“Would it really hurt anyone else?” She didn’t want to harm them. They were her friends. And if Elle and Sapphire were right, they were more than her friends—they were once her family, her community, her world.
“I don’t know. Perhaps not.” Elle paused. “To be honest, it’s highly unlikely.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are,” Abby said.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea.”
“But you want me to die. And the bridge is already damaged. What’s the harm in trying?”
Elle spun around herself, throwing off a flurry of sparks, then stopped. “Fine. If this is how you choose to kill yourself, fine. Just try not to make the bridge any worse while you’re at it, okay?”
Abby was besieged by second thoughts. She’d assumed Elle would be happy if the bridge killed her, considering her death seemed to be Elle’s main goal. But she wasn’t. Was there something Elle wasn’t telling her?
“You really think this will kill me?”
Elle seemed to deflate. “Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll link up, your body won’t have the right angelic frequency, nothing will happen. It’ll all be a big waste of time.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“I don’t know for sure,” Elle agreed.
She should call Gwynne, tell her what she’d decided to do. But she couldn’t, because she was mesmerized by the warm breeze that blew around her, ruffling her hair, and by a song that hovered at the edge of her awareness, a song of incredible longing. The breeze whisked her off the ground and into the sky, and she was caught in a dizzying, familiar whirlwind.
Gwynne. She didn’t get a chance to tell her, to say goodbye, just in case this didn’t work.
But it would work. She wasn’t going to die, and if she had told her what she was up to, Gwynne would have tried to stop her. And if she didn’t make it back—which she wasn’t going to think about because that wasn’t going to happen—Gwynne would figure out what she’d done. Heck, Gwynne could ask the angels. They’d tell her.
And her grandparents, they would miss her. They’d never understand the truth, though. She hoped Gwynne would make up some explanation for her disappearance that would make sense to them. Not that they needed one. They’d assume she’d followed in her mother’s irresponsible footsteps, just like they always warned her not to. Just one more irresponsible choice in a long history of skipping class and driving too fast and being friends with troubled classmates and donating the boring, fugly, age-appropriate dresses her grandmother spent good money on to the church’s homeless without permission. Not to mention dropping out of college and failing to get a real job with health benefits.
They wouldn’t understand that this time, she really was trying to do the responsible thing.
Chapter Sixteen
They stood in the void in complete darkness. It was silent, so profoundly silent and empty that Abby couldn’t feel where her body’s edges were. She had no edges—her awareness seemed to stretch out toward infinity.
After a time—once she remembered she had feet, had a body—she realized her feet were on a surface. She was standing on the bridge.
Out of the darkness, angels appeared like points of light, lining up along the bridge span as far as she could see in either direction, lighting up the void. They took each other’s hands, linking up, and as energy currents began to flow from one angel to the next, the angels became brighter, shining like pure, transparent crystals, each a slightly different shade along the spectrum—yellow sapphire, citrine quartz, topaz, amber, copper, gold—each one a dazzling, brilliant complement to the whole.
“Each angel stands at a node,” Elle explained in a hushed voice. “The number of nodes evolves over time, always one per angel, always attuned to our exact number. When all of us are linked, our combined energy forms a wave that returns the bridge to its normal state.”
Elle and Sapphire had volunteered to take the most dangerous positions, standing on either side of Abby. She was the weak link in the chain, and no one knew what would happen with a weak link. They’d never had one before.
Sapphire took her hand, and then Elle. And then…nothing.
“I told you this wasn’t going to work.” Elle started to pull her hand away.
But before she broke contact, for a fraction of an instant, the link flickered through Abby, connecting her to all the other angels. In that instant, she felt their emotions flow through her and knew they loved her with a love beyond all reason. They missed her. They wanted her to be with them. They were her family, the family she never felt her grandparents, although they loved her too, quite gave, because there was always that undercurrent of disapproval, that unspoken reminder that she was unstable and her mother was irresponsible and her father was scum.
