The Reaping (The Reapers Book 1) (14 page)

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I said in a tone that was supposed to be silly and flirty but came out serious and a little miffed. Why was everything suddenly weird between us? Oh, wait, it’s because my heart did that little flip when I saw him and I suddenly cared what he thought of me. Which was ridiculous. He just caught me off guard.

He laughed, as though everything was normal between us. “You are so right. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Do you have plans?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m cooking a big turkey dinner with all of the fixings.” I smiled, but I hesitated to invite him and, when I couldn’t figure out why I was hesitating, I decided to go for it. “You should come over. Angelica has to work, so the party’s not getting started until five.”

“Perfect. I’ll see you then.” But he didn’t leave. He just stood in the doorway and looked at me like he was waiting for something.

“Oh, by the way. That night that you saved me from Reid, Angelica said that you had stopped by the apartment and that you had something important to tell me?” The question felt really awkward, since so much time had passed, but I was curious.

He fidgeted, taking his hands out of his coat pockets and putting them back in a couple of times. “Oh, right. Shit. Look, I really screwed that up. This is going to sound weird, but sometimes, I have these intuitions… They’re usually wrong. I had a feeling you were in trouble, so I went to Angelica. I needed to make sure you were okay.”

“Jed said you told him that you just happened to run into Angelica.”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to tell him about my intuition because I’m wrong so often and then, after I screwed everything up, I just didn’t want to admit it.”

“Seems like you did just fine to me. If it weren’t for you, I’d have been hurt a lot worse.”

“Maybe, but I could have been there sooner if I’d trusted my instinct. When Angelica told me you were at the store, I figured you were fine and I went out to eat with Jed.”

“You were right on time as far as I’m concerned. You can’t just stop what you’re doing every time you have one of those feelings, right?”

“I guess.” He looked down at the floor, but he still didn’t leave.

I didn’t have anything else to say to him, and I was waiting for him to leave so I could move again.

He started to turn then stopped. “Cherie said you looked like you’d been hit by a car, limping and stuff. She said you told her you slept wrong, but she’s worried about you. Everything okay?”

Damn Cherie. Now I had to move and prove I was fine. “What is it about you? You walk in and my friends just fall all over themselves telling you my secrets.
She’s working late and her ex-boyfriend Reid has been giving her some trouble, she’s limping a little bit, please go save her
.” I had started in a joking tone, but now I was getting truly annoyed. Who was he to nose around in my life? He may have saved me from Reid, but he didn’t know anything about me. “How do I know you don’t have a limp or a headache or a sore throat? You don’t see me asking you about it.”

He held up his hands and backed away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. That’s what friends do.”

Oh right. I forced myself to walk toward him as normally as possible.

“Can I ask what really happened to you, or is that being nosy?”

I had to tell him something or I would make it all look more mysterious. Unfortunately, thinking on my feet was not a skill in which I excelled. “I fell.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there. Did it involve alcohol?”

Thank you, Caleb
. I did my best sheepish smile and nodded. “Yeah, Angelica and I were being stupid, and I fell down the stairs.” I wanted to slap myself for not being able to come up with a better story than that.

“Been there,” he said and smiled.

Thank god for boys and their stupid stunts.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Take some Ibuprofen and get some rest.”

“Yes, Doctor,” I called as he walked out. I tried not to sound giddy, but I was so happy he’d bought my terrible story. Maybe I was better at improvisation than I thought.

By the time I got home, showered, and headed out to meet Bruce for dinner, I was feeling more like I’d fallen from a first-floor balcony than a twenty foot cliff, and I thought maybe my symptoms were mostly psychosomatic. Like I had dreamt I’d been badly hurt so my body had created some sort of ghost pain to compensate? At least I wasn’t dead. I got to the restaurant before Bruce did so he wouldn’t see me limp in. When he walked in, saw me, and started heading toward my table, his eyes widened and I remembered I still had a pretty nice bruise on my face from being punched.

