“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured.
“I’m saying you don’t have to do what you’ve always done,” he said, voice snapping sharp. I swallowed hard, and stepped back. “You can just forget, drop off all the memories that make you you, and give yourself leave to feel more.”
“I don’t want to forget him.”
“You don’t want him to forget you.” He shook his head in disagreement. “You’re holding on to a Ben that doesn’t exist because you’re holding on to a Joanna that no longer exists. You don’t exist.”
I straightened on the spot. “I’m right here!”
“But you’re not present! If you were, you’d stay with me!” And he pounded his bare chest so hard the echo thudded through me. He ran a hand over his hair, pulling at it in frustration. “You want everything to be like it used to, but it’s okay to change, Jo. Growth doesn’t have to be painful. It’s natural for a person to change their mind. Even to admit they were wrong.” A humorless snort escaped him, but I only stared, and he fell back against the wall again, deflated. When he next spoke, his voice was again soft. “You can even change your heart. You can do it in an instant.”
I didn’t believe him. Certainly not in this instant. Because You don’t exist still hung on the air. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”
“Won’t.”
“Semantics.”
“Truth.”
“Hurts!” I countered, yelling suddenly. He should stop. Now.
“Maybe,” I said, after a hard swallow, “I just prefer him.”
He scoffed, expression shuttering again. “You prefer the idea of him…but the white-picket fantasy will never be yours, Archer. Your fence will always be coated in blood. Don’t drag him into it.”
I smirked. “Your concern for him is touching.”
“I’m concerned for you.”
No. Like everyone else, he was concerned for himself. “I love him.”
The words didn’t even faze him. “If you did you’d never have let her near him.”
That mobilized me. I clamored down the rickety staircase in haste lest I really think about what he was saying. “I just hope you find someone who feels this strongly about you someday. Then you’ll understand.”
Let him sulk and scheme alone, I thought, kicking a foam template out of my path as I headed across the vast open space of the warehouse. Because that person couldn’t be me. My mind had been made up long ago. It wasn’t a matter of just doing something new or dropping treasured memories like they were refuse. It was a matter of following through and sticking it out and making the life you wanted-and needed-for yourself. My life. With Ben. Period.
Hunter was at the railing now. I could tell because his voice shot over the empty warehouse like it was fired from his body. “I doubt it. Your violent need,” he said, throwing my words back at me, “has completely fucked me.”
I stopped in my tracks, the warehouse too silent after the sure-footedness of my heeled boots. I wanted to keep walking but I couldn’t leave him like that, not after what we’d done and shared and knew.
“Don’t,” he called from over the balcony, a warning and a command. “Don’t you look back now.”
“But-” I was already half turned and could see his strong naked silhouette from the corner of my eye.
“You’ve made a commitment with your head and your heart. A backward glance is an apology. And an insult. Better to stick with your bad decisions.”
And I had made my decision, long before he’d ever come into the picture. So despite the waves of pungent bitterness assailing me from behind, I began walking again. I needed to compartmentalize if I was going to effectively go after Regan…and Ben. I’d bottle this night up and let time wash it away, because there was only one way to fill the lack creating that hole inside me, and it couldn’t be accomplished with another man’s body.
So I strode out into the crisp autumn day, turning into the chaotic center of my hometown, the sharp scent of Hunter’s hostility lessening the farther I walked.
I didn’t look back.
27
Regan didn’t bother taking Ben hostage. She didn’t need to. He’d probably risen like the dead from that coffin-shaped bed and followed the crook of her little finger as she led him away from the chapel and sheets the color of blood. I followed their olfactory trail-rot and smug satisfaction mingling with the scent of their lovemaking, a figurative and conspicuous middle finger in my direction-until his vanished through the threshold of his modest home, and hers disappeared altogether.
She’d gotten what she wanted from him, and injuring him was unnecessary. Not to mention too easy. She’d rather do as her mother had before her, and let the man corrode from the inside out, a slow corruption of his mind that would torture him and me both. And watching him deteriorate, growing shifty-eyed as he began smelling like something rotted and rancid, was much more fun than a swift death. So she’d simply left him at home to sleep off their lovemaking, disease incubating inside him.
I left him there too and headed to the Strip to begin my search for Regan. It was the most populous, transient area of town, and if I were she, this is where I’d hide from me. I started at the north end, closest to the chapel where I’d last seen her, and started walking south. Tourists streamed around me like bright, chattering banners, but I never veered from the stiff, almost militarily precise stride that took me down the center of the walkways, my senses thrown outward, searching, but my gaze straight ahead.
Usually the dusky autumn afternoons distracted me. I always felt on the precipice of something profound in October, like I was walking a tightrope in the thin light between the past and the future, suspended over the unknown. This had never been truer than it was today, but unlike Octobers past, my upended hourglass into the future was now a ticking bomb. And when a breeze swept across the sidewalk in front of Planet Hollywood, skittering leaves and dust from City Center, it was accompanied by a rush of static bristling across the power line overhead. The sharp crackle followed me across Harmon, growing louder until the line sparked and sizzled overhead. When the mortals started noticing it, heads and hands pointed upward, I altered course to end up behind a strip mall composed entirely of souvenir shops. The last grain of sand had fallen in my hourglass. I’d cleared the tightrope safely, and now my unsafe future was here.
A click, more solid than static, sounded behind me.
“You’re early,” I said, without turning around.
“I’m hungry.”
I opened my mouth, the Tulpa’s mantra ready to trip from my tongue, but a sliver of sound shot past me and the air between me and the back of the pink stuccoed strip mall splintered like a web. I held my breath lest reality fracture on my exhale.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I did turn now, and found the doppelgänger dressed like me in dark jeans, a long-sleeved black tee, with a messenger bag slung across her body from her right shoulder. Of course, her dark clothing was relative. Layers and layers of the same mutable substance composed her body and clear face, and her outline now darkened into near-opaqueness, though anyone could still see she wasn’t human. Yet her hair no longer bubbled from shaft to end. She’d found my old style and copied it precisely. I was getting so tired of people doing that.