by Safari Spell
Calibre Creek Publishing
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Copyright © 2016 by Safari Spell.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Calibre Creek Publishing
Atlanta, GA
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover design by Joe Burns
Long Live Dead Reckless/ Safari Spell. – 3rd ed.
For mom,
who taught me to laugh when I was afraid.
Now I laugh every day.
Acknowledgments.
This book only exists because many wonderful people have always been supportive of my work. Writing groups, friends, Facebook fans, and family have built an encouraging, strong community habitat for my writing to grow roots.
My husband, Brian – thank you for challenging me to try this crazy thing in the first place. Thank you for putting up with furious all-night writes, neglected dates, and lots of irrational sobbing. Not only couldn’t I have done this without you, I never would have even started. Thank you for believing in me. I love you.
My Kickstarter backers – Sue Cheek, Stacey Varner, Aunt Nat, Brenda Spell, Karen Monroe, Kathy Monroe, Brett Howell, The Bartley bunch (Keith, Cindy, Rainie, CJ), Jeff Aultman, Sherry Shanklin, and Stephanie Lewis – you put your faith (and money!) in a timid first-time novelist without even knowing so much as the plot. Your generosity made this real. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Thank you. You are my heroes.
My designer, Joe – you’re pretty much the coolest artist I know, and for some reason you agreed to share your talent for this book. Thank you for being patient with my creative perfectionism and for being such a wonderful friend!
My editor, Kim – thank you for all the hard work and insight.
1
At twenty-two, I knew everything.
I knew how to pick a gravesite a dead person would die for. I knew how to dive out of a burning house and land on the cool side of the pillow. I knew how to fail an entire semester and still make Dean’s List. I basically knew everything except how to avoid falling in love with the vampire who ruined my life. But in my defense, there shouldn’t have even been one because vampires don’t exist. At least they didn’t back when I knew everything.
At twenty-three, I knew nothing.
I didn’t know how to get out of my hometown of Cypress. I didn’t know how to stop itching every time a cute guy realized I wasn’t invisible. I didn’t know how to delete mom’s last voicemail from my phone. I didn’t know how to keep dad out of the mental ward. Everything I didn’t know made me forget there was a world outside of my own – one full of unfamiliar faces.
While my mom lay in the hospital dying, I never saw a single face – just bodies. When a hand would reach out with some soothing word attached, I took it. When a shoulder that looked strong enough for my troubles was offered, I leaned.
I never questioned a kiss on the forehead back then, so I never felt the fatal one planted there. Had I looked in his eyes, I might have a different story to tell. But I didn’t, and that single moment changed the course of my life.
There’s nothing special about the place I was born, but I did always think it was weird that no one moved away. Anyone who left always came back to die. Then again, some people just skipped that step entirely and disappeared instead. Usually it was an amateur diver in Radium Springs, sometimes a lone fisherman on the Flint. Always on water, never a body found.
Only in my hometown could people both vanish and never leave. Generations of families festered in their own echoes, repeating the same lives over and over again. I couldn’t be one of them, that much I knew. There’s nothing here for anyone with dreams, and I have days and nights full of them.
Eight months of intense South Georgia heat slow-cooks perpetual complacency in this place. It’s all back roads, bars, and bad decisions, and with no fast road out of town, far too many people call it home. The truth is, some of them aren’t even people. There’s little to lure a stranger – especially a supernatural one. But when I was twenty-three, I met one.
I had actually known at least two others before Sage Talis walked into Goodlife Gym looking for a job, but I didn’t know it then. Supernaturals fit in better than they like to admit. Anyway, it was a hot Thursday afternoon the last week of August. Around four o’clock, to be exact.
It was the kind of day where the sun radiated down in actual waves you could see coming off the road. It felt like hell opened up somewhere on the edge of town to swallow up anyone who tried to leave.
When I walked into the gym lobby, my kitten heels clacked against the tile floor, causing the normal ruckus. A few heads turned my way, but they recognized me and went back to work. I first noticed him standing at the front desk counter. His back was to me, his head down, his left hand writing.
I stopped right there and stared. Sure it was rude, but it never occurred to me that no one else was looking at him like that. I thought we all were. A blush sizzled on my cheeks as I drew every inch of him with my gaze.
The shirt he wore hugged his gorgeous frame, teasing us all – I mean me. I knew I had to take a picture in case we never crossed paths again, so I pulled out my phone and pretended to read. It was hard to angle the camera without it being obvious what I was doing.
Actually, not hard. Impossible.
“Hey, Talor! If he turns around, you can get a picture of the front, too,” said Kati, the front desk manager.
I scrambled to pretend I wasn’t trying to take a picture of a stranger’s butt and ended up with a blurry one of my feet for all my trouble. Kati chuckled as I ducked into the time-clock room to hide.