“Hi,” he said as he sat down across from me. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“No, I was early,” I said, meeting his eyes in an attempt to get him to stop staring at my shiner. “I’m always early to everything. I even try to be late sometimes, and I’m still early.”

“Oh.” He nodded at my bruise. “Good.”

He picked up his menu, glanced at it for a second, and then looked back up at me. “So, are you okay? Is everything okay with you?”

“I’m fine.” I decided not to tell him what he wanted to know unless he worked up the nerve to ask me directly. I hadn’t figured out what I’d tell him, anyway.

“Okay. Good.” He returned his attention the menu for several long moments. “Thanks for meeting me. It probably seems pretty weird to you.”

“Yeah, it does.” He looked at me then and actually met my eyes. The smile that had been plastered on his face since he arrived faded a bit. I actually felt bad for giving him a hard time. He looked like a lost little boy for a moment, his longish brown hair tousled, his freckles standing out in the absence of his brilliant smile. “But I want to help you anyway I can. I understand what it’s like to lose someone.” Literally, in the case of my father, and I’d never felt the need to defend him to anyone.

He nodded and sighed in what seemed like relief. “A friend of yours?”

“Yes,” I said. I had lost a lot of friends. Maybe not in the way he meant, but we were here to talk about him. “So what are you getting?”

“What?”

“For dinner? What’s good here? I don’t eat out much.”

“Right, I think I’m going to just get spaghetti and meatballs. I don’t feel like being adventurous tonight. What about you?”

“A garden salad and French onion soup.”

“That’s right. You’re like super-healthy or something, right? That’s why you never stop in at the bakery with your roommate.”

“Or something.” He was getting on my nerves, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I wasn’t being fair to him because I knew that he had been friends with Landon. “I really love to bake and cook, so I don’t usually buy anything I can make myself.” I flashed him my most friendly smile. His shoulders dropped a tiny bit and he smiled back at me.

“I don’t blame you. I only eat bread and cakes from the bakery, unless I make them myself at home. I read the ingredients list for store-bought bread, and I have no idea what I’m about to eat. It doesn’t seem like anything close to bread.”

“Exactly. I just feel better when I eat homemade foods.” The other reason I never went to the bakery was that he sold coffee there. Too many ghosts.

“Me, too,” Bruce said, accepting my answer.

He smiled at me, and I relaxed a bit myself. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as I thought.

We made small talk until after we’d ordered and our food had arrived, and I began to worry the night would end without Bruce ever getting around to talking about Landon. I mean, Bruce seemed nice enough, but the conversation was awkward at best, and he wasn’t someone I wanted to hang out with after dinner. “So, how did you know Landon?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I was having such a good time I forgot all about that.” He took a quick swig of wine and cleared his throat. “I’ve known him forever. He and I were in the same kindergarten class and we were friends, I think. You’re kind of friends with everyone in kindergarten, right? That’s the way we were until…well, there was some stuff with my family. Most of my friends kept their distance, but Landon, he stood by me and kept me sane.”

Landon had been hanging around the restaurant for a while, watching us, but now he moved closer and sat in the chair next to Bruce. Landon just watched Bruce talk about him and what I saw in his face was love.

“What happened with your family?” I knew as soon as the question left my mouth that it was the wrong thing to ask. Both Landon and Bruce looked at me like I had suddenly stopped speaking English. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

Bruce’s expression softened, and he smiled. Landon continued to glare at me. “It’s fine. I’m the one who brought you here to explain Landon to you and you won’t really get it if I don’t tell you the whole story.” He put down his fork and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “My parents divorced when I was twelve. My dad moved away and my mom started dating this guy who was pure trouble. I hated him for taking my dad’s place with my mom, but I couldn’t help but admire him, too. He was a big guy who could bench press me, drove a motorcycle, and had amazing stories. I stopped hating him after two months of my dad not bothering to spend more than ten minutes a month on the phone with me, and I came to flat out worship the guy. He got me drunk when I was thirteen, arrested when I was fourteen, and then he killed my mom when I was fifteen.”

“He killed your mom?”

Bruce shrugged. “Car accident. He was drunk. He lived, and she died. I never saw him again.”

