Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“I feel it.” I pulled him back up and slid my hands beneath his shirt, feeling my way over his chest as I pulled the material up and over his head. I dropped his shirt on the floor and laid my hand over his heart, and I could feel it beating.

“Does it do that all the time?” I whispered, and he shook his head, his eyes swirling with pale blue twists of need, and hunger, and something deeper, and steadier, and…endless. “Mine doesn’t, either.”

Tod laid his hand over my heart and I blinked up at him. “It’s beating now,” he said softly.

“Yeah. It is.”

He kissed me, and I didn’t realize my legs had wrapped around his hips until he moaned into my mouth and pressed himself into me.

I felt so alive in that moment. So real and—

“Kaylee, are you home?” my father called from the living room, and the front door slammed shut on the tail of the question.

“Shit!” I whispered, before I remembered that he couldn’t hear us. He couldn’t see us, either, but I couldn’t hide the rumpled comforter.

Tod sat up and reached for his shirt while I straightened mine. “Relax,” he said as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. “What’s he going to do, kill us again?”

“Not me.” I ran both hands through my hair to smooth it. “You.”

“You’re almost seventeen, and you’re dead. He has to know that his parental influence is nearing its end stage.”

“He does. I think. We’re gonna talk about it. Just…not today.”

“Kaylee?” My dad’s footsteps echoed in the hall, headed our way.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on making myself both visible and audible. “In here.” I opened the door and my dad stepped into the doorway as I dropped the amphora around my neck. “Hey, do you wanna go out for…” His words melted into a sigh when he noticed Tod, but then he rallied with a smile. “Hi, Tod, I didn’t realize you were here. In my daughter’s bedroom. With the door closed.”

“Happy to be here,” Tod said, and I groaned out loud.

“Kaylee, can I talk to you for a minute, please?” my dad said with a glance at the rumpled comforter.

“Um, yeah.” I followed him into the kitchen, where he pulled a soda from the fridge and popped the tab.

“I know things are inevitably going to change, but I’m not going to pretend to be happy that the two of you were here, alone, behind closed doors.” I didn’t bother to tell him that doors no longer mattered. The only time I didn’t feel alone was when Tod was with me.

“I don’t really want to have this conversation with you, Dad.”

“I don’t want to have it, either, but you’re kind of forcing my hand.”

“No, I’m not.” I took a soda from the fridge for myself, and after a moment’s consideration, I grabbed one for Tod, too. “If you think about this logically, you have to admit that most of the reasons for me to wait to have sex died when I died.”

My dad flinched. “You said it out loud. There’s no going back now, is there?”

“Nope.”

He was thinking about my mother. Wishing she was here for this conversation. I knew, because I was thinking the same thing. But wishes were worthless, so I launched into logic.

“I can’t get pregnant, and I can’t catch anything.” Not that Tod had anything for me to catch. “And I love him. And he loves me. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

“Yes. It should. And it will be.” He closed his eyes and gripped the edge of the countertop, like it was the only thing holding him up. Then his eyes opened and his gaze met mine, his swirling with brown twists of regret and nostalgia. “But you’re still so young.”

“I’m as grown up as I’m going to get, Dad. And hell, I died a virgin. I died because I was a virgin. So I hope you can understand why I no longer see the point in preserving something that only served to get me killed.”

“Okay.” My dad nodded slowly. “Those are valid points. Just promise me you’ll think about this before you jump into anything.” He flinched again, and met my gaze with what looked like great effort. “You haven’t already jumped…right?”

“No. There’s been no jumping yet. And I promise that I’m not done thinking. How’s that?”

“Is that as good as I’m going to get?”

“It’s as good as I have to offer.”

“Okay.” He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look exactly mad, either. He looked…disappointed. And maybe a little scared. “You do understand that if we were to add up all the time we’ve actually spent together, you’d still only be around five years old to me, right?”

“I know,” I said, and his sad smile made me ache. “And you understand that I grew up during those years you missed, right? That’s not how I wanted it, but that’s how it happened, and I can’t go back and fix it. I can’t go back and fix anything, Dad.”

“I know. And I’m so sorry. So, how ’bout I start making it up to you with Chinese delivery? We got this coupon in the mail… .” He set his soda down and started digging through a pile of junk mail on the counter.

“Thanks, but I’m not really hungry, and Tod and I need to do something. Something work-related,” I added when his brows arched in suspicion.

“Oh. Okay.”

“But maybe we could watch a movie tonight?” I said when his disappointment nearly broke my heart. “Just the two of us?”

He nodded and forced a smile. “I’ll be waiting.”

Tod caught my gaze from the hallway, where he’d waited, unseen by my father, and when he took my hand so we could blink out together, he leaned close to whisper in my ear. “I’d say he took that pretty well. You know your dad’s the coolest dad on the face of the planet, right?”

“I know. One of these days, I may just tell him.”

“Do you remember the last time we were here?” Tod asked as we stood on the sidewalk in front of Lakeside, the mental-health unit attached to the hospital where Tod reaped souls and his mother worked the second shift as an R.N.

“How could I forget?” I felt a little queasy just thinking about it. “Feels different this time, though.”

“Because you can get in and out on your own?”

“Yeah.” That eliminated my fear of being trapped. Caught. Locked up. “Maybe I’ll pretend I still have to hold your hand to be invisible.”

“Role-playing. I like it.” His fingers curled around mine. “Have you heard from Lydia since we broke her out?”

Lydia was a psychic syphon and former psychiatric patient who’d saved both my life and my sanity by taking some of my pain into herself when I was locked up in Lakeside. Tod and I had freed her less than a month ago.

“No.” I’d tried two different women’s shelters—while I was incorporeal—before I’d realized she might not be allowed to stay without risking being put into foster care. “But I’ll keep looking for her.” She’d saved my life. I owed her nothing less.

“You ready for this?” Tod asked.

“Let’s go.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on Scott’s room, in the youth wing, on the third floor. Somewhere on the way, I lost Tod’s hand and started to panic, but he was there waiting for me when I opened my eyes in Scott’s room. “Guess I still need practice doing that in tandem, huh?”

“We have plenty of time to get it right. We have time to get everything right.” He started to pull me close, but I froze with one glance over his shoulder. Scott lay on his back, on top of his made bed, fully dressed, including laceless sneakers. His hands were folded beneath his head and his eyes were closed. Watching him when he didn’t know we were there was a little creepy. I still wasn’t used to being incorporeal on purpose.