Page 48 of Laced in Longing

I stay on my knees. Every instinct inside longs to rise and follow her; close the distance once more and tug her back into the warmth that is us. But she shakes like a startled bird, one breath from bolting, and I’ve lost her too many times to spook her now. So I let her go. My body remains in the snow as she fumbles with the door and vanishes into the building. Only when it clicks shut do I let out the breath I’ve been holding.

Well.

First, the obvious problem, the one I keep circling back to and keep flinching away from: I’ll be forced to watch her closer now. Much closer. She came up here to die, and she’ll try it again the second despair swallows her back down. It’s imperative I’m always near enough to catch her. This time was pure luck. Tonight was—I don’t even know what tonight was, and that’s the second problem, isn’t it?

Because I still feel the cold of the concrete beneath me and the chill of the air. Everything appears solid and heavy, and I have absolutely no memory of choosing it. I lunged for her on instinct, begging fate to stop her from succeeding this time, and my arms actually closed around something.

Grunting, I try to relinquish it. To thin myself back out into smoke and return to the way I’m supposed to be. I reach for that state of being and…

Nothing happens.

Still solid. Still kneeling in the snow with breath fogging just beyond my face.

How do I fix this? Do I even want to fix this?

No, not a chance. I got what I wanted: to touch her.

But I have a terrible feeling I’m going to pay for it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MAVEN

The door slams behind me hard enough to rattle the crappy little mirror next to it, and I stand there with my back pressed against the wood, breathing hard and frantic.

My hands won’t stop shaking.

I hold them up in front of my face and watch, entranced by this fine tremble that starts at my fingertips and works its way down into my wrists. I keep waiting for the guilt to hit me the way it always does. That gross, sludgy shame that pools in your gut after you try to do the thing and fail at the thing, because apparently I can’t even manage to die correctly, which is honestly so on brand it would be funny if I weren’t standing here doing my impression of an earthquake.

But the guilt doesn’t come.

That’s the truth that’s freaking me out most, if I’m being honest, because I know that guilt. I know it like a toxic ex I keep taking back. It should be here, curling up in my sternum, whispering, ‘You’re so pathetic you couldn’t even die.’ Instead there’s a loud humming static filling up all the space in my awareness where the shame usually resides, and under the static, one single sentence that I can’t shove down no matter how desperately I want to:

He’s real.

“He’s real,” I repeat out loud to the empty apartment. Can he hear me right now? I don’t know how god powers work, but I wouldn’t think so… “He’s—okay. Okay, he’s real.”

Saying it doesn’t help. No, it makes it worse, actually, because the second the words are in the air I have to deal with the fact that they’re true, and then my knees give into the stress, forcing my body to slide down the door until my ass nestles the cold vinyl.

I’m sitting here in a puddle of my melting sock-snow like a sad little popsicle.

What the fuck do I do now? I have spent the last weeks building this beautiful, airtight case for why I’m losing my mind. I had theories and a whole ranked list. Number one, I conjured him up because I’m so desperate and embarrassingly lonely that my brain finally cracked and coughed up an imaginary friend—which, tragic.

Number two, ghost.

Number three, the one I refused to acknowledge because it made my stomach do a weird swoop—that he’s exactly what he says he is.

And I can cross off one and two now.

There’s no way I conjured a set of arms strong enough to yank a full-grown woman back off a ledge. Nor did I hallucinate the specific thump of the air getting knocked out of my lungs when I landed on a real, physical chest. Hallucinations do not catch you. They also don’t have tangible jaws.

I touched his jaw. His entire face and…he’s beautiful.

My fingers rise to press against my mouth. It isn’t the same as touching him, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling. The white fabric was there, same as always, and yet when I reached out to touch the draping silk, my hand went through it like it was nothing. Skin greeted me instead. Warm skin. A hard line of a jaw with the faintest scrape of stubble along its surface, and brows that were thick and low, and a nose—a good nose, a real one that belonged to a face I couldn’t see but suddenly knew. And a mouth. With a full lower lip. The shape of his mouth is rooted in my hands’ memory.

“That’s not normal,” I inform the puddle of melting snow, my only companion. “That is not a normal thing that a normal person’s hands do.”

The puddle doesn’t respond. Rude.