In that instant, her heart filled with love for all these countless trillions of light-filled beings whose capacity for love outstripped anything human. The immense power of it was overwhelming. Her heart felt like it couldn’t expand to hold it all. Time stretched out and that fraction of an instant lasted an eternity.
She clutched Elle’s hand and reached for the link with all her heart, desperate not to let it go. It called to her, pulled at her, made it hard to think. She wanted to join the angels right now, for real. She could do it. She could cut the lifeline that kept her away from them. This was where she belonged, inside this supernova where love was pure and fearless and unconditional.
She gripped Sapphire’s and Elle’s hands, but they released her, and the fragile link flickered away.
Her nerves screamed in shock and her heart seized up in agony at being cut off from her glimpse of who she was meant to be, at losing that beautiful connection, at being deprived of that light. She doubled over and fell into Sapphire’s arms.
* * *
Gwynne padded to her kitchen in her pajamas to wash some breakfast lettuce and carrots for the vegetarians in the house. The kitten rubbed against her ankles to remind her the carnivores needed to eat too, nearly tripping her in her enthusiasm. Gwynne filled the kitten’s bowl and took the veggies to the living room where the guinea pig and rabbit cages sat on tall tables out of the kitten’s reach, far from any feline launching pad. She stopped.
Crap. She crept closer to the guinea pig’s cage.
“Pigness!” she gasped, cooing and covering her mouth.
Apple, who had not looked pregnant when she took her in, but had recently developed quite the suspicious don’t-look-at-me, I-swallowed-a-couple-of-golf-balls bulge, was cuddled in a corner of her previously solitary cage with three furry, bright-eyed babies.
* * *
No one knew what she’d done. No one knew how close Abby had come to doing something they wouldn’t understand. Something they’d condemn. As she tuned her harp, she glanced up every once in a while past Gwynne’s unstaffed desk to scan the handful of clients waiting in the lounge, but no one was paying any attention to her. She was sure someone would sense her brush with angelkind just by looking at her, and yet, no one said anything. Because no one could tell.
Gwynne rushed in, late for work, and didn’t say a word. Because even Gwynne couldn’t tell. Of course, Gwynne was probably trying her best to ignore her.
Gwynne tossed her bag on the floor under her desk and switched on her two digital picture frames and fiddled with them before returning them to their usual position, back-to-back, one facing her and the other facing out for the guests to see, with a small card positioned in front inviting people to Ask About Adopting a Rabbit. As usual, a slideshow played of her menagerie.
Abby came over to check them out, acting casual. “More rabbit shots? No,” she corrected herself, realizing she’d seen these before. “These are your old ones.”
“Keep watching. The new ones are coming,” Gwynne said. “They’re fun. My guinea pig had babies.”
Abby leaned over the desk and cocked her head upside down to see the photos that faced Gwynne. A family photo was next—a gawky Gwyn
ne in her early teens, curled on a sofa with two white rabbits in her lap next to her sister and her mother. Then came the picture of her garden, with the sun shining on purple asters and a rabbit at the edge of the shot. Then came another rabbit.
“When are the guinea pig pig-tures coming up? These are all rabbits.”
“That’s my sister,” Gwynne bristled.
Oo…kay. Abby refrained from pointing out that her sister had a rabbit on her shoulder. She thought Gwynne knew about this Where’s Waldo? rabbit thing.
Maybe not.
The new photos were next. Gwynne paused the slideshow to point out her newest additions. “Here’s Apple, the mom, and the babies—Nittany, Fuji and Apple Jack.”
She expected them to look like naked rats, but instead they were tiny little bundles of fur, all redheads like their mother, each with its own unique pattern of white patches. Their huge brown baby eyes stared right into the camera. “They are so cute.”
Abby shifted so her hair, hanging upside down, didn’t block Gwynne’s view. As she did, her hair swept against Gwynne’s extended forearm. They both froze.
