Forbidden Fruit (2 page)

Because I’m curious—and there will never be a better time to find out—I ask, “Is this the first time you’ve noticed how I feel?”

Jesse shakes his head. “Only the most potent flash. I knew you were nursing a crush, but I figured you’d get over it without me needing to say anything.”

“Is this where you warn me off?”

“It would be wrong to take advantage while you’re feeling grateful. I extracted you from a bad situation and—”

“The way you visit me, I could take it for encouragement,” I interrupt, unable to listen to more bullshit about my alleged emotions. “You’ve found reasons to stop by three times in the last week. And the mall’s nowhere near the station.”

“I’m looking out for you,” he mutters.

“Then stop. I can take it from here.”

“Are you cutting me off?” He tries to say it lightly, but I can tell that this feels like a breakup to him, too. A weird one, certainly, but there’s a bond between us, one I can’t explain and didn’t ask for.

“It’s for the best,” I say quietly.

I’m never gonna smother these feelings as long as he’s coming round, fanning the flames. Though I played the role once, I refuse to be Jesse Saldana’s permanent damsel in distress, always yelling for help from a tower. I can make a rope out of bedsheets and climb down my own damn self. So he can take his white-knight complex and go tilt at somebody else’s windmill.

“Shan… I just want…” In the end, he trails off, unable to express whatever it is. “Look, can’t we be friends?”

“Not when I want to kiss you so bad that it’s all I think about.” There’s no point in playing coy. He knows.

For a few seconds, his gaze locks on mine, and there’s a swirl of superheated awareness in his eyes.
Holy shit. He feels it too.
I have no idea if it’s an echo of what I’m offering, or if he’s been suppressing this because he feels like a dirty old man. Before, I didn’t chase him because I thought he saw me as a kid. But if he can look at me, right here, right now, and find anything desirable? Then he wants me.

I just have to decide what I’m going to do about it.

Two

Jesse’s the first to look away. “There’re so many reasons why we shouldn’t—”

“But we only need one why we should.” I’m smiling now, confident that I know where this is going.

“And what’s that?”

“Because we
want
to. Pick me up tomorrow night at eight. You know where I live.” He helped me move in, after all.

“We can have dinner,” he decides. “But it’s
not
a date.”

Yeah, like a label’s gonna stop me. I merely smile. “You’ve got my number, right?”

In answer, he taps out a quick
hey
and my phone pings. I shouldn’t find this so endearing. “See you tomorrow, cowboy.”

After he leaves, the rest of my shift is…bearable. I shut the place down at nine, and by fifteen past, everything is sparkling clean. I take the bus home, wishing I had a car. Maria’s out with her boyfriend, no surprise there, so I strip off the Pretzel Pirate get-up and take a shower. It’s not even ten thirty, and I’m bored as hell. I have the sense that I used to have somebody to hang out with—but maybe I left her in Kilmer. My head hurts when I poke at this half-formed memory, so I switch on the TV and numb my brain.

While some stupid show plays, I waver, tempted by an unwise idea. I’ve thought about doing this before, but I always decided against it. For obvious reasons, I can’t raise the dead when Maria’s around. Since she’s an Ortiz, I’m sure she knows about the Gifted population, but it seems best not to rub her nose in the fact that I can talk to dead people. Before I can think better of this, I head into my small bedroom. It didn’t come furnished, so right now there’s a futon in it, and I’m storing my personal stuff in the closet and in milk crates I stole from behind a convenience store.

Pulling the antique radio out of my closet, I sit cross-legged on the floor for a few seconds, holding it. Nobody else can feel this—I’ve tested it—but to me, this old gizmo radiates cold energy that tingles in my fingertips. There’s not much left from my Kilmer days since I bolted in a hurry, but I do have an old ring that belonged to my mother. Actually, I stole it from her jewelry box before she died. I used to be kind of a klepto, though I control the impulse these days. They’re serious about loss prevention at the mall, and I’d look horrible in an orange jumpsuit.

I dig it out of the small, satin-lined box that houses my jewelry. I don’t have much, and I wear most of my bracelets at the same time; I’ve grown accustomed to the weight and jingle on my wrists. If I ever went into the sun, I’d probably have tan lines from my bracelets. But I’ve been cultivating this pallor for years, mostly to irritate my mother. Now, however, the results are permanent. I’m pretty sure I’d burst into flames if I tried to tan.

Clutching the ring in my left hand, I focus on recalling how my mother looked and sounded, before the mental fog set in and my memory got weird. I just simply can’t recollect certain things anymore. My exodus from Kilmer is wreathed in shadows, which makes me think it must be bad. Either someone doesn’t want me to remember, or I’ve forced myself to forget. And you don’t usually block out the happy times.

Nervous, I fiddle with the dials of the radio as I whisper, “Restless dead, blood of my blood, I summon you to this place.”

The room immediately chills, raising goose bumps on my arms. Hissing static crackles from old speakers as I scan various stations by adjusting the dials. I’m into the AM side, down on the low end, when the white noise resolves into intelligible words, spoken in a familiar voice.

“You shouldn’t have called me, Shannon.”

That’s my mom all right. She finds reason to bitch at me even from beyond the grave. “Why not? I have questions.”

“Most of them, I’m not permitted to answer.” The display glows when she speaks, something I’ve never seen. This analog device doesn’t have a backlight.

The cold intensifies, so I can actually see my breath. “Not about the afterlife. I’m wondering what
happened
in Kilmer. I can’t remember how I ended up in Laredo or why Jesse Saldana was there in the first place.”

