Page 95 of Haunt Me

“I love you,” I tell her. “Forever. I meant that.”

“I know you did.” She presses her palm flat over my heart, and for one unbearable second I swear I feel the pressure of it even after I understand I’m waking up. “I love you too. Forever doesn’t stop just because I did.”

The light starts to fade before I’m ready.

I wake up shaking, drenched in sweat that has nothing to do with fever. My hand’s stretched across the empty half of the bed, fingers curled around nothing.

I don’t know if that was her. I don’t know if it was ever going to be anything but grief and a fever and a body too exhausted to keep the two apart.

But for the first time since the warehouse, I don’t feel like drowning.

I feel like something in me, some small stubborn piece I thought Cullen’s men had finally beaten out of me, has decided to keep fighting a little longer.

That has to count for something.

Samuel

Knox catches me standing outside the garage more than once, and on day nine, he finally hands me a key without a word, then leaves without looking back. Like he already understands I need to do this alone.

I hold it for a long time before I do anything with it. Long enough that the cold’s worked its way through my jacket and settled into my bones.

I know every inch of this building. I build half the shelving myself. I know exactly where the bay doors stick in humid weather and which fluorescent tube in the back flickers when it’s about to die. None of that knowledge makes it easier to put the key in the lock.

The bay’s dark when I finally let myself inside, just one bulb over the workbench that never gets turned off, casting long shadows across the tools I haven’t touched in months. The smell hits me first, oil and rubber and cold concrete, so familiar it’s almost obscene that the world let it stay exactly the same while everything else fell apart.

Raven used to bring me lunch out here. Nothing fancy, a sandwich from the diner. Sometimes she’d bring an apple she’d stolen out of the tree in her father’s backyard. She’d perch on the edge of the workbench, swinging her legs while I finished whatever bike I was working on. She’d narrate my own work back to me in a ridiculous, official-sounding voice, “and now the local mechanic carefully applies excessive force to a bolt that clearly does not want to cooperate,” until I was laughing too hard to actually finish the job.

I taught her to check her own oil out here, once, over her protests that she had a husband for exactly that purpose. She got motor grease on her cheek and didn’t notice for an hour, and I didn’t tell her, because watching her walk around all afternoon like that, marked and unaware and mine, was one of the best things I’d ever seen.

We danced in here once too. It was silly and unplanned, some song on the radio she loved and I pretended to hate. I spun her between two lifts while Knox stood in the doorway looking personally offended that we were being sentimental on club property.

Every square foot of this place has her fingerprints somewhere in it, even the parts she never physically touched. I don’t know how I thought I was just going to walk back in here and work.

The bike’s under a sheet in the back corner. Someone must’ve covered it after the funeral, because I sure as hell don’t remember doing it.

My feet don’t want to carry me toward it, but I make them anyway.

I pull the sheet off before I can talk myself out of it.

The chrome catches the single bulb overhead, and for one unbearable second I can smell her, actually smell her. Black vanilla, her shampoo, the same scent that she used to leave on my jacket when she’d rest her head on my shoulder. That’s all it takes. One breath of it and I’m not in this garage anymore. I’m in another world with her still in it.

My knees hit the concrete before I decide to let them. I don’t remember making a sound, but my throat’s raw after, like I did.

I stay down there a long time, my forehead against the cold metal of the gas tank, letting myself remember all of it at once instead of doling it out in careful pieces the way I’ve been rationing her since she died.

Her laugh when I dropped a wrench on my own foot. The exact color her cheeks went in the cold. The stupid private nickname she had for this bike, one I’ve never told a single living soul and never will.

I’m still on the floor, one hand braced against the tire, when the kickstand snaps up.

Not falls. Not slips, Snaps. The exact sound it made every time she used to kick it up herself before swinging on behind me.

The bike should fall. Six hundred pounds of steel with nothing holding it upright should be hitting the concrete right now. But the bike doesn’t move. Doesn’t so much as lean. It just sits there, balanced and steady, defying every law of physics. I stay frozen, arms half raised, staring at a motorcycle that shouldn’t be standing on its own and very clearly is.

“Raven?”

Her name comes out cracked, barely a whisper, more hope than words.

Somewhere behind me, so faint I almost convince myself that I imagined it, I hear it. Her laugh. Not a memory this time, not something my mind’s reconstructing out of grief and desperation. It’s real. Close. Warm in a way memory never quite manages to be.