“Fair enough.” He settled back into the cabinets. “What’s it going to cost me?”
He heard the scrape of a chair, the creak of springs as she climbed into bed. His throat felt like sandpaper. His stomach was a molten rock, hard and igneous. He kneaded his aching fist into the cool tile of the floor.
In a whisper, she said, “You have to tell me three more things that are true.”
He pulled his eyes shut against the onslaught of his ghosts. “I can’t think of any right now.”
“Three things you don’t like, then.”
He considered. “I don’t like coffee,” he said after several seconds had passed.
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack. Which, coincidentally, you’re sixty percent more likely to experience if you drink caffeine every day.”
“Colton.”
“What?”
“I spent weeks bringing you a coffee every single morning.”
“And I didn’t drink them.”
“I thought it was just because you were being rude,” she said. “I’m going to send you an invoice; those coffees weren’t cheap. What’s the second thing?”
He chewed on a half-settled smile, mulling it over. “I don’t like that you don’t come by the house anymore.” She went quiet after that, and he wondered what she was thinking. He wanted to ask, but then he was afraid he wouldn’t like the answer. Instead, he said, “Three—I hate keeping so many secrets.”
It was a while before she answered—enough time for him to regret saying it at all. He didn’t want her to be upset with him. He didn’t want to fight again.
“I was reading about necromancy,” Lane finally whispered, in a voice nearly too soft to hear. “When you first called.”
“As one does.”
“Do you think it’s real? I mean, I know it’s real as a concept, but do you think there are people out there who can manipulate the dead?”
He knew why she was asking. He knew the line of questioning that had led her there. It was the natural course of things, given what she’d witnessed in the meadow. Nate Schiller, knitting himself back together at her feet. He thought of little Delaney Meyers-Petrov leaning over him, her mittens full of stones. “Get up; the water’s too cold for swimming.”
“I don’t know,” he lied. “But I’ve clocked enough hours in other worlds to know that reality, as a rule, is limitless.”
“So you’re saying it’s possible.”
“I’m saying anything is,” he said, and it was the closest he could bring himself to spilling the truth.
As it turned out, Colton Price had a very long list of things he didn’t like. He didn’t like crowded spaces, he informed Delaney, as the rented town car picked her up in the haze of an autumn dawn. He didn’t like the smell of recycled air, he added as they zipped along the Callahan Tunnel, lights streaking past in bolts of yellow. He didn’t like seats with little room for his legs. He didn’t like proximity to strangers, public transportation, or bathrooms barely wide enough for his shoulders. An airplane, he argued, toeing out of his shoes in the security line, was all of these things.
“They pack you into a tiny metal box weighing ninety thousand pounds,” he said, looping his leather belt into a plastic collection tray. “Then they vault you through the sky at thirty thousand feet. It’s mathematically insane. Hi there. You look like a very reasonable person. Can I keep my watch on?”
On the other side of the belt, the TSA agent did not look remotely reasonable. She did, Delaney noted, look deeply tired of fielding passenger questions.
“No,” she said, without batting an eye.
But Colton wasn’t deterred. “It’s just that I’m not entirely comfortable taking it off.”
The agent stared. Colton scuffed his socks on the floor. On the belt, trays stacked high with belongings began to pile in a messy bottleneck.
“Just take the watch off, Price,” Delaney said.
By the time they made it to their gate, both of them a little terse, there were only ten minutes remaining until takeoff. After scouting out the window seat, Delaney buckled herself in and watched Colton do the same. He was more casual than she’d ever seen him, dressed in jeans and a raglan shirt, his face obscured beneath the brim of a vintage Whalers cap. Even dressed down, he was in stark opposition to Delaney in her lavender space buns and oversized pullover, shredded black leggings disappearing into jodhpur boots.
