Dreamfire (30 page)

He covered her with an afghan and went upstairs to bed.

 

Twenty-four

Josh forgot all
about the Valentine's Day dance until she saw Deloise's tickets on Friday night. She stood in the kitchen and stared at them until Deloise asked, “Do you want to come after all?”

Deloise looked stunning. Her light-filled brown eyes stood out even more than usual thanks to a fawn-colored suede dress that fell just below her knees. A cloth headband and low wedge sandals made it not just clothing but an outfit, and for once even Josh admired her style.

“No.” Josh had never been a fan of dances, but she especially didn't want to go to one that would only remind her of Ian. “You look great, though.”

“Thanks. Let's hope I can get out of here before Dad sees me and makes me wear something else.” Deloise finished transferring her stuff from one purse to another and called into the living room, “Haley? You ready to go?”

Josh lifted her eyebrows. “You're going with Haley?”

“No, he's just driving me and Will.”

Josh nearly choked on the soda she was drinking. “You're going with
Will
?”

Deloise chuckled. “Don't look so jealous, Josh. No, I'm not going with Will. I'm meeting Neil there and the photographer is paying Will to be his assistant.”

“Will can't drive you?”

“Will can't
drive
. As he put it, ‘No parents, no car, no drive.'”

Suddenly feeling guilty, Josh realized that this was something she should have known. The information would have come out in conversation if she'd ever actually spent any time talking to Will about something other than dream walking.

I'm such an awful teacher,
she thought, sighing aloud. She hadn't thought the evening could get any more depressing.

Haley appeared in the doorway, and Josh dropped her soda can.

Haley had never looked more like Ian. He was wearing Ian's Brooks Brothers suit, black on black on black, with Ian's Roman-coin cuff links and tie tack. His black curls had been trimmed and soothed with a minimal amount of soft gel. He smiled the confident smile Ian always wore. Even from six feet away, Josh could smell Ian's amber-scented cologne. She stepped backward, and her heel crushed the aluminum can she had dropped. Soda pooled on the floor.

“Evening, J.D.,” Haley said. He caught her eye and flashed a bold smile.

The hurt muscle in Josh's chest began tearing itself apart.

He's here,
she thought.
Three steps and I'll be in his arms.

But she knew that wasn't true.

“You look nice,” Deloise told him slowly, and Josh could tell that it was taking every ounce of her good manners to overcome how creeped out she was.

“Thanks. I thought I'd go in with you for a little while, maybe say hi to some of the guys from last year.”

But you don't have any “guys,” Haley,
Josh thought.
You didn't have any friends except us, remember?

“Del,” Haley said suddenly, “heads up.” He grabbed Ian's leather jacket off the back of a chair and tossed it to her. Deloise barely had time to pull it on and cover her bare shoulders before her father entered the kitchen with Will.

The sight of Will was somehow a relief to Josh. As casual as the other two were formal, he had on navy-blue slacks and a thin black T-shirt. He was wearing Whim's sports coat, and it was too big and very rumpled, but at least he wasn't in costume. At least he was recognizable. “You'll be home by eleven?” Lauren asked Deloise.

“Absolutely,” Haley said, and Lauren glanced at him, then did a double take.

“Um…” he started before trailing off, too startled to speak.

“We'll be home on time,” Deloise promised. She grabbed the tickets off the kitchen table and opened the back door. Alex called from the living room that the news was starting. Before Lauren went to join him, he glanced at Josh and noted, “You've spilled your soda.”

Alone together in the kitchen, Will helped Josh mop up the mess on the floor. “Are you sure you don't want to come?” he asked her.

“I'm sure,” she said. She stopped him before he knelt down in the puddle. “Are those Whim's pants?”

“Not this time. Deloise ordered them out of a catalog. She says they're helping me define my ambitions and climb my inner mountain.” He shrugged. “They're machine washable; I like that.”

Josh felt like smiling for the first time that evening, so she did. “They look good.”

