I'd Rather Not Be Dead (25 page)

I nearly turn around to run
back, but it's obvious there's no point trying to learn anything
from her with Ricky around. Assuming I'm still trying not to die
before Monday, Finn should be able to get her on her own at
school.

We turn off Main Street, lose
the sidewalk, and start walking along the side of the road toward
our houses. The other me hesitates for a few yards, but then
speaks. “I picked you because Cris's lone consultation in life is
that I can't stand you. He's already so jealous of you it makes him
sick.”

“He's jealous of me because you
can't stand me?” Finn asks, squinting a little.

“Idiot,” TOM breathes. “No, he's
jealous of you because everyone else worships you. He'd give
anything to have everyone adore him. To have Bobbi adore him...”
Her feet stumble and her jaw sets itself. Pulling a package of
cigarettes from her pocket, she lights one without slowing
down.

Finn doesn't seem to know what
to say, although I don't see how TOM's words could possibly come as
a surprise to him. “You sure making him angry is something you need
to be doing?” he asks eventually.

I catch onto what he means
before the other me does. Numbly, I shake my head. No... No, I'm
still not going to believe Cris pushes me off of that overlook.
He'll yell about this, he'll curse, he'll punch walls. But he won't
hurt me.

The other me agrees. “Not
everyone's as unstable as you, Mister I Talk to Inanimate Objects
Because They Don't Talk Back.”

“Alright,” he mutters. “But I
wouldn't go near any high places with him anytime soon.”

The other me stops abruptly and
jams the lit end of her cigarette toward Finn. “You've been talking
to Rain!”

The proper response here is for
Finn to lie, but he takes a heartbeat too long to do it.

TOM growls in disgust. “She
doesn't need encouraging, you dumb hick! Why don't you use your
powers for good instead of evil for once?”

Finn stares at her. “I...”

“Save it,” she snaps, cutting
into someone's yard and making a beeline to the woods beyond
it.

He watches her, then starts to
follow until I grab his arm. “No. I know where she's going. She'll
be alright. Even if you're right about Cris, he won't find her
there.”

He gives me a curious look.
“It's just a place. One of those alone sort of places.”

“Right,” he murmurs. “Not
somewhere I should go then...”

“I'll take you there later,” I
promise, making him smile just a little.

The mountains rise darkly around
us, swathes of black across a sky lit by stars and a bright moon.
Clouds are coming in but for now it's clear enough for the moon to
light the way better than the street lights we hit when we get
closer to Finn's place.

The TV's on downstairs and when
we open the door, lines from near the end of The Princess Bride
come quietly to greet us.

“Hey, Finn,” his mom calls
out.

“Hey, Mom.” He turns the corner
to look into the room where his mom's sewing a tiny jacket with
only the flicker of the television as light. The smile she gives
him is warm, but distant. And her eyes pass over me like I'm just a
parcel of air. “You still up?”

No, she's sleep-sewing. The
words form in my thoughts but I leave them unsaid. Sitting alone on
a Friday night making a costume for a teddy bear, Ms. Finnegan is
just too pitiable for me to snark about.

“I let the ferrets out for a
while,” she says. “They hate it when you don't stop in after
school. They miss you.” Her face is hidden by a loose veil of hair
and there's no self-pity in her voice, but there's a vulnerability
in her slumped posture.

“I'm sorry,” Finn says with
enough sympathy for me to know he read the same things into his
mother's stance I did. She said the ferrets missed him. She meant
she did. But she's either too proud or too sensible to say it. He
goes over and gives her a kiss on the top of her head while
Princess Buttercup threatens to kill herself on-screen.

“You should let them out again,”
Finn's mom murmurs.

“Alright.” He straightens and
looks down at her for a moment. “You're going to bed when this is
over, right?”

“Of course.”

Nodding, he gives her shoulder a
squeeze and starts to go.

“Oh!” she calls out suddenly. “I
almost forgot!”

“What?” Patiently, he gives her
some time to organize her thoughts.

“A girl stopped by. Bobbi?” She
waits for Finn to nod that he knows who she means. “She said she
was checking to make sure you're okay and still going to Blue Ridge
tomorrow.”

