It was like a switch had gone off when he felt the contact, and Rabbit finally regained control of his body. He jumped off the stage and turned, staring up at Oli as the other man straightened back to his full height.
“How?” He swallowed, his throat suddenly impossibly dry as he watched the ghost from his memories casually slide his hands into his front pockets. “You’re dead.”
“Is that what you thought?” Oli chuckled, but it wasn’t pleasing to the ears. “Did you even try to look, Rabbit? Hmm?”
No, he hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. There’d been a funeral, a private one that he’d had to beg his mother to let him throw, but that’d been it. His mother had claimed she’d contacted his friends since he hadn’t had any family and Rabbit had chosen to believe her. He’d been dealing with the loss of memories and the sudden influx of stage fright, something he’d never experienced up until then. But that didn’t excuse his actions, or rather, inactions. “I was a shitty friend. I didn’t—”
“Friend,” Oli rolled the word on his tongue as though it were in a foreign language. “It’s an interesting take, but we both know you’ve never had one of those a day in your life. All of these people,” he threw out his arm to indicate the auditorium seats, “they come here to stare at you like you’re some animal at the zoo. You’re nothing more than a commodity to them. None of them know you. None of them even want to try. There was just me. Me, who got close to you. Me, who extended a hand.”
He did so now, though the distance between them made it obvious he didn’t intend for Rabbit to try and take it now. Sure enough, after a moment, he dropped his arm back to his side.
“Did you like my roses, Rabbit?” Oli motioned to the one being squeezed tightly in Rabbit’s hand.
“You sent them?” He tried to think back on when exactly he’d received his first flower, but his life had been such a mess then, it was hard to recall much of anything. He’d spent most of his days moving through life like a zombie. If he were to guess, he thought perhaps they’d come a month or so after that horrible night. Which meant… “You’ve been watching me? All this time?”
That didn’t make any sense.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he asked. “Why didn’t you go to the police? What my mom did to you was a crime!”
“I was waiting till the bitch came back,” Oli admitted. “I went to every single one of your performances thinking that she’d be there. She used to hover whenever she wasn’t off planet, remember? But she never came. It was almost as though she knew to stay away.”
There was a gleam in Oli’s eyes that shouldn’t be there. It was similar to the one Rabbit had seen in Baikal’s gaze whenever the Brumal Prince started thinking about causing harm to others. It was the type of look that didn’t belong on the face of someone as docile and good as Oli, and seeing it there threw Rabbit off all over again.
“What happened to you?” he whispered, the question out before he could think better than to ask it. But something wasn’t right. This person in front of him looked like his music teacher and yet acted nothing like him. He may as well be a stranger.
“Why ask when you were there?” Oli cocked his head. “You watched it happen. You cried over my corpse—oh, sorry, not really a corpse, since I wasn’t actually dead. Passed out for a really long time though. Woke up just as a man was trying to bury me in an empty plot in the cemetery.”
“What?” Had his mother tried to dispose of his body? But then, who had that been being placed into the incinerator in the basement level of the hospital? After Rabbit had woken, he’d insisted on seeing Oli’s body. The doctor had grumbled the whole way down there and then let him in just in time to see the body being slid into the machine. He’d only caught sight of his legs and his shoes but he’d believed the doctor when he’d claimed it was Oli Easton.
That night, Rabbit hadn’t paid any attention to what Oli had been wearing so he hadn’t been in a place to disagree.
“That’s horrible,” Rabbit said, and Oli snorted.
“You should have seen the look on the gravedigger’s face. I guess he’d been offered a hefty sum to get rid of me because I only managed to ask what was going on before he’d lifted his shovel and tried to smash my brains in—for real this time, since your mom apparently failed to do so on her own.”
“You were almost murdered…again?”
“Seriously shitty luck I have, huh?” Oli clicked his tongue. “In my panic, I dove out of the way and the guy ended up tripping and falling. He landed inside the hole on his head. Broke his neck. I checked, by the way, so he was for certain dead. Ironic, that he’d dug his own grave. Isn’t that funny?” He laughed like it was.
Rabbit stared at him, that sense of wrongness only growing more and more with each passing second.
“Anyway, I tried to go home but I ended up seeing my obituary flashing on the screen by the funeral home entrance. Figured out what was going on pretty quickly after that.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?” Rabbit folded his hands, acting like he was cold when in reality he was pressing the button on his multi-slate that would redial the last number he’d called. Every single one of his instincts was screaming at him he was in danger and he needed Baikal. “I thought you were dead. I mourned you.”
“Did you?” Oli didn’t appear to believe that. “You seemed pretty out of it all this time, Rabbit. Didn’t look like you’d felt much of anything, to be honest. Hell, I was the one who was supposedly dead and yet you spent more time looking and acting like a ghost than I did.” He laughed again. “And why? I just told you. I accidentally killed a man. Sort of. Even if I’d gone straight to the police and tried to claim December Trace had set the whole thing up, she would have easily turned the world against me. I wouldn’t have gotten away with it like she had.”
That was true, and he could see his mom doing that. Finding some way to twist things and claim Oli was crazy, and made the whole story of her abuse up so he wouldn’t be held responsible for the gravedigger’s death. Didn’t matter that there would be obvious holes in her story or that Rabbit himself could have easily corroborated with Oli.
Oli probably hadn’t even trusted Rabbit would, and he couldn’t blame him. But the animosity aimed his way right now was a lot, and even though he fully believed Oli’s tale about the guy tripping, he also believed the rest of what he said as well, and according to him, he’d been stalking Rabbit.
Rabbit had no clue if his call was going through or not, but he kept trying, repeatedly pushing the button as many times as he could before Oli’s gaze dropped to his arms and he was forced to move them and hang them back down at his sides.
“I kept your flowers,” he ended up saying, figuring it was best to keep Oli talking. “Every single one of them. They were the only meaningful thing I had all year.”
That seemed to touch something within the other man, and some of his hatred drifted away. “Really?”
