Lacee looked to the parking lot then at the room behind me. “We just saw Cole in the parking lot. That was fast.”
The two girls gave Cole a strange look.
Lacee reached for Cole’s forehead with the back of her hand, but he dodged her. “You okay. You look flustered.”
Cole looked strung out on some sort of street drug.
“You might need to lie down,” Lacee suggested.
“He’s fine. Just a little peaked. I have to get those forms filled out and get them photocopied. It’s going to take some time because the campus is running out of ink everywhere. We have to go to the Art building.” I pulled Lacee and Nicki along with me.
Cole’s hard stare burned on my back.
* * * *
Cole
I hurried across the campus and waited near a tree beside the building Allie would exit from at any minute. She had always gotten out of class at exact 2:03 PM. I knew her schedule like it was my own.
It was 2:30 p.m.
The pit of my stomach turned to swirling ice.
What if something was wrong?
What if she wasn’t here?
Her car was in the lot.
The glass doors swung open to reveal Lacee, Shelby, and then finally Allie.
I gripped that tree as if I had never held onto anything in my whole existence.
Allie’s hair had grown a few inches and the color in her cheeks was ever glowing. She was the epitome of all things beautiful, and for the first time in two months, I breathed again. I only did it so that my animal senses could detect her very distinct sweet smell. Each human had a different smell when you were in animal form.
The bad humans with dark souls had a foul stench, which is why it was said that dogs could smell fear.
It wasn’t fear they smelled.
They detected the bad in the person and shied away. It was the same now for me. Though I couldn’t shift, every smell was amplified.
This human, this woman that I would love until the earth crumbled into dust had the sweetest most enticing fragrance that had ever existed. I had the insane urge to hurtle myself right into her arms for just that moment of contact. I was in the process of considering it when I noted the expression on her face.
Allie was troubled.
My protector switch flipped to high gear. I tried to delve into her thoughts, but the chemical reaction in a human’s body that sent off an odor of fear yanked me out of her mind.
Something had scared her.
Allie’s thoughts were blocked. She was mad. When she was mad in our past lives, I could never get into that crazy, fascinating mind of hers.
“What was he looking so frantic about?” Lacee asked Allie.
Lacee’s thoughts of Allie’s new significant other were also clouded.
What was this?
I tried Nicki as she absorbed the upset look on Allie’s face.
“He proposed.” Allie’s voice was hollow. Not happy the way a girl would have been in if she were in love.
Both girls turned to Allie and grabbed her arms in excitement.
I grasped the tree, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up any longer. I crouched there shivering from jealousy, pain, and internal rampage.
“Oh, my God!” both girls chimed in unison.
“He said he thought it would make me stay with him. Like he thought he might somehow lose me.” Allie tapped her fingers on her books.
I shuddered on the ground searching for the shift, but the ache in my bones wouldn’t come. I needed to be closer so I could hear every word she said.
“I told him I would. But later.” She looked down to the pavement, her face pinched with worry. She looked torn, as if she hadn’t quite made up her mind. Not really. Then she floor-boarded me. “I love him. So much. I just don’t want to move too fast.”
Lacee and Nicki squealed school girl–pitched squeals.
I went cold. I didn’t want to hear this, but I didn’t come here to hurt her with my prejudices. I came here to ensure her happiness.
“We just want to know that you are happy and that this is really what you want?” Lacee said as she looked around. They didn’t have an audience. At least not one of which they were aware.
“Does he make you happy?” Nicki asked.
My insides decayed.
I closed my eyes and prayed.
“More than I’ve ever been in my whole life.” Her voice shook.
My insides crumbled to ash. It was hard to look at her knowing she felt such strong emotion toward another, but this wasn’t about me.
I shoved away the hurt and forced myself to loosen my grip on her. I let my love for her motivate me. I had to be there when she fell.
There was no way she was completely happy no matter what devotion she held to the man that had her heart. There was something missing in her eyes.
My sole motivation for living was going to become helping that man find what it would take to make Allie happy. I had to become completely selfless. I lived for her happiness.
“I didn’t think that it was possible.” Allie had put her bag down and gestured a lot. “But when he isn’t acting like he is one step away from the nearest mental facility, he can be amazing.”
“Do you think that he might feel that he is in competition with a ghost?” Lacee said.
They were talking about my absence. Surely Allie had to have had some sort of withdrawals when I left.
The girls walked away from the tree. I closed my ears and my mind to the rest of the conversation. I walked between the trees and kept myself hidden. I would wait until the guy walked into Allie’s dorm to visit with her if I had to wait all night, a day, or even days on end.
It was time to see Allie’s suitor.
I needed to find out what he was about, what I could do to help him make her happy. It might be an attitude adjustment or God forbid, I might actually see some good thing in him that she saw. If the latter were the case, then maybe I could have some closure with just seeing that he was not going to hurt her and that she was just having some unexplained after effects from our relationship that had been causing her to be upset.
