Nikki has fallen quiet, and I'd hope that it was just sleep, except for I have learned that whatever we are, we don't sleep. Whether we're ghosts or angels or just our bare-naked souls, we shed the cages of mortality, and that meant leaving behind old habits.
"Penny for your thoughts?" I tease, letting her hair slip against my fingers and delighting in the delicate touch of something so simple.
"I'm worth far more than that." She objects, her voice playful despite the fact that she doesn't move. "My head's a mess."
"Tell me about it, then." We have time, after all, for her to try and untangle all of her thoughts.
She does move now, sitting up so that she can see my face. Now I see hers, too, beautiful, ethereal, but troubled. The downward curve of her lips tells me everything her eyes try to hide.
"What is this... existence?"
"Heaven?" I suggest.
It certainly wasn't heaven before her. Before her, time stretched and spanned and looped. A year felt like an eternity. It made my entire life look like the blink of an eye by contrast. Watching her, smelling her, being so close but unable to have her... that was hell.
But she's here now, in my arms like she always should have been. I can't think of that as anything other than heaven.
"It's not what they said." She sighs, her eyes sweeping the dark corners of the church... the church where I was murdered and she was... "Have you seen anyone else? Since you've been here, I mean..."
It takes me a moment to realize what she means... why she's asking.
"Nobody... until you."
The disappointment in her eyes guts me. "My father?"
She doesn't have to ask anything more. I already know what she wants, what she needs, and I'm already shaking my head.
"It's just been me all this time. I think maybe I was waiting on you so that we could go to the next place together..."
Her silent appraisal of me makes me feel worthless, even in spite of feeling valued just moments ago.
"You think there's something else? Something after... this?"
I hope there is. But if there isn't, I'd be okay with it, because she's here with me. She's all that I need, but I amnotall that she needs. I can't be; she had too many people she loved, in different ways.
"I think that I've been waiting for you all this time because I wouldn't go without you." It's the truth in the most gentle way I can give it to her. I've had a lot of time to try and figure it out, and that's the closest I can get to understanding wherever we are...whateverwe are.
Nikki shakes her head and buries her face in my chest, breathing me in as she clings to me like a life raft.
"I thought you left me..."
I know she did. I watched her cry herself to sleep asking why. I listened to her yelling at me on a moonless night, telling me she would never forgive me for this.
"I would never." I still won't. I don't care what's after this if she isn't with me.
A gentle sob vibrates against my neck, and she clings tighter to me, so I give her the minute to feel.
"Noah..."
I hold her against me, hating myself for delighting in her presence. Her mother will be distraught. Her brothers won't understand. Her sister won't even remember her by the time she's our age. Nikki's death is a fucking tragedy... not an accident, not a mistake, not a cruel hand dealt by fate.
I don't think she's even had a chance to process everything that happened to her before she died; a therapist would probably be a great idea right now, but something tells me they don't have grief counselors for the dead.
It's a shame, cause that would probably be a lucrative business.
I guess we're just supposed to be at peace here.
When her sobs taper to a small sniffle, I pull away from her enough to see her beautiful face, the sorrow and the grief, the rage and pain, the injustice and the disappointment.
