Rock N Soul (45 page)

I rolled my eyes and experimentally worked my muscles. Ow. But the good kind of ow. “I don’t know about gorgeous. I’m okay, though, I guess.”

“I’ve always thought you were gorgeous,” he said. “Even before I realized it was more than just an aesthetic observation.”

“Well, thank you.” I started to smile at him before I noticed that I was already smiling like an idiot. Gross.

“I want this to be my forever,” he said, and I should have groaned in disgust but didn’t because fuck if I didn’t want that too.

But it wouldn’t be, and we both knew it. The achy panic had already made my hands begin shaking, and I could feel my pulse speeding up again as the now-familiar dread started to creep in, but I could ignore it for a while. Surely we’d earned a few minutes of happiness and postsex cuddling before we had to talk about it. So I didn’t say anything, just put my head against his chest and draped my arm over his side.

He kissed the top of my head. “It’s weird, you know. To have everything resolved. It feels weird.”

“I can imagine,” I murmured into his chest. “You’ve had so much you’ve wanted to say for so long, it must be strange not to have that stuff inside you anymore.”

“Yeah. And now I have you.”

“Gross,” I said. “You know . . . I’m not even jealous of Eric now.”

“Really? I mean, you never actually needed to feel that way. But really?”

“Yeah. I feel pretty secure in how deep my talons are lodged in you now,” I said, lifting my head up to grin at him.

“Eric is my past, and you are my present and my future.” He leaned in and kissed me softly.

“Ugh,” I said once the kiss was over. “The poetics are a bit much, don’t you think?”

“Not at all,” he said, smirking. “I’m a songwriter. Poetics are what I do.”

Now that we weren’t boning, the cold February air seeping in through the edges of the window was starting to get to me. I wriggled out of Chris’s arms and got up to find some clothes that didn’t smell like airplane. Chris sat up too and put his ghosty clothes back on while I tugged on some warm pajamas and a pair of wool socks. The tightness in my chest and the gradual quickening of my pulse was getting harder to ignore, but I did it anyway. Based on the tightness in Chris’s eyes, I was pretty sure he was feeling the same thing.

“Want to watch a movie?” I asked, smiling a little shakily.

Chris smiled back. “Sure.” He sat down on the couch, and I picked something random out of my stack of DVDs and popped it in. I walked back over to the couch and cuddled up beside him. We watched the movie for a long time without talking, communicating through occasional light kisses and fingers running over each others’ skin, while I tried to work up the strength to do the right thing.

Suddenly a shiver ran through me, and my throat felt like it was going to close up. It was time. I pressed pause on the movie and took a deep breath. “Chris,” I started.

“No.” He pulled me close to him and held on, his arms shaking. “No, don’t.”

I swallowed a couple of times to loosen up my esophagus. “You have to go.”

“I don’t want to,” he whispered.

“I know,” I whispered back, then cleared my throat and spoke at a normal volume. “And fuck knows
I
don’t want you to, but you’re done here. I . . .” I regrouped and tried again. “I have to let you go, you know? So you can go wherever you’re going. Into the light or whatever. I don’t want to keep you from that.”

“This is where I want to be, though.” He dug his fingers into my skin.

I sighed. I didn’t have it in me to keep arguing with him much longer, not when we were on the same side. But somebody had to say it. “Chris, it’s going to be bad for you if we don’t say good-bye. You can feel that just like I can.”

He took in a long breath even though he didn’t need to. “I don’t care.”

“Well,
I
do,” I told him. And
that
part was true. “I don’t want to trade in your soul for my happiness. I can’t do that. Don’t ask me to do that.”

His fingers loosened in my flesh, then started to run lightly over my back. “I’m glad we had this,” he said after a moment. “I’m glad I got to be part of you before I left.”

I rolled my eyes and kissed his shoulder. “Fuck, you’ve been part of me since Christmas, at
least
. The sex was just a nice bonus.”