Maybe I had just been reading more into the situation.
Maybe the guy had not been the source of her discomforted mood.
She had been through a lot and it would be hard for anyone to understand that hadn’t been there with her through it all.
I wouldn’t be able to directly counsel this unnamed man, but I could read his thoughts and make some type of judgment as to his intentions. Amazingly, the selfish side of me didn’t seem to have much precedence here. I thought I would have more trouble dealing with Allie’s departure from our life, our eternity, but that wasn’t the case right now. My love for Allie was above all.
She was above all.
I walked from behind the building and looked into a glass with a darkened room behind it. I looked better than I had over the last few months, and my eyes were no longer sallow and sunken. I didn’t look as disheveled as I had when I had first gotten here this morning. Seeing Allie had done something for me. Just being in the presence of her energy was rejuvenating.
She didn’t have to touch me for her immortal presence to give me new strength.
I took a deep breath and stepped forward on the campus into the world that I hadn’t seen in two months, a stretch of time that felt like an eternity.
I was ready to face everyone who hadn’t seen me and probably wondered what had happened to me. There were going to be questions that I had to be ready to answer.
* * * *
On the frat house steps, I paused then walked in the front door.
Everyone seemed busy with their homework and didn’t even notice when I started past them. Really? I’d been gone two months and they had nothing to say?
John Beam nodded to me as he came down the stairs. We’d been close. He’d have known if I was gone. He just walked on past and s
at in front of his books spread in a messy array across the sofa and coffee table.
“John. How’s it been?” I stopped at the corner of the sofa.
He gave me a strange look. “The same as always. The chemistry instructor is ruthless.” John angled his nose back to his book.
I just nodded and went up the stairs.
My room was exactly the same as I had left it the day I had crashed my car. Except that some of my clothes had been taken.
“Hey, Cole.” Codie smiled as he walked into the room beside mine.
“Where are my clothes?” I said.
“You must have taken some with you when you left.” Codie shrugged.
“It looks like someone helped themselves to what they wanted.” My tone was crass.
“They’ll turn up.” He shut his door.
I lay down on my bed. So no one had missed me. Not even Allie.
How did I find Allie’s boyfriend without letting on that I was trying? I didn’t want to complicate her life, but she was bound to hear that I was back.
That was it!
That was probably why Allie seemed torn up earlier. Her friends had probably told her that they had seen me. They didn’t realize how that would affect her, but she wouldn’t have shown them either. I couldn’t help let a little hope fill me.
Maybe Allie missed me. So she loved another guy, but maybe, somehow, the knowledge of my presence had confused her. That’s all I needed. A little window.
I sat up in the bed.
Was it worth going through the pain to find out?
Of course it was. It was worth dying repeatedly to be with her so why wouldn’t it be worth living for a short amount of time in the illusion that she might be able to love me again.
I shuffled to the side of the bed. It occurred to me that my sanity might not survive the journey upon which I was about to embark.
I stood lifelessly beside my window. Across the campus of students walking around with books in their hands—either alone or with a significant other or with a group of friends—everyone seemed full of life. The doors to Allie’s old dorm opened and closed as female students went in and out, but there was no sign of Allie. She probably no longer lived there. In all likelihood, she lived across town with her new significant other.
I closed my eyes and listened hoping to hear her thoughts somewhere on the campus.
Nothing.
When I opened my eyes, at the front entrance of the girl’s dorm Allie had dropped her books. But she wasn’t busy gathering them up, she was staring at me.
I ducked behind the curtain and turned my back to the window.
My mouth went dry. I was hot. And I was never hot. It felt as though someone had poured a bucket of hot tar over my head.
Did this mean that she still lived there?
Was she going to come yell at me for leaving without telling her good-bye? Or did she feel so guilty that she couldn’t?
When I left, she had to know that I was unable to see her or speak to her—so would she come, now?
I had only a short amount of time before she showed up because for the first time since I had been back, I could hear her thoughts.
I need to see him.
I hadn’t expected that.
Not yet.
I had to run.
I peeked back out my window and Allie must have already been on the porch or, worse yet even, in the house. I unlocked and lifted the window, and escaped to the roof. A knock on my door caused me to lose my footing just as I rounded the gable of the house, but I grappled for shingles and lay flat hoping no one had seen me.
The knock came again. It wasn’t insistent. Just a knock.
I stood and sidestepped past the window beside mine.
“Please don’t do this.” Allie’s voice was shaky. The ability to control my legs left me.
“Cole?” Her soft voice tugged at the core of every molecule in my being.
I peered down over the ledge. No one was paying particular attention to the strange, ashen-faced guy on the roof of the fraternity. At least not until I stood.