“Okay.” He processes the
information. “Thanks.”

“I like her,” his mom says
softly. “She's nice.”

“Yeah,” Finn agrees. “She's
Drew's sister.”

“Drew who was over here the
other day?”

He smiles faintly. “Yeah, that
Drew.”

“They look like sisters,” she
observes. Which makes me question her eyesight. Do those pills of
hers distort the real world in addition to hiding Shadow?

“They do,” Finn agrees, against
all evidence to the contrary.

“I like her too.”

His smile widens. “So do I.”

“Rain too. All three of them
look like sisters.”

“Yep.”

I look at Finn to try conveying
to him that he's nuts, but he ignores me as his mother speaks
again. “Fiona says she might come for Christmas.”

Finn doesn't bat an eyelash at
the shift of subject. And he doesn't remind his mom of what he told
me a few nights ago, that Big Sister Fiona hasn't set foot anywhere
near Pine Ridge since the week she graduated high school two years
ago. All he does is say, “Cool. It'd be good to see her.”

The movie's close enough to the
end for him to hover until the closing credits so he can turn stuff
off while his mom puts her project away. Then he walks her to her
room and gives her a quick hug. “Night, Mom.”

“Night, sweetie.”

He takes my hand as her door
closes and leads me up the next flight of stairs without either of
us speaking.

The ferrets are ecstatic over
our arrival. Despite what Finn's mom said about these two feeling
lonely, ferrets, unlike cats, never act too mad over being
neglected. They're more like dogs in just being pathetically happy
with the here and now. Finn lets them out and we play for a few
minutes before picking up most of the food from the floor. We don't
worry about the pieces we miss, leaving them to be found by the
fuzzies as a sort of game. Everything's a game when you're a
ferret, even cleaning up.

It occurs to me that if my
mother had been in the room, she would have done something about
the pellets. I wonder if Finn's mom figured he'd take care of it
later or if she managed not to notice them. I miss my mom, but I
wouldn't let myself dwell on that even if Finn didn't distract me.
Unfortunately he's not distracting me by holding me close and doing
wonderful things to me, he's distracting me by hovering around the
window, glowering out into a night that's mostly hidden by the
reflections on the glass, and grinding his teeth together until I
itch to hold his jaw in place.

“What are you thinking
about?”

His look lets me know he would
have thought that obvious.

Sighing, I stand next to him and
look out too. I can make out shapes in the yard, clouds in the
sky... But no burning letters spelling out the time and means of my
demise. “You're just going to drive yourself crazy.”

“What am I supposed to do?” He
balls his hands into fists and places them heavily on the
windowsill as he snarls at his reflection. “Pretend everything's
wonderful? Act like I'm not about to get you killed?”

I swallow a lump in my throat
and tell myself I'm not permitted to cry. “It's not your fault I'm
dead, Finn.”

His teeth grind again before he
responds. “You said so yourself.”

I stop myself just before I deny
his words. Because I did say that, didn't I? When I first showed up
in Shadow and was desperate to get him to save me, I told him that
at best he was an accomplice if he knew I was going to die and
didn't stop it. “I was wrong.”

The first sound he makes is an
incredibly rude snort of derision. The second is a caustic laugh.
“Wow, Drew McKinney admits she was wrong. Sad the lengths the
universe had to go to achieving that.”

I try not to let the attack get
to me. “Lashing out in sarcasm is my thing, not yours.”

His tension loosens and he turns
his head to look down at me. “Thought you'd caught on to us having
more in common than you thought.”

A smile teases his mouth and I
brush a finger along his lower lip.

My finger continues, gliding
over his cheek. I arch onto my toes and let my lips come against
Finn's. His arms go around me as he responds to being kissed and we
move onto the couch, laying next to each other while the kiss
continues. And that's all we're doing, kissing. Slowly. Gently. In
perfect sync with one another.

The ferrets fall asleep curled
up in the floor beside us. Long after I've lost track of time, Finn
notices and moves them into their cage without waking them.

