Page 86 of Ghosted
His eyes soften. “Because I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you how much I love you so that it makes sense to you. I can feel my tie to the world has been severed now that Richard is practically case closed. I felt the light, like what you were talking about with Rebecca. It smelled like my mom’s homemade peanut butter cookies, and I almost followed it. But I don’t want to go, Rae. I want to be here with you. I may nothaveto stay anymore, but I want to. I choose you in this lifetime and the next. Over and over, I’ll choose you.” My breath hitches in my chest, and he presses a finger to my lips. “I’m no Shakespeare, but give me a chance to tell you why this is the right thing?” he asks, searching my face.
I nod, blinking back tears, so he says, “Finding out you’re dead is a fairly traumatic experience, you know. But the funny thing is, it hasn’t felt that way. Even though we’ve been investigating my murder, it’s just been… Fun. I haven’t had funin so long, Rae. My life was one monotonous day after another.
I felt like Ihadto be a lawyer, and Ihadto have all this fancy shit. I didn’t even know what I wanted out of life other than that I wanted to make my dad proud. He’s a good man, and I’ve always looked up to him. But I wasn’t happy walkingaround in his shoes. Death might have been the best thing to happen to me.”
“Are you nuts?” I ask, half-seriously.
He glares at me playfully. “No. Don’t get me wrong—I’m furious that I died so young. But also, if I hadn’t, I would have been promoted. And that would have been a kind of death too. I would have kept living an unhappy life full of expectation and working late nights.
In death, I got to get close to you in a way that would have been impossible if I had stayed alive. I got to fall for you. I got to see you like I’ve never seen another person. All the soft parts you try to hide, the way you help people even when it’s hard. How driven you are. How much those around you love you. Death took down that barrier for us. I’ve never felt closer to another person. Being removed from the world gave me a clarity I didn’t know I needed. A new meaning.” He tucks an errant lock of hair behind my ear, letting his fingertips linger against the underside of my jaw.
“Oh?” I ask, gently prodding him to get to the point. Not that I’m impatiently waiting on his second declaration of love or anything.
Definitely not.
“You,” he murmurs, tracing his finger along my cheek. “You’re my new meaning, Rae. Every time I make you laugh, I feel an answering light turn on in my chest. Every time I kiss you, my heart feels like it’s trying to beat outside of my ribs so you can hold it closer. Whenever you’re in my arms, I feel at home. You’re everything to me. You’ve carved a perfectly Rae-shaped hole in my heart, and it won’t beat properly unless you’re there, too.”
“Technically, your heart doesn’t beat anymore at all. Or atleast, the one buried six-feet down doesn’t,” I can’t help but point out with a smile.
He laughs, and I ride the wave of his chest rising and falling, mesmerized by his dimple and the flash of white teeth in the moonlight. “Okay, I’ll give you that one. But the point is, mymetaphoricalheart is yours if you’ll have it,” he says.
“Well, you already have mine, so it seems only fair,” I reply, leaning down and pressing a kiss over his sternum.
“You sure? I don’t share, Alderwood. We’ve already been over this. So if you’re mine, that’s it. It won’t exactly be conventional.” He has the audacity to look unsure.
I laugh. “What part of my life is conventional anyway? I run an oddities and occult shop with my crazy aunt. Every woman in my family has extra-sensory abilities.AndI frequently commune with the dead. A white picket fence has never been part of the plan.”
He tilts his head a little and asks, “So you don’t want kids?”
I shudder. “No. They’re great and all, but not for me. I’m about as maternal as a hamster.”
“Don’t they eat their babies?”
I bare my teeth. “Exactly.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he says, flopping his head back on the pillow.
“I prefer the term: having a deep sense of self.”
We lie in the specific, nearly complete quiet of two AM in a small town. My head rests on his chest, and my eyelids feel like they’re slowly filling with lead, getting heavier and heavier by the second. “You know,” I say sleepily. “I love you too. You make me feel seen and precious. No one’s ever done that for me before.”
“I know. I can sense your emotions, remember?” Dean says,rubbing a soothing hand up my spine. I catch the edge of his smile before my eyes slide shut, and I burrow deeper in his chest, thinking about how nice this would be to have forever. That I might get to find out.
I grumble something drowsily about know-it-alls and slide under the tide of sleep that finally crashes over me.
FORTY-SIX
My eyes open to disorienting,complete darkness. It presses in on me from all sides, caressing my skin like a lover saying hello after a long absence. I blink hard, trying to force my eyes to see through the infinite black.
How did I get here? I can tell I’m standing, but my senses are completely deprived otherwise. The space could be four-square-feet or have no borders. It’s impossible to tell. I feel like prey waiting for a much larger predator to snatch me out of the dark.
I take a tentative step forward and am instantly even more disoriented. I have the sense that I’ve stepped over a vast distance. I hold my hand out in front of me and, for the first time, notice a faint glow coming off my skin, instantly distracting me.
Oh, shit. Am I dead?
I immediately start cataloguing my body, running my hands over my face, my arms. Everything feels intact, but somethingisn’t right. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m struck with a sudden, breathtaking terror.
Spinning in a slow circle, I try to find something that sticks out—some way to judge where I am or where I’m supposed to go. My eyes ache from trying to focus on things that aren’t there, so I close them. I breathe in deeply, the total absence of scent distracting me. I shake my head and concentrate, unfurling my extra sense slowly, the way you tentatively reach a hand out to test if a pan or dish is still hot.