“Thank you.” They both stood up, and she carried the paper towels to the trash can. “Are you going to walk tonight?”

“Probably.” When he didn't reply and didn't leave, she asked, “What?”

“You should come to the dance,” he said. “You should get out in the real world.”

She thought it was a strange thing for him to say, and she was a little afraid he was asking her to the dance. “Why?”

“Because…” He sighed, then shook his head. “Try to do something fun tonight,” he said. “Try not to … let the season get you down.”

The season?
Josh wondered, and then she understood: Someone had told him that Valentine's Day was her and Ian's anniversary. She heard that he was worried about her, but his concern didn't take away her feeling of having been spied upon, gossiped about, maybe even judged.

No, almost certainly judged.

“I'll be fine,” she told Will tartly.

“Oh,” he replied with another sigh, “I know. Believe me, I know.”

“You coming?” Haley asked, ducking his head through the doorway.

“Yes,” Will told him quickly. He brushed his fingers against the back of Josh's hand as he passed her on his way out the door, and for a long moment afterward she stared at the place where he'd touched her, uncertain what to make of his action. She'd thought he was angry at her—or maybe she was angry at him—or maybe they were both just tired of the distance she was trying to keep between them. The more she tried to push him away, the more she wanted to be close to him.

Maybe she should tell him everything. Maybe his alienation would be easier to bear than this tension.

She wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch next to her father. He put his arm around her and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Are you doing okay?” Lauren asked her.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” she said, which was a complete lie, but she didn't know what good telling the truth would do.

Winsor's dad, Alex, sitting in the armchair, said, “You know we're all here for you, Josh. I know Valentine's Day was your anniversary, but I don't want you to think you're going through this alone. We're all missing Ian, every one of us who knew him. Especially Haley, I think. Valentine's Day isn't just about romantic love, it's about…”

Josh tuned him out. The trick with Alex's soliloquies was to only listen to the first sentence:
We're all here for you, Josh.
And Josh did truly appreciate that.

She watched the news with her father—more about the people in the strange comas that Whim's blog had been going on about, but no new information—and then decided that it really was time she moved out of the office and back into her bedroom. The last few days, she'd just been too tired to get around to it, and she had so much stuff scattered around the office now that gathering it all up would be a major undertaking.

After piling all her clothes into a laundry basket, she began the trek upstairs. She reached the second floor landing just as Winsor was attempting to embark it, and Winsor stepped back, crossed her arms, and waited for Josh to pass without bothering to hide her irritation.

Josh initially felt guilty, but all that anger she had been trying to swallow for months had grown beyond her ability to choke down. Before she'd made it up two more steps, she spun around, hurled the laundry basket onto the landing, and shouted, “Dammit, Winsor!”

Winsor jumped against the wall when the laundry basket hit the floor, and she stared up at Josh with astonishment and something close to either fear or derision. Maybe both.

“I can't do this anymore!” Josh told her. “All right? I just can't do it. If you want to fight, then let's fight, because I am sick to death of you walking around tossing your hair and rolling your eyes and acting like you're too good to be in the room with me. So just say whatever you need to say and let's get it out there already.”

Winsor's blue eyes were wide, but a pitiless half smile played on her lips. “Okay,” she agreed, walking back up the steps to the landing. “Let's have it out then. You go first.”

Josh wasn't ready to go first. She looked at the laundry strewn all over the floor and ran her hand through her hair, and finally she managed to say, “You should have told me how you felt about Ian.”

“You shouldn't have acted needy just to keep him.”

The words felt much like the kidney shot she'd taken a few weeks before. Josh had had no idea that Winsor thought she “acted needy” so Ian would stay with her. “I didn't! And I know you made him even more paranoid about his scroll. You encouraged him to break up with me!”

“I told Ian to do what he wanted to do. You should have let him go when he broke up with you.”