Sighing, I looked at the time. I was too early to clock in. I was constantly being reprimanded about the nickels and dimes it costs Goodlife when I clock in early.
To pass the time, I peeked out of the small window in the door to make sure he was still there. He was, and thankfully he seemed oblivious to my shenanigans. Good thing too, because I looked like a horny ghost haunting the window. Shifting on my feet, I decided to go back out and talk to Kati so I could at least get a better look at him. She wouldn’t blow my cover.
Well, not a second time, anyway.
The blinds of the Assistant Director’s office were open as usual, and at the desk sat a middle-aged creeper who followed me around. I hadn’t walked two feet past his open doorway when he launched himself out of the chair and covered the ground between his desk and the door.
He caught himself against the doorframe while I pretended not to notice the theatrics. Focusing instead on the gorgeous stranger, I took a spot about two feet away from him and leaned against the front desk counter.
I tried not to crowd him since it would have been obvious and awkward. You know, more obvious and awkward than what I was already being. Not that it mattered. He was still filling out paperwork, ignoring my existence. His face said mid-twenties; the air about him said something else.
He came across as seasoned and poised, like a wanderer who had spent some time as a monk. He also had a wild look about him, like maybe he’d wrestled some beast to the grou
nd just outside. The thought made my breasts swell another size.
His tousled hair made me want to run my hands through it, but I knew better. That brownish color was too close to blonde, and blondes tend to stick together like a cult. Still, I enjoyed haunting him. I mean ogling. I mean lusting. I mean looking.
A reddish five o’clock shadow edged his jaw and raced up his cheekbones, swarming around his lips. His eyes were set astride pretty much the cutest nose ever, and the most spectacular part of it all was the freckles splashed all across his skin.
There were so many freckles it was like looking at constellation camouflage, but I still saw him. Gazing at the unique dots, I imagined connecting them into shapes. The longer I looked, the more creative the shapes became.
“Sorry if I’m bothering you,” I said, controlling the tone of my voice so it sounded sexier than usual.
He never looked away from the paper. At this point, I felt a little foolish. Everyone kept cutting their eyes and whispering. I was that proverbial train wreck, but I wasn’t about to walk away without acknowledgement.
“I’m Talor. What’s your name?”
He ignored me again. Since I wanted an excuse to lean a little closer to him anyway, I arched to see his name on the application.
“Oh, hi, Sage,” I said, pursing my lips like an idiot. “You know, you don’t really look like a Sage.”
I didn’t even know what I meant by that, but it made him put down the pen and lift his head. It felt like his eyes took forever getting to mine. Once they did, everything around us went into a haze. I couldn’t tell what color I was seeing, only that the eyes were timeless, as if no sight in a world full of sights had ever escaped them.
It was something like green and gold with layers and depth – as many layers and depth as the earth itself. I think it’s called hazel in sober moments. I could have sworn the irises moved in synchronized swirls like a spectacular time-lapse of the night sky, but all I knew for sure was that there was something unsettling there.
When he blinked, everything went back into focus and we were just strangers staring at one another in close proximity.
“Talor, huh? Is that with a ‘y’ or an ‘i’?”
I felt feverish relishing in the glory that despite not being skinny or blonde, I wasn’t invisible to the sexiest man I’d ever seen.
“Neither was good enough for me, actually.”
“I believe that,” he said, curling a corner of his lip. It was only half a smile, but it was wholly genuine.
“So…what’s your last name, Sage? Just in case I want to play MASH and get spoiled on our future?”
I started to look down at the application again, but he covered it with his hand as he leaned an elbow on the counter. He didn’t answer me. Or if he did, I was too focused on the hair tumbling across his forehead to notice. I cleared my throat and gave a soft laugh.
“Oh. Going to make me work for it, are you?”
“Well, you do work here, don’t you?” he joked, looking away as he straightened.
I frowned before I could stop myself, but he wasn’t looking anyway. It was irritating for a boy to play hard to get. Before I could come up with something clever, his focus went to something behind me. His jaw tightened, stealing away that gorgeous smile. When I turned, the Assistant Director was walking towards us.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Sage. I hope you get the job. I know I’d like to see more of you,” I said with a wink.
I know I saw the beginnings of a blush under that glorious stubble. Looking the way he did, women had to flirt with him all the time. But he didn’t act like it. He was either shy or a snob, which meant he had a girlfriend (probably a skinny blonde with a thigh gap) and didn’t think I was good enough for him.
I could feel my blood boiling as I considered Sage the snob with no last name. Just as I grabbed the double doors separating staff from members, I heard his voice carry from the counter.
“It’s Talis. Let me know what MASH says. I don’t mind spoilers. I think I know what happens anyway.”
Head held high, I grinned and pranced through the doors. If he did have a girlfriend, he sure wasn’t thinking about her when he was asking me how to spell my name.
