His hands slid down my arms, and my eyes flew open again.
“What is it with you Hudson boys and your first loves? She was a rock star. A TV star. And she would have burst right out of any one of my bras. How the hell am I supposed to compete with that?”
“You’re not. Addison’s dead, Kaylee. Not just dead.” Because I was dead, and he was dead. “She’s gone.” Her soul had been disintegrated and scattered throughout both worlds two weeks before, and it could take centuries for it to slowly reform.
“I know, and I’m sorry about that, but honestly, I’m a little less sorry than I was a second ago.”
His eyes widened, and he looked…surprised.
Crap. What the hell was I saying? Addison had never been anything but kind to me. She’d put herself between me and Avari so I could escape the Netherworld, and she’d suffered horribly for it. Of course I was sorry she was gone. But…
“Her memory. Sabine was right. You can never really compete with the memory of a tragically deceased lover.”
“You don’t need to compete.” He lifted my chin so that I had to look into his eyes. “I love you, Kaylee. I love you like I have never loved anyone else. Like I will never love anyone else.”
I knew that, but…“After her?” I didn’t want to know, but suddenly I had to ask. “After Addy? How many? Were they pretty? Were they…good?”
His eyes flashed in panic. “Okay, you see that this is the envy talking, right, Kay?”
“I know.” But I didn’t care. “How many, Tod? When you touch me, how many other girls are you remembering?”
“None. Look at me.”
I looked at him, but I could hardly see him through tears. When had that happened?
“When I touch you, I’m not thinking about anyone but you. When I look at you, I can’t remember what any of the others looked like. When I hear your voice, I can’t even remember their names.”
“Really?” My tears fell, and he wiped them away with his bare hands.
“Really. Compared to you, they’re all nameless. Like…Thing One and Thing Two. And Thing Three. And…okay, that’s not helping.” His gaze searched mine, and his forehead furrowed. “This sucks. How can I help?”
“I don’t…” But I did know. “I think I need you to kiss me.”
His features relaxed, and his grin came back slowly, like he expected me to change my mind. When I didn’t, he pulled me into his lap, and I tucked my legs around him. “My pleasure.”
He kissed me, and my hands slid behind his neck. I wanted to devour him. I really did. And the beauty of being dead and in love is that you don’t have to come up for air.
I don’t know how long we sat there kissing, tangled up in each other and nearly desperate for more, but I know we didn’t stop until Emma came in to get ready for bed. And I only know when that happened because she pretended to gag in the doorway.
“I can’t even see you, but I know what you’re doing.”
“No, you don’t,” Tod said to her, his lips still pressed against mine. “We’re still dressed.”
I laughed and concentrated on being visible on the human plane.
Em sank onto the edge of her bed, and I climbed off Tod’s lap. “Better?” he said, and I nodded, my face flaming.
“Sorry. That was intense.”
“That?” Em waved one hand at the two of us, grinning. “Or the test dose?”
“Both,” Tod and I said in unison. He was only partly kidding when he continued, “Tell Sabine to give Sophie a half dose.”
4
“So? Do we have any classes together? Let me see.…” I pulled Emma’s new schedule from her hands as the office door swung shut behind us. “Crap.” I scanned the schedule again, hoping I’d misread. “There are only a couple hundred juniors in this school. How can we only have one class together?”
French. With Mrs. Brown. The only class “Emily Cavanaugh” and I shared was Em’s least favorite.
She leaned in to whisper, staring out at a sea of faces she’d known most of her life, none of whom recognized her. “If we were going to make up my age anyway, why the hell didn’t we go with eighteen instead of seventeen? Or twenty-one. That would have been nice.”
“You have to finish high school, Em.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
I’m sure there were several dozen good answers to her question, but I couldn’t think of any of them in that moment; I didn’t want to be there, either. So I gave her a little taste of the motivation I was clinging to. “Justice. This is where Avari and the other hellions hang out, remember? Invidia could be exactly where we’re standing right now, on the other side of the world barrier. She could be sniffing us out as we speak. How are you going to draw her into a trap if you’re not here?”
“Valid point. But frustratingly ironic. They hang out here to be close to us. To feed from our emotions. And now that I don’t have to be here if I don’t want to, I’m stuck here anyway, to stay close to them.”
“Welcome to my afterlife. Where’s your first class?”
Emma studied her new schedule as we ambled aimlessly down the hall, and I tried to ignore the stares focused on us—no, focused on me. I didn’t figure out what the whispers were all about until some idiot underestimated his volume.
“I can’t believe she came to school today. Her best friend’s been in the ground less than twenty-four hours, and she doesn’t even look upset.”
Oh. They’d expected me to still be mourning Emma, which had never occurred to me because Emma was standing right next to me. It had been much easier to pretend to grieve during the week and a half before she’d come back to school, when we were still waiting for the police to release her body so we could bury her. Without her next to me, I’d had no trouble remembering that she was supposed to be dead.
“Two-oh-four.” Em looked up from her schedule and frowned. “I’m headed upstairs. See you at lunch?”
“Yeah.” At least that much hadn’t changed.
First period math was weird without Emma. The stares continued all the way through class, and I actually had to do math during the last five minutes of class, when we were supposed to be starting our homework, since I had no one to whisper with.
But there were plenty of people whispering about me.
I was the center of attention when I’d secretly died, yet somehow I was still the center of attention now that Em had secretly lived. I couldn’t win for losing.
“Hey,
