelve again and kissing was the silliest thing invented. “Alas, I cannot stand in the way of true love,” Ezra said, flinging himself back onto the sofa with one hand over his eyes and the other trailing on the floor. “Oscar, we’ll just have to go the rest of our lives wondering what if!”
“I don’t know,” I said, stretching my legs out to rest my heels on the coffee table. “Living with the mystery might be for the best.”
Ezra snorted and rearranged himself on the sofa as if he were still twelve, all limbs and force and no regard for his spine’s future happiness. “We’d never suit.” He sighed dramatically. “Maybe in the next life.”
I thought I hid my twinge well enough, but Ezra’s pointed, sudden stillness and the silence from Julian’s end of the room told me I’d been caught out. “It’s fine,” I muttered. “I’m not dead. No one died this time, so I’d say we’re coming out ahead.”
Another beat or two of quiet, then Ezra said, “It only counts if we’re filming an episode. As this happened outside of filming, it doesn’t affect our average of cadavers involved in an investigation.”
“Damn,” I sighed, forcing a small smile. “I’ll have to try harder next time.”
Ezra’s phone chimed, and he glanced at the screen, a broad smile blooming on his lips. “Speaking of hard, it’s Harrison. Don’t wait up,” he called, bouncing from the sofa and practically sprinting to the other bedroom.
Julian glanced up from what he’d been working on and smirked. “So he’s distracted for a bit...”
I rolled to my feet, already unfastening the buttons on my cuffs as I headed for the bedroom. “Don’t dawdle,” I called. “We only have so long until Harrison has to hang up and get back to work.”
It was a good while later, Julian and I laying lazily on a bed still damp with sweat and cooling fluid that would make me race to the shower if I thought too long on it, we stared at the ceiling with the old popcorn texture and let our minds wander into pleasant fantasies of what if. “If we lived in England,” I said around a yawn, “I technically own Grandmere’s house.”
“Seriously?” Julian said on a startled half-laugh. “What do you do with it when you’re not there?”
I shrugged. “Even when I am there, I don’t live in it. Or any of her other properties. There’s a service that comes out and maintains the grounds, and another that cleans the insides. There’s a security service that keeps an eye on things as well.”
Julian pushed up onto his elbow, fixing me with a bemused expression. “I’m about to be offensive here but... How do you afford all of that?”
“How do you think?” I asked, my face warming. Money wasn’t something I liked to discuss, at least not when it came to obscene amounts of it.
“I’m guessing a trust created by either your grandmother or her late husband? Meant to protect their homes and properties?”
I blinked. “Actually, yes. Something like that. It’s not out of my pocket. My parents had a bit of money set aside for me, meant for after I turned twenty, and I’m the sole inheritor for both of my grandparents...” Trailing off, I shrugged, looking down. “I prefer to make my own way as much as possible, but I admit it’s been a great privilege being able to refuse money for séances and only accept gratuities or speaking fees and the like.”
Julian stroked his fingers through my hair and gave it a little tug. “Why are you so nervous to tell me that? Are you afraid I’ll want you for your money?” He said it teasingly, but I could hear a tinge of hurt in his voice. “You know I don’t care.”
I nodded. “But there have been times people have.” Few and far between, thanks to my tendency to let Ezra be the public face of our enterprise and run interference when people wanted to get too close. But there’d been a handful of times, times when I thought a connection was real only to find they were interested in me for my real or perceived status, the fact I came from money. Almost worse than the users were those who assumed I was fake not because they didn’t believe in the paranormal but because of my family, my background.
“Ugh,” I groaned, rolling to press my face against Julian’s chest. “Poor little rich boy, I know, I know. Out of all the things for me to fret over, this is the most ridiculous.”
“Hey, stop that,” he ordered gently, reaching to tip my chin up, to make me stop hiding. “You have your reasons, and that’s it. I was asking because I’m nosy—I wondered how you and Ezra were able to scrape by in an expensive-to-live place like London is all. And now I know. Not a big deal.” He dropped a quick kiss onto my forehead before asking, “And just for the record, if we did move in together—”
“When,” I corrected, a thrill of excitement shooting through my veins. “When we do.”
His smile was brilliant. “When we live together then, I would never make you use your grandparents’ home just to have somewhere to live. There’s a reason you don’t stay there, and that’s fine. Besides, somewhere of our own might be nice, you know? Somewhere just ours.”
Somewhere without memories attached to it, things that made me angry, made me confused... I nodded. “When we’re done filming this first season, let’s... let’s start looking for a place. We can figure out the where between now and then.”
It was going to be a huge undertaking—Julian couldn’t just pack up and move to England without miles of paperwork and approvals, and my visa was only good so long as we were working... “Shit. Ezra.”
