“Oh my God! I did not meet him on the Internet.”
Cash laughed and I was grateful for it. “Calm down. I’m just messing with you.” He snagged my hot chocolate cup out of my hand and took a sip. “But if you’re going to continue to be a dirty little secret-keeper, I’m taking this back.”
“If it will get you to leave me alone, take it.” I picked my book back up and peeked at him over the top.
Cash reached across the bed and pulled the book out of my hands. “Hey, why don’t you come over?”
“Seriously? I look like a zombie.” I spread my arms, feeling like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Black and blue and stitched all over. There was no way I was hiking across the yard to his house. “I’m not even supposed to get out of bed. Besides, I really don’t feel like watching you and your skeevy friends get wasted and pretend you know how to play guitar.”
Cash threw my book across the bed and frowned. “I can play.” I raised a brow and he laughed.
“Okay, I can play a little. Come on. It won’t be as fun if you’re not there to laugh at me. I could carry you? You wouldn’t have to walk at all.”
My battered reflection in the vanity mirror caught my eye and I looked away. “Even if I could, I’m not going anywhere looking like this.”
I also wasn’t going anywhere until Finn came back. There were still too many things left unsaid. He still owed me answers. Cash sat up on my bed and nudged my foot.
“You don’t look that bad, Em,” he said. “Believe me. The guys I’m having over will still totally hit on you. I don’t think a few bruises and stitches will deter their inappropriate behavior.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I just…” The humor drained from his voice. “I don’t want to leave you alone, okay?”
The guilt in his voice made my heart hurt. I couldn’t stand him thinking any of this was his fault.
“I’m fine. I swear. Besides, Mom’s home. I won’t be alone.” I grabbed my book from where he’d tossed it onto the pillows. “I just need a quiet night. No drama unless it’s the fictional kind.”
“Fine.” Cash ran his fingers through his messy hair. “Have your nerdfest. But I’ll call you later to check on you.”
“One of your famous 2:00 a.m. drunk calls?” I smiled. “Can’t wait.”
Cash disappeared out the window, shimmying it closed behind him. I listened to the cold November wind pulse against the walls of the house. Just the sound of it made me shiver. I tugged my red cardigan around my chest to hold in the warmth and burrowed into my covers, flipping the pages of the book I was reading.
I’d made it through three more chapters by the time Finn came back, stumbling through the wall like he’d been shoved into the room. He braced himself on the sill, pulling back the parts of himself that had seemed to melt right through the Sheetrock and cursed under his breath.
“You’re not very good at that, are you?” I asked, feeling relieved and upset all at the same time.
He glanced at me over his shoulder, then cast a haunted look back out the window. His eyes flickered with the movement of whatever he was seeing. Snowflakes, probably. Even from my bed I could see the eerie ballet of white dust against the black velvet sky outside.
“Were you…” I hesitated, searching for the right word. “Were you collecting a soul?”
“Where’s Cash? I thought he’d be with you,” Finn said, carefully deflecting my question. He didn’t have to answer, though. I could see it written all over his face. The pain and regret. The mask of horror that death brands into a person’s eyes.
I turned my attention back to my novel, pretending to read so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “He’s drinking with some of his buddies. They’re forming a garage band,” I said. “Not my thing. Besides, you and I never got a chance to finish talking.”
Finn didn’t say anything right away. He didn’t even look at me. But after a few moments of silence, he sat down beside me on the bed. The mattress didn’t give. The blankets didn’t shift. So close and still so far away.
“If you’re waiting for me to tell you I regret it, that’s not going to happen,” he said, his voice sounding tight and uneven. “I don’t. I wouldn’t take it back even if I could. You deserve to be here, and you sure as hell didn’t deserve to be cast off as the scum of the underworld for the rest of eternity because I made a mistake. If that makes me a bad person, if it makes you hate me…then I guess it is what it is.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I was afraid of what would happen if I let the words out. I didn’t hate him. I…loved him. He’d risked everything for me. He was still risking everything for me.
How could I hate him? I was just angry, and no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t go away.
“I am sorry I lied to you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I got in the way of who you were supposed to be. If I had just left you alone that first day…”
“Don’t say that.” I moved closer. “I want to be here, Finn. I want to be alive.”
“You could be in Heaven if it wasn’t for me. Do you realize that? You could still have that if I could just let go.”
“I don’t want Heaven. Not yet anyway,” I said. “I want…this.” I reached out, but Finn jerked away like I’d burned him.
“I can’t…I don’t trust myself with you right now.”
“What’s wrong?”
Finn scrubbed his hands over his face. “Nothing. Okay, not nothing. But I’ll get over it soon.”
I bit my lip and watched him. “If it helps, I don’t hate you.”
“You should.”
The lights flickered above us, the wind outside waging a war with the power lines. Without thinking, I leaned across Finn to grab a candle and a lighter from my nightstand drawer. My arm sank through his shimmer and dissolved through his arm. He inhaled sharply and I froze. My hand glittered like silver dust beneath his.
“I’m sorry,” I said without moving. I could feel his warmth against my cheek as I hovered over him.
“Emma…please,” he said breathlessly. He shut his eyes, like he was trying to get some control over himself. “No. I should go.”
“Please don’t.” The lights flickered again, so I pulled away to light the candle, then set it on the opposite nightstand beside me. “Talk to me.”
He watched me for a moment, his gaze jittery. His hand moved across the mattress between us, but he yanked it back before it got to me. “I don’t…I don’t deal very well with, um…” He swallowed.
“Fire.”
“Is that where you were? A fire?”
He nodded. “A lot of people died. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.”
“That’s how you died, isn’t it? A fire made your plane crash?”
He looked away, a pained expression on his face. “How do you know I was in a plane crash?”
“I researched your name on the Internet.”
“Why?” He still wouldn’t look at me. I wanted to make him. It felt necessary to life that he look at me at that moment.
“Because I care,” I said. “And because I feel like I should know these things, considering what you are to me.”
“And what am I to you?” Finn asked just as the lights gave a final flicker and went out. The candle glow made him look ethereal in the dark, his skin like caramel, his eyes the deepest shade of jungle green.
“I…I feel something when I’m with you that I’ve never felt before,” I whispered as if anyone else were there to hear. “Like we’re two halves of a whole.”
“You feel that way even after everything I did?”
“Yes. Don’t you feel it?”
He finally rested the back of his head against the headboard and stared at the ceiling like he was looking into a nightmare. “I was a fighter pilot in World War II. My plane was shot down at the Battle of Midway. I was only eighteen. I didn’t even finish high school,” he said in a flat voice. I had a feeling it was the first time he’d ever said it aloud since his death. “My mom begged me not to go, but I went anyway. At the time, it seemed right. I remember thinking I’d come home and show them all when I was a war hero.” He laughed, but it sounded bitter. “I did come home a war hero. Or at least the letter and medal that represented me did, all wrapped up in a pine box. I really showed them, huh?”