I need him here.

I can’t be without him.

He can’t be gone.

He knowsme knowsme knowsme.

I wake to find Dare seated on the edge of my bed, calmly watching me sleep.

“How did you…” I breathe, and I’m confused and startled and afraid. He smiles again and his black eyes glint in the morning light.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re here.”

He arcs an eyebrow. “It seems so.”

Happiness bubbles up in me, through my belly and into my chest.

“I’m glad,” I murmur.

“Me too.”

Dare finds the funeral home fascinating, and I take him on a tour. Through the embalming rooms, the Viewing Rooms, the chapel. I show him where we keep the caskets when they come in, where my father keeps the hearse and the family cars. The things that other people find so creepy, and that I find just a normal part of life.

“It smells like flowers here,” Dare observes, his large slender body filling the doorway.

“It does,” I agree. “It gets into your clothes and then you smell like a funeral home all day.”

“Nope,” he answers. “Just flowers.”

I let it go because I’d rather smell like lilies than death any day of the week.

I show him the beaches and the ocean and our sailboat. I show him the Carriage House and the forest and the cliffs. “Watch your step here,” I tell him seriously. “The ledge is thin.”

“Will do, mate,” he answers.

Mate?

I don’t want to be his mate. I want to be…

I don’t know what I want to be.

But when I show Dare the old abandoned amusement park the next day, Joyland, I take a minute to scratch our initials into the wood.

DD and CP.

It’s Valentine’s Day so it feels appropriate.

Dare smiles, and rolls his eyes.

“You’re 13. I’m 16.”

I lift my chin. “So? In a couple of years, we’ll be 16 and 19. And I’m the only one who knows you exist.”

That feels so strange to say, and I briefly think that he’s my imaginary friend. Don’t most children have them?

But staring at him makes warmth gush to my girl parts, and I don’t think imaginary friends do that.

Dare chuckles and we leave the park. “So talk to me about it when you’re 16,” he suggests. But his voice is filled with somethingsomethingsomething.

Interest?

Promise?

Darkness.

I don’t know.

All I know is that when he is with me, I feel invincible. I feel strong. I feel like me, but a better version.

So I do the only thing I can think of to do. I slide my grandfather’s ring off of my thumb and give it to him.

“I can’t take this,” he protests softly, but he’s so so touched, I can see it.

“It will remind you of where you are,” I tell him. “And who you are. I want you to have it. You’re a Savage, too. As important as anyone else.”

He slides it onto his middle finger and the movement is mesmerizing, and the sheen of the ring the sheen of the ring the sheen of the ring shines in the light and the world swirls.

It swirls

It swirls

It bends

It breaks.

The pieces drift around me and form pictures and I feel I feel I feel like I’ve been here before.

I stare at Dare, and he’s different, he’s older. My hand is older, too. Long and slender and strong, as I reach out to touch Dare’s face.

“Do you want to turn back, Dare?” I ask, and my voice is flirty, and we’re here in Joyland but it’s older and dirtier.

“Not on your life.” Moonlight shines upon his face, and drenches us, illuminating the dark stubble outlining his jaw.

“Let’s do it then.” I smile, and my heart is full and we disappear into Nocte.

The darkness swallows us, then blends together, then falls away, and then I’m once again standing in the sun, and Dare is staring at me, confused, bewildered.

“Calla?” There’s concern in his voice, and there is no stubble on his clean-shaven face.

I shake my head, shaking all of the confusion away, because it’s notrealnotrealnotreal.

“I’m ok,” I whisper, but I’m not really. Because sometimes I’m here, and sometimes I’m not.

Keep his ring. It will hold you to the ground, and make you always remember where you are. Eleanor’s words echo through my head and I focusfocusfocus on them.

I’m here.

Dare’s here.

Yet a minute ago, as real as anything, I wasn’t here. I was somewheresomewheresomewhere else.

We go home, back to the funeral home, and the days inch, fly, swirl past. They turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into months, confusing wonderful beautiful months.

Dare spends my birthday with me, then two. He spends Christmas. He spends every day in between. Every day, he becomes more and more unsettled.

Because he’s not real.

Because I don’t know what he is.

“If I could fix everything, I would,” I tell him one day as we stand on the cliffs. The wind whips at my hair and I shove it away. Dare stares at me and there’s sadness in his eyes.

“I know, Calla Lily.”

He’s so vulnerable, and sad, and he’s seventeen now and I’m fourteen.

I lean up, because I need to kiss him more than anything in the world.

“Kiss me,” I whisper, looking hungrily into his eyes. He looks away and the warmth the warmth the warmth. It warms my belly and floods my heart.

“I shouldn’t,” he answers, low and husky, and he’s unsure because he might be a figment of my imagination, or we might be related, and he shouldn’t he shouldn’t he shouldn’t.

But he wants to. I can see it see it see it. His eyes are cloudy and tormented.

“Do it anyway,” I reply, hoping, praying, holding my breath.

So he does,

He lowers his dark head and his lips press into mine, hard, warm, firm, real.

My first kiss.

Kissing him is like taking a fresh wintry breath. It gives me life, it fills me up, filling all of my darkest, most emptiest places.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Dare mutters, yanking away, and I don’t want him to leave, but he does it anyway.

He stalks away and I trail behind, my fingers on my lips, still in too much wonder to care that he’s regretful. I know why… because I’m fourteen and he’s seventeen and he’s my cousin and he thinks that creates a chasm.

But it doesn’t.

It’s not a chasm,

It draws us closer together.

He’s mine. He just doesn’t know it yet.

After dinner, I find him down at the woodshed, punching at it like a machine.

“Dare, stop!” I plead, holding onto his hands, trying to prevent him from injuring himself further. There is blood on his shirt, blood gushing from his knuckles. His face is so tormented, so pained.

“Do you know what it’s like not to be able to change something?” he asks, and his voice is so ragged, so painful to hear that it tears my heart into ripped pieces.

“Of course,” I tell him. And I lead him to the Carriage House where I clean up his wounds.

He strips his shirt off and muscle ripples from the top of his back to the bottom, and LIVE FREE is bold and strong. I can’t breathe because he’s beautiful and warm and vibrant, and he’s right here.

So close.

So close

So far away.

He studies me, my face, my eyes. And when he sighs, it’s such a lonely sound. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he says and he’s resigned. “Not like I do. Because you don’t remember everything, but I do.”

I open my mouth to reply, but he doesn’t allow it.

“I’ll be sleeping here in the Carriage House,” he tells me. “Instead of in the funeral home. It’s for the best. Maybe things aren’t going to change after all, this time. Maybe this will always be how it is, and if that’s the case, then I just want to let go, Cal.”

“Let go?”

He nods and I’m dying dying dying inside, because he can’t do that. I need him.

He won’t let me argue because he thinks it’s the right thing. My soul is crushed, but I leave anyway, because that’s what he wants. For now.