“And how do you know?”
“Because,” he said, proud and reaching and inaccessible. “I didn’t let it take me.”
She felt like she’d woken from a fever dream—or maybe like she was still inside it—the entire evening nothing more than a strange, lucid nightmare. “Do you hear yourself? You’re reaching too far.”
Colton slid a hand into his pocket. “?‘Ah, but a man’s reach should extend his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’?”
She frowned up at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Robert Browning. ‘I know both what I want and what might gain.’?”
“Poetry. Of course it’s poetry.” She barked out a laugh, much too loud for the ambience of the posh gallery. The hum in her head was quickly rising to a crescendo, strident and infuriating. The sway of the crowd was dizzying. She needed space. She needed a minute to think. When she pushed away from the table, Colton came after her.
“Wednesday,” he called. “Delaney, wait.”
She kept on walking, her bag slung over her shoulder. She didn’t make it far before his hand closed around her upper arm, rooting her in place.
“Don’t leave” was all he said.
She rounded on him at once, teetering on the edge of tears. “You didn’t bring me here to help me get this thing out of me. You brought me here to talk me into keeping it.”
He didn’t deny it. “Would it be so bad,” he asked, “to outwit death?”
“Death is part of life,” she bit back. “Nothing is permanent. Nothing stays. Everything comes to an end, that’s just the way it goes. And if you don’t figure that out, you’ll end up permanently stalled. Lost and alone like the man from the museum, filling your house with cheap, meaningless snow globes.”
His brows drew together. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
She wrenched her arm free of his grasp. “What did you expect? Because if you’re trying to convince me that I should be happy to have thisthingliving in my head, you’ll have to try a lot harder.”
His jaw locked. For a moment, they stood like rocks in a stream, the crowd ebbing and flowing all around them. Music she couldn’t place pulsed in the air, a different top forty for a different universe. She wondered, dully, if another copy of Delaney Meyers-Petrov and Colton Price were somewhere nearby. If they, too, were spending this night fighting. If they knew each other at all. The thought that they might not fractured through her, even as she wished to be anywhere but here, caught up in his shadow.
“I didn’t bring you here to change your mind,” he said, nearly too soft to hear. She was forced to read his lips in the quiet. “I brought you here to help me say goodbye.”
***
He didn’t speak. Not to answer her stream of questions, nor to fill the silence. He only walked on, tugging her in his wake with a relentlessness that left her breathless, jogging to keep up with him on the powdered white of the sidewalk. The streets outside the gallery were quiet as a grave, the dark held briefly at bay by the spangled lights of the matchstick city. It should have been a reprieve—the cool kiss of snow on her skin, the glittering elms on every corner. Instead, her skin stayed hot and fevered. Shadows throbbed at the edges of her vision.
Look at us.
Look at us.
She felt a little bit like a spindle, unraveling. As if she was moments away from coming all to pieces and spooling, ribbon-like, across the snow-laden lane.
“Price,” she said, for the fourth time in as many minutes. He hadn’t slowed, hadn’t even glanced at her, driven on by the invisible spur of some unseen master, some wild notion that incited him to haste. Like the devil himself was breathing down their necks, great maw held open in a beatific grin. “Colton.”
She wouldn’t go farther. Not until she knew where he was taking her.
Digging in her heels, she wormed her fingers out of his grasp. Her hand ached with the holding. Everything he did—every way he touched her—left little hurts along her bones. Left her stomach sick with wanting. It felt like something preternatural, this constant, unyielding pull to him. Like there was a cord threaded through both of them, tangling them into knots.
Close, crooned the voice.So very close.
“You’re acting insane.” Her words were swallowed up by the snow, by the dark, by the indefatigable presence in her head. “That’s nothing new. But this, tonight—you’re making me nervous.”
He rounded on her, grim-faced in the light. For once, the arrogant spark had deadened in his eyes. The familiar way he held himself, all broad shoulders and pressed angles and ironed confidence, had winnowed away. He looked as if he’d been chiseled into a ghost of himself, his curls windblown, his tie rumpled.
“We’re here,” he said, his gaze affixed to a point somewhere just above her head.
They were in a residential neighborhood, the homes pressed neatly together in narrow town houses of grayed-out brick. The cheery lights from the tapered windows threw oblong squares of yellow gold over the needle-thin road. The snow fell and fell.