He laughed, and I took that time to pry myself away from him and sit back a bit. He watched my movements and then slowly sat up too and faced me. “So this is it, huh?” he said.

Our eyes snagged together, and I didn’t try to look away. “Yeah. Just . . . know that the reason I’m telling you to go isn’t because I don’t want you here.”

“I’ll wait for you,” he told me again. He touched my chin, and I dipped my head to kiss the palm of his hand.

“You don’t have to,” I said, leaving my lips against his skin. “Just promise you’ll be somewhere I can find you.”

“I promise.” He tangled his hand in my hair and leaned forward to kiss my forehead. “I would have loved you for the rest of my life.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I know. Me too.” When my eyes opened, a couple of tears sneaked out the corners of them, but I wiped them away quickly and Chris didn’t mention it. “And I still will, no matter what.”

He kissed me again, and I let myself melt into the feeling for a few seconds, reaching up and gripping the sides of his face with shaking hands. When the kiss ended, we stayed there with our foreheads together for a long time before I finally convinced myself to say the words. “Good-bye, Chris.”

He sucked in another shuddering breath and rubbed his thumb over my neck. “Good-bye, Tyler.”

There wasn’t a dramatic exit or anything. He didn’t look up at the ceiling and start glowing with light from another world. There were no angels or trumpets or harp solos. He was just there, and then he was gone, and he took all the air in my lungs with him.

I reached forward and touched the empty space where he had been to make sure he wasn’t still there but invisible. Then I took a deep breath and let it out in a long stream while I tried to center myself. Vaguely, in the back of my mind, I knew I should be breaking down. I should be lying on my bed with my face in the pillow sobbing my eyes out. But instead I just felt . . . drained. Numb. I could hear a bunch of drunks stumbling by outside my window, talking way too loudly like drunks do, but they sounded even farther away than normal. When they were gone, the silence in the apartment seemed almost alive, like it was an intruder waiting in the shadows to strangle me.

I got up and went to my bed and crawled under the covers. I lay there for a while with my eyes open and tried to ignore the fact that the ring on my hand felt like it weighed at least a ton and seemed to be made of ice. Finally, I squeezed my eyes shut and took it off, slipping it into the drawer of the nightstand. After that, sleep took over quickly, and I had a flash of gratefulness for human exhaustion before it pulled me under.

In the morning, I forgot he wasn’t there.

I woke up buried in my mountain of blankets. It was warm, and it smelled like home instead of like hotels, and I let the corners of my mouth slide upwards while I stretched like a cat. After a moment, I mumbled, “Good morning,” and sat up in bed. My eyes automatically jumped to the empty couch. And that was when the sledgehammer hit my gut.

I wish I could say I was strong or that I accepted the whole thing with grace and style. But instead I immediately started fucking sobbing, making these awful gasping sounds even before my eyes got with the program and pumped out tears to go along with the noise. I lay back down and curled into a fetal position. The sobs just kept coming, and I didn’t want to stop them even if I’d had the ability to. He was gone and surely after all that had happened, I’d earned the right to lie in my bed and cry over him for a while.

So I did, for what I swear to God felt like decades. Every time I was sure that I had nothing left in me, that I’d cried out every tear my body could produce, another memory would surface and I’d find a few more.

And then, finally, they slowed down and stopped. I realized dimly that I hadn’t sobbed in a few minutes and that the tears were mostly drying on my face. Oh, I wasn’t
okay
, not really. The loss of him made all my internal organs feel like they had jagged edges that were all bumping into each other, and I was sure I’d been reduced to half a lung because it was tough to take in a decent breath. And I knew all of that would come back later—tonight, tomorrow morning, next week, a year from now in the dairy aisle at some grocery store out of the fucking blue. But for the moment, I was more or less done. I slowly sat up in bed again and braced myself to look around.