I mean, he’s from Texas for fuck’s sake, and it’s not like a creepy, haunted little town in Georgia is a tourist hot spot. When I ask him, Jesse smiles and says in his super-hot drawl, “Chalk it up to fate, sugar. I was destined to save you.”

Which is sweet, but it’s also bullshit. I want—I
need
—answers, but when I push too hard, it feels like my brain is about to pop out of my skull. Most people would heed that warning, I guess, but you can tell by looking at me that I’m not normal. That’s partly what my style’s about, honestly. It seems wrong to go around in jeans and hoodies. Then a guy who asks me out might expect an average girl, not one who talks to dead people. This way, I feel like he’s been forewarned, and if he still wants to date me, he shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a spooky surprise in this box. I mean, the package was wrapped appropriately, after all.

“There’s a reason you can’t remember,” my mom tells me.

Well, duh.
Sadly, this is the most civil exchange I’ve had with her in years. Most of our discussions ended with me screaming
you don’t understand anything
and slamming into my room. In life, my mother was a pearl-clutching Southern belle, and I suspect she used to prowl our house, searching for proof that I’m a changeling. So in that respect, death eased the tension between us—yep, oblivion’s the ultimate icebreaker.

“I was hoping you could clue me in.”

“The pain you experience when you try to remember
is
a clue, Shannon. You can’t circumvent a spell before its time through sheer willpower or mental force. There could be…repercussions.”

A spell? So somebody
made
me forget?
What the hell.
There are so many questions I should ask, but my energy is limited. The power to communicate with her is pulled directly from me in the form of life energy, and I suspect if I stretch my reserves too far, it might be lethal. Tonight’s not the time to find out.

So I settle on asking, “Do you know who did this to me? Or why?”

But the radio crackles, and I feel woozy. My mom’s gone. I desperately need a sugar rush or I’ll pass out. On hands and knees, I crawl over to the crate I keep stuffed full of chocolate. I’m pretty sure Maria thinks I’m bulimic. With trembling hands, I tear open a candy bar and cram it in my face. In a few minutes, I feel better. The black spots are gone, and my hands aren’t shaking anymore. Five years down the road, I’ll have rotten teeth and probably diabetes as well. They don’t warn you about this shit when you first start talking to dead people.

I try to picture what it’s like on the other side; I’ve never queried a spirit on how it feels when I summon them. Is it a painful tug or more of a warm, delicious rush? I highly suspect I’m feeding them.
Ew.
I close my eyes for a few seconds, then turn off my radio, killing the chaotic snake hiss.

The conversation with my mother told me enough to get started. If it’s a spell, it can be broken, right? Magick wears off on its own, unless it’s powered by some natural source, a ley line for instance. But I’m not attached to anything like that. Time will probably dissipate it, but I need to recover the missing pieces of my life; the hole’s bothering me, as if I’ve forgotten something super important.

The room is still freezing when Maria comes home a little later. She pops her head in and shivers. “Did you leave the window open?”

“Just closed it.” The lie seems better than an actual explanation.

“Fresh air is good if it doesn’t kill you,” she says dubiously.

She’s a nice girl, two years older than me, but sometimes I feel ancient by comparison. So far as I can tell, despite having an oddball family, she’s totally normal. Maria works at a jewelry store and goes to night school, learning to do hair. Which is cool and she’s good at it. She’s already volunteered to help me freshen up the blue streaks in mine; I have to do that often or the vivid color dies away to a sickly mermaid seafoam. She looks somewhat like Chuch, Jesse’s family friend, but not enough to be alarming in a girl. I just mean she has dark hair and eyes, plus a stocky build.

“That’s pretty much the way I feel.”

We make a little more awkward small talk because we’re roomies, not friends. She tells me about her date and the movie she saw. I joke about the kid who makes paper pirate hats in the food court. She seems to think this suffices for polite interaction and says something about a shower. I’m relieved, as I don’t know anything about dealing with regular people. I’m like one of those kids from Hogwarts, dodging through the train station and muttering, “Muggles.”

Once Maria leaves, I shut my bedroom door. I’ll scrub off my makeup later, after she goes to bed, like I always do. This is a quirk, but I don’t enjoy people seeing me without it. It’s armor in a way. For me to let someone see my skin? It’s major. Like, I’ve slept with guys who never did—and it’s probably why we broke up, too.

I pop my laptop, planning to watch some TV on the ‘net, but my mail client dings. No lie, my heart skips a beat when I see the name. Jesse Saldana. I got a couple of emails from him while we were moving me into this apartment, and he insisted on helping. But since then, there have just been his casual visits to the mall.

Which are definitely increasing in frequency.

Opening the message, I read:

Hey, Shan.

I’ve been thinking about you since I got home, and I just want to make sure we’re okay. It was a little awkward before I left. Or did I imagine it? I’m trying really hard not to be a jackass here.

Jesse

I skim the words twice. Most of it, I don’t care about, but for obvious reasons, I fixate on
I’ve been thinking about you.
Since I wake up with Jesse Saldana on my mind, I spend the workday daydreaming about him while making pretzels and pouring drinks for people, and then I come home to obsess about him some more, this seems like the least the universe can do to level the field. I hate the word
crush
, but it so totally applies here. And I don’t want to be that girl; I kind of hate myself for it, actually.

So I decide to make him sweat. Deliberately, I close the program and find some free TV online; there are sites that let you watch if you’re willing to put up with their stupid ads. It’s on my to-do list to get a monthly subscription to Netflix, but you need a credit card for that, and I’m not exactly flush with cash. So I watch this sitcom until I’m tired enough to sleep, and it makes me happy to imagine Jesse wondering why I haven’t replied.

In this single matter, I agree with my mother.

It’s best to leave a man hungry.

Three