Never Fade

been blown right off. It creaked as I opened it, and I slipped inside.

The store was bigger than I was expecting it to be but in worse shape. Someone had done a fairly thorough job of cleaning the joint out, but here and there were jumbo bags of chips, and a soda dispenser was still glowing and buzzing with last gasps of electricity. The gun stayed in my hand, cold and solid, trained on the glass doors of the drink refrigerators and the endless graffiti tagging that masked from view anything still inside.

I followed the line of the shelves as they flowed past the cash register and empty cardboard candy containers, around the front of the store to a fairly new-looking section of the building labeled FULL SERVICE.

The short hallway between the store and the mechanic garage was decorated with photos and posters of old cars with bikini-clad girls perched on top of them. I took in a slow, steadying breath. It was all rubber, gas, and oil; no amount of time or bleach was going to scrub that stench from the air.

There was another entrance into that section from the outside. The sign on the glass door was still flipped to OUT—BACK IN 15, and it directed visitors to kindly inquire at the back garage if it was an emergency. There were chairs, photos of vacant-eyed employees lining the wall, and model tires—but no footprints, no noise, no Liam.

A spike of fear cut through me as I shouldered the door to the mechanic shop open. I turned, trying to catch the heavy thing before it could slam shut, and that was the mistake—I knew it even as I turned, even as Instructor Johnson’s favorite saying rang out in my ears: Don’t turn your back on the unknown.

There was a tingling sensation at my back that I recognized a second too late. A burst of pressure slammed into me, throwing me forward as if someone had tackled me from behind. My forehead cracked against the door frame. My eyes flashed black, white, black as I crumpled. The gun clattered away, skimming across the cement, out of reach.

Then, a warm, familiar voice, pitched with fear: “Oh my God! Sorry, I thought—” Liam’s pale form burst out behind the hollowed-out car frame in the middle of the garage. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, looking around for the gun under the workbenches and tables. There were tools and parts scattered everywhere, collecting dust and even more grime. “You came out here alone, without any kind of way to protect yourself—”

“No way to protect myself?” he repeated, raising a brow.

“You know what I mean!” I crouched down, blinking back the dark spots in my vision, and felt under the metal table until my fingers closed around the barrel. I waved it toward him for emphasis. “What were you going to do against one of these?”

He turned back to the car, his mouth pressed tightly into a line of disgust. “I disarmed you pretty easily. What would the instructors say about that?”

It stung more than I expected it to. I watched in silence as he flipped the hood of the skeletal car back open, the tool flashing silver in his hand. But he wasn’t working; instead, his hands were braced against the green frame. The leather jacket clung to his shoulders as he leaned forward, hanging his head. I kept my back flat against the door, a silent guard against anything that might come in.

“So you found me,” he muttered, his voice strained. “I suppose I have Chubs to thank for that?”

His mind was turning through a wild range of emotions, flipping between what felt like hot anger and murky guilt and crushing hopelessness in a matter of seconds. It felt like his mind was calling to mine, like it was screaming for me.

I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead. Ever since I’d given in and stopped trying to fold them away, my abilities had been quieter. Settled, even. Now was not the moment to lose that bit of calm.

“I know—” I began, licking my dry lips. “I know you can take care of yourself. But we don’t know anything about this town. We don’t know who could come by, and the thought of you out here alone…”

“I wanted to be alone,” he said, his voice gruff. “I just wanted…I just needed to clear my head. Away from them. Away from you.”

I stared at him, trying to take what he had just said and align it with the look of all-out desperation on his face.

“Look,” I began, “I get it. You don’t like me, but—”

“I don’t like you?”

He let out a low, flat laugh. One fell into the next, and it was awful—not at all him. He was half choking on them as he turned around, shaking his head. It almost sounded like a sob, the way his breath burst out of him.

“I don’t like you,” he repeated, his face bleak. “I don’t like you?”

“Liam—” I started, alarmed.

“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t breathe—I just—”

“Liam, please,” I begged. “You’re tired. You’re barely over being sick. Let’s just… Can we just go back to the others?”

“I love you.” He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. “I love you every second of every day, and I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop—”

He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my mind.

“I know it’s wrong; I know it down to my damn bones. And I feel like I’m sick. I’m trying to be a good person, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore.”

What is this? The look of open pain on his face was too much to process. My mind couldn’t work fast enough.

My hands fisted in the pockets of my coat. I felt myself backing away toward the door, trying to escape that look, trying to stop my heart from tearing out of my chest. He’s confused. Explain it to him. He’s only confused.

“Look at me.”

I couldn’t move; there was nowhere to go. He wasn’t hiding from me anymore. I felt his feelings unravel around him, a flood of warmth and a piercing pain that cut through the daze I felt when he stepped in close to me.

My hands stayed in my pockets; his were at his sides. We weren’t touching, not really. I had the sudden, sharp memory of the way his fingers had brushed against mine a few hours before. He bent his face down to my shoulder, his breath slipping through three layers of cloth to warm the skin there. One of his fingers hooked a belt loop on my jeans and inched me just that tiny bit closer. His nose skimmed up my throat, along my cheek, and I saw none of it. I squeezed my eyes shut as his forehead finally came to rest against mine.

“Look at me.”

“Don’t do this,” I whispered.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he breathed out. “I feel like…I feel like I’m losing my damn mind, like your face has been carved into my heart, and I don’t remember when, and I don’t understand why, but the scar is there, and I can’t get it to heal. It won’t go. I can’t make it fade. And you won’t even look at me.”

My hands slipped out of the safety of my coat and gripped his jacket’s soft leather. He was still wearing Cole’s beneath it. “It’s okay,” I choked out. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I swear,” he whispered, his mouth hovering over mine. “I swear, I swear…I swear we were on that beach, and I saw you wearing this light green dress, and we talked for hours. I had a life, and so did you, and we lived them together. It doesn’t fit. That piece doesn’t fit. Claire was there, and Cole promised we’d never been. But then…I see your face in the firelight, and I remember different fires, different smiles, different everything. I remember you in the green dress, and then it becomes a green uniform, and it doesn’t make sense!”

Green dress—the beach? Virginia Beach?

One tear escaped my lashes, then another. It had happened so fast; I’d had to work so quickly in that sky blue room. What he was saying now—none of it had happened, not really, but the way he had told it then had felt real to me. We could have met that summer, on that beach, with nothing but a tiny stretch of sun and sand to keep us apart. I must have been thinking about it, even as I pulled myself out of his thoughts and memories. I must have missed that one tiny sliver of myself, or pushed it, or—

“I’m… It’s—it’s like torture.” His voice was strained, hardly even a whisper. “I think I’m losing it—I don’t know what’s happening, what happened, but I look at you, I look at you, and I love you so much. Not because of