He was still gone. But at least this time I expected it.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I picked it up, fully prepared not to answer. After all, there was only one person I wanted to talk to, and he wasn’t what you would call “alive” or even necessarily “in existence” anymore. But the name on the phone was Vic Mitchell. Another bellboy at the hotel. Who only ever called me to get me to cover for him.

Suddenly, the thought of getting back to work felt really good. I still had a couple of days off since Eric had sent us—
me
—back early, and moping around my apartment with all the ITM paraphernalia was probably the worst thing I could do. It wasn’t like the hotel was a place I could forget Chris, but it was at least a place where I could maybe think about something
other
than him from time to time.

I answered the phone and was pretty pleased with how strong my voice came out. “Hey, Vic. What’s up?”

“Hey, Tyler. I’m sick as a dog and I can’t go in today. Can you cover?”

Fucker didn’t
sound
sick as a dog. More like he’d rolled over away from his girlfriend’s tits and muffled his voice with a pillow. But hey, I would take it. “Fuck you, man,” I said, because that was what I always said when Vic asked me to cover. Reputation was important.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’ll give you Friday if you take today.”

I let out a super heavy sigh for appearances’ sake, even though I was already climbing out of bed to find my work suit. “Okay.”

He thanked me and hung up, and I grabbed a quick shower and put on my uniform. I went to the nightstand and took out Chris’s ring, then stood there and stared at it for a long time before I decided I just couldn’t fucking do it. Having it on my hand all day would just make it impossible to keep it together. But I also didn’t want to
not
wear it, because that felt like betraying him, so I finally settled on threading it back onto the chain I’d had it on in Los Angeles and tucking it under my shirt.

I’d done the right thing by letting him go. That didn’t change the fact that thinking about his stupid fucking eyeliner made me want to curl up in the fetal position again, but the desperate, panicky feeling was gone. When I thought about Chris, the ache that shot through me was just because we weren’t together, not because I felt like he was unhappy wherever he was. Most people don’t get the luxury of knowing with total certainty that there’s an afterlife and their loved one is in the good part of it. At least I had that. It didn’t really help, not right now, but it seemed like the sort of thing that would help in the future when I had a little more distance, so I was grateful for it.

I went to work, taking a different route than usual to avoid the places where I could see Chris in my mind’s eye. I had to stop more than once to stand in the chilly breeze and regroup so I didn’t burst into tears again, and all over stupid things, too. A pigeon that looked like the pigeon he’d been petting the day he appeared. A pair of jeans in a store window that were the same style as the ones he was always wearing. Some guy on a cell phone at the end of the street who had the same hair color as him. A couple of times, I almost decided to go back home and tell Vic to go fuck himself, but the thought of being in my room, on my bed, on my couch, fuck, even in my shower—it all made me want to never stop screaming. So I kept walking.

I eventually made it to the hotel. It was ridiculously busy for some reason, which was awesome because it gave me less time to stand in the hotel entryway with Mark the doorman staring at the street and thinking about what I’d lost. Break time came and went, and I kept working, smiling way too brightly at all the guests and racking up a fuck-load of tips even though I didn’t really care anymore. I didn’t bother to count them, because Chris used to count them and I couldn’t do something that he’d done. Not yet.

After a while, Richard came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Take a break, Tyler.”

I swallowed and shook my head. Downtime was bad. I couldn’t do downtime. “I’m fine. I’m working. It’s cool.”

“It’s not cool,” Richard said. “You look like you’re about to pass out, and I know you skipped your break earlier. I’m not having you faint and then claim I was working you to death.”

“I’m fine, really,” I said, but my voice was a little weaker than usual, and Richard must have picked up on that.

“Go take fifteen minutes in the break room. Drink some coffee. Get yourself a candy bar. I don’t care what you do, just don’t come back out until you’ve had a rest.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he narrowed his eyes and spoke over me. “It’s the law, Tyler. I have to give you a lunch break. So take fifteen minutes
at least
.”