“No—” Dustin reached for him. His hands found Greg's shoulders but the fabric of his shirt felt thin, insubstantial. “No, no, Greg, stay with me,stay with me?—”
The command had worked in the motel room.
It wasn't working now.
Greg was looking at him. His eyes were the last thing to blur — brown and warm — and his mouth moved and Dustin couldn't hear what he said.
“GREG!”
CHAPTER 39
He was going.
It didn't hurt. That was the strangest part. He'd expected pain. Some final, definitive sensation to mark the end of an existence, but there wasn't one. There was just... less. Less weight, less color, less sound. The world was pulling away from him, or he was pulling away from it.
The distinction didn't seem to matter anymore.
He could hear Dustin. Distantly, as if through water. There were hands on his shoulders that he could barely feel. A voice saying his name, sayingstay with me, and Greg wanted to — he wanted to so badly — but wanting wasn't enough.
He couldn't hold on to a world he was no longer made for.
His thoughts were scattering. He tried to hold them together but they slipped like sand through fingers, each one dissolving before he could finish it. He thought about the diner, the hospital, thought about ice cream melting on his skin, but the memories blurred. He thought about the motel. Dustin's mouth, the dark room,stay with me.
A part of him caught on that memory.
But at the same time, the teaspoon of soul-stuff that had been Greg—that had walked through walls and filed paperwork and discovered milkshakes and fallen in love—was thinning back into the everything it had been pulled from.
He couldn't fight it. He didn't have the strength.
He was almost gone, and he thought:worth it.
He thought:all of it, every second, worth it.
He thought:I hope Dustin got the right onions?—
And then something pushed.
Not pulled.Pushed. A force at his back, like a hand between his shoulder blades shoving him forward.
It was a foreign presence that almost felt familiar. Reckless and bright and almost like Dustin, but not quite.
It shoved him, and Greg stumbled. Not physically, since he didn't have enough body left for that, but something in him lurched toward the world he was leaving.
Toward Dustin.
Toward the thread between them that he'd been too weak to hold on to.
It was still there. Faint, almost gone, but still there, stretching from the dissolving center of him out toward something solid and warm and loud and alive and gripping his shoulders and shouting his name.
Greg struggled to reach.
The foreign presence pushed again. Harder.
Grab it, you idiot.
Greg could almost hear the words in his ears.
Whatever this thing pushing Greg was, it wasn't going to accept Greg giving up.