Landon was still glaring at me. “He shouldn’t have to tell you this.”

I ignored Landon and nodded at Bruce, urging him to go on. I had no idea what the right thing to say was.
I’m sorry about your mom
just sounded pathetic in my own head.

“Yeah, it was really bad for a while. My grandmother took in my sister, Rose, and me. Rose took it harder than I did. She’d been struggling for a while, and no one had really noticed. I’d been spending my time with buddies at school or with Mom’s boyfriend, and Rose was just the annoying sister hassling me to stay home with her. Mom and Gus’d stay out all night, and they never paid much attention to her, either. She told me once that she couldn’t sleep because the ghosts wouldn’t stop bothering her.” He shook his head. “I thought she had an overactive imagination. I didn’t see the signs.”

“Signs of what?” I tried to look interested and not eager. I’d never met someone else who could see ghosts.

“That she wasn’t well.”

“Wasn’t well?” I knew what he was getting at, but I didn’t want to believe it.

“She was diagnosed with severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia when she was fourteen. Supposedly, the trauma of everything brought it on earlier than it would have otherwise manifested.”

“You think she’s crazy?” I knew that was the wrong thing to say, but I had lost all control. This was no longer about Bruce’s delicate feelings.

He frowned at me. “I never use that word. She’s troubled…mentally, she has a sort of disability.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, it’s just…”

“What?” Landon asked me, hate burning in his eyes. “You a shrink now?”

I kept my attention focused on Bruce.

Bruce had been staring at me, almost like he could hear Landon. Then he shook it off and smiled. “It’s okay. I’m overly sensitive.”

“I just…I mean, don’t some people see ghosts who are perfectly sane?”

He laughed then. “I don’t think so, Kelsey. Besides that’s just one of my sister’s many symptoms. She could have been treated as an outpatient and lived a normal life, but she asked to stay in an institution, and my grandmother had the money and the inclination to grant that wish. To get back to the point of the story, most people were uncomfortable around me, the guy who’d lost his father to another woman, his mother to a drunken accident, and his sister to an asylum. Landon was the only guy who didn’t act any differently around me.” He looked at me expectantly.

I’m pretty sure he was waiting for me to suddenly agree with him that Landon was great and that I should forgive him for everything he’d done to me. I suppose I should have said all that to make him feel better, but I’m just not that kind of girl. “I guess that’s great, but was he actually anyone you wanted around? I mean obviously you liked the guy, but was he really any help?”

He didn’t get annoyed or defensive. “He actually was a huge help. He helped me and my grandmother find the best place for Rose, and he visited her there as often as I did. He was incredibly loyal, and he always knew exactly what to say to cheer me up. Then he left to go to college and when he came back…he wasn’t Landon anymore. He was… But it didn’t matter. He had helped me in my worst moment, and I did everything I could to help him. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I couldn’t reach him the way he had reached me.”

At some point during Bruce’s story, Landon’s attention had shifted back to Bruce. Landon was closer to him now, talking to him in a low voice. I had to wait for Bruce to stop talking to catch any of it, and even then all I got was “nobody could’ve helped me.” That, more than anything that Bruce said to me, made me feel a twinge of sympathy for Landon. Sympathy which was obliterated the moment Landon turned back to me with an unspeakably crass hand motion. The movement was so disgusting that I flinched and looked at Landon a moment longer than I should have. His eyes widened and he started to open his mouth to speak.

I did my best to pretend I had no idea he was there. “It sounds like you were a really good friend to him.”

“Can you see me? Can you tell him that I was an idiot? I was so high I couldn’t see straight most of the time. I didn’t even realize…” Landon was shouting at me, but my brief burst of sympathy for him had died. He was still the jerk trying to take my body and destroy my soul. Besides, I couldn’t risk giving away the only advantage I had. If he really wanted to get a message to Bruce, he could tell me in a dream.

“I wanted to repay him somehow for how much he had helped me, I guess. Talking to you about him feels like doing something. It would be nice if he could be the Landon I knew in someone else’s memory.”