Gwynne wanted to be friends, and maybe for being friends, leaning over the desk was too flirtatious, but it was hard to keep her distance when it felt so comfortable not to. Gwynne had been pretty clear, though, that she didn’t want her to touch her.
Abby straightened and pretended nothing had happened. “Hoping someone here will want to adopt them?”
“They’re not ready to leave their mother yet. But when they are…I don’t know. I’m thinking I might keep them myself.”
“You can’t save them all, Gwynnosaurus.” She was a hypocrite for saying it, but she said it anyway. Compared to what she’d risked her safety to do for the angels, caring for a few more critters was nothing.
Gwynne looked at her like she could see into her hypocritical soul and wondered what it would take to make her fall in love with her. She blinked, and the look was gone.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t save some of them.”
A customer came in, so Abby returned to her harp. She watched Gwynne out of the corner of her eye while she meandered from one Irish ballad to another.
“I’m a friend of Kira’s,” the woman was saying. “I’m visiting from out of town and she sent me down here for a free massage.”
“Rae, right? She told me.” Gwynne checked the computer. “I have you on the schedule. If you’d like to make yourself comfortable, it’ll just be a few minutes.”
The visitor leaned forward to check out Gwynne’s photos—in the outward-facing frame, like a proper guest should. “That kitten is adorable! Oh, the rabbits too. Which ones are up for adoption?” She kneeled gracefully on her impossibly long legs to get a closer look. “They’re so cute. I wish I could adopt one.”
Gwynne perked up. “You can.”
“I really can’t. I’m a dancer and we go on tour. I’d have to leave them with someone else for months.” She rose and backed away, probably worried that Gwynne was going to pester her if she didn’t make it clear she wasn’t interested. “Maybe someday.”
At least Gwynne wasn’t flirting with her. Listening to them talk was bad enough. Abby transitioned to a lively Scottish reel she thought a dancer might appreciate and played it as loudly as she could. If it distracted her from Gwynne, so much the better.
As Rae turned away from the desk and chose a sofa, Gwynne glanced in Abby’s direction. Their eyes met and Abby fumbled her tune. She looked away immediately, shaken by her reaction. There was something in Gwynne’s eyes, something in the set of her jaw, something that said:
I see you.
I am aware of you.
I could be making love to you right now if we weren’t both pretending to do our jobs.
Her link with the angels had been like this, except far, far less sexual. How a single human being could fill her with as much yearning as the light of a trillion angels, she didn’t know, but gazing at Gwynne made her realize she belonged on earth as much as in the Angelic Realm. She loved playing music for her sick patients at the hospital and she loved…her. Did angels fall in love? Or was that something you had to be human to experience? Was she in love with Gwynne?
Angelic love was searingly pure and absolute. Human love was less simple. What she felt for Gwynne was both.
She switched to an even trickier, faster-paced reel that required her full concentration. She barely noticed when Dara Sullivan arrived for her weekly appointment with Megan McLaren. What she did notice was Gwynne tapping something into the computer.
“Your appointment’s not for another hour,” Gwynne told Dara. “Did I mess up the schedule?”
“No, I’m early,” Dara said.
“Would you like to relax in the whirlpool while you wait?”
“I like it here. I like listening to the harp music.”
Abby smiled up at her in thanks.
Dara gave her a flicker of a smile in return, but it was Gwynne she addressed her next comment to. “I also like watching you count down the nanoseconds until the clients are gone and you and Abby can jump each other.”
Abby ended her tune midway, rolling a finishing chord in a feeble attempt to pretend she’d reached the tune’s real end. She had never seen Gwynne turn red.
Gwynne ran a nervous hand through her hair. “We don’t—”
Dara nonchalantly picked up a magazine and flipped it open. “Megan says she doesn’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but I think she’s just being tactful.”
Gwynne met Abby’s gaze again. There was vulnerability exposed beneath the raw desire that had been there earlier, and it made her want her even more.