“Hey, man! What are you doing up there?” a concerned guy said from the ground. “You aren’t going to jump, are you? Allie get over here. It’s Cole. Do I need to call somebody?”
“No,” Now exasperation filled her voice. “Colby Kindall Kinsley. Come down here this instant!” she said as if she had never been away from me and all the years hadn’t passed.
I scampered to the other side of the roof. After a clumsy descent down, I found a car with keys in it.
An intuition of sorts, maybe God guiding me, I don’t know, but whatever it was, it led me to speed down the highway to the apartment I’d seen Allie in months before.
* * * *
The old brick building had a loft apartment.
Somehow Allie had used my credit card. It was her money.
I couldn’t be too upset, though it was bruising to my ego that she had gone behind my back. I had never felt as though material things mattered between us, until I saw her sharing them with someone else. I suddenly felt like the farmhand who didn’t deserve her again.
The worthless, uneducated, ne’er-do-well who was expendable.
The thoughts made my brain hurt so I tried to stifle them back as I searched the doorway for a key. Nothing.
Suddenly, an ache started in my bones.
Was it going to happen? Would the shift finally come when I most needed it?
After a painful decrease in body mass, I turned into a rodent capable of shimmying through the smallest of holes. Along the foundation, I found a hole and in seconds, I got into the flooring. I was in the walls in seconds. A hole near the bathroom piping gave me entrance to a bathroom, and made my way in behind a large claw foot tub. I was thankful for the imperfections in the building and the incompetency of the contractors. I had an obsessive-compulsive tendency about all things carpentry and brick.
I had learned that over the years, too. Anything to fill my time and my thoughts in place of the unattainable marked female.
I scurried to the bathroom door and ran out to the living room. I stopped in my tracks when I came upon the grand piano centered in the floor of the apartment. So he played. How artsy, I thought drily.
Every wall was strategically covered in paintings themed around love and togetherness that gave me the urge to vomit. I had to shove back that stabbing nausea into nonexistence.
I didn’t hear the thoughts of a human sleeping or awake so I stood on my hind legs and raised from the floor into my human form. I looked around the room for signs of a woman’s touch. There seemed to be none.
Allie had come out of her dorm earlier, so why would she have rented this place with my credit card? Or had the guy stolen my identity and my girl?
My girl.
The thought lingered heavily in my head as my attention was lassoed in by the largest painting on the wall of the room. The largest portion of the painting was of the woman’s hair. The artist was obviously taken with the model for the painting.
The eyes of the female model were so familiar. And her lips. I’d seen them before. Many times.
It was Allie.
As I stared at the black waves of hair offset by the white background, I felt the inside of my heart wrenching.
She would always be mine. There was nothing inside me that could ever let her go. Not a million years of darkness, not a million years of her denial. She would always belong to me on a level so deep that I could never separate her from the core of my existence.
I stood entranced by the rest of the paintings.
The next painting was Allie’s profile leaning close to the profile of a male. It resembled me, but any guy could.
Her profile, though, was unmistakable. No beauty matched it.
I would know it from distances no human could possibly see clearly.
So the guy she had found to replace me was obviously artistic, li
ked the piano, and even had tastes similar to mine. If she wanted all those things, then why did she settle for him? What was he that I wasn’t?
I shuddered trying to hold back hate. I couldn’t let it get in the way of my duty to Allie.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on her face, though all I had to do was look on the wall. She would have been right in front of me. Everywhere I looked.
Something pulled my focus to other aspects of the room. You could tell much about another by looking at the things with which they surrounded themselves. So far, that had been all things Allie, but there had to be more.
In the area of the room that had massive bookshelves, the guy had stacks of journals. Much like mine. Had he studied me? Stalked me until he learned enough about me to entice Allie out of my arms?
I usually held the private writings of others sacred, but this man had something sacred to me in his possession. Anything that pertained to Allie, either in writing or thoughts would be evidence considering I had made it my duty to protect her. I flipped the book open to investigate.
I’ve never met anyone more mind searing and determined.
Allie waits.
The strength I see in her eyes makes me want to dominate her wholly. The battle to keep myself from losing my mind in her presence is ever escalating. Stability with her is proving difficult and her patience is infuriating. And if I hear, “Only a few more days,” one more time, I think I will implode.
I will have the sweetness of her skin on mine.
I stopped reading as a few more days sank in. Allie still wanted to be immortal and she hadn’t been in a relationship with anyone, though she had admitted a devotion to him? She knew my soul would finally settle, but she didn’t care to ask me how I’d been. I couldn’t fathom what it all meant.
I would witness her with him in person to find out, though.
I couldn’t waste time.
This guy was determined to break down her walls before the deadline and he had no idea that he was backing her off a cliff. Or did he?
I scrambled through my brain, remembering. Was there some clue there?
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