“I do, though. I really do. The other reapers make funof me for that, but…” Greg's voice had gone distant, almost dreamy. “I know you think your life is…I know you don't value it. I know you think death is meaningless and cruel. But do you have any idea what youhave?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Everything. You have everything. You have taste and touch and cold asphalt under you right now and the ability to be hurt by it. You have lemon ice cream and bad decisions and dreams about better ones. You have grief, which means you had love first. You had a brother. You have his memory. You have the coordinates of your first jump tattooed over your heart because it mattered enough to carry on your skin.”
Dustin's jaw tightened. “Greg?—”
“And when it ends—” Greg kept going, like if he stopped he wouldn't be able to start again. “When it ends, that's just another beginning. Whatever's on the other side of the threshold—the place I guide souls to, the place where Marco saw someone named Eddie waiting for him—you get to go there. You get everything, Dustin. Life and love and pain and loss and then, at the end of all of it,you get to move on.”
His voice broke on the last word.
“Reapers don't get any of that. We get the job. We get the clipboard and the collections and an office building with little cubicles. And if we choose to stop, there is nothing else for us. We dissolve. We scatter. We don't reach a threshold with someone else waiting on the other side.” Greg's hands were clasped so tightly in his lap that his knuckles had gone white. “This job is all I am. It's all I'll ever be. And you?—”
He stopped.
Dustin waited.
Greg didn't continue. Instead, he rose to his feet, clutching his clipboard. “I can't let you keep interfering with my job.”
Dustin stared up at him, scrutinizing the reaper who'd sat in an ice cream parlor with him just a few hours ago, marveling over the taste of chocolate. The reaper he'd kissed—not because he'd needed the distraction, but just because he'd wanted to.
Hestillwanted to.
After everything Greg had just told him, Dustin still wanted to kiss him.
He filed that thought away, unsure what to do with it as he slowly stood to face Greg. “You know I won't stop just because you ask me to.”
He wasn't sure if he was talking about kissing Greg or saving people.
Maybe both.
He pressed on. “You just told me I haveeverything. Taste and touch and grief and love and all of it. You said that. So how am I supposed to hear that and then let a nineteen-year-old lose it on a highway?”
Greg's mouth opened wordlessly.
“You can't have it both ways,” Dustin insisted, finding his momentum. “You can't tell me life is this incredible, precious thing and then ask me to stand back while yours gets snuffed out.”
“Hers,” Greg corrected quietly. “Jessica's.”
“Yeah. Hers.”
They looked at each other. Behind them on the motel wall, a faulty light flickered on and off.
Greg's features cycled through different emotions. Dustin thought he saw frustration, fear, resignation and something else he couldn't name. Longing?
Was that it?
“Fine,” Greg said finally. “Fine.” But he said it like the word was made out of glass.
He turned and walked across the parking lot without looking back. Solid. Steady. Every inch the dutiful reaper, except that his hands were shaking where they held the clipboard.
Dustin watched him go.
CHAPTER 21
Greg arrived at Interstate 25 at 3:15 p.m.
An hour and thirty-two minutes before he needed to be there. It was probably excessive, but Greg had never attended a highway collection before, and he wanted to be prepared. He wanted to observe the traffic patterns, identify the stretch of road most likely to produce a multi-vehicle incident, and position himself for a clean, professional extraction.