How could Winsor have possibly expected her to let go of Ian, then or ever? To this day, Josh didn't know who she was without his memory. “You shouldn't have dated the identical twin brother of the guy you were secretly in love with,” Josh shot back. “You
used
Haley! How sick is that?”

“You shouldn't have opened an archway when you had no idea what you were doing! You think you're so special, that there's nothing you can't do!”

“Special?” Josh cried. “I'm the opposite of special! The only thing in my life that made me special was that Ian loved me, and you made sure to take that away, didn't you?”

“He broke up with you!”

“Yeah, and it was less than a month before you were seducing him in the forest! He just needed time to get his head on straight. He would have come back to me if you hadn't thrown yourself at him!”

“Yeah?” The smile was gone from Winsor's face. Instead, a dark flush spread across her chest and up her throat. “Well, he'll never come back to you now, because you got him killed!”

There. The words had finally been said. Josh and Winsor stared at each other across the landing, and the statement hung between them like the reverberations of a chime that had been struck very hard. Josh felt her chin begin to tremble, and then hot tears poured into her eyes, and she sat down on the stairs and sobbed.

All the guilt and anger and terrible sadness she had been trying to hold off for months finally overwhelmed her. She had lost Ian—for all of them.

“Josh,” Winsor said, and then Josh heard her sigh. Her tone had changed from furious to defeated. “Josh. I shouldn't have said that.”

“It's true,” Josh told her between sobs. “You know it, I know it, everybody knows it! Just no one's saying it!”

“Nobody's thinking it but you,” Winsor insisted. “And—me, and I—I'm only thinking it because—I'm so
angry
that he's dead.” Josh looked up in time to see Winsor break into her own tears, and she flung herself down on the step next to Josh. “How
dare
he go and die and leave us with all this emotional crap we can't resolve. How dare he die and just not be here anymore! He's dead, so he's not here today and he won't be here tomorrow or the day after, and it's like he just dropped out, like he just quit the play and we're all still here trying to put the show on without him! I want to scream at him every moment of every day, and he's not here to yell at, so yeah, I get angry at you, because it
was
your idea to open the archway. But we both know nobody ever forced Ian to do a damn thing, and he could have walked away anytime if he hadn't been such a conceited, hardheaded prick, and if he hadn't been so hopelessly in love with you that he had to prove he didn't care about you by impressing you!”

Winsor put her face in her palms, and her tears ran in rivers between her fingers. She had described how Josh felt about Ian's loss more perfectly than Josh herself ever could, and Josh wished they had known months earlier that they were experiencing the same things. Still weeping, Josh put her arms around her friend, and they cried together for the first time.

The door to the Avisharas' apartment opened and Whim stepped out. He surveyed the two girls, sitting on the stairs, holding each other and bawling, and shook his head. “The dam finally broke, huh?”

“Shut up, Whim!” Josh and Winsor told him in unison.

“Women,” Whim muttered, and went back into the apartment.

When they were alone again, Josh said, “I'm sorry.”

“I know that!” Winsor snapped, sounding just as angry as she had before. She used splayed fingers to push dark, wet strands of hair out of her face. “Don't you think I know that, Josh? You are the most miserably sorry thing I've ever seen. You're punishing yourself like you shot him in the face, and that's driving me as crazy as anything, this martyr-for-your-sins bit, and how you're dream walking like you have a death wish, and poor Will tiptoeing around trying not to ask for anything from you.”

Josh winced. She knew Winsor was right about how she had acted, and she hated it.

“Let me tell you, Josh, if I really wanted to punish you, I could have just seduced Will. The boy's so lonely here he's begging for it.” She glanced at Josh and added, “Oh, don't look so shocked. You're the one who thinks I'm a whore.”

“I never said that,” Josh protested, trying to shake off the shock she felt.

“Yeah, but you thought it. Everybody's thinking it. I'm the girl who slept with identical twin brothers. For a while people at school were calling me Mrs. McKarr, can you believe that?”