“What about it?” I averted my eyes to the big, glossy, cherrywood desk behind him and tried to hold my eyes open. When I let them close there were flames. Smoke. Chaos.
“Your father seems to think that’s when most of your problems started.”
“So?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you be a little screwed up if you’d almost died in a fire? Does that make me crazy?” Not crazy. Just haunted. Though
“Let me ask you something.” He leaned forward and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Why did you go into the house that day? It was clearly dangerous. You could’ve waited for the fire department to show up.”
I finally let him snag my gaze. “And what? Just let her die?”
“Her?” Dr. Farber looked down at his notebook. “I assume you mean your neighbor.”
I swallowed and looked out the window. “Her name’s Emma.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you want her to be?” he asked.
I shook my head, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. “No. No, of course not. Emma’s my best friend.”
“Then why are the two of you estranged?”
I laughed and slapped my hands over my knees. “How much did my dad tell you?”
“Answer the question.”
“We’re just going through a rough patch. That’s all,” I said. “Friends disagree sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”
He scribbled something on his pad. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that she has a boyfriend now?”
“No,” I said, my mind reeling with memories and feelings I didn’t want to deal with. He was fishing. And I could feel his hook in me, bringing it all up my throat. Hell, maybe it was just because she finally found a boyfriend and I was a jealous ass. Or maybe it was because I was dying and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking I’d pissed away the past eleven years with her and now I wasn’t going to get any more. “Okay. Maybe I used to think that someday…”
I closed my eyes and groaned.
“It’s okay, Cash,” he said softly. “Keep going.”
“I used to think that later, maybe when I was done being stupid, and she was done being scared of everything… I thought that maybe we might end up there. Together.”
He nodded and waited for me to go on. When I didn’t, he shifted gears.
“What about other girls?” He cocked his head to the side to watch me. “Any other relationships?”
I rubbed my palm over the back of my neck. There were too many discarded girls to count. What did
Emma always call them? My “disposable girlfriends.” I felt so detached from that guy it was almost as if the old Cash didn’t exist anymore.
“I’ve dated a lot of girls.” If you could call an evening in the back of my Bronco or on the sofa in my studio “dating.”
“Anything serious?”
I stared at my sneakers, feeling a little guilty. What I felt for her was beyond my control. Like it had always been there, just waiting for her to bring it out. “No.”
Dr. Farber wrote something else on his pad. “Let’s talk about your mom.”
I clenched my jaw and sat back. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s not a part of my life.”
“How old were you when she left?”
“Six,” I said.
“That must have been hard.”
“Of course it was hard.” It would have been a lot harder if it hadn’t been for Em and her mom.
They’d fed me when Dad forgot. Let me sleep over when he was still at work past dark and I was too scared to be alone. Em even insisted they take me on vacation with them every year. God…it was no wonder I clung to her like a freaking security blanket all these years. I didn’t really know how to survive without her.
“Do you think that’s why you push people away?” he asked. “Are you afraid they’ll leave like your mom?”
I leaned forward and met his gaze head on. “She left us. Left us to have a life with her yoga instructor. She left a six-year-old son without a letter or a phone call and never looked back. If that taught me anything, it’s that anybody is capable of anything. I’m careful with who I let in. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being cautious,” he said. “But from what I can tell, you are more than cautious. If the things your father tells me are true, you have alienated yourself. Pushed everyone you love away. The question is why? What has its claws into you so deep that you can’t let anyone else see what it is to help you?”
As if his words had pulled it into the room, a shadow slithered through the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. It looked like an oil slick sliding down the wall, before it took shape and hopped up onto the desk behind him.
“Talk to me, Cash,” Dr. Farber said. “This is a safe place. I promise.”
The shadow demon opened its mouth and hissed over his shoulder, sliding down to the arm of Dr.
Farber’s chair. Fear pulsed in my stomach, my chest, my temples. I shook my head and stood up, ready to bolt.
“No,” I said, retreating out of the room. “It’s really not.”
Nowhere was safe anymore.
Chapter 10
I stared at Cash’s house, feeling so twisted inside I wanted to be sick. I’d never seen a place covered up in so much death. The brick looked bloodstained under the dying sunset. Shadows dripped from the awnings and splashed through the gutters in a mad dash to join the cloak of nightfall. The windows, shaded with toffee-colored curtains, glowed with light. That glow signified life. Life I was about to take away.
I closed my fingers around the pretty pearl handle of my scythe. Its warmth melted through my fingertips and raced through my body like lava. It was almost time. I closed my eyes, unable to believe I was about to do this to him after everything I’d
What a lie.
I opened my eyes when I heard Finn’s familiar voice and realized he was standing on Cash’s walkway, headed for the front door with a cell phone in his hand. I allowed the sun’s warm rays to soak through me, fusing me together cell by cell until I knew I was visible to him.
“Finn?”
He stopped, a shocked look playing across his face before he shoved the phone in his back pocket and made his way toward me. His skin looked sun-kissed and his green eyes were warm and alive.
Easton may have always looked like he was born from the night, but Finn always looked like he’d been dipped in summer. Especially now.
“Being human agrees with you.” I smiled at him and looked back at the house.
“You’re human too,” he said as he stood beside me, squinting at the sunset. “Dead. But still human.”
I sighed and chewed on my bottom lip. My scythe was so warm it would’ve burned me if I’d been alive like Finn. I was stalling, and if I didn’t stop it was going to get me into trouble. “I wish I could be as optimistic as you.”
“You could be if you wanted.”
“No.” I shook my head, feeling my braids snake across my shoulders. “I can’t. Not anymore. The afterlife may have turned out to be some sort of fairy tale for you, but it’s not like that for the rest of us. I’m still here.