He locks their door, then stands
and looks across the room at me.

By the time he makes it back to
the couch, kissing isn't enough. We move together, movements
perfectly matched. I help him pull off my sweater, enjoying myself
too much to speed things up making my clothing disappear.

His shirt joins mine on the
floor.

“Drew?” Finn murmurs, his eyes
closing as my fingers slide under the top of his jeans. Reaching
down, he grabs my hand and I stop, confused. “Drew?”

“What's wrong?”

His eyes search mine, but I
don't know what he's looking for.

The silence stretches.

“If you're worrying about birth
control,” I offer, “I don't think ghosts need it.”

His throat catches on his next
breath. “Tell me this isn't about you being a ghost. That it isn't
because no one else can touch you.”

My insides melt. “This isn't
about how many people can touch me. The only person I want touching
me is you.”

His fingers brush against my
brows, holding my hair back from my face as his gaze continues to
plunder mine. “Tell me it's not because you're lonely.”

It's a struggle not to laugh.
“I'm less lonely now than I've ever been, Finn.” I let myself give
in to a sappy smile. “I was alone my whole life. Now I'm not.”

“Were you?” The question is
scarcely louder than his breathing.

“Yes.” The reply is just as
quiet.

“You had Cris.”

Ah... “But I needed you.”

The depth of truth in that
statement rocks me to my core. And it was the right answer. Finn's
reserve vanishes in an instant and it's a deliciously long time
before either of us is capable of asking questions again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Finn's phone makes a truly
obnoxious sound while he glares at it without showing any sign of
picking it up. “Shut the damn thing off,” I grumble, reaching
toward it myself.

He jerks, pulled out of some
thought and uses his longer arm and better position to grab the
thing off the floor and press the key that silences it. He drops it
unceremoniously on the carpet, wraps his arms around me and holds
me down on top of him.

“You're dressed,” I can't help
but notice.

“Had to go to the store.” He
smiles lazily as his fingers draw little circles on my back.

“Right. Inventory shipment.” I
undo the top button of his work shirt, place a kiss on the freshly
revealed skin. “I would've gone with you.”

He laughs. “I'd have had to
carry you. You were sleeping like...”

A second button, a second kiss.
“The dead?”

“Yeah.” His breath hisses inward
as I slide my body down his to get to the next button.

“When are your friends picking
you up?”

He starts to tremble as I get
his shirt all the way open. “They aren't.”

Reaching down, he grabs my hair
and tugs me up far enough that he can kiss me with a possessive
passion that makes me really, really want to believe him.

“Tis not the moon, but the sun,”
I whisper against his lips, likely getting the quote wrong but not
caring.

“Not a lark,”
he counters. “A nightingale.” Wrapping his hand around the back of
my neck, he pulls me tighter and suddenly the quotes in my head
shift from
Romeo and Juliet
to
Taming of the
Shrew
. If he says that's the moon, it's the
moon. Of course no one's coming to get him. I would never dream of
arguing with anyone who makes me feel like this.

The phone rings but we ignore
it. Then the land line rings. Then, when he's shrugged out of his
shirt and I'm working on his pants, his mom bangs on the door. And
starts to open it...

Instinctively, I try to leap
away, but Finn holds me in place even as he quickly works his
shirtsleeves back over his arms. I envision a new set of clothes
for myself, feeling stupid when I realize I'm invisible and then
feeling smart when I realize Finn mom's looking right at me, her
eyes huge and her mouth slightly open. She blushes bright red. “I'm
sorry. It's Drew, isn't it? Oh, God. I'm sorry. I didn't...” Her
eyes go to Finn. “You have a phone call.”

She all but flies out of the
room.

My head crashes onto Finn's
shoulder.

“Of all times to be off her
meds,” he mutters.

In situations like this, it's
either laugh or cry, so I laugh. “Are you in trouble?”

“Don't know. Never been caught
with a girl up here before.” He sits up, shifting me so he can
carry me over to the phone and then sitting in the computer chair
with me on his lap. “My sister's done a lot worse though.”

“Oh?” I raise my eyebrows.