Gwynne closed her eyes. “I have work to do in the back,” she said. “Come get me if anyone needs me.” She disappeared into the storeroom.
Abby rocked her harp onto its base. Gwynne couldn’t look at her like that and then walk away. What a chicken.
She marched across the room and poked her head into the storeroom. Gwynne was pouring massage oil from a gallon jug into small squirt bottles using a funnel that she transferred from one bottle to the next.
Gwynne looked up from her work. Her eyes were bleak. “Is there a customer at the desk already?”
“No.” Abby stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind her. “Do you need help with that?”
“Abby. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for you to be in here.”
Chicken.
“Because I might steal some of the inventory?” Abby approached the worktable and screwed the tops onto the squirt bottles Gwynne had just filled. “These could be worth a lot on the black market.”
Gwynne continued to pour oil into more bottles. Abby was standing right next to her, in her personal space, helping her when she asked her not to, and she wasn’t backing away. This was good.
Except the next words out of Gwynne’s mouth were, “I don’t want to lead you on.”
Abby tightened the lid in her hand too hard. Gwynnosaurus wasn’t chicken at all.
It made her want to kiss her even more.
“You think this is leading me on? What about the way you were looking at me out there?”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Gwynne put the jug down and sidestepped Abby and opened the door. “Dara?” she called out. “Come get me if a customer shows up, okay?”
“Like I want to walk in on you two making out?”
Gwynne flushed. “We’re not—”
“Don’t worry about the desk,” Dara said. “You think I don’t know how to do customer service? I am the personification of customer service.”
“I want you to come get me,” Gwynne said.
“You want me to disturb you.” Dara clearly didn’t believe her. “When I am offering to help.”
Gwynne stepped out and strode to her desk. “You must really want my job.”
She leaned over and fiddled with the mouse. Dara slid into her unoccupied seat like she belonged there and Gwynne s
howed her what to do.
“You should be healing people,” Dara said. “Not filling out spreadsheets recording payments.”
Gwynne straightened from the computer. “Leave the billing program to me, please. All you need to worry about is the appointment schedule.”
“Relax.” Dara waved her away.
Gwynne started to leave, then stopped and looked over her shoulder at Dara. Abby watched from the doorway, half afraid Gwynne would not return to the storeroom, but she didn’t disappoint. Gwynne closed the door and once again they were alone in the small room.
* * *
Gwynne had no idea why Dara was so gung ho to take her job except that it was yet one more way to worship the ground she walked on, something she dearly wished she would stop doing. If Dara and Hank would just hurry up and sleep together…
If it wasn’t imperative that she hash it out with Abby, she wouldn’t have let Dara take over her desk. Not because she didn’t trust her to handle it, but because she didn’t like knowing Dara was on the other side of the door assuming she and Abby were getting in each other’s pants. Especially since now all she could think about was getting in Abby’s pants.
Why was she here?
Um…yeah. She wanted to apologize for earlier.
If only Abby wouldn’t stare at her mouth.
“You know what would really be leading me on?” Abby stepped closer and angled her head.
Gwynne swallowed. Abby was going to kiss her. She could see it coming. This was not a drive-by assault by a woman intent on making contact before she could react. This was calm and deliberate. Abby knew perfectly well that she might be rebuffed, yet she was confident enough not to care. Abby would give her all the time in the world to reject her, and still get what she wanted. It was hypnotizing.
She loved that about her, that she wasn’t afraid.
Her blood thrummed. She swayed toward her and met her halfway, and for the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to swoon. Her body buzzed with crazy pleasure and she knew denying herself this happiness was a terrible mistake she would never make again. Abby kissed her and kissed her and Gwynne clung to her and drank her in. Abby clutched the front of her shirt to bring her closer, and when that wasn’t enough, got underneath it and wrapped her small, gentle fingers around her bra straps with a fierceness that made Gwynne want to pass out from oxygen deprivation. She wouldn’t have minded. But it didn’t happen, because Abby broke the kiss.
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