2
Fate was cruel.
He ended up training with the morning crew, which was pretty much torture because I came in just as his shift ended. I used those precious crossover minutes during his first week to flirt, but he seemed even less interested in me then than when we first met.
His second week, I made the stupid decision to skip Dr. Milton’s class twice so I could loiter at the front desk and attempt small talk. I made little progress getting to know Sage and Dr. Milton noticed my repetitive absences. Even the Assistant Director noticed. But Sage did not.
During his third week, another Cypress woman disappeared along the Flint. They found her bike. Didn’t find her. But that was barely news anymore. The only reason anyone talked about it was because she was a long-time member of Goodlife. It felt weird trying to seduce Sage when other members stood around him crying about their missing friend, so that week was a scratch.
Even though he barely spoke, everyone seemed to like him – maybe because he barely spoke. I couldn’t understand why management sentenced such a quiet treasure to close with Spencer Kaden, the resident Goodlife Gym playboy.
It was a grim fate for such a nice new guy, but it did mean that we had the same shift finally. The only thing I could come up with was that management hoped he would even out the front desk reputation. You know, with Spencer being a man-whore and all.
Then again, Spencer himself was a head-scratcher. He was a star athlete from California who somehow landed in Cypress on a swimming scholarship. He was one of those people who actually had a trust fund.
It always kind of bothered me that someone who could afford to buy a college took scholarship money meant for normal people. He didn’t need a job, a scholarship, or even college for that matter. I suspected that his parents sent him away as some sort of punishment. Anyone could guess what he did.
Regardless, he was around for some reason, and his missing moral compass passed the time by smooth-talking girls into dropping panties by name introductions. Sadly, he was stupid good at that, and girls never seemed to hate him for it. I never understood why. In spite of his fatal character flaws, we were tentative friends.
That’s to say he never tried to get in my pants, probably because I was teaching a karate class when he first started. But he did come to mom’s funeral, and the day she died, he sent daylilies to my house. I just remember looking at them and thinking they were a metaphor for me, so I could never figure out how to talk to him after that. That’s when we started doing the dance we did now, an awkward shuffle with big chips on our shoulders and lingering looks.
When Sage showed up, Spencer stopped being polite. He began to see me the same way he saw all women and he made no attempt to hide it. I ignored his advances, hoping they would stop as soon as they started. It was annoying, but something far more important demanded my attention: Sage.
He and I were at the point in our “relationship” that I would throw discarded pen caps at other girls who dared flirt with him. When questioned about the projectiles, I pretended some renegade kid was responsible. The girls always believed me when I pointed at ghosts. No one ever suspected I was so ridiculous. I only did that a few times, fearing it would find me out.
I can’t explain those idiotic actions except to say that I wanted his attention more than I could admit – even to myself. I craved it on some level that never existed before he walked in. At first, I honestly thought I’d lost my mind. But every now and then, those sweltering eyes would wander from his solitary world and settle on me in such a way that said he wasn’t just looking at me. He was trying to see me.
Those moments were few, but they were all I needed to continue my quest. Since the snack area was right next to the lobby where he
worked, I made regular trips there to spy on him. I spent a good twenty dollars a week on candy and drinks that I never touched. I ended up with a dragon’s hoard in the nursery refrigerator. No one complained about my regular walkabouts because I had plenty of pity snacks to buy their silence.
Then one day, I got tired of just looking at him. That’s when I held up a pack of Reese’s to my co-worker, Larissa. I say co-worker. She’s a friend. A good one. Most co-workers would get tired of the constant schoolgirl chatter about the hot new guy, but she didn’t. She got a kick out of my raging hormones and his confusing disdain.
“So, I’m going to give you this,” I said, winking long enough for it to be weird, “because I just really want something else. I’m going to the vending machines.”
She was reading a book. She was always reading some book. That’s what happens when you’re a teacher for your day job, I suppose. She didn’t look up, but she swiped the Reese’s from me with precision.
“Girl, you’re hopeless. Get some M & M’s this time.”
I scoffed.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll be too busy talking to Sage for that.”
She looked up.
“Yeah, let me know how that goes. M & M’s.”
Gathering up all my nerve, I threw my shoulders back and began my journey to the front desk. It was almost closing time and all the big wigs had already gone home. I slipped through the double doors to the front lobby and tiptoed passed the vending machine area. Yeah, I was trying to sneak up on him. I have no idea why.
Sage was sitting alone at the front, his elbows resting on the counter as he read a book. My heart took an uneven turn in my chest. I grabbed at it, catching the collar of my shirt. He still hadn’t seen me. I could abort. I could. I think it was M & M’s, right? One foot went back, a retreat on my mind. No. You aren’t going back with candy. You’re going back with something to brag about. He reads books and he’s insanely hot!